Double wiki spam
We’ve seen multiple edits of the same wiki page by the same spammer, and have been wondering why on earth. What’s the point of removing your own edits?
Well, turns out there IS a good point.
My wiki runs Mediawiki, and it has a cool feature called rollback. An administrator can rollback edits he/she doesn’t like by clicking one easily accessible link.
By doing double edits on the same file, the spammer makes sure that feature can’t be used reliably, thereby necessitating a more complex operation to remove the spam. An operation any half assed administrator should be able to do. But as you know, that’s the theory, not the reality. A more complicated operation may be left for another day by an overworked administrator.
Guys, if you run a wiki, keep an eye on it, and learn how to rescue it should spammers get really obsessive. Chances are you’ll experience “obsessive” spammers. They’re just trying to up the chances of their spam sticking…
August 15th, 2005 at 11:52 pm
Don’t most modern wikis have a fairly deep backup/change history?
What you say is certainly true but I didn’t think newer stuff had that prob.
I work with PhpWiki 1.2. It certainly has the problem you mention.
Roy.
August 16th, 2005 at 3:02 pm
Mediawiki has a deep change history. But the one click rollback only goes one edit deep. To rollback once a page has been saved by two different IP numbers, you have to copy and paste to do it.
August 17th, 2005 at 9:06 am
There IS another way to rollback than copy and paste. If you have a good edit that’s still available as a version, you can bring that up and click on edit. You get a warning that you’re editing an out of date version of the page. If you click on save, you’ve effectively rolled back to a previous version, even one several versions old. But it’s not as easy as the rollback link, of course.