Wow, what a spam storm! I rolled back all those changes and locked the wiki for the moment. There’s no fighting a bot manually. 
I’ll look into what allowed this to happen later today and hopefully enable page editing and commenting again. 
Update: IP number blocked, lock removed. That was weird. 
Wow, spammers are learning about role playing games…
I still hate spammers, of course. But I have to confess, an adventure “on the most dangerous island of the world, R’lyeh, the resting place of the great old one, Cthulhu.” Just, wow! Or woe, I guess.
I’ve started to note a particularly nasty kind of spam for the Best Essays website. They don’t only add links to the wiki pages. At first they posted entire new pages that are on the topic of writing essays to CommunityWiki. But lately they’ve been using my username (!) to make edits. I assume they’re trying to sidestep peer review. I’ve just silently rolled back any changes they made, but today I saw another edit using my username, and when I investigated I found how they had experimented with the rollback function themselves and linked to an old revision containing a spam link to Best Term Papers. There must be real humans at work.
How annoying.
Here I am trying to send mail using some Perl module. But most of them seem to be written for the last millenium. They work best with a local SMTP host. For my own needs, that no longer works. The webhost doesn’t have a sendmail binary available. The SMTP hosts I can reach require SSL and TLS authentication. Now I’m slowly digging into MIME::Entity, Mail::Internet, Mail::Mailer, Net::SMTP, Net::SMTP::SSL, Net::SMTP::TLS…

After experimenting with the four or five mail accounts I have access to, I was finally able to get the following to work:
my $from = 'kensanata@gmail.com'; my $to = $from; my $host = 'mail.epfarms.org'; my $user = 'alex'; my $password = '*secret*'; use MIME::Entity; my $mail = new MIME::Entity->build(To => $to, From => $from, Subject => 'test', Path => '/Users/alex/test.html', Type => 'text/html'); use Net::SMTP::TLS; my $smtp = Net::SMTP::TLS->new($host, User => $user, Password => $password, Debug => 1); $smtp->mail($from); # sender $smtp->to($to); # recipient $smtp->data; $smtp->datasend($mail->stringify); $smtp->dataend; $smtp->quit;
Comments on 2009-06-06 Spam Makes Sending Mail Harder
Well, theoretically at least it should now be possible to subscribe to comment pages!
– AlexSchroeder 2009-06-06 16:43 UTC
Guess not, because the webhost doesn’t have Net::SMTP::TLS installed. 
– AlexSchroeder 2009-06-06 16:58 UTC
I think it works after all! Luckily I wrote my script such that it gets the page content and subscriber list via ordinary HTTP requests, so the cron job that sends out emails can run anywhere on the net. This one is running on a server hosted by Eggplant Farms.
– AlexSchroeder 2009-06-07 13:25 UTC
Often I log on to my various instant messaging networks (→ Contact) and some dummy Yahoo account will send me spam. Something like the following:
Tags: InstantMessaging Yahoo Spam
Back at work… got over 10’000 spam emails in my Junk folder, and about 300 mails in my Inbox with a 50:50 mix of spam to ham. Not too shabbby and lots better than in previous years! 
I switched to GMail a long time ago because I felt that GMail had superior anti spam measures in place. These days I’m not so sure. I have less mail in my Spam box (4065 right now), and yet I have to manually mark about a dozen mails as spam every day. Are other users poisoning the spam filters? Maybe inactive accounts gathering spam negatively affect the filters…
Tags: Spam 
Comments on 2007-10-09 Goole Mail Spam
I find that too. I think the evil spam zombies are getting clever, that’s all.
Give it time and gmail with fix that. Until next time, of course. 
– greywulf 2007-10-10 12:08 UTC
I’ using gmx and are very happy with it. SPAMs only at the beginning and in the last couple of months N O N E !!! Maybe I’m just not using the mail enough… 
– Belfin 2007-10-11 01:34 UTC
Yeah, my email address is all over Usenet – and has been since 2003.
– AlexSchroeder 2007-10-11 09:15 UTC
Well, I’m being hit by spam of the form
gdufty upibhmf fknwvl aixqf gumi pqrjxfb ntscbzoyp-- [http://www.icxjrg.yamfw.com krwfuq qeysb] 2007-04-24 15:27 UTCor
egzp supbvqnf qbgtfnyv bmilfzo ewfhl xospqz rtmxfbajo http://www.mvuh.meptrc.com-- [http://www.google.com mvny vqahjngdu] 2007-04-24 15:28 UTCHow stupid is that?
Unfortunately, that means you’ll have to answer a question when you try to post to this site. 
When an idiot comes along and spams twenty pages on my site, I can easily roll it back. But all changes are recorded for posterity in the log files, and therefore they appear on RecentChanges and thus also in the RSS feed. Too bad!
Unfortunatly simplistic schemes won’t work: I cannot skip all entries whose last edit was a rollback. I need to figure out what edits where undone by the rollback and then check whether there are any remaining edits in the current time window… Damn!
Comments on 2006-08-07 Reverted Spam Still Breaks My RSS Feed
The O'Reilly Radar has a mail by the mail admin showing how much crap their mail server is handling. [1]
Somehow I’d expect the spammers to know all about Cthulhu. And Nyarlathotep, of course!
– RadomirDopieralski 2010-09-20 20:20 UTC
That is kind of awesome. But also terrifying, in a “from a time beyond space” kind of way.
– Adrian 2010-09-20 21:27 UTC
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