INTENSE WIKI SPAM
First of all, I'm sorry if this is the wrong category.
Second of all, the spam on the wiki is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. I mean it. I tried to clean up a bunch of it a while back, and now the spambots just steamroll over my two hours of work with their ability to not get tired. And the result is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. I'm just wondering: Where are the wiki mods? Are there any? Who manages the wiki? Can they get some spam control in there? Because the spam is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. Not only do several hundred pages have to be deleted, but lord knows how many of those spambots there are, and how long it'll take to block all of them, and this whole situation is just COMPLETELY #$@*ING RIDICULOUS.
Second of all, the spam on the wiki is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. I mean it. I tried to clean up a bunch of it a while back, and now the spambots just steamroll over my two hours of work with their ability to not get tired. And the result is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. I'm just wondering: Where are the wiki mods? Are there any? Who manages the wiki? Can they get some spam control in there? Because the spam is COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS. Not only do several hundred pages have to be deleted, but lord knows how many of those spambots there are, and how long it'll take to block all of them, and this whole situation is just COMPLETELY #$@*ING RIDICULOUS.
Comments
I was just bored and deleted the contents of several spam pages...
But if you just search for 'drugstore' you will find about 120 hits for spam articles about some pills and chemicals, with links to some shady online shops. :-\
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam
(ETA: Doing a rough pass right now, which will undoubtedly leave a lot of spam, but for now my goal is avoid accidentally deleting good pages, not to delete all the bad pages. Expect results to be somewhat slow.)
There's also this entire category of spam pages only, with plenty still there.
And thank you so much! I can hit "random page" and NOT get spam now!
(Details: I'd been going through the orphaned pages, using some really broad heuristics to avoid deleting good stuff, but it turns out that most of the pages I needed to delete were already emptied out and just needed to be deleted, so I've been looking at all the short pages for the last few minutes. Deletion is throttled so that JoCo's servers don't get too hammered, and I'm doing some manual eyework before I delete anything, so don't expect miracles here, speed-wise.)
(Also, some pages are VFD that don't look like they should be -- e.g. my talk page and Lex's talk archive. I wonder why that is?)
(Now the wiki feels so zestfully clean!)
My perception of the current problem is that Bry appears to be the only mod who's still active, and he's too busy with real life to keep on top of the delete button. There's probably a way to have a script clear out the obvious spam on a regular basis, but none of us are wiki experts enough to implement it.
I have faith in you! (:
(PS - Check your PMs)
Can you run that script, pretty please? The spam is getting kind of offensive.
Guys, it may be time to disallow anonymous editing
@Bry is the only active wiki mod that I know of, and he hasn't been online today. I messaged him earlier about the possibility of giving a few other active wiki editors mod powers, which would help stem the tide.
I'm ambivalent about removing anonymous editing entirely. While it would help in this particular wave, spammers who create accounts are also common, and many fans who do one-time edits (like adding setlists or links to videos) may be dissuaded if the process is much more involved. Wiki editing is already awfully intimidating for a lot of us.
Regarding anonymous editing, there is a type of addition-related CAPTCHA on the wiki but only for those who try to add links, and this recent string of vandalism is simply inserting random phrases into pages. If we could add a CAPTCHA for all types of anonymous edits the problem would (hopefully) be solved.
Argh.
Spiked Math has a captcha solution which seems to work pretty well; they ask what the derivative of 2x is with respect to x, and automatically fill in the response using JavaScript, which most bots don't enable. I see the occasional spam post there, but not often, and I think Mike[d Spath] commented somewhere that this works better than the captchas he'd tried previously.
I wonder if we could have something like, 'What is the name of the assistant of the mad scientist on Skullcrusher Mountain' or something else which would be obvious even to casual JoCo fans ('the ____ is a lie'?), but not to bots, possibly with the answer already filled in the way Spiked Math does it. For bonus points, make it a song lyric involving robots.
Fixed that... it was the ! template.
It's almost as if the random-almost-believable-blog-comment bots that I've seen around the place don't realise that it's not a blog.
ETA: @Bry, is it possible to lock all templates somehow, so that they can only be edited by logged-in, preferably experienced editors? An edit in a template can have a huge impact.
This looks like the kind of attack described here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam#IP_address_blacklists
We used to have captchas. Captchas were ineffective. Taking them out actually reduced spam for some time.
Protecting hasn't seemed to work -- I protected "You Ruined Everything" (see http://www.jonathancoulton.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=You_Ruined_Everything&action=history ) but newly registered users were still able to vandalize. But I can give it a try -- what do you want me to protect?
ETA: Forum registration has also been slammed by spammers -- I'm getting about 50 new applicants a day, most of whom are fake. I'm sorry I'm not more energetic, but I'm not feeling very enthusiastic right now.
Lemme see if I can add mods -- please reply in-thread with your JoCopedia username if you're willing to help out
Thanks! (And nice to know who Boring Manager Rob is in this world.) I've promoted volunteers to mod.
I'll be back soon, I promise.
Now I won't feel like I'm incapable of doing anything genuinely productive!
Yay!