Spam bot invasion
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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.
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.
I also nominating User:MultiplyByZer0 because of active presence at wiki and a lot of clean up effort coming from this user.
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?
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.
Yes registration only CAPTCHA can be easily skipped by low paid humans, however it seems that the spams are created by machines — therefore adding a CAPTCHA when creating/editing pages for new users may help ;)
I have blocked and deleted the pages of the following entries. (Move them to a bottom list or something?)
Abdul Abhi2828 Abhishek.upadhyay11 Adamsmith Ahmad1234 Ahmadd123 Ajaykapadia2 Akki Alex Alexa Alexdogge1 Alexyokei Alhaji Amit8923 Andoralifs Andrusmith1 Anisingh Anjilajolia Anjilajoliaa ANNU17 Anshu01 Araja Asdasd Ashish12345 Ashish786786 Astrologerbaba16 Avisupport Baba786 Bisafepa Bitcoinsssupport Blizzardbluee Bookentry Bradyswan Brandi84 Bujelizala Caira Caleb Cbkjvjvkd Chorsupport Chunnu7294383gulabo Cooljass1 Cuwerokume Cybertechnisdhhdh Dabbu Dante Dasfgs Dear Depih12 Dev123 Dexter6789 Dfasffasf Dfgvfgvfsd5 Dfjhfgj Dfsdf Dgdfhfgjhfgh Dhanraj99 Dinni999 Dk923478 Dolka01 Dpkapadia1 Dsgdfhg Dsgsdhjfe Dykywipy Ellis S Skinner Emma000001 Emmawatson Emmie2680 Engineer123 Ergugfdguf Eswt Faer Fairsearches.pradeep Faisal Faulkner Fdbhdf525 Fibarip Frankgel Fransis99 Fullsupport Gakllerjohn Gattu Ghfdhfg Ghufgt567121 Gibson Ginjuilinhj Gk707027 Gofyozilto Gopalamj Gtrtgum Guwogepome Hajsfdjorkgpgk12 Harryji Hemantvar Herry9 Ginjuilinhj
And also restore the Main Page's talk page, which is here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/Talk:$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572
And also RoboWiki:Copyrights
Okay, it looks like GrubbmGait and Voidious are blocking spam accounts, and account creation has been disabled.
We still need to fix the main page, though.
I have located the main page here: http://robowiki.net/wiki/$$_1-855-665-7666@_HP_Service_Phone_Number_HP_Service_Phone_Number_Support_Number0572
Unfortunately, I do not have permissions to move it back.
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.
Thanks a lot User:Voidious, User:GrubbmGait, and User:Chase-san for cleaning the wiki. Special thanks to User:MultiplyByZer0 for tracking spamming users.
I have been through all the accounts of the 'Active users list' and Mass deleted and blocked the appropriate accounts. Seems that all New created pages are deleted at this moment. In that active users list still some spammers are listed, but they did more subtle things like minor edits and moving pages. Someone with a bit more knowlegde of wiki-stuff should go through their contributions and try to erase those.
Thanks for this colossal work. I've seen you deleting non stop for at least an hour.
Would you be able to revert some important pages as well? They are listed above this thread in reply to Chase-san.
Talk:Main Page has been restored afaik. But for the other two, without knowing where they went, it is hard for me to revert them.
Crap... I am very sorry guys. My git sync with wiki goofed up. I incindently restored spam pages.
Good news they all marked and sit in Category:Spam
They are removed (again), for this time I did not block you ;-) Note that a lot of new users have been created without any contributions yet, so spamming is still possible. And it would be nice if the 'Deletion log's could be hidden, now it is almost impossible to see what normal contributions have been made the last few days/weeks.
I have scanned through 'all pages' and deleted all spampages there, luckily easy to recognize due to loooong page names. Afaik no more spam is present, just some contributions from the Active user list that I can't locate anywhere. So, my 'spamming' of deletion logs is over, so Xor and Dsekercioglu and others can now see any discussions again.
Those buggers are smart. They create an account and then spam from it after some time passes. This is exactly what GrubbmGait predicted above.
We just need to embrace ourself for couple weeks. I suggest to put
[[Category:Spam]]
text within the offending pages so admins have easier time to track them down.
