Re: [Balloon] Balloon website taken offline due to spammers

On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 01:59:06AM +0100, Wookey wrote:
> The balloon wiki was suffering a major spam attack last/this week. It
> was being hammered so hard that simply leaving it up was putting the
> server load up over 20 which was making it slow for the other sites it
> serves. And new spam pages were appearing at a shocking rate.
>
> So I've disabled it entirely for now until I have some load controls
> in place and all the crap has been tidied out (They added 9300 spam
> pages to the 180 real pages). For many moons our textcha kept the
> problems reasonably minor (lots of spam users, but only a few pages), But
> in July we started getting 10/day and on aug27th something really bad
> happened and it rose to ~200/day, and eventually a bot load we can't
> cope with.
>
> I hate spammers.
>
> When the wiki is back (and the machine upgraded to wheezy which has a
> version of moin with this option), user signups will be moderated by
> a real human (or possibly just disabled entirely unless you ask
> nicely, as we don't expect many new users on this site).

I've seen exactly the same issues on wiki.earth.li, so I feel your pain.

J.

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