spambots in the wiki

[Darvin]

[dislekcia]

It's not a matter of not being willing. It's a matter of balancing working on the game vs learning a completely unrelated new system just to figure out how to deal with something that's invisible to the vast majority of DD wiki users, let alone DD players.

We'll get around to it. Just not right now... Also, I'm supposed to be on holiday here

[Gakato]

[dislekcia]

Yeah, that's not what that page looked like code-wise when I tried to do exactly that last month. I also can't just randomly go about changing stuff in a live system, my safe clone of the site is back at the office on a different continent. From experience, nothing with a mediawiki is just a quick 10 minute change - something else always breaks and you have to go hunting through multiple php includes to find out what the hell's going on.

[Darvin]

We had over 400 pages of spam posted in the last 12 hours. I am simply not capable of controlling this.

(edit: the spam-bots appear to have moved on and have posted only about one page of spam in the last hour. However, I'm certain they'll be back. The sooner we can put something in place, even as a stop-gap measure, the better)

[dislekcia]

Darvin, you really don't have to police this. I appreciate the effort, but I assume that there will be a way to nuke all pages posted after date X, or all non-interlinked pages, or something once I get back and can spare a day to focus on the wiki instead of new content.

[Darvin]

They're back, and with a vengeance.

Over 1000 pages of spam in under 24 hours.


(Also, for those who haven't been following the wiki's activity log, here's the update for the last ~3 months: Spambots took a holiday and averaged about 5 pages per day of spam created. I had it cleaned up by late November and maintained it easily until today's explosive spam barrage)

[dislekcia]

They must have unlocked a couple of new hosts to post from that weren't on the blacklist

[Darvin]

I created IP blocks for every incident of spam in the last hour (and deleted the pages they created, while I was at it) to hopefully slow things down.

And, of course, any other DD Wiki Admins can feel free to step in.

[Tinker]

For what it's worth, I think it would not hurt anyone if we removed page creation priviliges from most of the people, and used a handful of "old timers" as page creation admins or whatnot. The structure of the wiki is cca. 80% ready, and it would be maybe a half-hour effort to create those pages that we know we'll need in the near future (i.e. make sure all class challanges, dungeons, triple quests, etc. have their own page, even if it just says "stub").

Then the rest of us can fill it in gradually, and if we do realize that something is missing we can just talk it here and get the page created by the page creator admin.

Not sure if it's a lot of work to tweak the user rights, but it would make at least mindless page spam a non-issue. Hopefully overwriting good stuff with spam would not become an issue.