Anonymous messing up tag/artist updates

Someone (98.197.112.206 to be specific) was messing up the tags, truncating them at random places. They were also messing up the artists, translating the site's UTF-8 encoded text into something else. My guess is some errant bot, although the only thing the User-Agent says is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)".

I've restored the tags but no doubt this can happen again in the future. I would ask that people check http://miezaru.donmai.us/post/tag_history every now and then to make sure things look good, and if you see something weird going on give a holler, either here or through email.

For how long has anonymous been able to edit tags? Since the move to private, I mean. When it was fully open, sheer size of the community corrected this kind of crap very quickly and it was rarely an issue, but with a lot less of us, a couple disgruntled trolls can be a pain.

Since the site was reopened to the public, about two months ago.

Similar things have happened with the wiki - anonymous edits (usually in pairs) that make no changes but truncate the text.

As a sort of off topic side note/question... Do the colors next to each entry in the Tag History mean anything? I really like the look of them for no particular reason, but I have no idea if they serve any purpose beyond that?

Same color = same post.

Ah that makes sense. There's just so many shades that it can be hard to tell if two are the same (and hence the same post) or not.

I've found a load by accident through the uploader autocomplete. I've found a load more from the same date using the list tage by date feature, currently there's a load at the bottom of page 4/top of page 5 (which I will see to fixing now)

http://miezaru.donmai.us/tag?order=date&page=4

Ugh... is there any way to ban the retard/retard bot doing this?

Only if it has a fixed IP address - Albert indicated it had a standard user agent string so unless we can say there are no genuine users with IE6 on Win98 then it cannot be blocked that wey.

I've already IP-banned the one I started this thread for.

If there are a bunch, you can just give a list of post ids and I can write a script to revert to the previous version.

Would probably take just as long to list the post ID's.. you can see the ones I fixed as they should still be on the tag list for now but with zero posts against them.

And speaking about retarded bots.. spambot(s) seems to have take a liking to http://miezaru.donmai.us/post/show/129280 for some reason.

A question: did this ever happen before, in all the years (well, ~2) Danbooru was open and public to all? It's weird that it's only happening now, at least since I've been around here (mid/late 2006)

Not that I know of, although it's possible.