They sure are persistent little buggers. I think I've reverted about 50 pages of wiki spam in the last week, on 2 wikis. The little cretins just won't take a clue. They're just smart enough to be able to switch or spoof IP addresses to get around the blocks and bans, but not quite smart enough to realize that I won't let them win.
And, looking at my Referrer Karma blacklist, there are spamroach URLs in there that make even me blush. I mean, these people have nothing better to do than to register dozens/hundreds of obsene URLs, then feed them into their little script kiddie auto-blog-spammer software and see if they can scrape some Google Juice out of it.
Sorry, punks. Not on my watch.
I do get the sinking feeling that the wikis that I babysit will eventually act as some form of "deadman's switch" - I picture myself in my 90's, on my deathbed, worried about the spam that is about to infiltrate the online resources that I'd been stewarding...
There has got to be a better solution to the wiki spamroach problem than manual labour - that doesn't scale, and the spamroaches know this. They are armed with better weapons, and are only refining their tools and techniques. We just keep plugging more fingers into more holes, hoping to stop the coming flood of spam (ew - that's a nasty mental image... a river of that icky gelatinous goo...).
WordPress seems to have the spam problem nailed down pretty solidly - I have to exert almost no effort to keep spam from my blog. The little effort I do direct at it is in approving the occasional comment that gets popped into moderation rather than correctly passing or failing the spam tests. Why can't wiki software be that intelligent about nuking spam?
Update: a quick google turned up these links:
Update 2: Installed the SpamBlacklist extension for MediaWiki. They really left the process scary for non-geeks. Having to download the files individually from the webcvs repository, rather than just providing a nice .zip download, and not having the files configured to work "out of the box". Regardless, it was a simple installation, and it's now (hopefully) stopping spammers dead in their tracks. Or, at least slowing them down enough to piss them off enough to move somewhere else.