The Event

Screencap of one of the articles created during The Event. (credit: Prod)

The Event (aka The Darkest Day In the History of Witscopedia) was a spamdexing attack utilising Witscopedia that took place across a 12 hour period on September 9th-10th, and again on September 10th-11th.

The attack involved the creation of thousands of user accounts, publishing an unknown number of articles every second. The attack went unnoticed for several hours.

The attack was first noticed by Gui on September 10th at approximately 1:21 AM (JST). The discovery prompted Panic to use his emergency powers as a server administrator to lock the wiki, halting the attack.

Screencap of recent changes made to Witscopedia during The Event. (credit: Prod)

The attack was reinitiated later that day, after Staz unlocked the wiki without disabling editing permissions for non-users and then immediately went to sleep.

Witscopedia security settings configured correctly, as they should have been from the start. (Note that the 'read' permission was subsequently set to 'true' for all visitors.)

The wiki finally became officially unlocked on September 11th at approximately 6:48 PM (JST) when Staz correctly disabled account creation and editing permissions for non-users.

Aftermath

After The Event, new Witscopedia accounts can only be created by contacting a wiki admin, and only users with an account are allowed to edit the wiki. Non-users can still view the wiki.

Sus1d1p volunteered to become a Witscopedia admin in order to help with the creation of new user accounts.