A couple of years back I created a set of Wikis. The first was to help folks track resources for David Allen’s Getting Things Done Methodology. The second was to help people find power outlets in airports.
Over the years both of these sites have flourished in popularity. The AirPower wiki in particular has been written up in a variety of travel magazines and the Getting Things Done Tools list sees very regular updates.
As the sites grew in popularity and the page rank grew, the spammers noticed and had actually written automated scripts to update the pages and replace the content with links to porn sites. I was very close this fall to shutting the sites down in frustration and was thinking of passing them over to Jason Calacanis for use on Mahalo.
Over the holidays though I decided to spend some time on the infrastructure and migrated the sites from Flexwiki to Screw turn Wiki. Screwturn is a .NET based Wiki package that has membership capabilities, discussions and an interesting extensibility model.
I’m hopeful that putting editing behind a registration/captcha wall keeps the spammers away and allows the sites to prosper. I’ll probably put some advertising on the sites soon to help pay for the hosting costs.
Hope your New Year is off to a great start. Mine is.
Photo Credit: David Trattnig on Spam! from Flickr
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