Several really productive people spent most of their day today cleaning up porn link spam at the various PSU CS wikis…
Apparently, the separate password mechanism I'd put in place several years ago to keep random users from creating MoinMoin accounts had gotten purged in an upgrade a while back; none of us had done anything about it.
Spammers are like rats. Filthy, disease-carrying rodents that people think are brighter than they actually are, because they're stupidly persistent. They'll try every dumb, obvious way in, regardless of its merit. Once they find a way in, they'll try it again and again, long after it has been effectively closed.
I think we should be allowed to use arsenic and warfarin on them.
At any rate, Jamey, who otherwise would undoubtedly have done some really cool open source for XCB, our rockets, our radios, Debian or somesuch today, instead took point on scripting for cleaning up after these despicable vermin. Thanks, Jamey!
Josh, who otherwise would have been working on rockets, XCB, Sparse, or some similar goodness, took a couple of hours to re-hack my extra-password hack more cleanly for the latest Moin version, submitting it to the appropriate places for future inclusion in core Moin. Thanks, Josh!
I mostly stayed out of the way, but instead of starting my various urgent open source talks and projects in the morning, I got to start them in the late evening.
The spammers got their links up for about 4 hours, during which time they embarrassed PSU. Three highly-skilled, highly-trained open source software engineers spent about 6 hours cleaning up after them.
Wiki spammers. Warfarin is too good for them. (B)