Chainki.org Life

Spammers respond!

2007-10-18T10:58:00.000+02:00

It's amusing when I see that spammers actually respond to my Chainki anti-spam drive. Following is taken from a new page of spam where clearly a spammer has noticed that I have banned some Chinese characters (see my earlier post, Goodbye Chinese spam), and just rambles about what to do. The page then finishes with masses of links to his Chinese language school. Don't worry if you don't understand what the spammer wrote, but here it is anyway:

Ah ... yes. I assumed that this thread couldn't get approval. Then, after searching and seeing the other thread and with the information given in it, I've browsed my dictionary a little and thought that 搦 is more suitable choice and wrote there.
This is the story of this topic and my response in that topic.
Anyway ... How can we write "here you are"?

It sounds as "no" in the forth tone, meaning "here you are". But, I can't find it in my dictionary. How can we write it in Chinese characters? It is in the Pimsleur Mandarin I lessons.
Thanks ...

Haven't you already posted in this thread? -> What is the character for "Here you are" used in Pimsleur
It is 喏, pronounced nuò (not nòu).
Dictionary ->
n mj
Or have I missed something? __________________ 落　了　片　白　茫　茫　大　地　真　乾　淨　(blogger) 奼　紫　嫣　紅　開　遍　(windows lives spaces) Mesuper, thanks.

Goodbye Chinese spam!

2007-10-15T11:06:00.000+02:00

In trying to get rid of spam on Chainki, an important part of the battle is to try and ensure that it does not come back again. And ideally this should be done automatically. Even with a spam filter, if you see that a particular site, like xyz.com is adding spam and you block all entries by that site, it's possible that next day another site, abcdefg.com will spam. A lifetime job to add all the possible spammers!

But I've just clicked one neat way to get rid of Chinese spam - block individual Chinese characters! As parts of the site, such as the French Chainki are not allowed anything but French links (and generally French descriptions), it is clearly spam whenever anybody tries to enter Chinese characters into an edit.

Soooo...I have started to add simply random Chinese characters to the spam filter! The funny thing is that I have absolutely no idea what any of the characters I am banning mean, but it is (I think) likely to be highly effective in stopping Chinese spam. Here is a list of characters I have banned so far, all of which have been copy-pasted completely at random from Chinese spam text I have found on my site (apologies if any of these are swear words!!):

One of the great problems in dealing with spam is that you want to eliminate all the spam of the bad guys easily, without causing any problems to the good guys. This technique I think - or I hope - will eliminate very quickly all the Chinese spam!

Chinese spam? - Bring it on!

Spammers! Grrrr!!!

2007-10-12T12:28:00.000+02:00

Just when I thought I had the Chainki spammers on the run, they came back where and when I wasn't looking. I thought, over-confidently that the spammers were finished off by my nifty spam filter, but it does at least need keeping an eye on. I thought the site was largely able to look after itself. I stopped looking at changes.

Mistake!

While I wasn't looking for several months, Chinese spammers put hundreds of pages on the French pages of the site, before I noticed. Now, on the French part of the site, I filter (amongst other keywords):

.org.cn
.com.cn
.net.cn
.cn/

which should filter out ALL sites with a Chinese domain name (which have no place on the French pages!). Though that alone doesn't deal with the Chinese sites which use, for example, a dot com domain name, so in addition, I've added a number of particular specific offenders to my spam filter. Time will tell if I need to add many others, but for the moment things seem to be much better.

Another thing I have done is on some parts of the site, made it so that people have to create a login if they want to edit a page. This is a bit of a pity for the casual user who wants to make an improvement, but should also help reduce the casual spammer.

The spam war is one I certainly plan to win, but I do need to keep vigilant!

Goodbye spammers!

2007-05-24T13:35:00.000+02:00

One of the oft-said things about Chainki is that it will be killed by spam, since anyone can edit.

Well, Chainki has just got a new weapon against spam: the spam-filter!

This cooooool gizmo means that any attempt to add text with any of the following sorts of words:

adultporn
ringtones
buy-viagra

will simply be rejected and never seen! Horray!!

Try editing a page and adding these words and you'll see that it won't let you!

OK spam, bring it on!!

Nice URLs!

2007-05-17T13:26:00.001+02:00

Now, you can access pages in a "nice" way. What I mean by "nice" is that the website page addresses are much more friendly to read, because they don't have lots of squiggly characters such as "?" and "=" which are just for the computers benefit.

