Malte Kiesel wrote:
Chuck Smith wrote:
Last evening and this morning we suffered from a robot editing dozens
of pages on WikiCreole and I just noticed they are hitting jspwiki.org
as well. They are each from a different IP and sometimes it would
also make multiple edits so that a simple rollback would not be
possible. They would simply add a few random characters to the
beginning of each page they hit.
Yes, this is obviously the same bot that hit some JSPWiki sites about a
week or so ago.
Like that
http://www.wikicreole.org/Diff.jsp?page=People&r1=63&r2=62
(first line)?- Seems the bot doesn't handle encoding too well, too ;).
Anyone got an idea how to handle this properly? What is the purpose of
adding this gibberish anyways?
Someone thinks they're being inordintately clever when they're in
reality just being inordinately stupid and annoying. Some people
are by nature inordinately stupid and annoying, and we apparently
have to live on the same planet as them. A shame, really. Too
bad they can't have their own planet to pollute.
The problem with this is that while with proper countermeasures (e.g.,
captchas on adding external links) actual spam doesn't get through, but
since these edits do not add external links, this mechanism doesn't
work. Changes can get reverted quickly but in the course page history,
RSS and other notification mechanisms get polluted, annoying users that
subscribed to changes :-(.
Requiring login is no option since this defeats the wiki idea in my
opinion. Captchas on every edit should solve the problem but are not too
nice either.
Well, seems we have an option: either let this crap drift in or put
up countermeasures. It's a shame there are people with no life, but
there are people with no life. For those of us who have a life, we
don't want to spend it undoing bot-created garbage. For my own wikis
I've so far got restricted logins, which may "defeat the wiki idea"
but I at least don't have to deal with this crap. For several
upcoming wiki projects I'll likely be using captchas since I don't
have the time or interest in dealing with this stupidity. It doesn't
take any intelligence to write a bot that can infiltrate a site with
no security, it takes stupidity. Sad, small-minded people. All they
do is ruin the experience for other people.
Murray
...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com> === = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/ = = ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk = = = =
Boundless wind and moon - the eye within eyes,
Inexhaustible heaven and earth - the light beyond light,
The willow dark, the flower bright - ten thousand houses,
Knock at any door - there's one who will respond.
-- The Blue Cliff Record
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