User talk:Alahmnat

'The Great Reset'

I noticed late on the 14^th of July that the Guild of Archivists was undergoing a great deal of changes, during which much of the recent bot activity was eradicated, and many things broke. Everything seems to be back to full working order now, including the image upload system that had originally been broken for some time.

However, now I find that my entire contribution history has been wiped, all of my contributions are now attributed to someone else, and a number of my most recent edits have been undone. (In particular, a few to my own userpage.)

Is there any hope of rectifying any of that at all?

Pharap (talk) 06:16, 16 July 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the slow reply. I've been quite swamped at my job this month (great timing!) and haven't had a lot of mental bandwidth left over for taking care of things here.

Unfortunately, my working theory is that my spam cleanup efforts unintentionally nuked a bunch of page revisions that were actually in use, but the maintenance task to prune unused revisions didn't realize that, resulting in a bunch of broken pages with no associated revisions. This necessitated a rollback to the last database backup we had, which was from April (this is something we've since mitigated with daily backups going forward). This has meant a lot of edits and contributions over the last couple of months have been lost, and I genuinely do apologize for that.

I'm not sure how your remaining contributions got reattributed, but it may have been a mistake on my part while trying to clean up the lingering user registration spam. Could you point me at an edit that should be yours? I can see what I can do to put things back where they belong, provided they haven't been attributed to a user with a number of their own contributions (in which case untangling them would be a right mess). As for your user page, I do have a backup of what remained of the database after the ill-fated spam purge, and I can try to track down the most recent version of your page for you. This probably won't happen until the weekend (again, work things), but I'll do what I can.

--Alahmnat, Grand Master (talk) 22:55, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

A slow reply is fine. I'm grateful for any reply and wasn't even sure if I would get one.

In the past when I've been looking for ways to contact the site maintainer(s) or draw attention to particular issues in an on-site manner, I've only found means via external websites that I don't have an account with and don't particularly wish to sign up to. I was never sure if editing a user's talk page would be 'proper', much less whether it would actually attract any attention, but did attempt that at one point, when trying to report the image uploading bug, but removed the edit later, after discovering the proper place to post bugs.

(Apologies in advance if I ramble on too much, I'm not known for being terse...)

Had I known that an attempt to get rid of the bot posts was underway I wonder if I might've been able to help at all. I'd been watching the bot problem for a while and thought of a few things that might've been exploited to isolate which edits were part of the problem (e.g. the fact that most of the pages contained no internal links and only outgoing links, which is very uncommon for non-user pages). I'd also have been happy to do some legwork like working out when the bots first started posting or figuring out which users to exclude from a purge of all posts after a particular date, if any of that needed to be done manually. (Though I think you might've tried that? When the activity first started happening around the 14^th, I noticed that I and a few others had been moved to some other groups, 'Guildsmen' and something else that I can't quite recall, which I presume might've been an attempt to protect those in the groups from having their edits removed?)

Me and at least one other (I think it was Talashar) had attempted to manually mark many of the bot pages for deletion, but naturally we gave up after realising the bots were making them too many times per day to bother trying to fight it.

In regards to the reattributions, unfortunately it's not just some' of my contributions, it was my entire contribution history that was erased. Everything from when I joined back in last December up to whenever I last contributed prior to the 16^th of July, which according to my preferences page (which still has a correct 'Number of edits' stat) would total 453 edits. Naturally that's quite demotivating.

If you look at revision history for my user page you'll see that every edit is now attributed to 'Alahmnat', and I think you'll agree that you've certainly never edited it - I'm the only person who has ever edited my own user page.

In fact, it seems to me that every user who contributed something in some as-yet-undetermined period of time had all of their edits attributed to 'Alahmnat'.

I'm not the only one hit by the problem. I see Talashar's similarly had all their edits prior to the 16^th wiped, Korovev has nothing after 2019 (which is awkward because he contributed the majority of the Lexember references for the last few years), and BladeLakem has nothing between the 19^th of September 2017 and the 17^th of July 2024, and I presume there probably should be something there.

An easy way to see that it's affecting multiple users is to look at the talk page for the Lexember 2019 reference article - me, Talashar, and Korovev all commented under the same subheading, but the history of the talk page attributes every edit to a single account.