So, for example, the new form is:
http://en.chainki.org/wiki/Art_History

instead of
http://en.chainki.org/index.php?title=Art_History

(though this latter form still works for backwards compatibility)

Pretty nice eh?

Chainki featured on "Snap.com"

2007-02-24T19:54:00.000+02:00

I'm very pleased to see that Snap.com have decided to feature Chainki as an example of the use of their service:

This is how they choose to describe Chainki:

Chainki.org is the world's largest collection of links that anyone can edit. Wikipedia meets Dmoz, the open source directory, with millions of organized links all enhanced by Snap Preview Anywhere.

I have already noticed the number of visitors rocket, and this will very soon likely trickle through to the Chainki Alexa ranking (basically where Chainki sits in the world website rankings).

Woweeeeee! Cool new front page design!!!!!

2007-01-12T23:16:00.000+02:00

Woweeeeee! Cool new front page design!!!!! Just check out the change to the Chainki front page design.

Before it looked like this:
Chainki Old Design

Now it looks like this:
Chainki New Design

That is just sooooooooooooo groovy now! Who said I had the design skills of a dead fish?!

Another 100,000 places up in the world ranking!

2007-01-02T14:21:00.000+02:00

The first of the month is a good time to check the world-ranking of Chainki. According to the Alexa traffic rank for Chainki (the figures may be slightly different when you visit), Chainki now has a rank of 168,114 in the world, which is another 100,000 places up in the world ranking from last month!

Here is an overview of progress so far since launch:

01/08/2006 1,403,313
01/09/2006 985,084
01/10/2006 683,011
01/11/2006 396,450
01/12/2006 286,341
01/01/2007 168,114

So far, so good. Watch out Dmoz, here Chainki comes...

website previews

2006-12-15T14:41:00.000+02:00

I have just put on to Chainki what I think is neat new feature, the ability to have website previews. Take a random Chainki page, such as Shopping in Thompson Falls and move the cursor over the external links and you will see what I mean. Neat eh?

"Oh, it'll be full of spam". Will it?

2006-12-05T16:47:00.000+02:00

One of the initial reactions to Chainki is that, since absolutely anyone can edit, it will soon be full of spam. After now nearly 6 months of being working as a site, how is this prophecy of doom working out? Pretty poorly actually.

When, to start with, there was just me looking out for spammers, there was a little bit, but it was easy for me to cope with it. Now, as the site has grown and there are more and more visitors, true, there are more and more spammers, but also there are also more and more editors who take the time to stomp out any spam they see. Overall, I think the percentage of spammers to people who remove spam remains highly against the spammers.

And just imagine my personal delight when I now see that someone else than me has removed spam.

It shows that the system is working. It shows that the good guys in the wiki world always outnumber the bad guys. It has worked for Wikipedia, and I don't see why it should not work for Chainki.

The really good news as far as I'm concerned is that it looks that as the site grows in visitors, so the good guy vs. bad guy balance will probably stay the same, and so Chainki will never be full of spam.

I for one will be very happy about that.

Alexa rank upward and upward

2006-12-01T11:46:00.000+02:00

I have been following the rank of Chainki from the beginning on Alexa.

Now, being the 1st December, I checked again, and note the figures. Horray! Another jump of over 100,000 places in the world ranking!!

The particular rank on a single day or week jumps around a lot, but the 3-month average has consistently shown good steady improvement. The figures are:

1 Jul 2006 - Non-existent
1 Aug 2006 - 1,403,313
1 Sep 2006 - 985,084
1 Oct 2006 - 683,011
1 Nov 2006 - 396,450
1 Dec 2006 - 286,341

I suppose I could do the extrapolation and work out when Chainki will overtake Dmoz. Or Google.

Spoke too soon

2006-11-21T11:47:00.000+02:00

I spoke rather too soon in my previous post about Chainki appearing on Wikipedia. It is now an article nominated for deletion. This simply means that they are discussing whether Chainki is already notable enough to be included on the hallowed pages of Wikipedia. Currently doesn't look like it is. Yet.

