I run a couple wikis and one of them is hardly protected, partially for laziness and partially to keep it easy to use. I monitor all changes and delete/rollback all spam, with a silent whisper of "asshole" for each spammer I have to block (and this happens perhaps once a week).
On April 11 around 11:50 (all times EST) I noted yet another spammer, so I deleted and blocked him as usual. But there was something a bit unusual - the current asshole was actually nicer than usual and left an explanation URL, http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/. So I went there and used some deductive reasoning to figure out the spammer's email address, and at 11:59 I sent him a one-line message:
Don't you ever spam my site again, asshole.
At 12:56 I got a response:
Thanks for writing. We're sorry if caused you
any inconveniences, but be assured that this
is strictly a research project. Could you
please give us the domain name of the site
in question, so that we can disable it in
the system?
Might I also suggest that you enable
MediaWiki's anti-spam features?
Our system currently skips sites if we see a
CAPTCHA. The simple "puzzle" anti-spam feature is useless; we broke that with 5 lines of
Python.
To this I wrote back at 13:20:
A stupid research project indeed.
You took a habit of shitting on people's front
lawn leaving a note "I will not clean up after
me, but if you clean up for me and send me an
email with your address, I will try not to shit
on your lawn again, and besides, all front
lawns should be fenced". And just to be even
nicer, you didn't bother supplying your
email address (I had to guess yours, from your
URL). For your own benefit, you can only hope
you didn't shit on the front lawn of anyone you
really care about or will care about later on.
It will be best if you stop your project
altogether, but at least, grep your
files and remove anything that has "drorbn" or "katlas" from them.
I got no response and next I heard of this was on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
On April 11 around 11:50 (all times EST) I noted yet another spammer, so I deleted and blocked him as usual. But there was something a bit unusual - the current asshole was actually nicer than usual and left an explanation URL, http://graffiti.cs.brown.edu/. So I went there and used some deductive reasoning to figure out the spammer's email address, and at 11:59 I sent him a one-line message:
At 12:56 I got a response:
To this I wrote back at 13:20:
I got no response and next I heard of this was on slashdot.