Wiki is being carpet bombed

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MozTS

Us And Them
Sep 12, 2004
157
0
16
If anyone who visits the wiki and knows how to revert pages, could you please help me out here, the slowness of beyondunreal.com is making it impossible to keep up with these hand full of spammers and they don't seem to be stopping.
 

MozTS

Us And Them
Sep 12, 2004
157
0
16
Sexcellent.

The mess is almost cleaned up now, but it was some of the worse spamming I have ever seen yet. It really was something fierce, if you hadn't blocked it that evil might have started respamming its old pages after it completely bombed the whole wiki. I don't know how many pages it messed with. but on my 1200 x 900 monitor it is many rolls of the scroll wheel on the recent changes page.
 

tarquin

design is flawed
Oct 11, 2000
3,945
0
36
UK
www.planetunreal.com
Thanks larrystorch :)

Mychaeel has now implemented a system to automatically block people who post spammy external links.
It's caught one of the b****** already :D
 

Zur

surrealistic mad cow
Jul 8, 2002
11,708
8
38
48
Pff, hope the wanker that did this gets a sharp taste of Chongqing.
 

Mychaeel

New Member
That, and a (hopefully) sharp taste of getting a complaint filed with their ISP. (Though, sadly enough, there are quite spammer-friendly ISPs out there. But then at least we can ban their entire IP range with a clean conscience.)

Since tarquin wrote that, another spammer tripped the trap and got auto-blocked. As simple as it is, the filter seems to be quite effective so far.
 

Mychaeel

New Member
Totally different problem.

Wiki spam is characterized by a lot of links (500+) being pasted on one or many wiki pages. The idea is to improve the spammed pages' Google PageRank that way. The wiki filter works by preventing the addition of that many links to wiki pages.

Forum spam is, well, unsolicited advertising in the forums. You'd need a full-fledged text pattern-based spam filter to even attempt to distinguish that from solicited postings.

We rarely get that or something similar on the wiki, and if we do, it's only a minor annoyance compared to the mess the huge spam attacks leave to be cleaned up.
 

Mychaeel

New Member
Mychaeel said:
That, and a (hopefully) sharp taste of getting a complaint filed with their ISP.
I actually got a response to one of my complaints:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We have already issued a warning to the user to ensure that such activity is not repeated in future. Hence we would request you to consider this case as closed. The Trouble Ticket Number for this complaint is '2973'.

Please do contact us if the incident repeats again.

Assuring you the best of our services.

Thanking you.

Yours Sincerely,

Antiabuse Support
E-mail : Antiabuse.Support@relianceinfo.com
Phone : 91-(022) -30388464
 

nick89

Mr High Ping
Dec 20, 2004
448
0
0
34
The wiki is a such a good resource and the bible for n00b mappers and coders like me, it really sucks to see people do this sometimes.
 

JohnnySix

Caffienated Haemoglobin
Apr 6, 2002
406
0
16
England
planetunreal.com
Mychaeel said:
I actually got a response to one of my complaints:

Was the gist of that reply stating something along the lines of "don't bother us again 'cos there's jack we're going to do about it." ?

I guess, unless you threaten them with legal action, someone's monthly DSL subscription money is always going to win out. :(
 

Mychaeel

New Member
Well, I've got no idea whether they did anything at all, of course, but I like to think that they did. And you can bet I'll "contact [them] if the incident repeats again." ;)

Here's another one:

Hi,

we will take the necessary actions to stop this kind of illegal activity.

Ystävällisin terveisin
Best Regards
EUnet Finland
puh +358 9 4243 3205
fax +358 9 4243 0601
Linnoitustie 4 B (Alto)
02600 Espoo
 

Aegeri

Mad Microbiologist, of ASSHATTERY
Mar 15, 2004
514
0
0
40
New Zealand
I was most disgusted with the main wiki site when some German neo-nazis invaded the history section and altered a great deal of the holocaust areas. It was quite a shame.
 

tarquin

design is flawed
Oct 11, 2000
3,945
0
36
UK
www.planetunreal.com
Aegeri said:
the main wiki site

You mean Wikipedia?
Unreal Wiki is not connected to Wikipedia in any way.
'wiki' is just a way of running and organizing a site's content -- like 'forum' or 'blog'.

but yeah, it's not good when that sort of thing happens :(