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Underground > Policy & Help >

Our FAQ Has Been Destroyed

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18:30 / 29.10.04

Ah, sorry. Here, I mean.

22:46 / 30.10.04

Yeah, I noticed that. Not sure, really. I can only assume a badly-programmed spambot, unless it was testing whether links could be posted on the wiki, before removing them again, in preparation for a mega spam assault in the future or selling the URL on (which would be a bit tinfoil-hat to suggest).

09:40 / 02.11.04

Gosh. Lots of spam today, lots of newly-created pages.

*puts on tinfoil-hat*. Okay, I wonder if that’s what the testing was in aid of. Oodles of spam, all from the same place. 202.107.216.99, to be precise. Anyway, there’s a *slew* of new pages that’ll need deleting altogether sometime. And another bunch of pages, down at the bottom of the list, that don’t even have anything in them yet. And I don’t know how weird these pages are: there’s a couple more like it, I can delete the content but they’re still all linky at the top. And if I’ve accidentally emptied out any of our pages that had something important in them, I guess we can deal with it later.

10:51 / 19.11.04

Jeez. There may be as many pages on our wiki now which have been created by spammers as there are proper Barbelith-related pages. Is there any point to continually emptying these out? The only way anyone can access them is from the ‘Recent Changes’ page, they’re not linked to from anywhere else in the Barbelith FAQ.

I’ll do it if it’s thought necessary, I’m just wondering whether it’s really helpful, is all.

Anyway, there are now *quite* a few pages that’ll need deleting altogether. Eventually.

19:29 / 19.11.04

Seems pretty pointless now. They'll just be deleted and replaced with some new spam sooner or later anyway.

23:24 / 19.11.04

Okay, there's like ten million new spam pages now and I'm not motivated to fix them all.

TOM GET PASSWORD PROTECTION OR SOMETHING ON THE WIKI OR ELSE ABANDON IT BECAUSE IT IS POINTLESS NOW

11:53 / 20.11.04

should have said "please" there

We're The Great Old Ones Now

14:30 / 22.11.04

Uh huh.

15:25 / 22.11.04

Well, yeah, but it is a pretty big problem. The wiki appears to only keep revisions from a certain amount of time back, which means that if everybody (or Bed Head) gets fed up with having to fix it each morning, sooner or later there won't be any previous revisions of worth to revert to and we'll have lost all the work that was put into it orignally.

18:49 / 22.11.04

There’s another wave of new pages coming in right now.

Still, I’m thinking if we *only* fix the Barb-related pages, it might actually make it a much easier job to pick out all the dedicated spam pages when they’re being deleted. And besides, they may well be a drain on resources, webspace or bandwidth or whatever - I don’t know - but if spambots want to create new pages for their rubbish, it doesn’t really affect the barbelith FAQ, does it? Not the way yer average poster relates to it.

I still want a horrible fate to befall whoever is responsible for all this, of course. Just so you know I’m not going soft. Hard as nails, me.

20:47 / 22.11.04

There's absolutely no point in deleting the content from those new pages. If the proper FAQ pages are kept clean, the only links to the spam pages will be in Recent Changes, so they'll be invisible to anyone who doesn't go looking for them.

If you can be bothered to filter through the 100+ new pages for the fifteen or so original pages that need cleaning up, then carry on, by all means. It'll be a less time-consuming job than wiping all the spam, but it'll also be a fair bit more fiddly.

23:11 / 24.11.04

Okay, well, I personally am a bit sick of the whole business. It's so easy to add passwords or filters or *some* sort of barrier to the Wiki to cut down on the spam, and it's not been done.

I'm not going to go around fixing it any more. I know that Tom is busy with things etc but if this isn't any sort of interest for him, it's not for me either. Fuck it.

05:58 / 25.11.04

If Tom's got other things on his plate, he could appoint one or two new admins. Surely out of all the Barbelites there's someone with the skillz to pay the billz...

11:36 / 25.11.04

A bit drunk and cross last night, so could have been expressed a little more politely, but I *like* the Wiki and I would like to see a situation where people did more than clean spam from it.

11:37 / 25.11.04

er, or indeed, didn't have to clean spam off it at all

02:53 / 27.11.04

It'll be a less time-consuming job than wiping all the spam, but it'll also be a fair bit more fiddly.

heh. Okay well, so far, Fiddly>>>>>>>>>>Time-consuming.

