Pissed off

I am fucking pissed off. Over the last few weeks, I've been noticing attempts to spam the wiki on my website. The spammers would create a new page similar to one already existing, and fill it full of links to Russian linkfarms (right term? who cares?). It was annoying, and I figured it would only get worse, but I didn't get too worried. I deleted the pages, blocked the IP address (it was all coming from one open proxy), and watched the changes page for further action. Last night I checked the changes page again. It was late (well, sort of; it had been a long day) and I was making one last check before going to bed. Just to make sure that everything was okay, you know? Every single fucking goddamned page had been vandalized. Every single page that I had put up had been replaced with spam, and there were a dozen new pages with even more spam. Over the course of maybe four hours, all my work had been removed. My only consolation is that Google had not visited the wiki since the changes had been made. There were maybe a hundred pages to revert. And PHPWiki, the software I was using, sucks ass through straws when it comes to reverting changes. Check this out, ladies and germs:

• There is no easy, documented way to revert to a specific revision of a page using the web interface. The version I was using (1.3.4) forces you to go edit an old version, then save that version. The new version I tried upgrading to (1.3.10) allegedly has "action=revert", but I was unable to get this to work: it appeared to do nothing different from "action=edit". To be fair, this may be because the spammer seemed to edit most pages multiple times, perhaps to get around action=revert. But why couldn't I find any documentation on this? All I could find was this page and the words "See action=revert".

• There is no easy way to revert to a specific revision of a page using the database directly. Check it out: The database appears to store metadata in a column dedicated to compressed, cached markup. That's right: instead of breaking out metadata like revision, author IP and so on into a separate table, it's stored in the middle of a big gzipped, serialized PHP object. This means I can't do something like "delete from version where versiondata like '%10.0.0.1%'"; going to the page I've done this on hits an assert in the code that appears to check that the revision listed in the cache column is available in the pagedata table. Whee! Let's get all our programming ideas from MS Office!

As a result, I'm pulling a backup of the database from Friday in order to get the old pages back. I'm going to dump the pages to HTML, figure out how to script whatever changes I want to make, then leave PHPWiki forever the fuck behind me. Shame, really, 'cos I do like the ease of use of Wikis. But I do not have time for this fucking nonsense. Shame on me for not remembering these words:

Someone challenged me, Well, how am I supposed to continue hosting these low-barrier discussions? I'm sorry, but I don't know. To quote Bruce Schneier, "I feel rather like the physicist who just explained relativity to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked, 'How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?' I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either."

Those of you looking for info on the NWR04B, please continue to leave comments on my blog. I'll get the documentation from the wiki back as soon as I can.