Looks like we’re suffering a sudden spam attack on the Wiki - and it has gotten VERY SLOW for me (I can’t even revert pages atm)…
We need to do something. We should disable anonymous posting, add Captchas for registration, and start blocking/banning IPs/users.
We need to add a couple moderators who have block/ban capabilities.
Maybe you should disable anonymous editing :?
Maybe you should disable anonymous editing :?
Yes, that’s the least we should do at this point…
But I’m just a user - so I can’t do much.
Looks like we're suffering a sudden spam attack on the Wiki - and it has gotten VERY SLOW for me (I can't even revert pages atm)...We need to do something. We should disable anonymous posting, add Captchas for registration, and start blocking/banning IPs/users.
We need to add a couple moderators who have block/ban capabilities.
I saw the spam, but not the slowness. I will disable anonymous editing the next chance I get.
umccullough wrote:Looks like we're suffering a sudden spam attack on the Wiki - and it has gotten VERY SLOW for me (I can't even revert pages atm)...We need to do something. We should disable anonymous posting, add Captchas for registration, and start blocking/banning IPs/users.
We need to add a couple moderators who have block/ban capabilities.
I saw the spam, but not the slowness. I will disable anonymous editing the next chance I get.
The slowness comes and goes for me - it seems like i only have a problem when i’m trying to clean up spam and view various history pages.
My (uneducated) guess is that maybe the wiki is being "crawled" by bots or something which is causing it to blow chunks?
Strange, further investigation shows that some pages are slow while others are not…
For example, I can’t even get to this page now:
http://www.haiku-os.org/wiki/index.php?title=Talk:Status&diff=4093&oldid=4022
ar1000:
There is still a bunch of talk pages with spam on the wiki - it appears I can no longer successfully revert them as most of the time when I click on a history or diff link the page hangs and never loads.
I had someone else in #haiku confirm that they could not access the pages I was trying to reach either - so I’m certain it’s not my connection.
Maybe the recent spamola is confusing the wiki diff engine or something - in any case, if you check “Recent Changes” you’ll see a bunch of talk pages spammed by anonymous IPs.
Can you please revert these and block them for everyone’s sake? I can’t categorize the IPs with proof of spam because all the links time out, and I don’t have time to mess with it any more.
The kind of spam we’re getting should NOT be tolerated - they attack wikis with thousands of URLs to increase their search-engine relevance. By allowing this spam to continue, they are increasing their search ranking.
some pages are slow while others are not...
Feels more like a server problem, it gets bogged down ( in fact that URL opened a save dialog for me, so the script is timing out ). Rather worrying if a heavier CMS is plonked on to the server, would a request for donations towards hosting go amiss?
ar1000:There is still a bunch of talk pages with spam on the wiki - it appears I can no longer successfully revert them as most of the time when I click on a history or diff link the page hangs and never loads.
I had someone else in #haiku confirm that they could not access the pages I was trying to reach either - so I’m certain it’s not my connection.
Maybe the recent spamola is confusing the wiki diff engine or something - in any case, if you check “Recent Changes” you’ll see a bunch of talk pages spammed by anonymous IPs.
Can you please revert these and block them for everyone’s sake? I can’t categorize the IPs with proof of spam because all the links time out, and I don’t have time to mess with it any more.
The kind of spam we’re getting should NOT be tolerated - they attack wikis with thousands of URLs to increase their search-engine relevance. By allowing this spam to continue, they are increasing their search ranking.
I have been blocking and reverting, but at the momet, my FTP access is not working. I am e-mailing around to solve it and I should be able to fix it soon. And, I still am not seeing a speed decrease. Could it be that certain ISP’s are having trouble connecting ot the Haiku server?
I have been blocking and reverting, but at the momet, my FTP access is not working. I am e-mailing around to solve it and I should be able to fix it soon. And, I still am not seeing a speed decrease. Could it be that certain ISP's are having trouble connecting ot the Haiku server?
Last night I found some time to revert 5 more pages - I think I got them all now.
I notice there’s no additional spam this morning, so hopefully you blocked all the major offenders 
I’ve narrowed down the speed problem to only certain diffs on large spam attacks. I think the problem is as johndrinkwater suggested - that the diff script takes too long and times out - at which point I end up with an empty page.
Maybe a newer version of mediawiki would solve that - who knows.
This was the latest version when I upgraded it a couple o week s ago.
This was the latest version when I upgraded it a couple o week s ago.
Ah, didn’t realize it had been upgraded already
I saw the spam, but not the slowness. I will disable anonymous editing the next chance I get.
When I last updated the wiki, it was set to not allow anonymous editing, but I had issues with the upgrade.
When I last updated the wiki, it was set to not allow anonymous editing, but I had issues with the upgrade.
Yeah - I had thought it was disabled before - and was surprised when it started allowing it again (I believe I posted a question in the main page Talk about that even) - in any case, disabling that would be a very prudent move again
Perhaps when I started updated it that preference was lost. I fixed it in any case. ACCOUNT REQUIRED!