Wix Groups Being Abused For Web Spam Campaigns

Yesterday, we noted how web spammers were abusing the Webform module for Drupal to place spam files on websites. We continue to look into that spam campaign and found another interesting aspect of it. Spammers are also abusing the Groups feature of the Wix managed website service. That is notable, as services like that are supposed to handle a lot of the work for you. It would seem like flagging this type of spam is something they should be doing, but it doesn’t appear being doing that.

In one example we looked at, the spam campaign was also apparently abusing LinkedIn as the content posted on the Wix Group on a website was linking to now non-existent pages on LinkedIn:

That same impacted website, a Christian academy, also had spam added to the group that seems more problematic to the specific website, as it was promoting pornography:

It seems like Wix could do a better job of handling this. It also is a reminder that spammers will take advantage of the ability to post content on websites, so any functionality that allows that should be disabled if not used and otherwise be moderated.

Wix Doesn’t Currently Support Importing WordPress Websites or Blogs

One of the services we offer is to do transfers of websites from one web host to another, though we often have people that contact us about this service looking to transfer the content of a website to or from a website design platform, like Weebly or Squarespace. We recently had someone contact us about moving a WordPress based website to one of those platforms, Wix. We did a quick to see if it was possible to do that, so we could at least let them know if that is possible, even though we don’t offer that. After we did that we tried to email them that information, but it turned out they hadn’t provided a valid email address, but we can at least share this information with others.

Currently Wix doesn’t support importing websites in to their service:

Currently, importing a site created outside of Wix is not supported.

They also don’t currently support importing blog content in to their service either:

Currently, importing blog content or data from an external source or blog is not supported.
So either you would need to do the transfer manually or look for a third-party solution for that.