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

Re: stupid other login

[jducoeur]

Oh, and as for what they did -- lots of stuff. It looks like they were originally just adding sporadic bogus entries that would link to their paid websites. Then, probably sometime recently, someone went through and automated the whole thing, deleting all the real entries and adding literally tens of thousands of bogus ones pointing to their customers.

It's standard wikispam stuff: they stuff a real website full of their BS, all as interlinked as they can get it, to drive up the Google ratings of their customers. Unclear how well it actually works, but it's big business nowadays. It's why wikis are in a constant arms race against the vandals these days...