Spam bot invasion

Jump to navigation Jump to search
Revision as of 24 August 2017 at 19:56.
The highlighted comment was created in this revision.

Spam bot invasion

Hi Skilgannon,

I think you have page deletion permission. We need it, since there are hundreds of spam pages whcih appeared on wiki today.

May be there is a way to get such permissions to new crop of users. Looks like many previously active advanced users are not here anymore.

    Beaming (talk)‎01:05, 24 August 2017

    An admin can mass-cleanup the spam by using Special:Nuke on suspicious users from Special:ActiveUsers, as well as suspicious edits from Special:RecentChanges.

    In the light of this, I would like to nominate User:Beaming and User:Cb for admin rights.

    Skilgannon's email can be found in Contacts.

    More discussion on this attack can be found here and here.

    More suggestions:

    • IP-ban these bozos.
    • Do some of the stuff mentioned here.
    • Merge all spam accounts together so we can keep track of them more easily.
    • Delete/hide spam entries from Special:RecentChanges.
      MultiplyByZer0 (talk)‎03:25, 24 August 2017

      I also nominating User:MultiplyByZer0 because of active presence at wiki and a lot of clean up effort coming from this user.

        Beaming (talk)‎14:27, 24 August 2017
         
        Edited by author.
        Last edit: 14:52, 26 August 2017

        List of users who need to be nuked for spam:

        THIS LIST WAS LAST UPDATED AS OF AUGUST 24 3:37 PM

        Old list:

          MultiplyByZer0 (talk)‎03:38, 24 August 2017

          Thanks for listing those bot! I think we should take action as soon as possible, e.g. disable account creation and delete spam accounts.

          Then may be we should try to add some CAPTCHA for new users?

            Xor (talk)‎07:57, 24 August 2017

            I made CAPTCHA suggestions here.

            I believe it is possible that these spammers are not bots, but low-paid humans working in huge "spam farms". A registration CAPTCHA should therefore require at least basic knowledge of Robocode (e.g. name one sample bot).

            In any case, nothing is going to happen until Skilgannon wakes up.

              MultiplyByZer0 (talk)‎09:37, 24 August 2017

              Great ideas! Thank you for your effort!

                Cb (talk)‎11:22, 24 August 2017
                 
                 
                 

                Okay, it looks like GrubbmGait and Voidious are blocking spam accounts, and account creation has been disabled.

                We still need to fix the main page, though.

                  MultiplyByZer0 (talk)‎20:22, 24 August 2017

                  I have located the main page here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572

                  Unfortunately, I do not have permissions to move it back.

                    MultiplyByZer0 (talk)‎20:33, 24 August 2017
                     

                    Thanks everyone for jumping in here! I turned off account creation again (for now), blocked a bunch of accounts, and mass deleted the pages they created. Also restored the Main Page (thanks for pointing to it!). I'll continue later, but I am a little busy at work atm / today...

                    We have faced a lot of wiki spam - we have Captcha on account creation, some custom anti-spam code, no anonymous edits. But eventually we just fell too far behind. Like MultiplyByZero said, I think these may be a mix of bots and real people. Surely we could get to a decent setup with upgrading MediaWiki and finding the right plugins, we just never made time (yet).

                    And yeah, I'd love to discuss getting a new admin or two on board! We haven't added anybody new in a while and indeed all the current ones are sort of retired.

                      Voidious (talk)‎20:56, 24 August 2017
                       
                      Retrieved from "http://robowiki.net/wiki/Thread:User_talk:Skilgannon/Spam_bot_invasion"