Wiki spambots

[chrio]

The modlet wiki has been troubled by spambots since 14 September.

I noted that the main page had been changed, and created an account to fix it but I didn't realize the extent of the modifications done at the time.

14 days log of changes done
user creation log

I informed Vadi in a PM, but I figured it was best to post it here aswell. Btw, if you start to mass delete accounts, I would prefer it if you can leave mine intact.

/Chrio

[SlySven]

Golly, that IS bad - and I can't do much about it (I don't have any super abilities on the WIKI) other than to delete the text on the offending pages - but it can easily be reverted if the bot notices...! Given that a login on the forum gives wiki write access I wonder how many of the members that I think are bots but have not tried to post spam here are instead spamming the wiki instead...

[Vadi]

I've disabled registration and deleted a whole lot of pages. Re-enabling registration was a disaster...

[SlySven]

You will also need to delete the user or at least clear and lock the user's page as they often have dubious URLs as well.

[Vadi]

I've finally reversed all of the spambots damage and there shouldn't be anything left: http://wiki.mudlet.org/index.php?title= ... &limit=500.

[SlySven]

Oh that looks much better - lets hope we keep the b*****s out of there in the future.

[SlySven]

Returning to Bots closer at hand - is it worthwhile requesting that real-life actual human person type beings - the sort of member we want do NOT fill in the website area of their registration data - that might be one way to help to filter them out from the incessant spew of accounts created by Bots that stuff dubious or just plainly off-topic links into that field.

In hindsight this is probably so the approved search engine Bots: google, bing, yahoo (at least) see the links and record them and increase the page rankings for the referred to sites which is what those SpamBots are probably aiming at (and their creators get paid for)...

And for reference I really don't recommend clicking on a website in the "Members" listing or on an individual's details page unless they have more than a couple of posts on the board and actually seem to be active real member here...