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Our FAQ Has Been Destroyed

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11:40 / 06.07.04

The wiki's getting spammed regularly by that online casino now.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

12:32 / 06.07.04

Did you make a note of their IP? Perhaps we can report them. [/triupmh of hope over experience]

13:03 / 06.07.04

Most recent was

July 5, 2004 12:06 pm by 217.132.115.94

but there's also

June 29, 2004 8:59 am by 217.132.89.133
June 24, 2004 7:46 pm by 217.132.89.125

00:04 / 07.07.04

Ooh, Israeli spam.

Could try reporting it to the ISP... or just ban the IP range. Or both.

21:14 / 07.07.04

Y'know, if it keeps up at this rate we're going to have to come up with an alternative to the wiki. I've just had to reset sixteen pages because of the same thing again. Fixing it is hardly a chore, but it's still starting to take the piss.

July 7, 2004 8:18 am by 217.132.115.90

this time.

11:11 / 08.07.04

What can we replace it with, apart from something in non-community editable html? A sub-board that has threads for every entry in the Wiki?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

15:30 / 08.07.04

I gather that some sites password protect their Wikis, except for the sandbox area. Could we do that? A communal, publicly viewable password, for example "Barbelith," would prevent spambots from attacking but would allow humans to edit entries.

21:09 / 08.07.04

Three more today. One from that fucking casino again, two from elsewhere:

July 8, 2004 8:32 am by 217.132.115.90
July 8, 2004 7:47 am by 61.149.114.93

08:41 / 09.07.04

The second one appears to be Chinese:

inetnum: 61.148.0.0 - 61.149.255.255
netname: CNCGROUP-BJ
descr: CNCGROUP Beijing province network
descr: China Network Communications Group Corporation
descr: No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street,
descr: Beijing 100031
country: CN
admin-c: CH455-AP
tech-c: SY21-AP
mnt-by: APNIC-HM
mnt-lower: MAINT-CNCGROUP-BJ
changed: hostmaster@ns.chinanet.cn.net 20000701
changed: hm-changed@apnic.net 20031017
status: ALLOCATED PORTABLE
source: APNIC

role: CNCGroup Hostmaster
e-mail: abuse@cnc-noc.net
address: No.156,Fu-Xing-Men-Nei Street,
address: Beijing,100031,P.R.China
nic-hdl: CH455-AP
phone: +86-10-68019956
fax-no: +86-10-68019958
country: CN
admin-c: CH444-AP
tech-c: CH444-AP
changed: abuse@cnc-noc.net 20031016
mnt-by: MAINT-CNCGROUP
source: APNIC

person: sun ying
address: Beijing Telecommunication Administration
address: TaiPingHu DongLi 18, Xicheng District
address: Beijing 100031
country: CN
phone: +86-10-66198941
fax-no: +86-10-68511003
e-mail: suny@publicf.bta.net.cn
nic-hdl: SY21-AP
mnt-by: MAINT-CHINANET-BJ
changed: suny@publicf.bta.net.cn 19980824
source: APNIC

08:59 / 09.07.04

Why don't we contact the ISP that the online casino spam is running through and ask them to do something about it? Their website is here.

Hmm, the ISP seems to be connected to a company called Elron Technologies. Why don't we get the NYC 'Lithers to go to the offices of Elron Technologies and cause a ruckus?

09:59 / 09.07.04

Yeah, someone must live near enough to Rivendell to go visit.

13:18 / 09.07.04

Apparently "Rivendell" is located at 850 Third Avenue, New York, New York. I think the company has moved on, or used the address under false pretenses, as I can't find any records of them occupying floorspace in the building, and the two telephone/fax numbers listed under the whois have been disconnected and/or reassigned to someone else (a charming girl called Bridget, apparently).

21:46 / 11.07.04

There seem to be various spam filters for Wikis, but I'm not sure exactly which Wiki software Tom is using.

If this is happening a lot we should certainly put one in before requiring registration, though the latter wouldn't be too bad an idea either - it's not like you can really contribute to the Wiki without being a Barbelith member anyway, it's not like random people are going to come across the Wiki by accident and say "oh, they're way wrong about Barbelith in-jokes, I've got to correct that". The major importance of it is the collaborative aspect and that's not affected by requiring registration.

15:38 / 12.07.04

Two so far today from 217.132.115.90 again. That IP address is starting to appear in Google results now, as having attacked other wikis.

00:26 / 19.07.04

Hey, how has this been happening? What exactly are they doing, changing the wiki? Also how do you get the IP addresses?

