Talk:Main Page/Archive 20070815

This page is for discussion of the DIY Wiki main page, and the Wiki as a whole.

It also seems to be a favoured place for spammers advertising dodgy pharmaceuticals, ~~fake~~replica Rolexes and so on <sigh>

Previous discussions on this page have been Archived

spam

Since the 203.162.0.0 netblock seems to have been a frequent source of spam, and we probably don't care too much if vietnam has access to this UK resource, anyone up for blocking a range of IP addresses?

203.162.16.0 - 203.162.31.255

netname:      VDC-NET 
country:      vn 
descr:        VietNam Data Communication Company 
admin-c:       KNH1-AP 
tech-c:        DAD1-AP 
status:       ALLOCATED NON-PORTABLE 
changed:      hm-changed@vnnic.net.vn
20061102 
mnt-by:        MAINT-VN-VNPT 
source:       APNIC 
person:       Khanh Nguyen Hien 
nic-hdl:       KNH1-AP 
e-mail:       anhdzung@vdc.com.vn

--John Rumm 02:53, 16 July 2007 (BST)

good idea NT 18:09, 16 July 2007 (BST)

I would suggest

A block on 203.162.27.0/255.255.255.0 since that class C has been the source of at least 5 attacks in the last month.

--John Rumm 21:17, 16 July 2007 (BST)

Sounds good to me John NT

blocking netblocks

I don't think we can block netblocks via the wiki software (though it could obviously be done at the server level.)

--John Stumbles 19:31, 17 July 2007 (BST)

How do the wiki blocking controls work, by blocking all access, or by just blocking write access?

We can only (AFAICT) block individual users/IP addresses. Obviously all the spammers have been just IPs. --John Stumbles 01:06, 18 July 2007 (BST)

I meant more in terms of what does a blocked user see - does blocking them chop off all access to the site, or just prevent them making edits? The other solution should spam become a particular problem would be to change policy such that a user account is required (possibly with pre approval on account creation). --John Rumm 13:27, 18 July 2007 (BST)

Er, dunno. I guess it just makes the 'edit' functions unavailable to that user, or probably redirects edit attempts to a why-you-are-blocked page.

I could block you and you could tell us :-)

--John Stumbles 23:54, 18 July 2007 (BST)

Go on then, I will report back... (assuming you can unblock a blocked user!!) --John Rumm 01:20, 22 July 2007 (BST)

If it was done at the server level (say using ipchains) then that would block all access - the server would simply cease to exist to any user on the blocked address range. That may be a little more severe than is really required (then again probably not an issue).

--John Rumm 20:24, 17 July 2007 (BST)

Propose add John Rumm as moderator

John's been patrolling this wiki and reverting spam. It would be useful if he were able to block spammers too. He has also contributed to articles in the wiki. I'd like to see him be a moderator alongside myself and NT. I've asked him and he says he'd be happy to do this.

Do you agree NT?

Any other views?

(Grunff, if you're reading this, if all say aye can you just do it?)

--John Stumbles 09:42, 23 July 2007 (BST)

Great NT 15:08, 23 July 2007 (BST)

Good afternoon

hello administrators of site  wiki.diyfaq.org.uk I not so a long ago settled in Morganton

and so, that I lost connection with magnificent a man, Amanda- Brianporkon, and now try to find him, last that I know so it that he lives in citi, and often vi sits the resources of type your wiki.diyfaq.org.uk, nik at negoDavid/Sarahporkon , if suddenly will see this nik write that this man contacted with me . I very much I am sad without socializing with this man.To reason wanted to say thank you to the command your resource. So to hold boys. Only little request of,sdelayte that your resource was accessible more pochasche

I was about to revert the above (from User:201.243.59.225) but I think it's so good we should keep it :-)

Reverse DNS for 201.243.59.225
Generated by www.DNSstuff.com

Location: Venezuela [City: Caracas, Distrito Federal]

Preparation:
The  reverse DNS entry for an IP is found by reversing the IP, adding it to "in-addr.arpa", and looking up the PTR record.
So, the reverse DNS entry for 201.243.59.225 is found by looking up the PTR record for
 225.59.243.201.in-addr.arpa.
All DNS requests start by asking the root servers, and they let us know what to do next.
See How Reverse DNS Lookups Work for more information.

How I am searching:
Asking a.root-servers.net for 225.59.243.201.in-addr.arpa PTR record:  
       a.root-servers.net says to go to ns-sec.ripe.net. (zone: 201.in-addr.arpa.)
Asking ns-sec.ripe.net. for 225.59.243.201.in-addr.arpa PTR record:  
       ns-sec.ripe.net [193.0.0.196] says to go to DNS1.CANTV.NET. (zone: 243.201.in-addr.arpa.)
Asking DNS1.CANTV.NET. for 225.59.243.201.in-addr.arpa PTR record:  Reports 201-243-59-225.dyn.dsl.cantv.net. [from 200.44.32.10]

Answer:
201.243.59.225 PTR record: 201-243-59-225.dyn.dsl.cantv.net. [TTL 86400s] [BAD: No A record]

--John Stumbles 00:27, 4 August 2007 (BST)

More Spam

Is there something we can do to stop most of it? Does wikimedia have any clever tools for mass spam?

I can think of a neat idea or 2, but I assume what wikimedia has is what we will need to work with. NT 14:17, 4 August 2007 (BST)

will there be utterances on this topic User 76.28.136.181

No. NT 11:56, 5 August 2007 (BST)

Spam Overflow

I suggest we could use this page as a deliberate spam trap, move the useful content to another location and let this be a spam dump. It will be quicker to simply wipe the page regularly than trawl through an ever growing list of previous versions.

I dont know if there is a way to script/automate wiping the page contents, if so it would save us wasting time. NT 14:59, 6 August 2007 (BST)

If we in effect block this page then they will just spam more important pages. If you want to have fun with them it would be more entertaining to edit their links so that they visually appear the same, but actually harm their site rankings. ;-) --John Rumm 04:34, 7 August 2007 (BST)

I'm suggesting using it as a spam dump, not blocking it. All we would need to do is move the genuine discussions on here to another page. NT 09:58, 7 August 2007 (BST)

We would need to make sure that the page is not spiderable then, otherwise we are just helping the spammers cause by allowing the crap to get any "airtime" (not to mention that some rather odd google searches would start to land here! --John Rumm 12:55, 7 August 2007 (BST)

I dont know enough about it to know what method spammers use to find these pages. Either way we could still wipe the page clean as and when, which might be daily, it would just be less work and hopefully avoid encouraging them to go anywhere else.

Do you know how to set Robots.txt to exclude this page? Should we?

Any ideas for another page or page title for this discussion? NT 23:42, 7 August 2007 (BST)

Thought I would try a little experiment on this page seeing as it is only ever the three of us who use it. --John Rumm 01:57, 11 August 2007 (BST)

Lets hope this doesnt cause the spam to spill onto other pages. If it does I'll move the content here to another page so this can become a spam trap. NT 10:31, 11 August 2007 (BST)

One way to find out ;-) --John Rumm 21:51, 11 August 2007 (BST)

Well, now we know unfortunately... the spam is going elsewhere. I suggest unblocking this page and moving the content. In fact if we dont do it promptly the spam will all go elsewhere and make our job 3x worse. NT 16:00, 14 August 2007 (BST)