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(a)gmail.com>
To: Brian0918 <brian0918(a)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