Topic on Project:Support desk/Flow

Hi. So spammers have loved our wiki lately (illinoiscommunityjustice.org), and I've ended up with a ton of pages listed in http://illinoiscommunityjustice.org/Special:AllPages that have punctuation in the URLs. Trying to delete the pages with the built in delete function isn't working for me, because these pages generate a 404 error (the ones that have periods in the URL seem to be the main culprits). Anyone got advice for how to delete a page that returns a 404?

MediaWiki 1.15.1 PHP 5.2.17 (cgi) MySQL 5.0.92-50-log

Thanks in advance,

Frank

Protect your wiki from Spam! See Manual:Combating spam.

Thanks, already started working on that, but in the meantime, I've still got these pages I need to delete that return a 404. Any suggestions for that?

Thanks!

Frank

Seems like a problem with your server config. Punctuation in URLs is no problem, e.g. see MediaWiki:Common.css

I note that there are other pages with similar names that you have deleted and that the relevant pages don't seem to appear in recent changes. I'm not immediately sure why.

OK, I've run into this before with page names that start with a special character. The pages exist but cannot be accessed by clicking on the wikilink as it results in an invalid name for some reason. Try the following:

1. click on the link to one of the bad pages
2. between .org/ and the name of the page, type: index.php?title=
3. if you click enter at this point you will see the page and should be able to click the delete tab. Or you can simply append &action=delete to the end of the page name above
4. thus: http://illinoiscommunityjustice.org/index.php?title=Generic_cialis_10mg,_100mg,_5mg,_40mg,_50mg,_60mg,_20mg,_2.5mg,_200mg_online_-_liaison_sp_cialis_e_-_cialis_form_indian_pharmacies&action=delete (try it: http://illinoiscommunityjustice.org/index.php?title=Generic_cialis_10mg,_100mg,_5mg,_40mg,_50mg,_60mg,_20mg,_2.5mg,_200mg_online_-_liaison_sp_cialis_e_-_cialis_form_indian_pharmacies&action=delete)
5. proceed with the deletion action

For reference, this sort of issue (Can't get to page with periods in it) happens when short urls are set up incorrectly...

thanks for this workaround! Will look into the configuration of short urls

Frank