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I'm guessing that ferrim is spam. If no-one says anything to the contrary within 24hrs then I'll add it to the spam category.
If it is spam, it's either a random spambot post or it's someone testing to see how vigilant we are. If the latter, as there's no content then they may simply test to see if the link stays active. In which case, our previous "policy" of blanking the content won't send the right signal here (especially as there's no content to blank). Is there any objection to renaming spam entries? Say, as 'spam (original title)' (or whatever the allowable punctuation characters are)?
No objection, let's rename it.
Good. But I'd like to at least wait for Toby's input on this one - he's generally thought about the implications of these things a lot more than I have.
Toby's not around for a bit so I took it upon myself to do the name change in this case. It's reversible so if there's disagreement it can easily be changed back. The page ferrim is now at 'spam: ferrim' and I removed the automatically added redirect so that ferrim is now a dead link.
I've just done the same with our other "spam" pages. The former TessWither and employee are now 'spam: Original Name'.
I've been putting these things in category: spam, as you've noticed. I think that there's a good argument to renaming them, which is to make a link to such a page fail to work. (Of course, you have to be careful when you rename them to ensure that this actually happens! Which you did.)
So the only thing that I don't like is that a name like spam: ferrim is ugly and doesn't fit in with any of our other names. But maybe that's a good thing too!
I was pretty sure that whatever naming scheme I came up with I'd get something wrong! I'm not particularly bothered what it is but we should get it sorted out now while there's only a couple of pages to change. So I think it should have 'spam' at the front (how about 'zzz spam' to make sure it's at the bottom of the list in the pages list?). I was going to say that it should then have a marker and then the original title, though of course we may want to edit the original title if it's offensive. And perhaps we don't even want to have the original title, maybe just 'zzzspam 1', 'zzzspam 2' and so on.
I'm not sure if Instiki keeps a record of name changes so if it is felt that we should keep a record of the original title then this radical renaming isn't right.
I like the radical renaming, although it's true that there should be a record of name changes, in case people get overzealous and apply this to borderline cases.
You're familiar with the database now, right? Do you know of any record in it? Certainly there is no record in the History page that an ordinary user sees.
MediaWiki used to not keep a record of name changes either, but they started to create a record when vandals started moving pages on Wikipedia.
I guess that the automatically added redirect is a method of keeping records, though I deleted those from the spam pages (otherwise, what was the point of moving them?). I'll check in the database next time I'm logged in to an instiki installation, but I don't think that it does keep a record of page renames. Certainly there's no place for that in the bits of the database that I am familiar with, but there are tables that I haven't yet explored so it might be tucked away somewhere there.
I think we're reasonably covered against malicious name changes (i.e. where they delete the redirect as well) since we can always use the backups to find out what the previous name was. A bit of a kludge, I know, but hopefully not one we'll have to resort to very often.
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