[Mediawiki-l] Getting rid of spam pages that all have the same format

Azurite azurite at seventh-star.net
Tue Mar 1 05:43:08 UTC 2011


Hi all,

I run a small but up-to-date MediaWiki install on my domain, and recently, it's been hit by a crazy amount of spam. I've taken to installing as many extensions as I can for preventing it in the future: Bad Behavior 2 and Bad Behavior 2 Extended, Spam Blacklist, reCaptcha for creating new accounts, even limiting edits to users with confirmed email accounts. Nothing seems to be helping. And in the meanwhile, I'm stuck deleting pages one-by-one, because each spam page is made by a new (fake) user with a different IP address.

Is there a way to mass-delete spam pages that all have the same format?

So far all of these spam pages have had a single period on the first few lines, then centered and in "BIG" type, three greater-thans, an external link to a forum site that always has a different string at the end, and three less-thans. Then there are a lot more periods on lines by themselves, and a few blurbs of text with external links.

If this isn't possible, what about choosing (e.g. via tick boxes) all pages to delete from a certain date or date range? Because my Wiki is so small, sometimes the only edits on a given day are from spammers, so something like that would really help me delete these pages, especially given the different user/IP problem (otherwise I'd just user Special:Nuke).

I'm getting the IP blacklist from StopForumSpam, but I don't know how to best get rid of the spam that's already there.

Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

--Azurite


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