Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Spam/2023 Archive Apr

getcameracrew.com
Two attempts so far (named user removed tracking tag, so tracking here). OhNo itsJamie Talk 00:40, 3 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Hello, Sorry about it, I didn't really know the rules, I will check and start editing in line with the terms. I wanted to remove the link so I doesn't stick to my name. Thank you! Firat-GCC (talk) 05:44, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

RKD/WOW SEO farms
Two large farms of SEO/PR "news" blogs that utilize fake or anonymous authors and obvious guest posting or just multiple copied press releases are listed below. All of these link back to the same person running a "Digital PR, Social Media Management, Digital Marketing, Wikipedia Page, Advertising, Influencer Marketing" service, but the two farms only overlap on the name of the service (each farm individually links through hosting, adlinks, or elements from the sites). More details available on request if that's not enough, but since the service is closely tied to an individual, I'll avoid outing here.

There have been hundreds of references to these sites removed, almost always by undisclosed paid editors and to junk SEO articles. See history of Draft:Seyyed Sajjad Mousavi, Draft:Emmanuel Alade and Draft:Mehran Mohammadi.

All sites listed below and have been cleaned up weekly for a while (that is, there are no lingering links that would cause problems to live pages). Since the problem is recurring, and these are purely used for spam, my intent is to add all of these blacklist in the next few days unless someone objects.Sam Kuru (talk) 01:19, 8 April 2023 (UTC)





vangiare.vn
Apparition11 Complaints/ Mistakes 02:19, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Spam links to Businessrefer
User:Ayushtakeelite (talk) keeps adding spam links to "Businessrefer" in random Wikipedia articles. Sauer202 (talk) 10:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Spam journal article links
adding many links to a single journal article. I and others have reverted a few but there are more being added currently. Have warned user with Uw-spam1 via talk page. Amkilpatrick (talk) 12:18, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

wiki-moderator.com
I work at a legal non-profit and we received the following advertisement on our website's Contact Us page: Name Justin Wilson

Email justin@wiki-moderator.com

Comment or Message Wikipedia is considered to be the World’s most significant tool for reference material. The Wiki links show up on the 1st page of Google 97% of the time. With a Page on one of the most revered reference tools, you are sure to get yourself or your business noticed. So if you're thinking of getting a Wikipedia Page created, it's the best time of the year. If you are interested in getting more information just respond back to this email. Thanks, Justin Wilson Wiki Moderator justin@wiki-moderator.com Respond with stop to optout. Suomi13 (talk) 22:44, 15 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the info. Looking at https://who.is/whois/wiki-moderator.com which shows that domain was recently registered, I suspect this is a new front for List_of_paid_editing_companies. There's not much we can do to stop them though unfortunately. SmartSE (talk) 12:26, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

ceresana.com ancient refspam


I just came across this domain of a market research company which is cited > 50 times. Of the links that I've checked, they were added by IPs in 2013. I suggest that they all need removing. FYI in case you saw my edit summary at Fertilizer. SmartSE (talk) 12:32, 19 April 2023 (UTC)

acmite.com
Similar to ceresana.com above, this is present in a lot of chemistry-related articles and most were added by a SPA. SmartSE (talk) 10:51, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Linkwatcher technical issues
Hi, apologies if this is not the best page to discuss this. I work in the Wikimedia Cloud Services team, where we manage the infrastructure powering Wikimedia tools. I wanted to raise awareness of the fact that the Linkwatcher bot (@CoiBOT managed by @Beetstra) is currently having some technical issues. As far as I'm aware, it stopped working and adding new links on April, 6 2023 when the old ToolsDB was shut down (T333471).

I've spent a significant time trying to migrate it to a new dedicated database, as it is by far the biggest database among all tools hosted in Wikimedia Cloud (about 500GB of data + 500GB of indexes). You can follow progress in T328691 but as @ASarabadani_(WMF) wrote in that task, the structure of the database is badly in need of a redesign, or it will keep on growing at an unsustainable rate.

I am doing my best to get the tool back online at least temporarily, but we need to find other engineering resources (either volunteers or WMF) and prioritize a redesign of the database and/or a rewrite of the tool, or we're bound to encounter more issues in a few months from now. FNegri-WMF (talk) 11:45, 20 April 2023 (UTC)

Heaven Sent Gaming and aywv.art


aywv.art and newmexicocultural.com redirect to heavensentgaming.com. They are the same website, which is a functionally a blog. I've cleaned up some of the cite-spamming, but since this has been going on for over a decade at this point I doubt that will be the end of it.

Sockpuppet investigations/Smile Lee's many accounts have collectively spent years making questionable edits while disproportionately citing Heaven Sent Gaming. Articles for deletion/Heaven Sent Gaming (2nd nomination) is just a tiny taste of this tedious history. The sock's pattern is to make superficially productive changes, but the wording is loaded and the cited sources are often misrepresented or unreliable.

I recently noticed Sockpuppet investigations/JustMyOpiñon. Behaviorally, they should probably be merged as a single farm. These new socks cite the domain aywv.art instead of aywv.heavensentgaming.com. They also add promotional mentions of Heaven Sent Gaming to barely related articles based on extremely flimsy, obscure, or local softball sources.

Many of these new edits are coming from IPs. Every example I have found which cites this website geolocates to the city where Heaven Sent Gaming is located. Almost all of these socks focus on that region, so this matches past history.

As an example of how disruptive this gets, this edit summary to an article on a major video game mentions the Swedish Wikipedia as justification for restoring the spammed source. This source was in the Swedish article, but it was imported from the English Wikipedia at the article's creation, and it was originally added there by a WP:SPA in 2013, only a bit before Smile Lee's first identified socks were created.

Grayfell (talk) 00:45, 20 April 2023 (UTC)


 * Note that I have filed a new report at Sockpuppet investigations/Smile Lee for this. The spam now mostly comes from IPs, so unfortunately addressing one will not address the other. Grayfell (talk) 08:28, 21 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Added to the blacklist given the long history of spamming documented at the SPI. Spicy (talk) 18:42, 22 April 2023 (UTC)