02:08 / 19.07.04

Yeah, the wiki's being changed. Here's one of the most recent attacks. IP addresses are logged every time a page is altered and you can view them by navigating through the recent changes.

07:56 / 19.07.04

That's really fucking sad isn't it? They should count themselves lucky that some of us don't know how to hack, because i'd love to fuck with them.

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:47 / 19.07.04

No, that is not our way. Anger leads to hate, hate leads to fear, fear leads to suffering, suffering leads to Swansea.

21:24 / 19.07.04

Or Hull.

09:21 / 20.07.04

What are the other Wikis doing about it?

10:22 / 20.07.04

Some have banned the IP range, others have instituted a password sign-in.

00:51 / 21.07.04

Some have banned the IP range, others have instituted a password sign-in.

That would be a cool idea, having to put our user passwords in before we can edit it so that only members can change the wiki (hey, isn't that the case already, that only members can change the wiki? How else could anyone get to it?) then if the IP is logged Tom or any mods can just match it to the member. That's if you made a database of all of all member IP's anyway. Sounds like an annoying job though, timeconsuming.

01:30 / 21.07.04

Beats the alternative, tearing down the Wiki altogether, or locking it up so it can't be modified.
I say keep up with what the other sites are doing and we'll grind the spammers down with a concerted effort. They'll go back to stealing from mailboxes and contaminating batches of pharmecuticals or whatever it is these fucks do when they're not sticking their dicks in our ears.

16:10 / 21.07.04

It occurs to me that I could probably only let people with a barbelith cookie into it. That woudl probably work.

09:05 / 22.07.04

Rivendell?! It's those fucking elves! Release the Urok-hoi!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:54 / 22.07.04

I don't actually understand any of this electrickery business, but I do realise the Wiki is a useful and cool thing to have, and should be protected. Is the cookie option fairly simple, Tom?

Apart from anything else, it seems a really odd method of spamming. If you've deliberately looked at the Wiki to, you know, FIND OUT stuff about Barbelith, then isn't your irritation at not being able to do so going to make you even less likely than normal to be interested in whatever they're pushing this time? Or are they just trying to piss people off for no other reason?

15:25 / 22.07.04

You're assuming a level of human agency that isn't present. It's automated -- a way of sending out, say, five billion links, of which maybe 10,000 would be clicked, and maybe 10 or 15 viewers would be kind of interested in the content. Wiki code is simple enough that a machine can do it.

16:48 / 22.07.04

Are Wikis googleable? Because then this kind of spamming would make the site being promoted in the spam rise in search engine listings. It would explain the inclusion of phrases like "sopranos is pretty exciting!!"...although that could just be an overenthusiastic individual.

20:18 / 22.07.04

That's exactly why it's happening,as far as I can tell. They're supposed to be hyperlinks.

You'd think they'd realise that wikis don't accept HTML - it's decidedly inept spammery.

14:43 / 28.07.04

The Barbeith wiki uses UseMod, a rather simple wiki to tweak and hack on. Its just a perl script. There are lots of patches for it to tweak its behavior. I even wrote one of them.

One thing you can do initially is set it to only allow edits if you are logged in to an account. That keeps the spambots away neatly. You don't even need to be fancy with cookies, though that would be a useful mod. Tie it in with the barbelith login, so that it requires you to login to the board first. That would be the ideal solution.

06:48 / 17.08.04

OK, the spammers are back, and they are at least fifteen shades cheekier than usual...not only did they slap over 100 links into the homepage, they went through a couple other pages and erased the information contained therein, replacing it with "online casino"...no links, just a big middle finger from our (lengthy torrent of really really foul language erased by mental censor) buddies in the east.

This is getting sillier and sillier, and if it continues in the same vein I can see people taking turns to rebuild the entire Wiki every morning. Can we please implement one of the suggestions up top?

09:10 / 17.08.04

on the main page there was a HTML link to the incongruous word 'manga' in between the word 'political' and 'activists' - this has now been removed

10:16 / 17.08.04

Found another one of the [manga] links...and finally realised that the [Aria Giovanni] ones are pornographic spam too. Feeling really stupid now, considering one of the AG ones was in 24pt writing in a headline.

10:43 / 17.08.04

Oh, and can someone find the page this Carlshao page is hiding in? I've taken out the weblinks it listed, but the page is still up and I can't find the original link source in order to get rid of it.

13:42 / 17.08.04

interesting - couldn't find a reference to the creation of the link to hentai which I have just deleted. It must have occurred between 11am and 330pm today.

Looks like someone with waaaaaaaay too much time on their hands is coming here regulalrly...

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