Ting Chen wrote:
Hello,
in the last two days the chinese wiki is under massive attack. The attacker uses a bot and various IP-adresses. We have problem to block all the adresses and we are at the moment also short on person to remove all the devastations. At the moment the attacker creates lots of new articles with the following content: (???????????????????????????????????) DeleteMeShizhao
Can someone help?
Sorry this is really an emergency. Thanks.
I wanted to express my sincere apologies for not responding to this attack. I saw a message on the village pump but it was inspecific and I was busy, so I ignored it.
I wrote [[m:Vandalbot]] back in February, and promoted it on en, in the hopes that people would read it, and know what to do in this situation. Unfortunately the page hasn't been promoted on the non-English wikis as much as it should have been. I'll also update it in response to this latest attack. Here's the URL for convenience:
http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandalbot
It's very important that all sysops read this page carefully. It's like first aid or fire response, you'll never think to read the manual when you're in the middle of dealing with an attack.
The important thing is that you MUST CONTACT A DEVELOPER, when a large scale attack is launched. This doesn't mean standing in the middle of nowhere and calling "developer!!" into the wind, you need to get their attention. You should probably contact a developer who will be willing and able to respond. Your best bet would probably be me. I'll update the vandalbot page on methods of contacting a developer.
BE SPECIFIC. Quote numbers. Wikipedia is attacked by bots constantly. "Someone is vandalising zh" won't get anyone's attention. A better report would be:
"Someone is creating 1 page per second and has been doing so for the past day, and we can't block them because they are using many different IP addresses. 3000 pages have been created."
What you have to understand is that it's much easier for me to delete 3000 pages than it is for you to do it. I'm very sorry I didn't do so. In the future I'll watch the reports more closely.
-- Tim Starling