aMule Forum

English => aMule News => Topic started by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 04:49:02 AM

Title: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 04:49:02 AM
aMule's Wiki will be down for some days for maintenance.

The recent continous spam attacks it's been suffering has forced the current situation were a software update has become of great urge.

Anyone looking for the info that could be found in the wiki will have to use either Google's cache feature or check through http://archive.org (though archive.org's copies are more than a year old, so in most cases, not very useful). Of course, you can ask someone in the aMule Team (contact through e-mail or through IRC at #amule in irc.freenode.net) to mail you the document/article/info you were looking for.

Before you ask, the date when the wiki will be back up again is undeterminated. Obviosuly, it will be as soon as possible. But we are very busy these days and it won't be up until we can assure the situation we've been suffering these past moths will not happen again.

WE ARE VERY SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE.

Public request: Help/Recommendations/Guidelines from anyone who has had experience fighting against wiki spammers will be very much apreciated.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: lionel77 on October 09, 2005, 07:35:55 AM
What if we made registering mandatory for posting to the wiki? Wouldn't that elimate most of the spamming?
We already don't allow unregistered posting here on the forum, so why not handle the wiki in the same way?
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Kry on October 09, 2005, 09:34:45 AM
Because it kinnda, hum, kills the wiki's feling.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Vollstrecker on October 09, 2005, 10:31:12 AM
How about something like a quarantine box. Registered users post and all is fine. Unregistered users post, and the post comes to a separate Area, where someone can commit or reject it. This can be admins, separate mods, or just anyone that is registerred. Of course should the commiter be, too, and in case commiting spam or incorrect posts you can talk to this person or in worst case forbid him to commit.
This could be done with one additional field in posts and user database. Something like post.commited_by and user.allowed_to_commit.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Kry on October 09, 2005, 11:29:21 AM
Again kills the whole wiki feeling.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 05:12:07 PM
lionel77:

allowing only registered users to edit won't work. The last spam attack was done by two registered users and lots of non-registered ips. One of those two registered users spammed ~500 articles in 20 minutes.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 05:14:54 PM
vollstrecker:

actually, what I see is that that would requiere a lot of admin time spent in maintaining the wiki. Specially when some registered user modified an article which an unregistered user had modified before and hadn't been yet accepted.

Anyway, back with what I said to lionel77: the las spam attack, which took over the whole wiki (all of it's articles, talk pages and special pages), was done by two registered users (and some unregistered IPs too. bu the registered users did more than half the job).
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: lionel77 on October 09, 2005, 06:04:39 PM
OK, then nevermind my suggestion -- all I ever saw was unregistered spamming and since the wiki was already down I wasn't able to look at the more recent spam attacks.

Looking forward to the new wiki software. :)
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: kreegee on October 09, 2005, 06:49:34 PM
just require a captcha ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha ) when posting an edit should do the  job. i'm shure there's a captcha-plugin for almost any wiki-system...


imho that doesn't kill the wiki-feeling, everybody can still change the wiki at runtime...
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: phoenix on October 09, 2005, 07:57:17 PM
Hum, good idea, a captcha looks promising...
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 08:49:15 PM
Thanks kreegee!

that's what MrFaber and I have been talking about this afternoon:

[19:51] There are so many wiki sites out there, there should be another option
[19:51] Very good would be a registration through numbers and chars on images so bots wouldn't work but this is more a job of wikimedia than of yours/ours
[...]
[20:03] like I said before and kreegee in forum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha would do the job, but I don't know if there is a plugin
[20:04] best would be everytime a catcha for edit from anoymous and only one time on registration
[20:05] i've seen wikis where you must do the "write down here the numbers on the image by the right to verify you are not a spammer" to be able to submit an edit
[20:05] that would be th best imho, but i don'ty think we have to time and even maybe the knowledge to do it
[...]
[20:06] ah, ye, a captcha. i didn't knwo that was the name
[20:07] yes. best would be: registered users do the captcah only on register. non-registered users, on every edit
[20:07] Jacobo221, I didn't know the name too that's why I tried to describe :)

let's see what deltahf has to say about it ;)
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: wuischke on October 09, 2005, 09:00:40 PM
Sounds promising and should prevent things like 500 Edits in 20 Minutes...
I'm looking forward to it, even if I didn't write much in the wiki until now...
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: kreegee on October 09, 2005, 09:23:58 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Jacobo221
Thanks kreegee!

