Help:WikiSpam

Spam is a horrendous problem on this and all other wikis. Unlike most spam, in which the object is to get the viewer to click a link and hopefully buy a product, by and large the sort of spammer that targets a wiki is a "linkdumper", aka someone engaging in "blackhat SEO".

What does that mean? Well, Google (as well as other modern search engines) ranks a page in its index according to how many other pages link to it. "SEO" - Search Engine Optimization - is a term for the practice of trying to get a page ranked as high as possible on Google. "Blackhat SEO" is the practice of doing so by unethical means - such as by using bots to trash wikis and forums and blogs with page upon page of links to completely unrelated sites. Making matters worse, the types of sites that use blackhat SEO are frequently disgusting, scams, and/or outright illegal.

What does this have to do with you? In most cases, nothing. However, unfortunately, the spammers are so persistent and so destructive that certain IP address spaces have been permanently blacklisted from submitting any form information whatsoever to this wiki - most notably, at the moment, several Russian ISPs.

If you are getting 403 Forbidden errors when you try to submit changes to an article or register a user account, please feel free to email FourOhThree (at) freebsdwiki dot net and we'll see if we can't work something out to allow you access.

--Jimbo 01:07, 28 February 2006 (EST)