Voting

Hi everyone! It's been a while since the last phrase voting cycle, but the forums now have voting to replace the soon-to-close Google Moderator system from before. The next topic will be...fruit trees! [caption id="" align="alignright" width="215"] This tree needs a little love[/caption] Just to recap the rules since it has been a while since the last cycle:

• Suggest phrases a fruit tree might say when you interact with it.
• Vote on the suggestions from other people (upvote the ones you like and downvote the ones you don't).
• The top responses (usually 2, unless there is a large gap to 2nd place or there is a tie for 2nd and 3rd) will be put into the game soon after the cycle ends.
• The cycle lasts two weeks, starting on Monday, June 22nd and ending on Friday, July 3rd. You can still suggest phrases after the cycle ends, but I will pick the winners on the deadline, so they will not be counted.

However, I want to provide an incentive so that we get responses from more people. The winner will get a diamond, and all users who suggested something relevant will get a ruby. You can suggest things for fruit trees to say and vote on others' responses on the fruit tree phrase voting page on the forums.

Wiki Trouble

I also want to explain the problems with the wiki that happened last week. What started it? A spambot registered thousands of fake accounts (1 to 3 per minute, based on the logs), and starting creating several fake pages per account, all full of random text advertising links to spam websites. Why was user registration disabled? This prevented more spam accounts from being created while I was working to stop them. Why was editing disabled? This prevented the existing spam accounts from creating more spam pages, which was causing the database to crash due to the hundreds of writes per second. What did you do to fix it? Like the above answers state, I first disabled editing and registration to contain the problem. Then, the database was cleared of all spam accounts, after I deleted several thousand pages. Was other data affected? I'm sorry if I deleted a real account or page by accident, there were thousands of spam accounts and picking the real ones was nearly impossible. Is my account compromised? The game and forum accounts are separate from the wiki and secured by Firebase, so those accounts were not touched (the game, forums, and site were not affected by this event at all. Yay for separation!) The wiki accounts are private inside the MediaWiki database, and the spammers had to access to any user data, other than what was public on wiki pages. Why did they do this? I honestly don't know, because the pages created had broken links, so the spammer did not benefit at all, even from ad revenue of visited pages like most spammers. What has been done to prevent it in the future? Account registration, page creation, and link creation all require that you answer a simple question correctly, which a spambot is (hopefully) not able to do easily. However, real people like you will not have any problem (can you add one to a number, recite the first few letters of the alphabet, and look at our logo if you were asked to?) Everything is back to normal now, so start suggesting here!

— Klikini