At 11:48 PM 10/9/2005, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

Brooks Moses wrote:

...

Our spammer has returned.

You have to wonder why people think this is funny.

Indeed. I actually suspect that he doesn't -- I suspect he's being paid (or has some other reason) to be trying to improve the pagerank of those particular websites in Google. Which he is doing by putting links to them on Wikis -- in a way that, if his bots weren't buggy and thus didn't delete the page content half the time, and if nobody looked at the "recent changes" log, would be completely invisible until the next time someone edited the page. Incidentally, on reverting the changes -- the trick is to notice whether his change has a section name as its changelog entry. If it does, then the reverted page will include _only_ that section if you use the usual reversion method, and you'll have to go to extra effort to recover the rest. At this point, the easiest way to fix those is probably to let me do it, because I took the precaution of pre-loading "edit" pages for all the potentially-affected pages (luckily, our spammer is hitting the same pages over and over, rather than going for variety), so all I have to do is hit "save changes". :) - Brooks