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...)

The more I think about it, the more puzzled I am by the vandalism of the Rolls.

First, there's the fact that there is no longer a comprehensive listing of the Rolls available. I took that offline a long time ago, due to prior abuses. The site is intentionally search-only. Which means that the listings shouldn't show up on Google, and Google is the entire point of wikispam. So either they've come up with a clever way of tying specific listings into their wikispam farms, or they've wasted a significant amount of time for no good reason -- the whole thing was a completely useless exercise.

And then there are the deletions. They didn't just add lots of entries -- they deleted all the data that was already there. What the heck was the point of that? Wikispam is valuable insofar as it gets good ratings from Google, and your ratings are based on how many people link to the site. If you delete all the useful data, fewer people are going to point to it, driving down your own ratings. So deleting the existing data really is just counterproductive vandalism: they go to extra effort just to damage their own results.

So I'm forced to conclude that these people are (a) pretty damned thick, and (b) pointlessly destructive. So much for the image of the clever hacker...

... 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?