These bots or paid spammers have been promoting a Vietnamese holiday website and a bunch of copy-paste news articles
All have been blocked and their articles deleted.
Most likely bots, given what I’ve seen in the past. You’ll want to keep a close eye on that; I’ve seen wikis where the search became completely useless due to spam articles. If I recall correctly, there were hundreds of thousands of them.
Yes, I may need some help. They have been attacking again.
EDIT:
Oh, boy
You might need to temporarily disable new members until you can figure out a way of confirming them that the bots can’t get around. It could be as simple as adding some small change, depending on who’s doing this, whether they have access to the bots’ code, and whether or not they’re targeting enough other wikis that they won’t notice if their bots start failing on this one.
There’s an option to block IP’s created by the username, however, it lasts for a day only. I might have to look further into this.
If the bots are using a VPN, it might be possible to block certain ranges of IP addresses based on that, as I’ve seen some websites do, but that would prevent any legitimate users who are using that VPN from making accounts. It also wouldn’t necessarily be a permanent solution if more bots arrived using a different VPN, or if the current bots switched to another VPN. You could block VPNs altogether, but that’s probably not ideal.
How much control do you have over the wiki and its software? Are you hosting it yourself?
How much control do you have over the wiki and its software? Are you hosting it yourself?
I have full control of the wiki and its software. I don’t have control over the machine hosting it, as I could only afford a shared plan (for now).
The solution I’ve found for now was to restrict all editing from anonymous and new users. And to allow comrades to edit and create articles, I created a new user group allowing users to do exactly that.
The only downside is that it’s done manually, and restricting editing will probably affect the editing frequency of ProleWiki for a while. Oh, well.
EDIT: It’s done. A bunch of spammer accounts created, none was able to create a single article. A battle won.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Antispam
Thought this might be of use
Bot farms commonly use rented private IP addresses. The good ones anyways avoid obvious tells like using a VPN. Basically they use methods to acquire access to IP addresses assigned to consumer facing ISPs to appear as if they’re a normal person living in some city somewhere. IP blocks are not typically the way to go to prevent spam unless you have only a few IP’s being consistently used.
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I kinda knew you weren’t because of the Stalin article you created, but I insist that you find a more appropriate username lmao
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Hey, could you remove me from the new user group, please? I found out about this wiki today via a Discord server and i want to try and start contributing some articles about brazilian communist figures. I created a lemmygrad acc just to reply to this. my user acc is https://prolewiki.org/wiki/User:H._Vilaverde
Done, comrade.
Hello comrade, I would love to write some entries if you would allow me! My username is ComradeCorgo.
My Reddit username is Comrade_Corgo if you would like to vet me
There you go, comrade, thanks for joining in.
Can I be given edit access please? Username is J2050.
Done, comrade
Can I participate too?
I’ll admit that I am not exactly an ‘ML’, but bashing the people’s republics isn’t something that I enjoy doing (anymore) either and I can just focus on certain topics if you would recommend that I do that.
Absolutely, comrade! Any political or historiographic disagreements can and will be resolved inside the wiki, so your contributions are very welcome. Besides, I don’t think there is any major dispute between your thought and the wiki that would affect the ideological consistency of the project
Do check out our principles and see if you can spot any disagreement with it
When do I get permission to create pages?
Usually after some quality edits, the admins approve the permission to create new pages. This is to promote the improving of already existing pages.
You should also be careful when copying articles from Leftypedia because of the different citing templates. Currently the article on Nazi Germany is a bit of a mess… I suggest that you don’t blindly copy everything from it and consciously edit it using our citing methods (instead of creating a template just for it, which is bound to necessitate a fix eventually)
I know this sucks, but these citation methods came about for a reason. We needed freedom to change our citing style whenever needed, and Wikipedia’s bloated coding is awful to do something like this
Okay. Which templates should I use for citing books and journals? I’d be glad to fix the entry myself.
If you’re used to the Visual editor, our templates are here:
If not, it’s the “Citation” and “Web citation” templates
Are you using captchas? It’s usually a good deterrent against bots.
Not so much anymore, unfortunately. There’s now software that’s able to solve captchas, sometimes even more efficiently than humans. It’s possible the bots wouldn’t be using it, but captchas are so common that there’s a good chance they are, that or a captcha-solving service.
If so many websites use them, then it’s not completely useless. Besides it’s better to have them, rather than not having anything. Right now anyone can write a script to continuously attack the wiki. Even if a CAPTCHA can be bypassed, it makes attacks more complex and will filter out a large percentage of bots, which is better than nothing.
Hello comrade(s), I’d love to contribute to the wiki ! I have free time. Pls whitelist my username, it is the same as here (Comradecucumber). :)
There you go, comrade, you’re redlisted
Thanks !
