[Mediawiki-l] deleting an account and rollingback all edits and new pages...

[Frederick Grose]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 6:56 PM, <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:

> In a message dated 11/24/2010 3:52:08 PM Pacific Standard Time,
> 2007 at gmaskfx.com writes:
>
>
> > <<Well after upgrading to the newest version and using a few extensions I
> > was able to clean up the mess but it still took a good days worth of
> work.
> >
> > There were three "users" making edits so rolling them back created
> > conflicts unless you did them in the right order. I resolved the
> conflicts by
> > copying the revision of the page I wanted to keep, deleting the page and
> then
> > pasting back in the content.
> >
> > One thing I really don't like about most of the solutions I used is that
> > they still leave traces of the spam in your database.
> >
> > Anyway .. I don't have alot of traffic on my wiki so it's my fault for
> not
> > checking it frequently enough that I could have just restored to a backup
> > of the database. I need to see if my service provider will configure a
> > longer period of backups. >>
> >
>
>
> I have the same issue from time-to-time.  I also used this trick of
> deleting the page and posting back my last good version, but of course that
> wipes
> out all the past history as well, not that most people with Mediawiki's
> really care about that history....  I'm just not certain that when you wipe
> the
> history in this tricky way, if it actually releases that space out of the
> database for use by another article, or if it's still sitting there,
> unlinked,
> but using up space.
>

The page history seems to begin anew for regular viewers (protecting them
from seeing the 'deleted' content), but administrators can see deleted
versions of the page by visiting the deletion log that shows when attempting
to delete a page that has a deletion history.


> I've also wondered about the case, when you leave the spam in the old
> version.  Does that still get indexed in Google?  Or is Google clever
> enough to
> only see the top version of your page?  I don't know the answer myself.
>
> W
>