[Mediawiki-l] Vandalism, but then they corrected it? Weird spider behavior.

[Joshua Oreman]

On 9/2/05, Tony Molloy <tony.molloy at uconn.edu> wrote:
> Last night we had about 59 new accounts created on our Wiki. They then
> proceeded to do multiple edits to about 40 or so different pages. Each
> page had about 15-20 changes made.
> 
> The weird thing is that the last spider/bot to visit each page erased
> all the stuff that the others had created, leaving each page (from what
> I can tell so far) as it was originally.
> 
> The sites they were injecting into the pages were:
> http://WTHP5.disney.com
> 
> Now for my questions:
> 
> I had enabled "registered users can only edit", but this didn't help
> because they obviously automated this process. Is there something
> stronger I can do while still enabling the spirit of the Wiki?
> 
> Some of the pages won't seem to revert back to my last edit. Can I
> somehow completely delete any changes they made to the system and get
> their record of touching the pages out?
> 
> Is there a faster way to revert a bunch of pages at once? This is taking
> forever to read each page and verify things are OK.
> 
> I'm pretty disheartened by this. If it continues, I'll have to turn off
> external internet access to our wiki (this is for an academic library).
> We already see quite a few visits from other libraries, and we have some
> valuable information to share.

I assume you're on MySQL 1.5 something.  This won't work for 1.4.

This MySQL query MAY do the job.  This is UNTESTED, and if it
contained a mistake, it MAY TRASH YOUR WIKI.  I would STRONGLY
recommend making a backup.

This will revert everything to the most recent version before
TIMESTAMP.  (TIMESTAMP is in the format 'YYYYMMDDHHMMSS', with the
single quotes.)

I wouldn't recommend using this if you're not somewhat familiar with SQL.

UPDATE page, recentchanges
   SET page_latest = rc_this_old_id
 WHERE page_id = rc_cur_id
   AND rc_timestamp < TIMESTAMP;

Once again: this is UNTESTED.  Use at your own risk.

-- Josh


> 
> 
> 
> -Tony
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