A special "Hello" to all the Wikipedia editors who are reading this! (I say that, coz in the Wikipedia discussion, they refer to my happiness here in this blog at seeing Chainki appear on Wikipedia). Well so I was - well chuffed! And why shouldn't I be? And I'll also be sad to see it go from Wikipedia. But like Arnie, "Chainki will be back...".

And "He who laughs last...".

As seen on Wikipedia

2006-11-20T11:54:00.000+02:00

I'm very pleased to see that Chainki now appears in Wikipedia!.

Hooray!

In fact, I'm particularly pleased, since when I first put Chainki online, I created a page in Wikipedia myself (blatent publicity attempt I know), and it was almost immediately pulled off as a completely unknown site etc. etc. Now, however, someone else not connected at all with Chainki (though they could be also editing on Chainki) has added a page on Wikipedia, and there is enough on the web about it generally that I presume the page will stay.

The affect on traffic to the site has already been quite significant, since Chainki is now one of (currently) only 25 other Web Directories listed on Wikipedia. When you think of just how many web directories exist on the web (there are thousands), it's pretty decent to be listed right up there alongside the likes of the Yahoo! Directory and DMOZ.

So you see I have many reasons to be pleased. Flattered that someone (other than me) thinks Chanki is worth putting in Wikipedia. Happy for the increase in traffic already. And thirdly, and by no means lastly, delighted that this will undoubtedly have a knock-on effect and get links in other respected places.

My one slight worry - one day I fear that the take-off will go absolutely ballistic. For example, I imagine with some trepidation what would happen if an article in, say, the BBC news gets published, and then that gets picked up by other news agencies, and all of a sudden the site has huge worldwide publicity, and can't cope with the traffic and crashes continually and my hosting provider sends me a huge bill, and I have huge amounts of work trying to get some of the other 60+ languages installed....!

Welcome to Swedish!

2006-10-25T17:31:00.000+02:00

It is with great pride that I announce the addition of the Swedish version of Chainki.

This brings the total number of supported languages to 6 (you can see them all at the Chainki home page.

Sadly, I don't know any Swedish except for the words "Abba", "Volvo" and "Ikea". Still, that should be enough to be getting on with.

Chainki featured on Web 2.0 blog

2006-10-23T12:27:00.000+02:00

Chainki has been featured in a very nice blog article on "Web 2.0"; though it is in French, you can find it at leweb2.blogspot.com

Thank you Mr.Blog!

In fact, I think that article was responsible for briefly pushing Chainki into the world's top 100,000 sites on Alexa (see next post).

Chainki enters world's top 100,000 sites!

2006-10-18T15:36:00.000+02:00

It may not seem very high, but according to Alexa, the web traffic rankings site, Chainki has, at the time of writing entered the world's top 100,000 sites!

The figures for traffic rank when I looked today were as follows. I put in brackets the figures from my this earlier post back in July:
Today: 91,215 (was non-existent since only sites in top 100K are rated daily)
1 week average: 240,739 (was 406,925)
3 months average: 525,242 (2,323,377)
1 month change: up 1,845,529

For the latest figures see Chainki on Alexa.com.

Largest wiki in the world in its category!

2006-09-08T15:01:00.000+02:00

It's official! According to List of largest wikis Chainki is now officially the largest wiki in the world in its category!

The category is the green one - all those wikis which run using the MediaWiki software (the software which Wikipedia and Chainki use), excluding projects such as Wikipedia itsefl which are run by the MediaWiki foundation.

Who says size doesn't matter?

Database dumps available

2006-08-17T18:24:00.000+02:00

Finally I have managed to sort out Database dumps of the Chainki data. Now, if anybody wants to create a website based on the Chainki data they can. Cool eh?

Ah....the life of webmaster of the world's biggest wiki of links is never done.

FAQ clean-up

2006-08-17T18:08:00.000+02:00

Today I tidied up the FAQ pages. Hopefully made them easier to user. Hopefully.

Danish!

2006-08-12T15:39:00.000+02:00

Now the Danish Chainki is online.

This was actually pushed rather by a Danish website that someone added to the following pages:

* Hair
* Hair Removal

Not wanting to simply delete the site, I decided to install the Danish pages, and move them there.

Only problem - once I'd installed the Danish pages, my Danish wasn't good enough to know where to put them. Oh well.

And now in German...

2006-08-10T17:28:00.000+02:00

Chainki in German is now available.

Bit late for the World Cup 2006, but hey.