you're welcome ;)

i'm shure theres some kind of implementation of this in mediawiki, other people MUST have done this before...
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Truzzone on October 09, 2005, 09:44:20 PM
For MediaWiki I found this (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-cvs/2005-September/011427.html) and this (http://www.fxparlant.net/Category:Mediawiki#Captcha)  :)

Best regards,

Truzzone  :)
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 09, 2005, 11:21:48 PM
Hey Truzzone! The second link ( http://www.fxparlant.net/Category:Mediawiki#Captcha ) looks great (I hope it doesnt requiere to have wordpress or drupal installed though). The first one is good but doesn't block all edits, just some and what's worst, is confident on registered users. The second one looks like a better anti-TuringTest solution :)

I had actually seen that page when searching for captchas but didn't take much time reading it. Now that you linked to it, i took a closer look and looks quite good. Thanks alot for that link!!! It needs some changes IMHO, such as SysOps shouldn't have the catcha img and box (ok, it's not veryfied if you are a sysop, but it's better if it even isn't there ;) ). But looks really good. It even is XHTML compliant hehe.

Thanks a lot really for that link :)
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Vollstrecker on October 10, 2005, 03:16:57 PM
A captcha would reduce the spam for sure. For all the rest I would suggest, that some trsutfull people can get a mail with the editions, so they can decide in a short time period if this is spam or not. That's a point where I could help, too till I relearned programming.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Truzzone on October 10, 2005, 06:51:54 PM
Quote
Originally posted by Jacobo221....
Thanks a lot really for that link :)
Oh... no problem I search for resolve the problem, because the document in wiki pages are very important for all know more about aMule  :)

I hope the down will short  :baby:

Good work!  Truzzone  :baby:
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 10, 2005, 08:45:45 PM
vollstrecker: thanks for your offer, but the thing woul dbe to block spam before being commited, not after. at least as much as possible. Anyway, the mail thing could be an aditional security measure...

truzzone: i love your avatar :P
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Vollstrecker on October 10, 2005, 09:40:40 PM
The mail thing is thought for filtering the rest wasn't blocked before.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: To on October 11, 2005, 11:09:29 AM
I honestly think that the link would help it's the first one. But that's only one doc from the mediawiki cvs, donno it that's fully implemented by now.
Anyway I'm going to try this.

Title: use a list of banned urls
Post by: jogolo on October 11, 2005, 05:51:48 PM
We had the same problem with zwiki (zwiki.org) out our site.

Zwiki uses a so called banned_list. This list contains certain strings (mainly urls) which are not supposed to turn up in an edit. it could look like:
.spammer.ru
fancyspam.org
....

If the edit contains any of theses strings (blacklist) then it is rejected. This solved the problem most spam only contained URL coming from mostly the same domains, something like *.hotmail.ru or *.chat.ru (so the list simply contained .hotmail.ru and .chat.ru strings).

Also, moin has some kind of spam protection. Look at the documentation of the wiki software you use and see what it can. Otherwise switch to mediawiki or moin :-)
Title: RE: Wiki is down
Post by: zoob10000 on October 14, 2005, 05:26:32 AM
That means that the docs are inaccessible. Could you put the Wiki back up in read-only mode for now? Otherwise, it's really hard to figure out how to use stuff like amuled.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Truzzone on October 14, 2005, 04:23:25 PM
The Google Cache is update with 'Page on maintenance mode.' for many documents, it isn't possible to re-activate wiki in read-only?  ?(

Best regards,

Truzzone  :)
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: Jacobo221 on October 14, 2005, 06:42:52 PM
you should use archive.org then for the moment. though their copies are quite old
Title: nice solution against wiki spam?
Post by: frank on October 15, 2005, 11:25:57 AM
The blacklisted wordslist really worked for me in fighting email spam in a 500 user environment.
Every time you get spammed, blacklist the ip address and some of the obvious words.
This is a hell of a job to begin with, but once you get started on this, and work on this once every day or so (even though you will only this for half an hour), you will see a dramatic drop, well i saw a huge drop, i filtered about 60% of the spam that would otherwise pass.

Perhaps you can find some other wiki's that have the same problem. Like wikipedia?

I also read something about a trusted environment. Begin by trusting a selected view, and have those trust others easily. This will generate an environment where it is still easy to "wiki", and have less impact of spammers.
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: wuischke on October 16, 2005, 02:07:31 PM
Please set up the wiki in readonly-mode. It's really needed to look up some things no matter wheter you could change things or not.
My memory is worse than a wiki...
Title: Re: Wiki is down
Post by: m0l0c0 on October 20, 2005, 04:12:23 AM
readonly-mode please ! I need help to amulecmd, and the achive, is too old.