[Wikipedia-l] Vandal bot attack on zh

Thu Apr 8 18:09:17 UTC 2004

Chinese Wikipedia (zh) suffered several vandal bot attack since yesterday
(see http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Ipblocklist).
The bot vandalize articles (seem random, but essentially dates) by adding
same text on several articles (I counted 31 edits in 1 minute!). Each time
the bot is blocked it comeback with a new IP (anonymous or as logged user).
To help Chinese people block and revert the bot, some administrators from
other WP (as I know: Shaihulud, Suisui and me) was temporary promote as
administrator on Chinese WP. The SQL access was also temporary enabled.
Please let's status and SQL access to the next few days.

Don't you think edit 31 pages per minute is a kind of easy things we can
automatically point at vandalism? What about automatically block this kind
of editions? As it's just to stop the bot ardor, I think that block it for 1
hour is enough.

One last thing: The dev abilities of Shaihulud help us a lot to face this
emergency problem. If you want to transfer those abilities to stewards
(inter-admin), one very important thing to take into account is that at any
time of the day, we need active stewards. If all stewards are in America and
Europe, there will have time where no stewards are active.

Aoineko