Oracle.com, Wetpaint, Spammers, and the Tale of an Unmoderated Wiki

Update: A few hours after this post going live, it seems that Oracle started to clean up the wiki. Very good!

Oracle’s official Wiki (at http://wiki.oracle.com ) is becoming a haven for spammers. The site has a high page rank (PR 7), is completely open and unmoderated, uses a free builder from wetpaint.com (yes, you have to create an account at wetpaint.com to participate there) and looks to have no one taking care of it.

Guess what happens when you visit? Try to visit their main page (wiki.oracle.com – Scanned link) to see by yourself:

All the latest threads are about prescription drugs, tramadol, etc. Even Google is noticing it already and has crawled more than 1,600 pages with spam.

There are two big lessons to learn here:

1. If you are putting a site online, make sure to take good care of it, no matter who you are
2. If you don’t take care, spammers will do it for you.

Specifically with a company the size of Oracle, we would expect better care of all their online proprieties.

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