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Someone has left rubbish on several pages: Fort Worth Web Design : Essays : Digital Printing : Halloween Contacts : Whitetail Deer Hunting I will go and tidy up but it is worth checking where it came from.
The content seems the same on each entry. I won’t copy it here for safety.
Thanks, for catching and removing this!
Tim, can you say which pages this rubbish was left on? It speeds up the checking if I have somewhere to start!
Home page, FAQ, Hurewicz fibration and Blob homology.
They are the four pages I changed about 13,50-55 today.
Thanks!
(After leaving my comment, I got the idea to check ’recently revised’ and was just about to say that I’d found four likely candidates! However, for future reference then it does help to know where to start.)
Now that I know where to look, I can get the IP(s) used and check to see if any other pages were effected, also I can keep a record of these dubious edits and block suspicious IPs (there’s a few persistent … people … out there).
Full marks for vigilance!
I noticed four apparently unrelated Anonymous Coward entries including Home Page and FAQ so I went to see what had been done. I know some times we forget to or cannot edit the name, so wondered who would be looking at / changing FAQ and Home, ….
Looks like you got ’em all. No other matches for that IP and no other matches for those weird words.
Good :-)
I have a faint memory of having seen several of those sights on some other occassion, way back, but the memory is faint and if I saw them then they were eliminated afterwards.
We’ve had spam with some of the same links (or at least some of the same words, I don’t know about the URIs), although I think that this is the first time with this particular selection and format.
Anonymous coward has hit again: Blob homology, FAQ and home page. I will delete. Look for Haloween contacts.
The time was September 24, 2010 02:35:03 from 129.121.77.124
It is 09.24 here (North Wales) I tried to edit FAQ and it said Anonymous Coward was editing. Then it cleared and I have deleted the link.
Well spotted. It’s the same IP as the other ones. I wonder why they left “Hurewicz fibration” alone the second time.
I’d say that their persistence earns them a block. Any disagreements?
The “Anonymous Coward” that was editing when you tried was another little wotsit adding another spam link. This time at the bottom of the page.
Obviously some malicious twit has a warped idea of what ’fun’ is. Any hope of a ‘rampaging robot’ à là Arxiv. (How do you represent an evil grin with a smiley?)
I’m not sure that this is being done by a robot. The links aren’t being put in at the very top or very bottom (the latest on the FAQ was just above the ’category: meta’), which would suggest a robot to me. Also, they’re using Markdown syntax so they know that the nLab is based on instiki. It’s possible that robots are sophisticated enough now to detect how one writes links and put in links in the same format, I don’t know about that.
(The arxiv “rampaging robot” works by embedding a hidden link in a page which a robot would follow because it doesn’t know that the link doesn’t get shown. I triggered it once and had to use a different arxiv mirror for a month.)
I just did a quick grep through the pages to see if there were any obvious links anywhere and couldn’t see any so I don’t think that we’re missing any spam here and so don’t think that we have a huge spam problem. Obviously it’s annoying, and persistent offenders should be blocked, but I don’t think that we need more serious measures in place yet.
(I did follow up on one or two strange-looking links - which turned out to be fine - and came across this gem on grading. As I’m currently going through our universities pedagogical training, it’s on my mind a bit so I was in the right mood to read this!)
That looks quite interesting. I hope it was distributed to students. I believe in criteria based marking and grading, as the criteria tell the students a lot about the way to think in an acceptable way. (But I will get off thread if I continue. :-) as always.)
The offending IP address doesn’t seem to be dynamic, so there should be no collateral damage in blocking it.
But if there is, what would an innocent user see if they came along later?
If I do a full IP block then they get an “Access Denied” notice. I could put in place a partial block which would only block them from editing pages (though that would take me a day or so to look up the precise syntax). I guess that that’s a safer option just in case it is dynamic.
What I hope is that these spammers realise that we’re reasonably vigilant and so go away and don’t bother us again.
Can you write the Access Denied notice (it’s just HTTP 403, yes?) so that it says something useful? Say, “This IP address has been blocked for spamming. If you believe that this block is in error, write [email address].”. Of course, you’d want to use a dedicated email address (possibly munged on the 403 page itself). Or point to the contact instructions at steering committee (nlabmeta). (This makes them jump through several more hoops but also means that the spam may show up on the Forum next.)
In this situation, this is all Just In Case. But if we get a good system, then we could use it even for dynamic IP addresses. (Although another way to handle those is just to make the block temporary; Wikipedia uses 24 hours.)
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