(Pardon if you see this twice, it may have been dropped on the floor, and the message you'be already seen depends on this one.)

At 09:40 AM 10/13/2007, Raffael Cavallaro wrote:

On Oct 13, 2007, at 10:28 AM, Marc Feeley wrote:

...

Anyone have a > suggestion on how to deal with this?

Require a login, confirmed by email, to edit content?

That will hinder people who want to help, especially since MediaWiki isn't so good about maintaining sessions or remembering users.

If you're willing to wait up to a day, I check the site every morning and will revert vandalism (don't have authority to delete pages, though), and would be happy to fight this clown for a week or so to see if he gives up.

It looks like the same person from a PRC address started the vandalism on the Gambit Wiki on the same day as he hit the Scheme Punks (ERR5RS among other things) Wiki, same style and about the same number of edits.

Scheme Punks then got spammed (new pages) by perhaps the same person (Chinese language, I think (not Japanese or Korean)) and the administrator instituted a system where new pages can only be created by logged in and pre-authorized users (this works for the ERR5RS effort, might not be so good for Gambit).

And it's still suffering from the random psuedo-word insertion vandalism as of today (plus I just noticed some link spam).

And, yeah, some people just revel in vandalism. Very recent statistics seem to show that the psychic payoff for participating in the Wikipedia community hit a tipping point in February, and I think at least a third of that is vandals masquerading as Wiki- lawyer "deletionists" who just enjoy destroying other people's work. Wikipedia is also constantly vandalized in this general sort of insertion way, but what has prompted someone to attack seriously obscure Scheme sites is open to question. Given how automated attacks were half a decade ago, I'd guess just random port-80 "do I see a MediaWiki?" scanning---no "FORTRAN RULZ!" graffiti ^_^.

Which implies this may be a robot rather than someone we can deter with reverts....

- Harold