[Mediawiki-l] Malicious content deleting bots

[Platonides]

Lonny wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> We at Appropedia.org have been getting hit by these deleting bots as well.
> They seem to delete everything after an ampersand.  They have also removed a
> few plus signs in tables.
As i suggested before, they may not be blanking bots, but any other type 
(eg. trying to add a spamming link at the end) which have edit features 
so broken that make them remove content.
There is no point in creating a bot which "removes text after &", you 
would blank the page almost without loading the edit page.

I guess they are using application/x-www-form-urlencoded without proper 
encoding:
wpStarttime=20070101&wpTextBox1=Wiki content&wpSave=wpSave in the post 
data will save "Wiki content", but if you try to pass "Wiki & Content",
wpStarttime=20070101&wpTextBox1=Wiki & Content&wpSave=wpSave  wpTextbox1 
value is only "Wiki "