[Mediawiki-l] Spammers got me

[Eric K]

In your case I'd say:
1. (temporarilty) stop all edits (freeze the wiki, disable anonymous edits and new registrations).
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['sysop']['edit'] = true;

This will stop registrations and allow only sysops to edit the pages.
 
2. While logged into your sysop account, revert all pages manually to the correct last edit (rollback). I dont know of any fast/auto way to do this.
 
3. Make a DB backup if possible. For that file size of 10GB, the webhost may need to do that for you and you can download the file.
 
4. Delete all old revisions of all pages:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpecialDeleteOldRevisions2
 
Make sure every page has the correct current version of the edit. Old versions will be gone.
 
Thats the only way to reduce the size from 10GB of junk to a clean DB. You'll lose all page histories. There's no way to select only the vandalism stuff for deletion as far as I know. Certain options in the above extension:
"up to date: specify the date of the revisions. All revision before and on that date will be deleted."
 
 
Now you gotta do spam prevention. Examine what kind of spam you were bieng attacked with. Simple solutions:
1. Make all user registrations to a CAPTCHA before they make the account.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit
 
2. If an anonymous IP puts in a link, make them do a captcha.
 
That should be pretty much it. There's other stuff you can do:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam
 
Watch what kinda spam you get and adjust accordingly.
 
For human spammers or vandals, check the Abuse Filter extention (link on the page above).
 
Erik
 
 


--- On Wed, 9/15/10, Steve Nance <snance at charter.net> wrote:


From: Steve Nance <snance at charter.net>
Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Spammers got me
To: mediawiki-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Wednesday, September 15, 2010, 7:57 AM


Subject says it all. I didn't have Edit and Create page restricted and now
my Text table is 10 gig and my IP is threatening to disable my site if I
don't fix it.



Is there a way to delete all data from the text table except what was
created by the sysop?



I'm sure this has been covered many times but the achieves are not that
friendly for finding things.



Steve



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