wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a vindictive wiki spammer last night. But, here's the thing - the spam prevention blacklist worked perfectly. The spammer wasn't able to add any of their own links to the wiki. So, they decided to punish me by vandalizing 50 of the most popular pages on the wiki with an apparently random (and invalid) spam URL.
The software they used to do this evil deed automatically created a new account for each edit, and the whole thing took them less than 10 minutes to do. It took me 45 minutes to undo, even with rollbacks etc... because of their insidious creation of 50 separate accounts for 50 separate edits. I would have just reverted back to a nightly database backup to blow them all away in one fell swoop, but we had actual valid users making actual valid edits, and I won't blow any of that away. Better to manually remove the detritus than to lose a single valid edit.
I'll be installing Bad Behavior today, when I get a chance It's not like I have anything better to do than to play a game of Wiki Detente with a cretin who would vandalize an open academic resource because I wouldn't let them add their link to their ViagraCasinoPenisEnlargement Google Juicer website factory...
The signature used by this roach shows up on a few sites on a quick Google. This is insane.
Update: I just installed Bad Behavior for MediaWiki - took a whopping 60 seconds to install and configure. I'd tried a previous version, but it got a bit, well, overeager about blocking stuff. To the point that even I couldn't view or edit anything. Had to kill it last time. Hopefully this time will be better...