Different wikis have a list of external sites that are likely to be SPAM, and prevent publishing content that contains external links to those sites by using abuse filters. Since those lists are different for each wiki, when translating content between two wikis it is possible that a link that is valid in the source wiki gets added to the translation, preventing it to be published.

In such cases, when the user tries to publish and gets a Spam-related error it is hard to (a) understand what happened and (b) find which is the problematic link from those in the document.

The proposal is to use the issue communication system (T189488) to communicate the issue:

• The paragraph and the affected link will be highlighted.
• The issue is presented as a Warning since we want it not to block publishing. If the user tries to publish the article with problematic links, those will be removed behind the scenes to prevent the publishing process to be blocked. In this way, the user will be able to publish the translation even if the problematic link is lost along the way.
• An action to remove the problematic link will be also provided. This will turn the link into plain text.

Message:

Links detected as spam
Some links are pointing to sites considered as suspicious for spam by this community.
Consider linking to an alternative destination, or removing the link.
Problematic links will be skipped when publishing.

If it is hard to anticipate the issue without publishing. We can consider supporting the issue as an error that would be shown after clicking publishing. We may want to explore this before finalising the messaging used.

This issue was mentioned by a translator in this discussion.