Hello,
I've been accessing wiki.alu.org regularly for the past few days, and I
noticed very frequent attacks by spammers. A few days ago they deleted
the Road To Lisp Survey, and yesterday and today they did the same with
the front page. In all cases I was able to restore the pages by going
back to a previous version, but this is obviously not a long term
solution. I have no idea how many other pages were modified, and no way
of preventing this from happening again. [Actually, it just happened
again while I was writing this message, I restored the page again, let's
see how many times I need to do it...]
It would probably be a good idea to add some kind of anti-spammer
protection to the site... is there anyone here who has access to the
code for it and can try to do something about it? I'll be glad to help
if necessary.
Thanks,
Alberto
Alberto Riva wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been accessing wiki.alu.org regularly for the past few days, and I
> noticed very frequent attacks by spammers. A few days ago they deleted
> the Road To Lisp Survey, and yesterday and today they did the same with
> the front page. In all cases I was able to restore the pages by going
> back to a previous version, but this is obviously not a long term
> solution. I have no idea how many other pages were modified, and no way
> of preventing this from happening again. [Actually, it just happened
> again while I was writing this message, I restored the page again, let's
> see how many times I need to do it...]
>
> It would probably be a good idea to add some kind of anti-spammer
> protection to the site... is there anyone here who has access to the
> code for it and can try to do something about it? I'll be glad to help
> if necessary.
Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's
probably asleep. IIUC, its running a lightly modified cliki on sbcl.
I have no idea where he found the cliki sources.
Don't worry about the spam for now; unless you automate your cleanup,
its a losing battle. This needs to be solved server-side.
- Daniel
D Herring wrote:
>> It would probably be a good idea to add some kind of anti-spammer
>> protection to the site... is there anyone here who has access to the
>> code for it and can try to do something about it? I'll be glad to help
>> if necessary.
>
> Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
> administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's probably asleep.
Great, thanks :)
> Don't worry about the spam for now; unless you automate your cleanup,
> its a losing battle. This needs to be solved server-side.
Yes, it seems so. I just reverted it one last time, but now I'm going to
bed too...
Alberto
Alberto Riva wrote:
> D Herring wrote:
>>> It would probably be a good idea to add some kind of anti-spammer
>>> protection to the site... is there anyone here who has access to the
>>> code for it and can try to do something about it? I'll be glad to
>>> help if necessary.
>>
>> Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
>> administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's
>> probably asleep.
>
> Great, thanks :)
>
>> Don't worry about the spam for now; unless you automate your cleanup,
>> its a losing battle. This needs to be solved server-side.
>
> Yes, it seems so. I just reverted it one last time, but now I'm going to
> bed too...
DNS entries for the wiki have been disabled until we have time to
clean up the mess.
Thanks,
Daniel
D Herring <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> writes:
>
> Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
> administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's
> probably asleep. IIUC, its running a lightly modified cliki on
> sbcl. I have no idea where he found the cliki sources.
I know that cliki has a basic brain-damaged CAPTCHA--does the ALU wiki
use the same one?
I believe that services such as http://recaptcha.net/ are pretty easy to
use. Annoying, but easy. And it helps digitise books, which is a noble
goal.
--
People who do technical support for a living are bitter, twisted and
uncharitable. Eight hours a day of telling people what's already in the
manual [...] results in a steady and inexorable progression towards a
state of depressive sociopathy. --dansdata.com
Robert Uhl wrote:
> D Herring <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> writes:
>> Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
>> administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's
>> probably asleep. IIUC, its running a lightly modified cliki on
>> sbcl. I have no idea where he found the cliki sources.
>
> I know that cliki has a basic brain-damaged CAPTCHA--does the ALU wiki
> use the same one?
Not right now. I was thinking that it would be fun to use a
Lisp-specific captcha, such as:
Print the result of
(concatenate 'string "abc" (reverse "def"))
where the lisp expression is randomly generated combining a few basic
operators, and the strings are random...
Alberto
On Jul 3, 11:22 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Robert Uhl wrote:
> > D Herring <········@at.tentpost.dot.com> writes:
> >> Thanks for the heads up. Drew Crampsie at tech.coop is currently
> >> administering the wiki; I just emailed him about this, but he's
> >> probably asleep. IIUC, its running a lightly modified cliki on
> >> sbcl. I have no idea where he found the cliki sources.
