At 03:35 PM 10/9/2005, Brooks Moses wrote:
I did notice one very significant problem, however: In a number of cases, the last history file prior to the spamming was missing a lot of things -- it seems that, if a section is removed, it also disappears from the history for the _previous_ edit.
Thus, I'm now going back through and trying to recover these. This will entail a loss of information, because the last changes to those sections will have been completely lost.
Ok, here's the complete list of pages that had sections go missing, which have been recovered: Contextgarden (lost one edit, reconstructed) Installation hints (nothing appears lost) Math (lost one edit, reconstructed) Talk: Main Page (lost one edit) TeTeX 3.0 installation (lost one edit) Presentations (lost one edit, reconstructed) Release Notes (nothing appears lost) Structurals (lost one edit, reconstructed) Web resources (nothing appears lost) As best I can tell from the commit logs on the two pages with lost edits that haven't been recovered, the edits were fairly minor. In the remaining cases, the missing edits were mostly mine, and I remembered the basics of what I'd put in the previous time. In the one reconstructed case that wasn't mine, the remains of the page contained the missing edit. This points out that, until this bug is confirmed fixed, we need to be very careful when reverting sabotaged pages, in order to make sure that we haven't lost any sections in the process. The strategy that I used for this was to compare all reverted pages against both the newest-known-good page and the one immediately prior to it. - Brooks P.S. At this point, I've gone through every single page touched by the saboteurs in the last couple of days, and confirmed that all of the spam has been removed and the damage fixed (except for the pages needing deletion). Thanks much to Adam, Patrick, and Taco, who did the bulk of the damage repair!