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