>
> > I know that cliki has a basic brain-damaged CAPTCHA--does the ALU wiki
> > use the same one?
>
> Not right now. I was thinking that it would be fun to use a
> Lisp-specific captcha, such as:
>
> Print the result of
> (concatenate 'string "abc" (reverse "def"))
>
> where the lisp expression is randomly generated combining a few basic
> operators, and the strings are random...
Please no more captcha with random letters, they don't stop only the
drones for posting but humans too.
Bobi
>
> Alberto
Slobodan Blazeski wrote:
> On Jul 3, 11:22 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
>> I was thinking that it would be fun to use a
>> Lisp-specific captcha, such as:
>>
>> Print the result of
>> (concatenate 'string "abc" (reverse "def"))
>>
>> where the lisp expression is randomly generated combining a few basic
>> operators, and the strings are random...
> Please no more captcha with random letters, they don't stop only the
> drones for posting but humans too.
Ok, the strings don't need to be random, of course, and mine was not a
terribly serious suggestion anyway. But it has the advantage that even
beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
Alberto
On Jul 5, 5:04 am, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Slobodan Blazeski wrote:
> > On Jul 3, 11:22 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> >> I was thinking that it would be fun to use a
> >> Lisp-specific captcha, such as:
>
> >> Print the result of
> >> (concatenate 'string "abc" (reverse "def"))
>
> >> where the lisp expression is randomly generated combining a few basic
> >> operators, and the strings are random...
> > Please no more captcha with random letters, they don't stop only the
> > drones for posting but humans too.
>
> Ok, the strings don't need to be random, of course, and mine was not a
> terribly serious suggestion anyway. But it has the advantage that even
> beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
> and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
They could always do something like:
(defparameter *dictionary* (vector "Poison Ivy" "Mr. Freeze" "Ra's al
Ghul" "Two-Face" "The Riddler" "Clayface"))
with more words of course,
(defun get-random-word ()
(svref *dictionary* (random (length *dictionary*))))
(concatenate 'string (get-random-word) " " (get-random-word))
Slobodan
http://www.linkedin.com/in/slobodanblazeski
>
> Alberto
Alberto Riva wrote:
> Ok, the strings don't need to be random, of course, and mine was not a
> terribly serious suggestion anyway. But it has the advantage that even
> beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
> and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
What's wrong with reCAPTCHA? I like the idea that captchas are used for
something useful, like OCRing books, too.
--
Frank Buss, ··@frank-buss.de
http://www.frank-buss.de, http://www.it4-systems.de
On Jul 4, 11:04 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> But it has the advantage that even
> beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
> and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
But if a beginner can cut & paste to a lisp prompt and cut & paste
back, so can a computer! The point of a captcha is that you >can't<
cut & paste, and even the letters are meant to be too distorted for
OCR.
Which, by the way, opens a market niche to provide advanced OCR to
spammers...
fortunatus wrote:
> On Jul 4, 11:04 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
>> But it has the advantage that even
>> beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
>> and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
>
> But if a beginner can cut & paste to a lisp prompt and cut & paste
> back, so can a computer! The point of a captcha is that you >can't<
> cut & paste, and even the letters are meant to be too distorted for
> OCR.
Yes, I know, but I wonder how many spammers will take the trouble to
write software to do that, just to spam a single site, with a relatively
small audience too.
Alberto
On Jul 9, 12:34 am, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> fortunatus wrote:
> > On Jul 4, 11:04 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
>
> >> But it has the advantage that even
> >> beginners can copy&paste the form to a Lisp REPL and get the answer...
> >> and they may even learn some new functions in the process :)
>
> > But if a beginner can cut & paste to a lisp prompt and cut & paste
> > back, so can a computer! The point of a captcha is that you >can't<
> > cut & paste, and even the letters are meant to be too distorted for
> > OCR.
>
> Yes, I know, but I wonder how many spammers will take the trouble to
> write software to do that, just to spam a single site, with a relatively
> small audience too.
I would.