URGENT: ConTeXt Wiki being actively sabotaged!
It looks like someone is currently actively going through the Wiki and deleting pages (and creating some blank useless pages, such as the one named "Brooks"). Can someone block this before the damage gets worse? - Brooks
At 02:25 PM 10/9/2005, you wrote:
It looks like someone is currently actively going through the Wiki and deleting pages (and creating some blank useless pages, such as the one named "Brooks").
Update: It appears that the sabotaging has been stopped for now, and the mess cleaned up, except for the blank useless pages that need to be deleted. (See the "Spam Removal" page on the Wiki for a tally of those.) 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. (See, for instance, the history for Talk:Main Page, and do a diff between the Sept. 5 version and the last Sept. 4 version.) Meanwhile, this is either a bug in our setup or in MediaWiki in general.... - Brooks
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!
Brooks Moses said this at Sun, 9 Oct 2005 16:18:52 -0700:
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.
Yeah, I noticed that the last "good" pages from reliable authors were sometimes blank. I have to wonder if some of this attack was based on that bug/misfeature, because there seemed to be a lot of edits along the way. Thanks so much for raising the alarm, Brooks! -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Adam T. Lindsay, Computing Dept. atl@comp.lancs.ac.uk Lancaster University, InfoLab21 +44(0)1524/510.514 Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK Fax:+44(0)1524/510.492 -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Adam Lindsay wrote:
Brooks Moses said this at Sun, 9 Oct 2005 16:18:52 -0700:
Thanks so much for raising the alarm, Brooks!
indeed! I wonder if there are ways to guard against this (requesting a login for editing probably a good firewall) Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------
I wonder if there are ways to guard against this (requesting a login for editing probably a good firewall)
This is no guard, spambots register themselves as regular users. Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net
Hi all, [lost changes]
Meanwhile, this is either a bug in our setup or in MediaWiki in general....
It's a bug in the Software. I'll upgrade. Patrick -- ConTeXt wiki and more: http://contextgarden.net
participants (4)
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Adam Lindsay -
Brooks Moses -
Hans Hagen -
Patrick Gundlach