Urgent: Don't starve wikia is currently being vandalized

[Viktor234]

8 minutes ago, Kelloggs Dogfry said:

Pardon me if this is not applicable or is a dumb input, but would an ip ban against said aggressor be of any use?

In some cases, banning a griefer could be worse than to keep his work going on. An example here for you:

As we can see, the Wiki Griefer has the ability to change his IP adress to make a new account and to carry on his act.

Once his new account gets detected by an admin, the admin bans his account, the griefer gets informed that his account got banned, and he just uses a new IP to make a new account.

Result: Griefer lost an account, but he's aware of that and he's able to make another account and to carry on his work.

But if the admin manages to detect the griefer and decides not to delete his account, then the admin might become able to stalk the griefer's work and to undo everything the griefer does. As long as the griefer isn't aware of that, he's not really able to edit any page because he's being stalked. To avoid this, he needs to make another account with the same or a different IP. If that's the case, then the admin can ban his previous account, since he's aware that the griefer won't use that one anymore, because others can stalk him at his work.

Result: Griefer might be not aware of the fact that he lost an account, but he's still able to make another account and to carry on his work.

Banning is effective if there's a sign that the griefer has only access to a limited amount of IP adresses, otherwise it might be same as if the admin would stop stalking the griefer and trying to detect him once again.

[SpikeGuy]

33 minutes ago, Viktor234 said:

In some cases, banning a griefer could be worse than to keep his work going on. An example here for you:

As we can see, the Wiki Griefer has the ability to change his IP adress to make a new account and to carry on his act.

Once his new account gets detected by an admin, the admin bans his account, the griefer gets informed that his account got banned, and he just uses a new IP to make a new account.

Result: Griefer lost an account, but he's aware of that and he's able to make another account and to carry on his work.

But if the admin manages to detect the griefer and decides not to delete his account, then the admin might become able to stalk the griefer's work and to undo everything the griefer does. As long as the griefer isn't aware of that, he's not really able to edit any page because he's being stalked. To avoid this, he needs to make another account with the same or a different IP. If that's the case, then the admin can ban his previous account, since he's aware that the griefer won't use that one anymore, because others can stalk him at his work.

Result: Griefer might be not aware of the fact that he lost an account, but he's still able to make another account and to carry on his work.

Banning is effective if there's a sign that the griefer has only access to a limited amount of IP adresses, otherwise it might be same as if the admin would stop stalking the griefer and trying to detect him once again.

The issue is that the griefer is really really fast at posting spam on the wiki, and every ban slows them down enough for us admins/regular users to catch up with cleaning stuff. Besides, he's perfectly aware of us undoing his work because it shows in the activity log. And we can stalk him anyways, since he's not particularly creative about naming new accounts.

Also, the amount of junk coming in seems to have slowed down. It may be because he's getting bored/frustrated at all the constant deletion, but it could be him running out of addresses.

[minespatch]

1 minute ago, SpikeGuy said:

Besides, he's perfectly aware of us undoing his work because it shows in the activity log.

To the point he messages expletives on member board pages.

[SpikeGuy]

And then we have to delete those messages (and occasionally new threads). And I have to throw protections onto the personal profile pages of those users fighting the vandalism because otherwise they get vandalized.

[Owlrust]

It's not that surprising to see certain people in society do things like throwing poop into other people's passions, this person is merely just some rando-troll that gets a kick out of screwing with people. I'm not too upset about why specifically they choose the DST wiki, or what their motivations for doing so is; do we ask why a virus is attacking an immune system? Of course not, we just focus on getting rid of it through preventative maintenance and understand that its goal is to disrupt (either a system or a function), and giving this guy attention is well...kinda what he wants y'know? On the bright side however, take heart that there are many more people on the opposing side of these actions (every fine user on these forums for example) than there are people that take joy out of mischief like this, and these things will be dealt with in time by the appropriate people under controlled circumstances. "If you feed a troll it will come back for more. Feed it garbage and it will bite off your hand, and feeding it sweets will never convince it to leave. Feed it nothing and the troll will starve on its own and go looking somewhere else after awhile". 

[Queron81]

The griefer was active again an hour ago. I just visited the Wiki when he started to vandalize and started reverting his changes, some people joined in helping reverting until the griefer got banned like after 30 minutes.

Is there a possibility to implement an edit timeout like 5 minutes for new accounts?

[minespatch]

I'm not sure what to tell the janitors. IT's like they don't believe me when I say the admins need help.