And now also in Dutch

2006-08-03T17:06:00.000+02:00

The Dutch version of Chainki is now online.

Now, I hope you folk in The Netherlands are happy. Back to your tulips now please.

And you Dutch speaking Belgians can get back to your beer please.

But how will people find Chainki?

2006-08-02T16:11:00.000+02:00

A very common question I get asked when saying that I have a website, is how will people find the site? I suppose the underlying thought is that I will have to spend millions advertising the site.

Not so.

If I had a website for, say, a hotel in London, just like any other hotel in London, then I suppose I would have to spend money advertising it. But in the case of Chainki the answer is that people will find it via the search engines. And the open secret of getting it into search engines is to have valuable content - content that is unique enough that people will want to go to your site rather than anywhere else.

Here is an example of a search on Google for sosl transistor radio
which someone had done and they had found Chainki (I have access to this sort of info from the logs).

When I look at that page Chainki is in 2nd position (search engines are changing all the time, and it may not be there when you repeat the search). The particularly interesting and satisfying thing for me is that although this is the 111th entry in the Google list (2nd position, but on page 2 of 100 results per page), the person doing the search decided that the Chainki entry looked close enough to what they were looking for to go into Chainki.

A central landing page

2006-07-31T18:19:00.000+02:00

There is now a brand new central landing page:

Chainki

Before, if anybody surfed to the general chainki.org address, they were redirected automatically to the English main page.

Of course, it is still possible to bookmark either of the language specific home pages:
http://en.chainki.org for English
http://fr.chainki.org for French

Chainki reaches 50,000 pages

2006-07-27T11:30:00.000+02:00

Today Chainki passed 50,000 pages. Not bad I feel, since it only really started a few weeks ago. Still, not to be complacent, there are 686,740 pages waiting to be generated...

As mentioned in "The Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky"

2006-07-26T00:23:00.000+02:00

Well, well, well. A mention in the hallowed Courier-Journal, Louisville, Kentucky. OK, I admit, I have never heard of it. And I have to admit that I barely know where Kentucky is let alone Louisville.

Nonetheless, this, I will claim as Chainki's first reference in the news world!

It's not exactly the biggest in-depth review or exposé which I have ever seen about a website. But I'm pretty impressed that one way or another word is getting out. How, I wonder, did some guy on a journal in Louisville, Kentucky hear about Chainki?

What with Chainki actually appearing to take off, this is starting to get a little scary...

As my mum said today - you'll soon be on Richard & Judy. After my head stops swelling, I do at least think that if this continues at this rate, some geeks at a geek conference may actually in future have heard of me. Now that really is scary...

No. 38 in the "List of largest MediaWiki wikis"

2006-07-25T20:11:00.000+02:00

I've submitted Chainki to be listed in the List of Largest MediaWiki wikis (MediaWiki you will remember is the software which runs not only Chainki but also Wikipedia, amongst others).

It's come straight in at number 38 (at least when I wrote this post). Another place to watch progress.

And of course, size does matter.

They've gone bloggin mad

2006-07-25T19:29:00.000+02:00

Now the UKeiG, the UK eInformation Group, a professional body for users and developers of electronic information resources have blogged me.

Thanks!

Chainki appearing in a blog near you

2006-07-24T19:34:00.000+02:00

Recognition!

It's always nice as a webmaster to know that somebody out there is actually looking at your website with interest. Phil Bradley has even written a little piece on his blog about Chainki.

Thanks a lot Phil!

First appearance in www.alexa.com

2006-07-23T00:26:00.000+02:00

Alexa is a site which tracks how important a website is compared to all other websites on the internet. The idea is that the nearer you are to number 1 you are the better. Up until now Chainki didn't even appear on the radar - not surprising since it only started this month.

However, today when I checked, ah joy...Chainki appears. The figures will perhaps have changed when you look, but this is where I was looking: Alexa data for Chainki. When I looked, and bearing in mind that this is the first time Chainki has ever even been noticed on the radar, Chainki had:

a 3-month average place of 2,323,377 and
a 1-week average of 406,925.

It's not exactly straight in at number one, but it's a baseline from which to judge any improvement.

I'm delighted - at least it's starting to appear, because it is a reasonably objective view of the "success" (or not) of a website.

"Bonjour" to all our French friends

2006-07-21T19:49:00.000+02:00

Chainki is now available in two flavours.

