Spam is the fire in which we burn
My eyes are half crossed from spending the last couple of hours cleaning up the BetterEULA.com mediawiki. Check the site logs for a little bit of what I've been doing, and I suspect this is only the tip of the iceberg. I did actually figure out how to mass-delete users using myPhpAdmin to access the SQL database, but there doesn't seem to be a similarly transparent mass-delete for pages.
It's so odd when a site gets so thoroughly spam-attacked. This certainly happened to Gamewatch.org's phpbb2 forums, and the result was similar -- I had to spend a few hours researching how to protect against spam, then a few more implementing the solutions and cleaning up after the breach in question.
It is an effort, much like washing dishes, that so directly feels perilously close to a futile striving against entropy. And at the same time getting severely spam attacked is almost a backhanded (and irritating) form of flattery. Obviously these bot-controllers decided that my sites were high profile enough to warrant taking over.
It also makes me think about the amount of useless knowledge I accumulate. phpbb2 and probably mediawiki are both terminal technologies; in a few years something much better will come along, or in a few more we'll undergo a paradigm shift that makes them utterly obsolete; knowing how to fix them is like learning cassette tape repair or how to use a slide rule. In an abstract way that knowledge might be deemed useful and at a certain period of time it's critical, but also so deeply entropic -- and it's weird to viscerally experience the sensation of spending so much time on something that basically gets you back to square one, back to break-even. Anyway, one more entropic notch: I now know how to secure a mediawiki.
It's also ironic that there is just no escape from these kinds of cleanup efforts -- clearing out spam is the equivalent of dusting or taking out the trash or doing laundry. Theoretically virtual space was supposed to spare us from that, but it does just replicate reality, and anything of any significant interactivity is going to be subject to griefing, whether directly malicious or just as a side effect of another motivation, and either way the result is a whole bunch of poop that has to be cleaned up.
I'm going to go outside for awhile. =P
It's so odd when a site gets so thoroughly spam-attacked. This certainly happened to Gamewatch.org's phpbb2 forums, and the result was similar -- I had to spend a few hours researching how to protect against spam, then a few more implementing the solutions and cleaning up after the breach in question.
It is an effort, much like washing dishes, that so directly feels perilously close to a futile striving against entropy. And at the same time getting severely spam attacked is almost a backhanded (and irritating) form of flattery. Obviously these bot-controllers decided that my sites were high profile enough to warrant taking over.
It also makes me think about the amount of useless knowledge I accumulate. phpbb2 and probably mediawiki are both terminal technologies; in a few years something much better will come along, or in a few more we'll undergo a paradigm shift that makes them utterly obsolete; knowing how to fix them is like learning cassette tape repair or how to use a slide rule. In an abstract way that knowledge might be deemed useful and at a certain period of time it's critical, but also so deeply entropic -- and it's weird to viscerally experience the sensation of spending so much time on something that basically gets you back to square one, back to break-even. Anyway, one more entropic notch: I now know how to secure a mediawiki.
It's also ironic that there is just no escape from these kinds of cleanup efforts -- clearing out spam is the equivalent of dusting or taking out the trash or doing laundry. Theoretically virtual space was supposed to spare us from that, but it does just replicate reality, and anything of any significant interactivity is going to be subject to griefing, whether directly malicious or just as a side effect of another motivation, and either way the result is a whole bunch of poop that has to be cleaned up.
I'm going to go outside for awhile. =P