I came across what most likely was a vandal bot using IPs on the range 152.163.100.*, and some other IPs I don't remember, creating a couple dozen articles with random titles and the same block of nonsense in the body. They would appear 3 or 4 at a time, each on a different IP. I've been told this is an AOL range, and that if it's a bot, that's bad. So, just letting you all know....
--brian0918
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Wikipedia e-mail: AOL vandalbot Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:26:18 GMT From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: Brian0918 brian0918@gmail.com
(I also put this on your talk page.)
Please hop on IRC and let the devs on #wikimedia-tech know straight away - vandalbots coming from AOL is a doomsday scenario, owing to their stupidly broad proxy network, and Tim Starling really wants to know about this stuff if it springs up. Try to keep it to as small ranges of AOL as possible, though Tim says he'd happily block the whole ISP if the alternative is making the wiki read-only. Drop a line to Wikitech-L as well (you have to subscribe first), detailing what makes you think it's a vandalbot and so on, best detail possible. (If it turns out not to have been a bot, blame me ;-) I'd rather you raised an unnecessary alarm than fail to raise a necessary one.)
- d.
Brian wrote:
I came across what most likely was a vandal bot using IPs on the range 152.163.100.*, and some other IPs I don't remember, creating a couple dozen articles with random titles and the same block of nonsense in the body. They would appear 3 or 4 at a time, each on a different IP. I've been told this is an AOL range, and that if it's a bot, that's bad. So, just letting you all know....
--brian0918
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Wikipedia e-mail: AOL vandalbot Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:26:18 GMT From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: Brian0918 brian0918@gmail.com
(I also put this on your talk page.)
Please hop on IRC and let the devs on #wikimedia-tech know straight away - vandalbots coming from AOL is a doomsday scenario, owing to their stupidly broad proxy network, and Tim Starling really wants to know about this stuff if it springs up. Try to keep it to as small ranges of AOL as possible, though Tim says he'd happily block the whole ISP if the alternative is making the wiki read-only. Drop a line to Wikitech-L as well (you have to subscribe first), detailing what makes you think it's a vandalbot and so on, best detail possible. (If it turns out not to have been a bot, blame me ;-) I'd rather you raised an unnecessary alarm than fail to raise a necessary one.)
- d.
There really is no excuse for AOL not to tag their user proxy accesses with some kind of token that can be used for abuse complants.
The simplest way round this problem would be to "greylist" AOL, by preventing anon editors from editing from AOL proxy address space.
AOL currently has roughly 22% of the U.S. ISP market [source: http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html]. Applying this restriction would thus have no effect on 78% of potential anon Wikipedia editors, and might even _increase_ the overall quality level of Wikipedia anon contributions.
Any legitimate AOL contributor need only create an account to be able to edit, an this could be made easy for them by diverting the "edit this page" link for anons to a login page which said:
"Because of problems with vandalism by some AOL users, you will need to register a username before editing. Creating a Wikipedia username is free, and has many benefits... &c. &c."
Of course, this would not stop AOL-hosted vandalbots from repeatedly registering accounts in order to edit, but it would be possible to limit this by throttling the rate of new account registrations from AOL IPs in the usual way, as well as other possible anti-vandalbot measures such as requiring the use of CAPTCHAs (with an E-mail automation alternative for the disabled) for AOL account registrations.
-- Neil
The login with captchas requirement sounds like the best possibility for remedying this. It forces the person to remain in the loop and waste their time, although if they're willing to make a bot to vandalize wikipedia, they obviously have time to waste.
Neil Harris wrote:
Brian wrote:
I came across what most likely was a vandal bot using IPs on the range 152.163.100.*, and some other IPs I don't remember, creating a couple dozen articles with random titles and the same block of nonsense in the body. They would appear 3 or 4 at a time, each on a different IP. I've been told this is an AOL range, and that if it's a bot, that's bad. So, just letting you all know....
--brian0918
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Wikipedia e-mail: AOL vandalbot Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 09:26:18 GMT From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com To: Brian0918 brian0918@gmail.com
(I also put this on your talk page.)
Please hop on IRC and let the devs on #wikimedia-tech know straight away - vandalbots coming from AOL is a doomsday scenario, owing to their stupidly broad proxy network, and Tim Starling really wants to know about this stuff if it springs up. Try to keep it to as small ranges of AOL as possible, though Tim says he'd happily block the whole ISP if the alternative is making the wiki read-only. Drop a line to Wikitech-L as well (you have to subscribe first), detailing what makes you think it's a vandalbot and so on, best detail possible. (If it turns out not to have been a bot, blame me ;-) I'd rather you raised an unnecessary alarm than fail to raise a necessary one.)
- d.
There really is no excuse for AOL not to tag their user proxy accesses with some kind of token that can be used for abuse complants.
The simplest way round this problem would be to "greylist" AOL, by preventing anon editors from editing from AOL proxy address space.
AOL currently has roughly 22% of the U.S. ISP market [source: http://www.isp-planet.com/research/rankings/usa.html]. Applying this restriction would thus have no effect on 78% of potential anon Wikipedia editors, and might even _increase_ the overall quality level of Wikipedia anon contributions.
Any legitimate AOL contributor need only create an account to be able to edit, an this could be made easy for them by diverting the "edit this page" link for anons to a login page which said:
"Because of problems with vandalism by some AOL users, you will need to register a username before editing. Creating a Wikipedia username is free, and has many benefits... &c. &c."
Of course, this would not stop AOL-hosted vandalbots from repeatedly registering accounts in order to edit, but it would be possible to limit this by throttling the rate of new account registrations from AOL IPs in the usual way, as well as other possible anti-vandalbot measures such as requiring the use of CAPTCHAs (with an E-mail automation alternative for the disabled) for AOL account registrations.
-- Neil
Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
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Hi,
Neil Harris wrote:
The simplest way round this problem would be to "greylist" AOL, by preventing anon editors from editing from AOL proxy address space.
There is an ongoing discussion on en: about this very feature and a corresponding policy change, resulting in a rough consensus that this kind of weak block/greylist would be nice to have, for AOL and other dubious shared address ranges. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Blocking_policy_proposal.
I volunteered to help writing such a feature, but I'm completely new to the MediaWiki code, so I suppose most people here would be able to implement it much faster than I. And of course it would need support from some core developer to get it into the codebase. Anybody here willing to help?
Best regards Christian
- -- |------------ Christian Siefkes ------------- christian@siefkes.net -----| | Web: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Jabber: hc@jabber.ccc.de | | Graduate School in Distributed IS: http://www.wiwi.hu-berlin.de/gkvi/ |------------ OpenPGP Key: http://www.siefkes.net/key.txt (ID: 0x346452D8) As long as the world shall last there will be wrongs, and if no man objected and no man rebelled, these wrongs would last forever. -- Clarence Barrow
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