Are both the usernames and user ids in the revision history corrupt? On Mon, Feb 29, 2016 at 3:24 PM, Steve Rainwater <[email protected]> wrote:
> This is a somewhat complex problem so bear with me, I'll try to > describe it as concisely as possible. > > Background: > I'm in the process of updating a large (20k pages), old (started ca > 2004) MediaWiki site. It was running MediaWiki 1.18.3 and I thought a > good first step would be to update the site to the 1.19.x LTS version, > which I did (with the plan of moving to 1.23.x in March). Extensions > were updated as well. Everything seemed stable and pre-upgrade backups > were not kept after a month of no problem reports (big mistake, I > know!) There are nightly backups but only a week's worth are kept for > storage reasons. However, I have located some very old (3 year+) > database backups. > > The site admins use a MW extension called "merge-and-delete" to deal > with spammers. There is a permanent, blocked user called "spammer" and > any time a new user account is created by a spammer, the editors merge- > and-delete that account into the "spammer" account. There are < 100 > real editors on the site and this process kept them from being > overwhelmed by the thousands of spammers creating accounts on the site > in recent years. > > The Problem > About a month after the 1.19.x update, a problem was discovered. > Somehow, all edits dated 2011 or earlier were altered such that they > are now credited to the "spammer" user rather than the actual user who > made the edits. The cause of the corruption appears to be a bug/problem > related to the merge-and-delete extension and MW 1.19. I'm not seeking > help for that here - I have turned off and removed the extension. > > My problem is: how to restore the edit history so that edits are > credited to the correct users again. The timestamp and page names of > all edits are still correct, only the user name was corrupted. But the > only backup old enough to have uncorrupted edit history data is years > old and from a much older version of MW (maybe 1.16). And I need to fix > the problem without losing years of edits. > > The Solution? > I can't see any easy fix for this. But I have thought of an approach > that might work. If I write a bot that reads the very old database, > extracts only <=2011 edit history, and then compares that data to the > corrupted live site, perhaps it could work its way through the edit > history making corrections. Does this seem plausible? And, if so, any > advice on what to look out for? If anyone has alternate suggestions, > I'm up for entertaining just about any idea on how to fix this. > > -Steve > > > _______________________________________________ > MediaWiki-l mailing list > To unsubscribe, go to: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l > _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list To unsubscribe, go to: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l
