I don't remember exactly when it started, somewhen in late April, I guess. But we are currently seeing a flood of wiki spam where the links all point to .edu domains.

It seems to me like the spammer was specifically looking for a certain message board software that is very popular in the .edu world. He then posted spammy articles on those boards and then went on to spam the hell out of wikis, blogs and every other web form he could find.

Here's one example, hosted on tesl.tcnj.edu. New .edu sites turn up every day, this one is one of the older ones thus the spam has already been indexed by Google.

I've sent a good number of abuse complaints to the contact addresses of those .edu domains, but I've received very few replies. I have the impression that many of those discussion boards were set up by university staff that has since moved on to other jobs. Their email accounts are now dead and nobody bothers to clean up their old web space.

Since the spam is so aggressive and mostly points at subdomains, I decided to add those domains to our blacklist.

If you are looking for more examples, take a look at this revision history of a page on our wiki that doesn't even exist. Pretty shocking.

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