I must admit that I was starting to think that KtOG was getting very popular at first. The last time I checked on the site, I noticed that over the last few months the hits had risen dramatically. KtOG is fun, but it’s not *that* much fun!

For some reason I happened to click on the link for All Pages. The main page on the site looked fine, so I wasn’t expecting what I found - there were over 190 new pages on the site! Most of them were in Chinese, but all had links to other sites - obvious spammers. At first I didn’t want to give up on the wiki - it’s the same software that powers Wikipedia, and I had gotten used to using it.

I had taken a shortcut to my wiki paradise and used the “one-click-install” option that my hosting company offers. It’s an awesome system, which allows you to upgrade the installation at the click of a button. Unfortunately…

though I had diligently been updating the install (as I do on several other sites) and I didn’t realize that the scripts were overwriting my customizations. I had put some code in there to deny new users on the wiki, so when I had upgraded the install, this got wiped out and everybody who asked was accepted. This meant that I had about 50 new Chinese friends who weren’t as interested in KtoG as they were about posting totally unrelated spam.

I was going to keep one guy’s spam contributions… he was advertising WoW Level-up services. That’s right, he and about 10 of his Chinese buddies will sit and play World of Warcraft for you so you can play with a kick-butt character for a small monthly fee. At least this guy was posting *relevant* spam which is pretty unusual.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered there was no easy way to get rid of all the spam! Or the spammers for that matter. You could block them (one at a time), and you could delete the pages (again, one at a time) but it was just too much hassle. Wiki software is designed to retain everything and the history of all previous versions. The whole point of a wiki runs counter to my normal practice of wiping these guys clean off my server and banning their IPs. Though I could ban them and delete their pages, their ‘contributions’ would live on forever in the change history of KtoG. In the end I decided to just delete the old wiki and install WordPress - WP is becoming a bit of a habit for me, it’s so damn easy to use.

I’ve recreated the site as closely as possible so you can all breathe a sigh of relief
http://ktog.in8sworld.net/