User talk:Spriditis

Hi Spriditis

I cannot delete article titles over here at Marspedia, but I thought I would help you out a bit. Maybe we can beat back the spammers somewhat. I saw your note to User:Strangelv. I think most of The Moon Society people may have given up on Lunarpedia. There are always other concerns and they might not see much benefit. If you got administrator powers you could delete titles of spam and that would improve things. Do you think User:Strangelv is the only person who could make you an administrator?

I would ignore the IP addresses unless one is used twice. I think the spammers have some way to spoof the system and avoid leaving a record of their real addresses. Did I help much? - Farred 05:03, 21 May 2012 (UTC)

I have to disagree about IP based attacks. I find them far less destructive and easier to deal with than account based attacks. They usually wait awhile before attacking from the same one again, but eventually they will. I originalyl banned them for 30 days, but found some hitting again, upped it again, and again, and finally settled on 180 days. I've also passed out some overdue admin cap party favors. Sorry that I don't have enough of the sort Riff and Bun Bun might bring to a party.

Big thing about IP attacks: botnets have a finite number of them, and it can be months before a zombie gets a different IP address. Blocking them for half a year means that they're out of commission for that long. After seeing the notice on my talk page I was assuming this was going to be identical to the deluge on LPedia where there's no server access and completely ineffectual protections. Good news is it isn't but the bad is that these attacks are doing more damage than just adding piles of garbage to the database -- probably need to see if I can install the Bad Behavior extension...

--Strangelv 05:18, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Well. Thanks, Strangelv. Congratulations, Spriditis, you should get used to the awesome responsibility eventually. The next thing on the agenda is to get rid of some of the spam. Perhaps I could go after old spam and Spriditis the new spam. - Farred 09:45, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

I just did a blanket delete with a WHUMP variant on the zero length articles (clicking on Show Bots should show you what WHUMP has done, but I've just discovered that sometimes that doesn't work here -- at least not with days and changes set to large values -- and no, I don't know of a way to make the buffer larger). Right now I'm trying to categorize all of the uncategorized legitimate articles so that I can do the same to all of the uncategorized articles that are not legitimate articles.

Aside from damaged articles and being listed as an attack page the situation here is actually a lot less bad than the situation I've been pounding my head against for the past year or so with LPedia (not connected to Marspedia, Lunarpedia, et al. -- it's a political party wiki) -- a problem that's finally under control now that I've finally succeeded in writing a bot that logs in as a user and deletes and bans, and I presently have it checking Lunarpedia and Marspedia every 20 minutes. I should probably check up on how Exodictionary and Scientifiction are doing. Exoplatz could definitely use some batch jobs after we eventually get it repaired and up and running again. -- Strangelv 23:09, 22 May 2012 (UTC)

Have we run out of targets on Marspedia already? It may be time to move on to Exodictionary -- it's been getting slowly pummeled for awhile, although it may not be a large percentage as it has more articles than the rest of our wikis put together -- at least until I get Autostub1 working and crank out about 10,000 articles for Lunarpedia... -- Strangelv 00:23, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Hi. Yup, again quite large amount of spam in these 2 weeks. Atleast Farred and other have dealt with it.

About Recent changes display - it seems that value of $wgRCMaxAge (in DefaultSettings.php) currently is set to 13 or 14 days. Explanation of this setting: $wgRCMaxAge

Having it set to retain changelist for a longer time - for example ~ 28 days would help: $wgRCMaxAge = 28 * 24 * 3600;

-- Spriditis 19:09, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for finding that information. I may see if I can apply that after I've sufficiently recovered from this weekend's convention to attempt it (I also need to get Exoplatz back up and running -- we're missing out third most important wiki right now). I also need to try to see if I can get WHUMP to do a better job at recognizing garbage posts. This said, Marspedia and Lunarpedia are not getting truly pummelled. When that happens, deleting the garbage becomes almost impossible to keep up against. ...Which was the case with Exoplatz before I discovered that upgrading it wasn't as easy as I'd expected -- and I certainly don't want to follow up by rendering one of our two flagship wikis inoperative before I get Exoplatz back up and running. 8\ -- Strangelv 08:48, 11 June 2012 (UTC)