Citizendium Blog

Over the last 48 hours, a vandal or group of vandals has been maliciously assaulting the wiki.

I am not sure what the appeal to vandalism is. Perhaps it is like a rock star trashing a hotel room. Either way, gathering enemies achieves a sort of relevance. So to the vandals…thank you for making us relevant.

When this project was created, we foresaw the possibility of attacks and prepared our hosting provider (Steadfast.net) to harden both the box and switch against attacks.

Hardening the wiki is a different matter. Each method used must be carefully chosen to avoid CPU, memory and bandwidth bottlenecks. What is in place now is stop-gap, but I believe it will survive slashdotting. The new software stops all bot/script activity at a cost of logging a lot of data.

Sadly, anti-spam/anti-vandal software solutions are not mature or even in alpha stages. Obvious solutions are lacking, such as throttling. I have not been able to find a CAPTCHA extension for new account creation and may have to write a homegrown one.

Stopping vandalism requires time. Time is money. I hate burning money. Like IRC in the early days, when you could split servers and create spoofs…the code will just get better inevitably.

-Jason Potkanski