Chinese human-powered spam

Here's a worrying trend. Futurescape has been running JigsawUK, a wiki for British digital media startups, for more than a year. In the last month, there's been an increasing amount of spam. The Italian spam is from a bot and that's not too hard to fight by setting a banned words list.

What's much more awkward to deal with is human-powered spam originating from China. In about 10 days, there have been spam pages for heavy machinery, SEO services and gold farming services. (That's where someone in China plays World of Warcraft or Runecraft to create high-level characters or equipment, buildings etc that they can sell for real-life money.)

The spammers are reasonably good at using wiki markup and even seem to be "innocent" about what they're doing. After their page was deleted, one of them made a new page with a plaintive message asking, apparently in all seriousness, what the problem was.

So here's the key question. We're used to receiving automated spam and fighting it with automated responses, as with e-mail spam vs filters. But what happens when it's worth employing someone in one part of the world as a human spammer?

Automated responses won't work nearly as easily when there's a real intelligence on the spamming side, rather than a bot. Yet the cost of using people to defend against this on the receiving end would very quickly be disproportionate.