Cliki (and this blog) was down for a couple of hours this morning#

Wed, 09 Mar 2005 15:47:34 +0000

Cliki (and this blog) was down for a couple of hours this morning. It's up again now, and apparently has new CPU, motherboard and PSU.

All those years ago when writing the CLiki Privacy Statement, I failed to foresee a need to publish excerpts from server logs for the purpose of ranting about spammers. So instead of spewing a bunch of grep output from one recent cliki spam, I'd better just tell you that

• He seems to be a human using an ordinary web browser, not a script. This also holds for the other recent front page defacement that I checked. And his IP address (which comes from "CNCGROUP Beijing province network") isn't on any more DNS blacklists than is usual, so no help there either.

• His referer(sic) when he arrived was a google search for "qzzp.futurenet.com.cn". When I tried this search it turned up an old version of some Cliki page which had been spammed. Obviously, a NOFOLLOW robots tag isn't enough to stop pages from already-followed links continuing to appear in the index, and thus cliki continues to appear to be a good place to spam. Even though as discussed previously it won't get you any googlejuice.

So it was easy enough to add NOINDEX to the old pages as well. To make robots take notice, though, I managed to touch every file on the site, so the dates of previous revisions are a bit off (where 'a bit' is between one hour and five years). But as of tomorrow evening cvs.telent.net goes back online (I hope), which should make it more convenient to hack on this, and in the process of adding diff support I think I'll have to revamp the way that change information is stored anyway, so keeping the dates of previous revisions in some place other than the file's mtime should not be a tough additional requirement.