[pmwiki-users] Reverting a PmWiki Site and its History to an Older State

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 06:34:22PM +0200, Shlomi Fish wrote:
> I have set up a PmWiki (0.6.7) Wiki site at http://perl-begin.berlios.de/. 
> However, it was heavily spammed, and as a result, I'd like to revert its 
> state and its history to an older state, when everything was OK, before the 
> spammers touched it.
> 
> How can I do that? Is there any script that will allow me to process 
> the pages this way? 

I'm not aware of any scripts that do this.  AFAIK, this is the first
time anyone has needed something like this (others have talked about
"it would be nice to have...", but before now nobody has said "I need...").

Unfortunately, due to the way 0.6.7 stores the page history it
might not be possible to reliably automatically revert the pages,
depending on what the spammers have done.

How many pages have been affected?  If it's less than thirty or so
it's probably easier to just fix them manually (and upgrade the
software) rather than try to fix them automatically.  One site I 
recently worked on had been heavily spammed (>120 pages with
spam) and it was still easier to go through and correct the pages 
manually.

The trick to doing this is finding the pages with spam on them.
All I did was write a quick script that found all of the pages
with more than 20 external links on them, then check+repair each 
of those pages one-by-one.  I was able to work at about 2 pages
per minute.  If that would help, I'll write a (v2) cookbook script
that generates a list of all of the "possible spam" pages --
that makes it much easier to find+fix the culprits.

Pm