Annotating Spam control

From eg

Effective spam control is a wiki best practice and email best practice.

Individual edits

Delete spam

To delete spam (Unixism rm spam) is a wiki best practice and email best practice. This is an exception to advice to avoid delete as a strategy. While some advise to never delete, a lot of spambots detect spam and add more wherever it has managed to remain undeleted, and it becomes impossible to compare versions of wiki pages meaningfully if there's a version consisting mostly or only of spam in between two good edits.

It isn't usually a good plan to delete spam irrecoverably as spam filters are imperfect. Using a bulk folder that expires questionable mail and allows users to look at it at their leisure (or not) is an email best practice.

Where spam versions only exist, delete pages entirely if possible. Always revert to pre-spam versions rather than simply remove the spam content, as it may have replaced realtext. Do not under any circumstances edit the version whilerestoring the pre-spam version. Do any editing in another edit.

Wiki-wide spam control

The mediawiki mass delete mediawiki spam blacklist extension and mediawiki spam garbage collection utility are future possibilities for control, but they just don't exist yet sadly. for now, we have captchas, and can add spam-only pages to category:delete.