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Wiki Vandal
A person of minimal intelligence who delights in defacing or maliciously deleting Wiki pages. This wretched creature longs to feel powerful and important, but lacks the ideas and patience to make original contributions to the discourse, and also lacks the courage even to try. Attempting to compensate for these deficiencies by attacking the work of others, the Wiki Vandal is doubly pathetic because they do not appear to realise that the work is easily restored, and that they can be traced, blocked and reported to their ISP. Vandalise if you will, but you will only make a fool of yourself.
Morten - guys (&gals) - don't add people to the list below unless you are sure they are vandals.
I found myself (or rather, the adress of our firewall) added by some zealous person as an 'alias' for Naruto. I had removed some junk from his homepage and I think this made me suspect?? Also please consider that often these people just want the attention. Don't give it to them.
mgoetze: It would be really good if not just anyone were allowed to edit RecentChanges. Stefan: We seem to have our first persistent and recurring vandal behind IP 12.228.141.176. Arno - shall we block this individual permanently? Zarlan: Why are the homepages of the WikiVandals chatouille and Naruto? allowed to remain? Arno: just got an email from chatouille. I don't want to fan the flames, but his email is worthy to be posted to alt.humour ;o) Let's just say, he didn't understand what a wiki is. The problem with banning IP addresses is that most users are from dial-up lines, which means they have a different IP address every time they dial in and connect. That's why IP blocks on SL are temporary only. Blocking IP addresses is a good countermeassure to stop vandalism in progress. Permanent blocks are difficult to implement without a required username/password scheme. Tristan: Then maybe we should consider a username/password scheme. It's got to be less of a nuisance than having constantly to restore vandalised pages. Stefan: I'm not in favour of that. Up until now WikiVandal containment has been manageable, and implementing username/password would cease to make this a Wiki. Charles: There is a point about growth, too. The more users SL has, the smaller the burden on individuals to restore any pages, and the more time that would be taken on logging in - not to speak of the diminished likelihood of vandalism succeeding beyond a nuisance level. Morten: Quite. 1 idiot v. 100+ sensible users is not a fair contest, really. Hu: It is a fair contest, even if it is a lop-sided one! Stupidity is its own reward. One could probably say the same thing about idiocy. Charles is right: The more eyeballs, the faster fixes happen. The SL library page was hit twice and was down for 14 + 62 = 76 minutes. Hikaru no Go was down for an 63 minutes. In my experience, these are at the long end of the distribution of times before detection and repair. Vandal IP list, most recent first:
Note: IP's change if the user logs in on a dynamic IP, as most big ISPs provide, but patterns may emerge. For example, 68.120.128.31 and 64.168.21.1 may be the same vandal. ISPs can be contacted to get them (possibly) to check their logs and to notify the user to stop defacing pages. The US military might be interested in their vandal as one of their own, or a hacker launching from that IP. Call it that to get the ISP's attention. It doesn't matter if it sounds like hacking but is only a wiki, it is still defacing pages. After repeated notifications (sometimes after the first), they will cancel the account. Regarding 207.45.248.22: June 18, around 13.00 GMT, backed off after changing FrontPage and Go, restored by tsjanl. I don't think that was a vandal really. Zook. The vandal responded in the sandbox:
We can hope the vandal has learned a lesson, even though we see the illogical vandal saying they vandalized the first page to see how SL responds to vandals so therefore it isn't vandalism. tsjanl: I reacted when he changed the goban on the Go-page. Maybe I should react a bit less direct next time. Hu: I can find no fault with your approach, tsanjl. You quickly reversed the defacement, you alerted the vigilant monitors via this page, and you clearly have thought about it. I think 207.45.248.22 was a vandal but has learned a lesson, thanks to your swift reaction. 207.45.248.22 : Sorry to bother you, i told i wasn't a vandal ! I asked a legetimate question on the Frontpage. I was so surprise to find a site that every one can modify all the contents ! I asked wether if was dangerous or not. It wasn't vandalism. The only trick i did was to add some star points on the GO page ;-). It was my first time here ! So i'm absolutly not a vandal ! Thanks to you tsjanl I won't be upset anymore about the content here ! Thanks for your job ! I subscribed to this site ! I'm not anonymous anymore: my name is egao ! I'm very pleased to discover this site !!! (excuse my english ...) Confused: Egao, it really doesn't matter whether it was vandalism or a simple misunderstanding. The damage has been undone, you understand now how this Wiki works. In my experience, people here get judged by their current behaviour, not by their sins in the past. So the best course of action is to go and enjoy the site, contribute where you think you have a worthwhile contribution and let the past rest. Nico: What kind of behaviour should people adopt when such defacement attempts appear?
Charles The FrontPage has been revived, and I expect the admins will block Mr. or Ms 193.0.96.15 shortly. The main thing is to use this page to flag the attack. Arno: If you are the first one after a defacement, then you can revive the page (you need to set "deshi" status as your wiki experience in UserPreferences). If you are a "deshi" then click on edit-page and you will see a link below the text-area called "Revive previously archived version" Click there and you should get the original page. If this doesn't work (too many versions saved meanwhile) then only librarians or admins can revive the page (through the info&history page). I blocked the IP address now (for 12 hours). Charles, librarians can block IP addresses as well. See the librarian and admin page.
As a regular visitor of KGS, I have noticed an increase in references to SL. That in itself is a joyful thing. As a side-effect, people start making kibbitzes like " HolIgor: There is one point. Several times when I pressed save button all context of the page disappeared. It happened only with Netscape on my UNIX box, never with IE under Windows or Netscape under Linux. I restored the page immediately, but not everybody knows how. I think that is the bug of the browser that fails to send the text to the server at the moment when old record has been deleted. Tristan: Spamming is another problem familiar to users of Sensei's Library. To find tips for combatting spam, so as to leave more time free for studying and playing go, visit Spank A Spammer. This is a copy of the living page "Wiki Vandal" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |