7 Components: the Function Pages - Developers

List of special
pages
Nofollow
attribute
128
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Last but not least, let us make one small modification: You can tailor
the list of special pages to suit your needs and, for instance, change
their order or eliminate unwanted pages. Information on these pages
is contained in the file SpecialPage.php in the directory mediawiki/includes.
To remove entries, simply delete the line that begins
with the name of the corresponding page. To change their order,
move the line to the desired position. However, make sure that, except
for the very last entry, all entries end with a comma.
8.4
Wiki Spam
Spam, that is, automatically generated messages with the intent of
advertising a product, has, to date, primarily appeared in the form of
emails, and represents a fairly new problem in the wiki world. The
route via email seems to have been far more attractive to the senders
of such messages than an open site up to now. Besides, in wikis,
spam has usually been able to be warded off with the aid of IP bans
and simple rollbacks. However, an increase in the frequency of wiki
spam (as well as spam in blogs, forums and guest books) has become
evident. The reason lies in the assessment of pages by search
engines. The more external links lead to a hit, the higher that page is
ranked. The assumption is that a well-linked site is most probably
relevant to many people. To receive as many links as possible,
spammers place a mass of external links to their homepage in the
wikis, blogs, etc. It does not matter that these entries will be deleted
soon after; the important thing is that a certain percentage of such
links are still online when the search engine robots visit a site. Of
course, this type of spam is aggravating. It can decrease the motivation
of Wikians considerably, and thus poses a serious threat to the
community.
Luckily, even the big search engine operators have recognized
this problem and are in the process of developing a solution. This solution
has taken on the form of a new attribute for the href tag which
indicates that the search engine, when searching for contents to be
indexed, need not follow a particular link:
No Spam
This attribute is attached to all external links. Thus, these links lose
their influence for the search engine's page ranking. In MediaWiki,
8 Administration