BGForums

we have admin volunteers?

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

No i have 404 edits(read deleted and banned 404 spam pages/spammers) in the last 30 days because I thought you were paying me per edit.

at this rate it would actually take less effort for me to allow the valid users as they sign up since I doubt we get anywhere near 400 valid users added to the wiki per month. I've been banning just about every new user anyway.. and everytime I don't ban one I end up having to delete his spam page.

Maybe the IP blocking system isn't working, or maybe they are just using an infinite number of proxys i don't know..

Not sure what the easiest solution for you guys would be.. but I'm open to any suggestions.
(new user group that allows editing and default users aren't allowed to edit pages, add a captcha, Validations email, Use the forum accounts instead of independent wiki acccounts.. etc Its all better than the status quo)

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

anyone cleaned it up lately?

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

been a while, been quite busy lately, but will get around to do it the weekend as I should have time then.

Nope, I was doing it every day for about 6 months but just gave up because its not that hard to add a captcha to a wiki or Make it so new accounts cant edit for few weeks and i was spending around 1-2 hours a day cleaining up the spam. Longer than it would take to implement a more permanent solution. There is probably a few tens of thousands of spam pages give or take by now. I only remove ones that effect real pages at this point, and on rare occasion ill go on a cleaning spree and remove a few hundred or so.

Edit: or just remove automated account creation all together, since the only 3 or 4 people have done any real edits to it and 99.99% of users are just spammers, Id rather check once a day for accounts i have to create for ppl than check 4 times a day for new spam accounts and delete those pages + remove the users. Which is what you have to do to keep up with the spam bots.

It took me somehting like a total of 6-12 hours of work to clear all the spam last time it was like this, but now they have so many bots that they have 10+ new posts by the time you delete 10. I'll clean it again if you disable automated account creation or implement some sort of solution which would reduce the amount of accounts that pop up. As it is now its something like 150-250 new spam posts an hour. Just futile to try to manually keep up with it, more or less actually make headway on back dated spam.

At this point it would take less time to copy all the Useful pages over to a new wiki than it would to delete all the spam, which i thought about doing but dont have a server for.

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

Decided to clear some, and actively block new spammers for a few hours.. looks like they moved to the forums as retaliation.

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

S.o.b.! This telancatdiat is some persistent mofo!

EDIT: 158 spam posts, I mean come on ...and he's not even done yet

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"If everyone is thinking alike, someone isn't thinking."
- General George Patton Jr
In Brazilian IAAR as Pascoal Humberto de Souza Branco

Ya its worse on the wiki. Balt gonna have some cleaning up to do when he finally gets on.. lol

Please no one respond to His spam posts.. will make it easier for Balt to clean up..

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

Anyone want to search me out details on the version of wiki we're using so I can learn to manage the site? George is too busy with the update and I haven't had time to look for the info to learn it.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

Installed software
Product Version
MediaWiki 1.17.0
PHP 5.3.3 (apache2handler)
MySQL 5.0.77
http://www.supremewiki.com/index.php/Special:Version


Media Wiki has a wiki.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

The technical manual can be found here.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Contents

Media wiki also has a lot of pretty simple to install add ons that would help alot.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features

Any number of them would help, although some are more obtuse than others. (At this point the wiki has pretty much 0 add ons, I kept looking for commands to help the spam that just didn't exist Like NUKE for example )

I'll let you look them over, but some are far more effective than others. (some of the captcha extensions aren't effective while others are)
But generally i don't think were dealing with sophisticated spam bots here. So just about anything is likely to improve the situation.

Confirm edit with Questy captcha and the simple antispam extension used in tandem should cut 99% of them out.
Confirm edit allows different Captcha modules.

Questy captcha lets you define the questions and answers so they can be Supreme ruler related, and aren't reliant on a series of pictures etc that can be easily guessed.(not to mention the questions can easily be changed if bots start catching on to all the answers)


And the Simple Antispam makes any edits by bots that get through the captcha to be discarded since Bots usually write in to the invisible box users can't see or edit in.

And NUKE would make cleaning up the mess they have made 1000% quicker.

(ya you only asked for the version and software but I've had hours and hours of deleting the spam to think about this)

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

Well there is no captcha anywhere, not on registration page, nowhere... And second thing is:
"E-mail address is optional, but is needed for password resets, should you forget your password. You can also choose to let others contact you through your user or talk page without needing to reveal your identity. "
E-mail should be required field with E-mail confirmation, so after you check you email you get a link to visit, and then you are registered.
You are able to register with no email at all or with email such as a@a.com, just tested with user WuOneTest you can just delete it.
There is too little security in there, and if noone of you knows php you need to hire freelancer, they know much more solutions. That's not much job for them.

Well George does. However hes the main programmer for the game.. so his time is better spent on updates etc.
Which is why balt was asking for info so he can try to learn how to manage it and adjust it to be a bit better.

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Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.

The fact that 5 new spam pages are created in the time I Edit one is pretty dismoralising Ll.
Nice to see that it is being fighted...
I'm motived to help but...
How to edit these kind of page ? http://www.supremewiki.com/index.php/User:Tom46614

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Nicolau Abraão Rojas
Brazillian United Front
South East State

FYI, the wiki is down for the moment.

Anyone have ideas of another format we could use? We're confident we can port the data to another format but haven't had time to consider options.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

Ya I noticed there were times the spam was so bad it was taking down both the wiki and the forums.
As to an alternative, not off the top of my head, been so busy baking hundreds of pies (about 300 a night at the new job) for the upcoming holidays I haven't had time to do much else Including think about stuff.

Could always temporarily port the data to a new wiki with user registration locked . Its kind of a catch 22, if you want easy user editing you're gonna have spam problems. If you lock it down its less likely to have additions. Not sure of any other format that would suit your needs tbh.

_________________
Si vis pacem, para bellum
my Supreme Ruler Cold war mods Site
Redistribution of my mods is prohibited. By downloading them you agree to not redistribute the file(s) without expressed permission.