So several years ago I started a wiki for stuff and giggles.  I was playing around with hosting mediawiki on a laptop that I had retired.  It was a fun project and I learned a lot about setting up web services on a simple linux box.  This was pre-buntu and before you could just add a LAMP package with a snazzy Linux distribution.  It had a short life of it’s own when people would actually post some stuff and I had a ton of good homebrew information on the site as well as some posts from family members and friends.
It eventually got indexed and got pretty trashed.  In the same vein as why I had started it, I secured it with various means (only registered users could post, simple captcha to create account) cleaned it up, and it had a long quiet life of it’s own with a few actual changes that were worthwhile. Every blue moon someone would put some spam on the site which was easy enough to clean out manually.
For several years it was easy enough to maintain with the manual method. At one point, I decided to go ahead and host my domain(s) so I embarked on another learning process from moving some existing web services (WordPress, Mediawiki, MyTinyToDo, etc.) with data from a locally managed “server” to a hosted one. Again, I kept the database intact and made the migration transparent just for the sake of a learning exercise.
Recently, my captcha must have been broken as in just a few days it logged up hundreds of changes which were almost entirely spam and link farms. I kept all the data and the database, but it will probably just wither away and die eventually.
As a side note, who knew that captcha was an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”