[Seot]

What a wierdo

[SpikeGuy]

A little detective work (and some cross-wiki hopping) reveals that this vandal first became active in early February this year (Feb 5 and 7 to be precise), opening a single account that hit four wikis (Don't Starve, Minecraft, Slither.io, and Fortnite) before being banned on all of them. And then a second account pops up on Slither.io on February 10, getting in a single edit before getting banned. The edit included  "I have Tor now. you haven't seen nothing yet."

And then absolutely nothing for nearly three months. If I had to guess, I'd say that he was making preparations during this time, like setting up lots and lots of sockpuppet accounts or gathering up a pile of inappropriate images. Or trying to pick his target. Of the initial four wikis hit, Fortnite never suffered another attack. I think it's because that wiki, being bigger than ours at least page wise (it has more than double our number of pages), would be too prominent a target and would draw too much attention from higher-ups too fast. Slither.io, by contrast, is a really small wiki. Since it has no active admins (and thus no proper first line of defense. Regular users can revert edits but they can't delete pages/files or ban accounts. VSTF members can do those, but they have to be called in), it would be nearly defenseless against dedicated vandalism. However, it's too small and wouldn't really affect enough people.

Our wiki (and Minecraft, I guess, since it's about the same size as ours), I think, happened to hit a sweet spot between being big enough to really draw attention and cause disruptions, and being small enough to overwhelm the local admins/users to an extant and to be slow to draw Fandom staff attention. I'm not quite sure why it was Don't Starve and not Minecraft that was chosen as the final main target, but it may have to do with the faster response we had to vandalism. (We accidentally "fed the troll", so to speak, in terms of provoking interest. Not that we shouldn't have reverted the changes – that would involve leaving wiki pages defaced for longer than necessary.) I think it was seeming just that more active than Minecraft that settled it (though being unable to read his mind, I can't confirm that being the case, and this is just speculation)

The attacks began on May 1, and they've been constantly coming in since (though in quick spurts as you'd expect, rather than a slow steady barrage). It started with anons inserting inappropriate messages (most often with the n-word) and sometimes deleting the rest of the page, but then escalated to user accounts posting NSFW images, and then overriding important files with rather graphic NSFW images that displayed on the front page by evening/the start of May 2 (complete with comments about being surprised this is allowed. It isn't anymore now, and will never be in the future). And then it's just been more and more of the same since. (Still, I think there's kind of a focus on racism against those of African descent more than anything else.) Minecraft and Slither.io were also hit during this time, but those were more cursory things than any kind of dedicated assault like the one we got, with edits being in the low double digits at the very highest. He did notably post a screenshot of our front page at a time when the images were overridden on Slither.io, along with the text "pic related its me epicly trolling a wiki."

So yeah, I think that's it for a bit of a history dive and a description of what's been happening in the past 5 days. Oh, and I know I shouldn't provoke them more or "feed the troll" or anything, but right now, what I want happening to him and/or his computer is quite similar to what Willow thinks should be done to ugly wooden buildings.

Let's just hope this stops soon.

[minespatch]

8 minutes ago, SpikeGuy said:

Let's just hope this stops soon.

Screencapped your post and sent to a janitor. Hope this helps.

[SpikeGuy]

4 minutes ago, minespatch said:

Screencapped your post and sent to a janitor. Hope this helps.

Could you also mention the 50+ sockpuppet accounts?

[MondayNight]

So... supposed months of "dedication" from a troll, using the Tor browser I reckon, with integrated VPN. I don't know how these Fandom Wiki pages work regarding accounts, but is it possible Bots are being involved? Because this amount of devotion remind me of Clouds and his sock-accounts plus Bot usage. Is interesting because such a chap might be some wanna-be Haxor testing certain tools, not necessarily someone with a vendetta against part of DS/T community or someone politically motivated (as was suggested) against certain groups - the obscenities might be just means to an end. Perhaps I'm having too high of a view on some run-of-the-mill no-life troll, heh. As a saying from my country goes: "Big is the Lord's Garden and many lunatics are jumping the fence."

