Re: Zsh wiki and spam

["Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri" <andreas.kahari@bils.se>]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 12:30:02AM +0200, Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> > I went through most (all?) pages and removed the spam (I'm the
> > "kusalananda" user) only to have some of my edits immediately reverted
> > by spammers ("justgerardz", "justgerrardz").
> 
> I've e-mailed the administrator of the wiki so hopefully he can block
> those users. It's a constant battle and I don't think there are any easy
> solutions.
> 
> That reverting seems to be being done by some automated script bot. The
> two similarly named accounts you list were even fighting each other over
> a few pages - install:start for example.
> 
> I suspect this particular script is only capable of reverting back one
> edit. A few months back I removed spam and improved a page as a single
> edit and the script just reverted to the last spam page.
> 
> On some pages, I've just made two changes: first to revert the spam
> and then add some arbitrary changes. I'm hoping that doing it as two
> edits will stop it reverting the spam at least for a short while.

I've checked, it doesn't matter. The bot (or whatever it is) just
overwrites the page with its copy of the contents.

Removing the spam accounts would help, for a while. Another idea is to
disallow edits without comments, and to make sure all accounts have
valid mail addresses. The next step would be to designate an active zsh
user or users as administrators that are able to grant editing rights to
others.

In its current form, the Wiki is useless since the bots keeps reverting
changes.

Cheers,
Andreas

> > Is the Wiki dead? In that case, maybe the reference to it should be
> > removed from the manuals?
> 
> There's plenty of scope for the content to be improved but it isn't
> dead.
> 
> Oliver
> 

-- 
:: Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri, Bioinformatics Developer, BILS,
:: Uppsala University, Sweden
::----------------------------------------------------------------------
:: My other car is a cdr.