Cunnan:Village pump

In Medieval villages people would gather at the Village Pump to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On Cunnan the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.

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Announcements

• Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:
  • Moved during 2003
  • Moved during 2004
  • Moved during 2005
  • Moved during 2006

Topics

Spam flood

As anyone who looked at Special:Recentchanges today probably noticed Cunnan was the target of a group of spam bots who touched a large number of pages. The domain the bots were spamming has now been added to the antispam filter.

I've been through all the touched pages and have edited and saved the most recent useable version of each. Unfortunately, the spam bots unwittingly hit a bug in the software which means that the the page revisions before each of their edits have most probably been corrupted. If anyone feels like spending an hour helping to cleanup then they should go through my edits for the day and check that the page revision I restored each article to was optimal (i.e. the second most recent revision in most cases).

Cunnan's software has been upgraded so that the database corruption wont occur again even if the spam bots return. Tobin 23:35, 8 Oct 2005 (CDT)

• Hmm, it just happened again. I believe I have got rid of the spam, but it was done using multiple "machines" so it wasn't worth my time blocking everyone. Also some pages were hit multiple times. Rollback only works for the last action on the page, including rollbacks, so some of the fixes had to be edits. Nasty! I understand Tobin's problems the first time. - Cian Gillebhrath 09:53, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)
  • Three cheers for Cian! Thanks for doing the dirty work Cian, the fact that you and Tobin have done this is much appreciated. Given that this is the second time this has happened maybe it's time that we adopted a policy of only allowing editing for people who have logged in. It's not a foolproof defence I know, and it makes us feel less welcoming, but it would save a lot of aggravation. Conrad Leviston 20:55, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)
    • The most nasty wiki spam bots use a mixture of accounts and anonymous edits (the attack today and the first major attack are both examples of this). Forcing people to register only inconveniences humans. I've updated the anti spam filter to include the <div> id that the recent spam attacks have all included. Hopefully this will catch future attacks from this bot. - Tobin 04:57, 5 Nov 2005 (CST)
    • The two attacks I have "cleaned up" today all targetted the same files but the second one created blank pages. I wonder if they were doing so for a purpose? I blocked the repeating URLs which sometimes actually used a username. Cian Gillebhrath 19:40, 11 Dec 2005 (CST)
      • I've added some things from today's spam flood to the anti spam filter. If things stop working someone should tell me. -- Tobin 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)

• FYI the France page is currently showing up as uneditable due to the spam filter --Simoncursitor 02:41, 8 Dec 2005 (CST)
  • I know, I'll remove that site from the anti spam filter when I've got time to do a general cleanup -- Tobin 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)

• I'm getting sick of not being able to properly use the word special-ist (without the hyphen) because it includes cial-is (without the hyphen). I seem to use the word (and it's relatives) quite a bit. Is there any way we can still exclude the pharaceutical (because that trick is working nicely thankyou), but allow certain words that contain it? special-ist special-ism, special-ists, special-istic etc. Tiff
  • Oops, my bad. I'll change the anti spam filter to require a non-letter character on either side for a match. Should happen after I'm back from work today. Have people noticed any other false positives? -- Tobin 13:15, 12 Jan 2006 (CST)
    • Should be fixed now. The new rule for c*alis is [^A-Za-z]c*alis[^A-Za-z] (with the * replaced by the appropriate letter of course). -- Tobin 01:43, 13 Jan 2006 (CST)

• I was unable to add a link to the Bordescros website hosted by www . freewebs . com / bordescros because of the spam filter. Can this be made an exception please.--MasterWill 06:49, 16 Mar 2006 (CST)
  • I've removed freewebs from the spam filter. - Tobin 00:15, 24 Mar 2006 (CST)

• Not quite a flood this time, but the same pages have been attacked by the same sort of spam from various different "users". Is there anyway we can combat that sort of spam (other than the manual power of moderator's fingers) ? I have been banning the users for 2 weeks, but it really is pointless if they just come back with a new "name" the next day. Is it possible to prevent people/bots using usernames that are in the format of URLs (eg. 218.53.104.2)? - Cian Gillebhrath 08:49, 23 Jun 2006 (EST)

Protected Pages

• I have just protected a couple of pages that have been repeatedly hiit by a spambot. These pages are woman and convent. I will try to remember to remove the protection once that particular spambot has given up. Conrad Leviston 22:22, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)

Branle Dance Broken

I've found that the page for the Branle dance is broken, both from searching for it and from the link for the dance page.

branle looks fine to me. Conrad Leviston 22:17, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)

I have tried it again and it's still not working. Specifically, I'm getting this error:

    A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last
    attempted database query was:
   
   (SQL query hidden)

    from within function "MediaWikiBagOStuff:_doquery". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry
   'cunnan:messages:Currentevents' for key 1 (localhost)".

I am using Mozilla Firefox, the latest version (if that might make a difference).

• I can't interpret the technical stuff (I'll leave that to others, who i hope will log in soon), but it's working fine for me too, on a recent version of firefox. Maybe this is a timing issue - Conrad Leviston and I are in the same timezone, and may be logging in a quieter time of day than you useage-wise. Have you checked 10 minutes, or even an hour later? We've had occasional errors related to server overuse.Tiff 19:15, 27 Jun 2006 (EST)