[freddiums]

48 minutes ago, x0-VERSUS-1y said:

So... supposed months of "dedication" from a troll, using the Tor browser I reckon, with integrated VPN. I don't know how these Fandom Wiki pages work regarding accounts, but is it possible Bots are being involved? Because this amount of devotion remind me of Clouds and his sock-accounts plus Bot usage. Is interesting because such a chap might be some wanna-be Haxor testing certain tools, not necessarily someone with a vendetta against part of DS/T community or someone politically motivated (as was suggested) against certain groups - the obscenities might be just means to an end. Perhaps I'm having too high of a view on some run-of-the-mill no-life troll, heh. As a saying from my country goes: "Big is the Lord's Garden and many lunatics are jumping the fence."

i sincerely doubt that they're using bots, a majority of the vandalism is specific to the pages. plus, downloading tor and buying a decent vpn is a lot easier and cheaper than setting up a network of bots advanced enough to make semi-coherent sentences that are easily mistaken for a real /pol/ browser. not to mention that they'd be working around the clock instead of seeming to adhere to a sleep schedule.

one potential explanation is that it's multiple people and they're trying to raid the wiki, but again they'd be working around the clock, and from what i remember of my years on 4chan the majority of attempted raids flop before anyone joins in, especially when there's no real reason why they'd focus on raiding this wiki in particular.

it seems to me that there's no real reason they'd use bots or multiple people to raid a few small to medium wikis, so most likely it's one or two neets with way too much time on their hands.

[minespatch]

@SpikeGuy

[SpikeGuy]

55 minutes ago, minespatch said:

@SpikeGuy

Well, it could be referring to me, but I didn't contact Fandom personally. Could this be talking about Deiaa? In any case, should we move this onto the wiki?

[minespatch]

3 minutes ago, SpikeGuy said:

In any case, should we move this onto the wiki?

Sure, sorry.

[Deiaa]

On 5/7/2020 at 4:35 AM, SpikeGuy said:

Well, it could be referring to me, but I didn't contact Fandom personally. Could this be talking about Deiaa? In any case, should we move this onto the wiki?

Yes. That's me. I've updated them on the situation and provided a few more details.

Please move this discussion to the wiki, there's no reason to do it here.

Before I go, here are a few tips for anyone volunteering to help out:
 

• Do not attempt to communicate with the troll in any shape or form. Simply undo his vandalism and do not acknowledge him. If you do, you'll 'feed the troll' by essentially saying "you got my attention". Always revert his vandalism in silence. Do not acknowledge or refer to him in your edit summaries, either.
• He seems to be at least somewhat competent at editing wikis. If you're up for helping out, use Special:RecentChanges to keep an eye on everything. It's a list of all changes on the wiki, and it auto-refreshes every 20 seconds, so no need to constantly refresh it. This page is accessible to anyone, so keep in mind the vandal can also see it.
• From the same page above, keep an eye on the Upload log. If he uploads any image, it will show up there, and you can revert it by going to the file page. Make sure to click the 'revert' button next to the version you want the image to be reverted to. If you spot one of his images on an article that is otherwise normal, do not edit the article, go to the image's file page and revert the image instead. Be warned that almost all of his images are NSFW. Proceed at your discretion.
• If he renames a page, check the page history and make sure to rename it back to its original name without leaving a redircet behind. If it says that a page already exists under that name, then he left behind a redirect, which has to be deleted by an admin. In that case, simply rename the page to something else non-profane or offensive and remove its content. We'll take care of restoring things from there.

[freddiums]

hey, i know this convo was supposed to be moved to the wiki but.. i dont have an acc on fandom and im fairly certain if i made a new one it would take a bit for me to be able to post there but uh

i think i potentially know who the vandal is? i dont know for sure it's the same person, but someone from these forums added me on discord after i posted to the server bulletin and sent me a video full of transphobia & gore (specifically ftm srs gore) after i mentioned being a trans man

again, i dont know for sure that it's the same person but like... im trying to stay positive and assume theres not too many people in this community who would do this kind of thing, i guess

[Terra B Welch]

2 hours ago, taako bell said:

i think i potentially know who the vandal is? i dont know for sure it's the same person, but someone from these forums added me on discord after i posted to the server bulletin and sent me a video full of transphobia & gore (specifically ftm srs gore) after i mentioned being a trans man

Man that is horrible, why must people like this exist? Stay strong dude! Don't let some troll like that get to you.

As for the Wiki, I like to go on the wiki on occasion to add edits of consistent info I've encountered on things, I recently made an edit to the farm page regarding an old bug that's been around since about 2017.

I just hope this vandal is dealt with soon before all the pages on the wiki get locked.

[minespatch]

2 minutes ago, Terra M Welch said:

As for the Wiki, I like to go on the wiki on occasion to add edits of consistent info I've encountered on things,

Sometimes the wiki posts images for the new updates or skins that are easier to access for art refs for me. That's how this all started for me.