These people really did go to far too much work...

[jducoeur]

Digging through the Rolls logs, I find that the spammers went to some real effort. They bothered to put real data into many of the fields -- they hooked the name fields up to name generators, location fields up to location generators, the whole nine yards. They even generated fake email addresses for the email fields. Clearly, they thought that there were automated mechanisms here doing data validation on the fields. And all completely to no avail: I still think the entire exercise was pointless, and the spam entries just look different from real ones, so it doesn't actually slow me down in deleting them.

(Although I'm not quite sure what they were thinking when they kept putting "square coffee table" into the Interests field...)

Comments

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

I don't know from real databases, nor do I understand the full extent of the Rolls. Is asking people to put their own info in again (starting from scratch) not a reasonable option? It sounds like a massive amount of work you'll need to do, to restore it.

[jducoeur]

Eh; it's the difference between me spending a few man-days on it, or ten thousand people spending a few minutes each. I'd rather not have to inconvenience that many people, and the overall cost is lower for me to do it in bulk.

Besides, most of the work isn't cleaning up the damage. The hard part's going to be updating the systems so that this can't happen again, which will require some significant overhauls to how the Rolls work...