Re: Wiki Abuse

Good. I'll cook up a mail to squid-users, explaining the situation and
what to do for users who wish to retain their userid.
I am tentatively scheduling the cleanup for next weekend.

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 3:57 PM, Alex Rousskov
<rousskov_at_measurement-factory.com> wrote:
> On 01/15/2013 03:12 AM, Kinkie wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 7:11 PM, Alex Rousskov
>> <rousskov_at_measurement-factory.com> wrote:
>>> On 01/14/2013 02:47 AM, Kinkie wrote:
>>>>> Can we grep the wiki data to locate those other user accounts?
>>>>
>>>> Yes, I found out that we can. It's 129 users total.
>>>> Amended plan: create a page to explain the account policy; post to
>>>> squid-users; preserve those 129, the editors, the admins, and whoever
>>>> answers from squid-users; remove everyone else with no other warning.
>>>>
>>>> Eliezer, Alex; you are right that it'd be nice to warn each individual
>>>> user personally, but:
>>>> - it's 28k of them. Out of those, I estimate 8k to be real (and the
>>>> estimate is VERY generous), at least 20k are drive-by spam attempts
>>>> - many of the users have probably fake or spoofed email addresses
>>>> (remember, no address verification is done), so the mail would be
>>>> unexpected to them, and even if only 10% answered, it's an excessive
>>>> amount of work.
>>>> - recreating an user account is a trivial matter (even though it now
>>>> requires an admin's intervention)
>>>>
>>>> I will keep the old user accounts around in case they are needed.
>>>>
>>>> Does the plan fly with you guys?
>>>
>>>
>>> If I understand your plan and estimates correctly, you want to
>>> inconvenience a few thousand of legitimate users, and we could expect a
>>> few hundred of those users to come back at you so that you can manually
>>> re-enable their accounts? In this case, I hope your estimates are wrong
>>> both because I do not think we should inconvenience so many without a
>>> very good reason, and because I do not want you to spend so much time on
>>> handling those manual cases.
>>>
>>> Can we remove non-editing users that did not register to receive any
>>> notifications? If yes, how many users will be left after that?
>>
>> Hi Alex,
>> I suspect we are saying the same thing: I wouldn't really
>> inconvenience users. Registering for an account on the wiki allows for
>> a few things:
>> - subscribe to page notifications
>> - customize quick-links in the user's profile
>> - with additional authorizations, edit the wiki
>>
>> I would not touch users which have done legitimately any of the above
>> (some users have tried to XSS the wiki or to use their profile for
>> link-spam and would be removed).
>> After the cleanup, the wiki would contain about 400 registered users;
>> 25334 users would be reverted to anonymous (doing so would have a
>> performance benefit for them, as they could use cached pages, while
>> registered users can't). I expect that the number of wrongly removed
>> users be in the units, a few tens at most.
>
> Sounds good to me.
>
> Alex.
>
>

-- 
    /kinkie