..as Flux might say. Although nothing too fiddly has happened the last couple of nights, tbh. However, there have been literally *hundreds* of brand new pages made tonight. The longer this door is left open, the bigger-and-more-time-consuming job it’s going to be, to delete them all permanently - if they can even be deleted like that.

I’m _just_ saying. Point me in the right direction and tell me what to do.

And yeah, I really like the wiki too. Not only is it worth saving, it’s worth expanding. Just as soon as we can build pages that don’t get replaced with spam every other day.

20:36 / 01.12.04

So, here, Tom says:

With regard to the Wiki - yeah spammers WILL be a problem, and there's nothing we can really do about that. Keeping it together will be about sharing the not-terribly-onorous burden and making sure that a decent proportion of us checks on it every few days and sees how it's doing and if it needs to be fixed. It's not ideal, but I think we have to just assume that there are evil fucks in the world who would destroy any creative piece of work to sell viagra if they could - and that part of being in the world in a useful and positive way is to actually work to keep some of that in check. Not glam, I know. But functional.

I just *don’t* think that is going to work. Not unless we organise a rota and give everyone a different hour of the day. Resetting a page isn’t onerous, sure. But sifting through which pages need to be reset and which don’t becomes more difficult every time another slew of spam pages is created, and then it only takes a wave of spam to comes along to jumble them all up again. Some dude’s just rescued a page I’d missed, a page called ‘sandbox’. If I missed that, then I’ve probably missed others. And it’s not much of an incentive to expand the wiki in any way, if every new page only makes it more difficult to keep hold of what’s already there.

So, do we need a proper rota, or does anyone have any other ideas at this point?

20:44 / 01.12.04

Proper solutions have been suggested in this thread. I'd like to see them implemented. If they don't work then fine. Let us know that they don't, because right now it looks like there hasn't been even been an attempt at putting them into practice.

Restricting edits to those users who log in doesn't appear to be that time-consuming a job.

Also, as I said in the other thread, it's *not* an "every few days" issue any more. It hasn't been for weeks. The 27th November saw sixteen alterations to the main FAQ page, nine of which wiped out all the content and replaced it with spam. Sixteen changes, over half of them attacks from spammers. And that's one page - there's far more than that getting fucked over each day.

If the situation were the same as it was a few months back then yeah, I'd have no problem with carrying on with cleaning duties. As it is, though, I'm no longer going to delete spam when I know for a fact that it'll just be replaced by yet more spam twenty minutes later.

20:55 / 01.12.04

Well it does work on other sites and other projects all over the web, so i don't see why it shouldn't work here on Barbelith. Take wikipedia for example. That's not to say that the problem isn't legitimate, but I think it's manageable.

I've looked into getting it password protected and stuff, but it wasn't as easy as I'd thought. I am actually coming out of my enormous work thing now (taking longer than I'd hoped, but it's starting to happen) and as a result I may actually be able to do some more work around the place. The wiki will be one of my first ports of call.

21:09 / 01.12.04

Hope dawns!

The sandbox fix was me, by the way -- I'm 196.what.ever.

After I'd done it it struck me that Grey Area's original fix might have been a sarky response to other spam, since "SandBox" is a really common page designation on other wikis. I dunno, it didn't take long to fix.

09:51 / 02.12.04

Sandbox is one of the spam created pages. I briefly toyed with the idea of turning the spam-pages with more abstract names into a creative project, putting some sort of poem or fiction in there using the page title as inspiration. But then I realised that the spammers will just wipe it. So I didn't. Sandbox remains the only attempt that was launched.

07:52 / 03.12.04

Okay - right. Here is the situation with teh wiki in a nutshell and I have to be quick because I"m not showered or dressed yet and I'm late for work.

Basically I looked into the password stuff within the wiki and it's way way less obvious and easy to set up than people suggested and I'm not even convinced it does what it said on the tin. I don't think that's a satisfactory option. I could probably use some of the extra plug-ins, but I need a good clear day or so because it's important that we don't lose content on the wiki and it's also important that I don't break the whole thing. I am taking this seriously though and I will do my best to sort something out THIS VERY WEEKEND.

Moreover I've thought about .htaccess as a way of passwording the whole area, and I'm not sure that's a terribly good idea. Some of the point of FAQs is so that people can get to know the history of the place without having to be a full member yet. Passwording it worries me a bit, because they will find it harder to read.

