User talk:ChrisP

Thanks! But the humour wikis are never edited, they are vandalized, it's the usual (constructive) way. On a serious note, those spammers that attack this wiki use the same pattern of those that attack the wikis of Uncyclomedia. We've tried several methods to block them, and the only that seems to have worked was a rangeblock on their IPs. If you are interested in how we dealt with this problem:

• Mass Vandalisms, when we noticed the problem
• Mass Vandalisms 2, a new wave of attacks
• Spambot attacks, includes a list of blocked IPs and good reasons why this should not be done

BTW, I wrote some nasty Flash animations in those wikis too, however some of them are probably horribly written. Cthulhu.fhtagn 16:45, 29 September 2011 (BST)

I think that those pages that are frequently targeted by the spammers should be protected at Sysops level, like Main page. Cthulhu.fhtagn 17:52, 1 October 2011 (BST)

Ok, maybe I can help preventing the spammers to make this site their playground. I became Sysops at another site for the same reason, I was the first to revert spam. Cthulhu.fhtagn 18:48, 2 October 2011 (BST)

Thanks! I hope I will be a good Sysops. Cthulhu.fhtagn 22:19, 4 October 2011 (BST)

• After almost one month sysopsing, I think the spambot attacks no longer are a problem for those that wish to visit the wiki. The pattern of them is this: they create an account, then edit Main Page, then abandon the account, returning 12 hours later. Just by protecting Main Page, I could block this attack. However, the disadvantage is that there are hundreds of spambot accounts, all those accounts and their editions should be eliminated, so that the history of Special:RecentChanges only shows real recent changes, and not spambot failed invasions. Cthulhu.fhtagn 19:27, 30 October 2011 (GMT)

• Oh, no, the spambots gave up targeting Main Page, and they are now spamming in their own userpages! BTW, I wrote SWFTools:Policy, feel free to change anything. Cthulhu.fhtagn 18:22, 2 November 2011 (GMT)

• I am seriously considering a Range block of 0.0.0.0/0 - this will prevent all editions by IPs and the creation of new accounts. I will try that for 12 hours, probably tomorrow I may extend, or maybe I may start splitting one bit at a time. There's no way the spammers will win! Cthulhu.fhtagn 01:11, 3 November 2011 (GMT)

• News from the war against the spambot:

I blocked all IP ranges that ever spammed any other project under UnMeta/UnCommons. Probably they will find new IPs, but then they will also attack UnMeta/UnCommons and I will block the new IPs.

I am deleting every account that is created for the purpose of spamming. No need to inflate the number of users with 100s of spambots.

Should I ask for help and invite someone else to admin? Sometimes I can't verify if the wiki is under attack, and then there are many spams. Cthulhu.fhtagn 23:49, 14 November 2011 (GMT)

Thanks, but I was a Bureaucrat before (that's why I'm deleting spambot accounts). And I don't know that much about MediaWiki, I'm kind of learning it "on the fly" (this is the third wiki that I was made admin for the same reason, fighting spam). Cthulhu.fhtagn 15:41, 22 November 2011 (GMT)

Mediawiki extensions

I looked at the list of Mediawiki extensions, and here is what I think could be useful. I tried to rank them in order of usefulness, it's probably better to implement and test one at a time.

CheckUser

• CheckUser - CheckUser function allows a user with permissions to check which IPs are used by a given username and which usernames are used by a given IP, without having to run queries directly against the database by hand.

This is the strongest anti-spam tool, it allows some administrators (those with check user privileges) to get the IPs of any editors. It's used to get IP ranges of the spambots.

Cleanup after spam attacks

• Recent Changes Cleanup - Allows sysops to hide any line in the RC page. See description for more detail.

For a visitor, it's ridiculous to get the Special:RecentChanges and see that 99% of them are spam. But I'm not familiar with this tool.

Other anti-spam tools

Some of these tools may not be necessary, because CheckUser will significantly reduce spam. I'm not familiar with most of them, but they look interesting.

• AbsenteeLandlord - Auto-locks the wiki database if the sysops are all inactive for some time.
• AkismetKlik - Rejects edits from suspected comment spammers on Akismet's blacklist.
• Blacklist - Restricts access to specified pages by adding a robust blacklist option to MediaWiki.
• BlockTitles - Allows users to block the creation or editing of articles with certain title names.
• Check Spambots - Checks editor's IP address, e-mail and name against external known-spambot blacklists.
• CommentSpammer - Rejects edits from suspected comment spammers on a DNS blacklist.
• ConfirmAccount - Requires submission and approval of accounts.
• ConfirmEdit - Adds CAPTCHAs for page saves and other user actions.
• LockTitle - Enables locking of certain titles to prohibit unprivileged users to create said page.
• NotEvil - Block any edit which contains a url, unless the user is on the Not Evil list.
• Nuke - Gives sysops the ability to mass delete pages.
• Username Blacklist - Block the creation of user accounts matching a regular expression blacklist.

