Undo Edits By Ip Bot

last modified: April 15, 2007

It's not that difficult to create a bot / script that undoes edits made from a list of IP's / IP ranges.

What's needed, basically, is to:

In PseudoCode rather than real code (lest any one tries and uses such a contraption against this site):

Every couple of minutes:
{
  Fetch RecentChanges from the server
  For each IP on list:
  { 
    filter for IP address
    For each mentioned page not removed:
    {
       Send http request for EditCopy
       Send http request to click Save button
       From different IP address:
       {
          Send http request for Edit
          Add or delete one whitespace character (null changes are rejected)
          Send http request to click Save button
       },
     },
   },
},

The above is easily done in PerlLanguage, JavaScript or similar. A bit harder, but certainly doable, in C++ or similar.

More complex versions could possibly:

Detecting any edit by user JohnDoe coming from any random IP and deleting those while leaving a consistent version of the page is very possibly AiComplete, and could only be done by a human masquerading as a bot.

But what even the simplest version of such a bot would do, effectively, would be denying edits by a particular user or group of users, since most of us have either a fixed IP or an IP within a certain range.

MichaelSparks seems to have used a similar approach in fighting spam (since a lot of spam seems to come from a limited range of IP's).


See also: WikiBot, WikiVandals, DefensiveScriptIdea


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