Folks: As you may know, info.aprs.net had a massive spam attack recently, and was getting dozens of spam pages produced per day. Scott Miller disabled new account creation there (because it's running too old a version of MediaWiki to support the necessary add-ons to lock it down in a less draconian manner), and I have been spending the last month or so deleting hundreds of spam pages.
I just took a look at www.xastir.org, and it's not in such bad shape as all that, but it is getting the occasional spam page posted --- four last week --- and there were several dozens of old spam images on there, too. We're not getting the automated spam attacks that Scott's sites all were getting, but there is definitely some abuse. I have cleaned out all the spam on www.xastir.org, deleted all images that are not related to APRS and deleted all accounts that have produced spam or spam images recently. I have spent some time in the last day or two deleting accounts that look like they might have been bot-produced. I am being rather heavy-handed in account deletion. If the account was used recently to create spam or upload non-APRS imags, it has been deleted. If the UserID does not look like a call-sign or real name, and has had no user contributions, then I'm deleting it on the presumption that it's a bot-created account that was once created for spamming, but for which all the spam has already been deleted, or as part of a spamming probe from the days where we were getting random gibberish inserted into pages (there were lots of gibberish names, and also some that sorta-kinda-semi looked like callsigns if you're not really paying attention (e.g. Kxy5z --- wrong format)). The time is probably near for the wiki to get locked down a little tighter --- we're clearly still allowing automatic account creation without confirmation, and the time will come when this gets hit hard, just as all of Scott's sites did. Fortunately, our wiki is running a newer version of MediaWiki that supports all the good add-ons that will help secure it, but it'll take Chuck's intervention to enable them. -- Tom Russo KM5VY SAR502 DM64ux http://www.swcp.com/~russo/ Tijeras, NM QRPL#1592 K2#398 SOC#236 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off." _______________________________________________ Xastir mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir
