Wikipedia:Spam blacklist

This page documents an English Wikipedia behavioral guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

Shortcuts WP:BLACKLIST WP:SPB

This page in a nutshell: As a countermeasure to spam, the spam blacklist is used to prevent blacklisted URLs from being added to Wikipedia.

The spam blacklist is a control mechanism that prevents an external link from being added to any page when the URL matches regex rules listed at the local or global blacklist, or belongs to a site listed at Special:BlockedExternalDomains. These lists mostly contain spam sites, but also include URL redirection services (which could otherwise be used to bypass blacklisting),^[1] some sites which are persistently abused for shock effects, and some sites which have been added after independent consensus.^[2]

Specific links can be allowed by overruling the blacklisted links through addition to MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist.

The spam blacklist is supported by MediaWiki's SpamBlacklist and AbuseFilter extensions.