There are very few categories of people who I would line up against a wall and have shot...

[jducoeur]

... but Russian spammers have managed to make their way into that list.

I just discovered that the Rolls Ethereal have been vandalized -- utterly, meticulously and very intentionally destroyed -- by a spammer. Special. Not going to be simple to recover, either, since the bad data is interleaved with the good in the logs. In theory, I can fix this; in practice, it hasn't been done before, and some of the tools I need don't exist yet (I added the logging facility a long time ago, but not the tool to recover from the logs), so a bunch of time that was going to be spent on wiki-tech instead has to be spent on the Rolls. What fun.

Anybody know a good captcha package for Perl that I can drop in here?

Comments

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Yes, sucks substantially. I'm just sorry I can't be of any use in restoring it.

[jducoeur]

Thanks. This is mostly down to improving my tools, putting in some real security measures. I've managed to avoid the need for that for over a decade now, because there hasn't been any motivation for anyone to vandalize the Rolls on a small scale. But now, with these big automated spam farms being run by blithering idiots who don't know how useless it is, I don't seem to have any choice.

(Of course, the first step is going through the logs, and removing all the spam entries. Fortunately, this turns out to be remarkably easy -- I think I'm managing pretty high accuracy at a scan rate of about 3 entries per second...)