Useful gadgets

Some MediaWiki extensions are useful in the creation of articles. One very important extension, and it surprised me that it was not implemented, was:

• Cite - footnotes for citing sources in Wikipedia articles and help for correctly citing Wikipedia articles in offline media.

It allows verificability, by providing references to be added to the text. The format for the reference is very simple, just write <ref>This is a reference</ref> and there will appear a small superscript number with an internal link to the reference, like this ^[1].

Other useful tools are those:

• CollapsableText - Adds a table to easily hide/show portions of text.
• Eval - Provides mathmatical functions for MediaWiki.
• JsMath - Math rendering with the javascript library jsMath.
• Math - Render mathematical formulas between <math> ... </math> tags.
• MediaFunctions - Provides various parser functions to obtain properties of media files.
• ParserExt - Provides a collection of parser functions.
• ParserFunctions - Enhances parser with logical functions.
• RandomSelection - Displays a random option from the given set.
• StringFunctions - Enhances parser with string functions.
• StringUtils- Manipulate strings.

They allow the creation of intelligent pages, for example:

• Ultimaquintafeirismo (Lastthursdayism), a religion parody that preaches that the world was created in the Last Thursday; this page has a different aspect for each weekday
• 13470, 50, 50135, 30, 3773516, 3, 13206, this page includes a flash animation (click in the calculator) and the spoiler section is hidden (collapsed)
• RandomSelection is very interesting to give pages a different (and random) aspect, it's useful in humor wikis and in wikis that include exercises.

Now, back to the warzone! Cthulhu.fhtagn 18:26, 27 November 2011 (GMT)

FTP

I'm not familiar with FTP access, and how to edit those weird javascript files. OTOH, probably the owners of Uncyclomedia could help. As I said earlier, I'm learning how to Sysops on the fly, and probably I will make some mistakes. Cthulhu.fhtagn 11:49, 29 November 2011 (GMT)

Signal-to-noise ratio

I have an idea to improve the signal-to-noise ratio here, since there are 500s 300 _{I'm killing 'em all!} spambot accounts to half a dozen users and 100 spams for each legit edition. What about offering a course on swfc? I think there may be a few interested users among the UnCommons vandals. Cthulhu.fhtagn 20:46, 3 December 2011 (GMT)

Check user

Thanks for the updates! There is a problem with the Check user. I can run it, but the output is an empty screen. Cthulhu.fhtagn 17:25, 4 December 2011 (GMT)

• "Recent Changes Cleanup" seems to be working fine. I used it to hide a spam and de reversal of the spam. Nuke will be tested after the next spambot attack. Cthulhu.fhtagn 17:29, 4 December 2011 (GMT)

• The spambots vanished. Now I miss them. Cthulhu.fhtagn 23:48, 14 December 2011 (GMT)

One spambot attack in two weeks. That's manageable. I also did a mass-delete of unused accounts (probably spambots), and cleaned everything, so that Special:RecentChanges only show the useful Recent Changes. For someone visiting the wiki, it would look like we are lazy guys, who post once or twice a month. Cthulhu.fhtagn 13:00, 17 December 2011 (GMT)

• OMG... Carnival break, and 20 spammers attacked here! Cthulhu.fhtagn 21:06, 22 February 2012 (GMT)

• Quite properly, I've just deleted about 20 unused accounts, while listening to Metallica's Seek and Destroy. Unfortunately, one of them was a valid editor, however, since he/she did just one edition in 2010 and then vanished, I hope he/she will never notice. But I must be more careful in the future. Cthulhu.fhtagn 17:56, 12 March 2012 (GMT)

• Now there are from 100-150 accounts, most of them are still spam bots, but it's much better than the initial 600. Probably by April all spam bot accounts will have been eliminated. Cthulhu.fhtagn 14:34, 19 March 2012 (GMT)

• I think, for now, that the priority should be to try to figure out how to show the output of the Check User. The spam bot attacks diminish whenever they also attack UnCommons (the Commons of some Uncyclopedias), because then I get their IPs there and block them here. Cthulhu.fhtagn 03:17, 20 March 2012 (GMT)

• Ok, next time a spambot attacks, I will test the tool. It's scary to see that the spambots are taking up all abandoned wikis, just do a Google search for "wiki loans" and watch the disaster: http://www.google.com.br/search?q=wiki+loans Cthulhu.fhtagn 21:51, 23 March 2012 (GMT)

• Sweet! With Check User, it's easy to rangeblock the IPs used by spambots, and prevent them from attacking from the same site and different accounts. Now I'm going to do a cleanup. Cthulhu.fhtagn 19:23, 29 March 2012 (BST)

New problems

Now both pages Special:RecentChangesCleanup and Special:UserMerge are not showing anything. Cthulhu.fhtagn 19:27, 29 March 2012 (BST)

• Now the spambots vanished, probably the captcha was enough. But why do I miss them? :-) Cthulhu.fhtagn 21:36, 1 May 2012 (BST)

  I guess we could now think about populating the wiki with hints and tutorials. Cthulhu.fhtagn (talk) 16:44, 5 May 2012 (BST)