Mailing List Archive

Brion Vibber wrote:

>I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
>today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
>accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
>there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
>recent revision by an author other than the most current.
>
>
Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
* User A vandalizes pages, X among them
* Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
* Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
contributions, user C reverts X manually
* Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the vandalism
* So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!

Am I paranoid, or what?

Magnus

> Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
> whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
> * User A vandalizes pages, X among them
> * Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
> * Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
> contributions, user C reverts X manually
> * Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the vandalism
> * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!

I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

Andre Engels

> > * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!
>
> I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

It seems that it's also possible that in the time between someone clicks
on "delete this page", enters a reason for deletion and clicks on
"delete", another person could write something useful on the page. The
page still gets deleted.

The software can detect EditConflicts, so this shouldn't be possible.

Kurt

Thanks, Brion. That will be very helpful for sysops who are undoing vandalism. Will it also let you enter a comment?

There's always a chance that a page deletion or "Hi, mom!" message is more of a newbie experiment than deliberate damage.

Ed Poor

-----Original Message-----
From: Brion Vibber [mailto:brion@pobox.com]
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 2:38 AM
To: wikitech-l@wikipedia.org
Subject: [Wikitech-l] Last edit rollback


I think I forgot to mention this except on the French list; earlier
today I added a rollback-last-edit function (for sysops). It's currently
accessible from the user contributions page; next to 'top' revisions,
there's a 'rollback' link which will resave that page with the most
recent revision by an author other than the most current.

It's basically just a shortcut for page->history->old revision->
edit->save, not a new functionality, but rather handy if you've got to
do more than a couple at a time.

(See changes to Article.php; slighter to Language.php, wiki.phtml,
SpecialContributions.php)

I've also put the current CVS revision of everything as of a few hours
ago onto all the languages, so we should be running consistent.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Wednesday 04 December 2002 06:40, Andre Engels wrote:
> > Do you check if the "most current" edit is still the same as the one
> > whos contributions page you are looking at? Otherwise, this might happen:
> > * User A vandalizes pages, X among them
> > * Sysop B looks at A's "contributions", with X being a top edit
> > * Others users have been alerted as well, and just after B loads A's
> > contributions, user C reverts X manually
> > * Now, B uses "revert". The top edit is from user C, reverting the
> > vandalism * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top
> > again!
>
> I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.

?action=rollback&oldid=131072

phma

On Wed, 2002-12-04 at 05:55, Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> Thanks, Brion. That will be very helpful for sysops who are undoing vandalism. Will it also let you enter a comment?

Naw, if you want to leave a comment you can just do it the old-fashioned
way. This is intended more for 'bot gone wild' situations where you have
to revert dozens of mistaken or malicious edits by the same user.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On Wed, 2002-12-04 at 05:48, Kurt Jansson wrote:
> > > * So, the revert gets reverted, bringing the vandalism to top again!
> > I did a little test, and this kind of behaviour is indeed possible.
>
> It seems that it's also possible that in the time between someone clicks
> on "delete this page", enters a reason for deletion and clicks on
> "delete", another person could write something useful on the page. The
> page still gets deleted.
>
> The software can detect EditConflicts, so this shouldn't be possible.

Good point. We can stick the last-revision time in as with edits...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

Despite all the critics, at least for our first vandal bot on the German
pedia the rollback function came just handy and worked fine. Thanks Brion.

Sven (Ben-Zin)