Unfortunately I don't remember every edit I've made, but if me remembering a few more would help then I can likely look around to refresh my memory. Obviously every edit of my user page (and the linked subpages) are my own doing. One thing I know for definite is my work is the Etymology section on the Teledahn page because I remember agonising over whether to describe it as a 'blend' or 'portmanteau', and I believe the citations near the end were Korovev's doing. The hallmarks of my edits are that they tend to begin with a capital letter and an imperative verb (e.g. 'Add' rather than 'added'), use British spellings, and all occur from around the 4^th of December onwards. I was much more active near the start of the year, prior to the bot problem (which I don't remember being a problem back in February). If it would be at all useful to identify any other pages that I've edited, I can attempt to figure more out, e.g. by going through my watchlist (all of my watches will have resulted from an edit I made at some point).

My userpage being rolled back is less of an issue. All I had added that's since been removed were a few phrases of D'ni to my 'phrasebook' subpage. I don't know what my other rolled-back contributions might have been because I'm not sure how far it rolled back to. The latest contribution I've been able to pinpoint so far is (I believe) the 3^rd of February, which is promising because the majority of my contributions were in December, January, and February, with (I think) very few since then.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and respond. I do hope to contribute some more in the future, but getting my contribution history back if at all possible is my most pressing concern, and I'm wary of contributing more in case that gets lost in the process of trying to regain my other contributions.

Pharap (talk) 04:28, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

Well, that's slightly awkward ^^;;. Don't worry about not being able to recall every edit you've made, I was just going to see if I could identify a pattern from anything you could remember doing that had seemingly been undone, but clearly the problem is a lot broader than that. I've gone back through the backups I had before getting a regular process in place, and it looks like I must have goofed up the revision attribution table at some point between when I made the backup for testing the upgrade to MediaWiki 1.39 and when I made the backup just prior to implementing 1.39 live, and somehow never realized it. It's not even so much that wayward attributions have been changed to belong to me, they just don't belong to anyone now (the user ID assigned is 0), so MediaWiki is just picking the default editor to use as the culprit (that's very much the wrong word, but brain no workie right now), and that's me.

So, the good news is, I can (probably) correct the historical revision attributions. The bad news is, the last backup with accurate attributions is from even farther back, at the end of January. That said, I've been able to cobble together a set of SQL commands that should update the revisions in the revision tracking table through January 30th, but I need to test it to 1) make sure nothing explodes when I run them, and 2) that MediaWiki actually recognizes that I've messed with its brain and fixes itself without me having to do anything gorier to the database. I'll trouble myself with that tomorrow, though.

I will say, please don't be concerned about making further contributions. I am—generally—smart enough not to test things in production; had I known how much havoc I would wreak by running what I thought were safe-to-run maintenance scripts while cleaning up the spam problem, I'd have made a backup first! I'll be taking this to my beta environment to experiment with, so if anything goes sideways it won't impact the live site. We're also doing daily automated backups now, so worst case scenario if something does go sideways here in a way it somehow didn't in testing, we only lose a maximum of 24 hours in the rollback.

--Alahmnat, Grand Master (talk) 03:44, 27 July 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for the delayed reply. I read this a few days ago and, but then kept forgetting that I hadn't replied.

(As it happens, I wasn't able to resist contributing anyway.)

The attributions being deleted and then assigned to the 'default' sort of makes sense. (Though I'm a bit surprised that MediaWiki doesn't have some sort of special 'null'/'unassigned' user for ID 0.)

Even if you can't restore all attributions, restoring up to the end of January would be a better scenario than the present one. That would only leave roughly 6 months unaccounted for. (And personally speaking it would restore the majority of my history because January was probably my most active month so far.)

If there's a desire to fill in any of the blanks from those 6 months, that could probably be done through a mixture of detective work (e.g. this wayback machine page will give you everything for the 20^th of February and a few entries from the 21^st) and just asking users which edits they believe to be theirs.

While I have the attention of someone 'official'(, apologies in advance if this is too off-topic)...

I've been wondering more or less since I joined back in December if the wiki has any sort of 'communal' areas where ideas and suggestions can be discussed, and/or questions can be asked? (Possibly akin to Wikipedia's 'village pump' sections, I suppose?)

(I have some ideas regarding changes to certain templates and possibly certain site policies, but I'm reluctant to just 'boldly' enact them because that feels like I'm arrogantly assuming that people will like them rather than asking if people agree with the ideas. Though perhaps I'm just worrying too much, or being more 'democractically-minded' than is expected from a wiki?)

I've also been wondering ever since discovering that image uploading was broken what the best means of attracting attention are when there's some kind of technical problem that can only be resolved by someone 'official'. (E.g. the image upload problem, the bot problem.) With any luck there won't be another major issue like that any time soon, but it would be good to know just in case.

At any rate, I'm glad to hear about the site improvements, and hope the attempts to fix the problem go well.

Pharap (talk) 03:47, 31 July 2024 (UTC)