Two or three positive things though:

(1) I have upgraded the wiki software to the most up to date version
(2) I have investigated the IP banning stuff and there is stuff there that a Wiki admin can do
(3) Wiki admins can also delete pages that turn up out of the blue and lock pages for short or longer times if the page is being constantly buggered around by a bot
(4) Wiki admins can also lock the whole site for a bit if the thing's being attached by a bot

It occurs to me that we could operate with a style a bit like this:
(1) I could appoint some admins (it's basically just sharing a password with them - Grey Area and Bedhead are obvious candidates for this)
(2) If someone starts spamming the wiki they could add his IP address to the ban list
(3) If it's really systematic, they could lock the wiki while they're doing the bans

It's not a solution, but it is a start and a move in the right direction that should make looking after the wiki EASIER if nothing else. Does this appeal to people and is anyone interested in the job?

I've also spent quite a lot of time over the last couple of days getting rid of about 50% of the dodgy spam pages that people created on the site.

07:54 / 03.12.04

Oh and I've 'locked' the homepage so that basically for the moment it can't be changed, which should at least mean that the site is never TOTALLY broken (ie. you can get to all the core pages that the damn spambots haven't changed yet)

09:44 / 03.12.04

Sounds good to me. Locking the pages and blocking IP's would be a start, since a lot of the spam seems to come from a dozen sources or so.

Should we compile a list of the pages that need deleting? (the likes of Sandbox, Hello, Linux compiler, Wangabangawhatever*, etc.)

*before anyone pipes up, I know there's no page called Wangabangawhatever...it's just a collective term for all the Wangziaou-style pages. =)

10:07 / 03.12.04

Oh, now this pisses me off no end. Kether has been infected. Considering what Kether is, and what it was for, am I the only one who feels like something sacred has been defiled? These vermin must have names, yes? I want someone to stalk.

10:11 / 03.12.04

I'll help.

10:27 / 03.12.04

Can I suggest either Dupre or fridge as ideal candidates for this too? I know they’ve both recently expressed their exasperation in this thread, but these updates, the ability to actually deal with the situation might change that. If they want/have time, etc. Only they were doing this wiki-protecting thing for many long months before I ever started helping, and I always appreciate their advice.

Also, can we keep the SundayBreakfastInSanFrancisco spam page? I’ve always rather fancied doing something with that. In fact.... Grey, I’ll PM you.

And Tom, thank you for spending time on this. Really appreciated.

10:38 / 03.12.04

Is there a wiki page on this spam problem?

10:49 / 04.12.04

All these companies have to be going through the same internet advertising company- any way to identify which one is behind the bots?

11:53 / 04.12.04

Mostly the spammers are from China, and are basically trying to improve their standing in Google or similar search-engines by getting links on other people's sites. This is normally based on a misunderstanding of what Google tracks and analyses, but there's little we can do about it. I've blocked a whole range of Chinese IP addresses from editing the Wiki and hopefully that will be a step in the right direction. I'm thinking of installing MediaWiki instead, because that has an only-logged-in-members can post option, which appeal to me, but it would mean someone starting to transfer all the content over from the current software. Would you guys be up for that, or not?

12:00 / 04.12.04

Depends on the formats it's stored in. If it's plain text -> plain text I can write a script to convert, I should think - if it's something in SQL it might be take a bit longer, but probably doable, though someone else might be able to do it faster.

I'm unemployed right now so I have the time, and it should be good practice.

15:12 / 06.12.04

I enjoy helping as well.

00:45 / 08.12.04

Okay so basically i set up a new wiki the other day here: http://www.barbelith.com/faq/ that you have to register to join. It has a fair number of new features, is slightly more complicated to use, but should resolve most of the problems we've been having with spammers.

I have not transferred all the data over from the last wiki. I've done a good block of the most important stuff though, so if any people want to organise between themselves who wants to start the process of making it the more normal home for the FAQ, then that would be great and wonderful.

This could be a really good opportunity to tighten up and clarify the wiki. Feel free between you try and recreate it in a fashion that you think represents the board as well as possible.

Oh and please don't link to the site yet - the individual page addresses are probably going to change int he next couple of weeks or so.

15:57 / 08.12.04

You mean links to the wiki pages from the Underground, right?

I wish there was a way to automatically convert CamelCase links to the bracket-bracket version.

14:17 / 09.12.04

Can someone explain to me how we do this? Presumably it’s more complex than cut ‘n pasting, but is it simple enough to be done by someone who doesn’t really know anything about computers? I'm willing enough, but a bit slow with it. And how are you marking which pages have already been moved? Would it be practical to assign me a particular section to shift?

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