[wplug] Wiki Gibberish

[Michael Semcheski]

Hey Everybody,

The WPLUG wiki has been under constant (and increasing) fire from bots
that seem to post utter gibberish on some pages.

For now, anonymous users have to complete a recaptcha to edit a page.
We'll see how it works.

The reason I'm writing this is to see if anyone has a good theory on
why they do it?  There are no links in the gibberish, some of it is
Cyrillic, some of it is English that doesn't make any sense.

I've got three theories, but if anyone has any thing to add, or a
better theory, I'd be interested in hearing it.

1)  Its steganography, and the bots are controlled by a powerful
intelligence organization.

2)  The bots are part of a wave of feelers that hope to find poorly
maintained wikis.  The botmaster then searches for specific gibberish,
and the results returned are all poorly maintained wikis.

3)  They are poorly written bots.  The author intended for them to
wiki-spam, but there's a bug that causes them not to post the link.


There are a lot of similarities between the wiki spam and some of the
email spam that comes.  Obviously there's a connection, but the reason
eludes me.

Mike