French
and
Original

Or should I say:

Chainki est maintenant disponible en deux langues, le français, et l'original.

Chainki gets a new coat

2006-07-21T19:44:00.000+02:00

Chainki now has a new coat.

It used to be dressed in white, identical to Wikipedia, but now it sports a rather fetching (in my opinion), battleship blue.

Go on, tell me what you think.

First vandal :-(

2006-07-18T13:51:00.000+02:00

This blog is all about firsts at the moment. Today we had our first vandal. See if you can spot what they did. The clue is in the comment they gave to their edit: "important link"

Here is the main page before they appeared.

Here is the main page after their vandalism.

Or maybe they just thought the link really was that important?

First visitor via a search engine

2006-07-17T13:27:00.000+02:00

Another first! This time, the first visitor to the site via a search engine.

They came via this Yahoo search. It's a bizarre looking search that the person entered, but (at least when I check - your milage may vary, since search engine results are a moving beast), Chainki is right up there in 3rd place. 3rd place! Not bad.

It's a little silly that the search engine jumps to the edit version of the page rather than the article itself. Probably confused the poor punter no end. But from the logs, I can see he or she stayed around on the site quite a while.

Just need to get another few thousand people coming each day...

The first new site!

2006-07-17T13:11:00.000+02:00

One of the things I've been doing is trying to get other websites to link to Chainki. An example of this is my request on battlestarwiki talk page

Anyway, it worked. They added a link to Chainki on that site, and they also added the first new site to Chainki Battlestar Galactica site added.

Ah, another small step in the right direction...

Minor spat with a dmoz editor

2006-07-14T11:02:00.000+02:00

I mentioned on the dmoz editor forums in this thread that Chainki existed as a merge of wiki and dmoz data. Very quickly I had this rather terse message slapped on the front page of the wiki:

This site is in violation of the Open Directory License [1] - although it links to the Open Directory Project - since it fails to have the correct links to categories on each page.

They're dead touchy about people not giving the attribution to their site correctly. And with good reason; they grant people the right to use the content in any way they wish and all they ask is that sites put an attribution at the bottom of each page. Fair enough.

And in fact I had put the attribution but a small error in putting the code in production meant that the attribution looked right at a glance, but an eagle-eyed dmoz editor spotted in an instance that it wasn't quite right.

From the full story, Violation of the ODP licence?, you can see that it took me about 6 minutes to fix it. Not bad responsiveness eh?

And at least someone visited the site and bothered to comment. As a webmaster there's nothing worse than having your site ignored.

Sombody made an edit!

2006-07-12T22:59:00.000+02:00

Another amazing event: somebody has actually made an edit on Chainki!

For me, this is very exciting. Why? Because it shows the wiki working.

Take a look at their edit

It's interesting because it seems they were looking for travel and wanted a list of cities, so added the subcategory "Cities". Of course, the information is there, but under the regional pages, for example for London . Nonetheless, why not have some references via a "Cities" page? Good idea sir!

Anyway, this person made an edit, but they also made my day.

A visitor! A visitor!

2006-07-12T22:49:00.000+02:00

I had the first visitor! Yes, someone, goodness knows how (maybe something to do with the fact I was shamelessly promoting the site wherever I could), visited Chainki!!

I just happened to be looking at the online stats which show who/when/what people look at, when I saw that someone (not me!) had been on the site. They looked at Help (not written yet, oops), looked at a few pages about beekeeping, at a couple of menu items which didn't exist (oops), and went their merry way.

I have duly added some Help, and since the person was looking for beekeeping, the help is done in their honour about aforesaid bumblies.

A site is born!

2006-07-12T11:33:00.000+02:00

I have been working on the www.chainki.org website for many months now. In a way, I have been working in this domain for many years now with a similar site which was struggling without the power of the wiki software I now use.

Anyway, on Friday 7th July 2006, at 17:26 (it's in the "Recent Changes" log, so I can see exactly), I cleared out all the test pages, and created the main page for the site.

Chainki was born!

Intro

2006-07-12T11:29:00.000+02:00

Seen the website www.chainki.org yet? Well, I'm the guy who created it. My name is Hugh. This blog is to record some of the background behind the site in a bloggie sort of way. I don't know what the future will hold, nor this blog for that matter, but welcome aboard!