Probably all MediaWiki bots can be used as vandalbots, but it's true that this is not their only use. If there is a publicly available bot framework that was available when Recyclopedia was up, then, it might be plausible that someone other than Erik Moeller or Tim Starling (who had control over all such bots prior to that) launched the attacks against Recyclopedia. Given how fast they happened, and what pages they targetted, it's not credible that someone not already very intimately acquainted with MediaWiki bots could have done it, or that someone not promoting Wikimedia would have bothered. But that doesn't have to be stated to everyone on the planet in an article necessary. There are enough reasons to be wary of those characters, i.e. Wikimedia corruption. Let's hope calling them on it, keeps them far away. There are also decent developer types like Brion Vibber. --142.177.X.X
- I didn't see any bot attack and i would say i frequented Recyclopedia until it went down. Why hasn't anyone salvaged the mysql from bobo? And as I said earlier I had a little accident and one of my fingers is quite badly hurt so please would you hold with this unrelevant and loosely claimed Wikmedia bashing. --Juxo 21:35, 7 May 2004 (EEST)
- It's pretty relevant if Wikimedia thugs are taking down other wikis that just happen to disagree with them.
re "within a week"
- I saw only the local trolls and i have to say i frequented the place. And it run for a month without any attacks. --Juxo 00:05, 10 May 2004 (EEST)
- Local trolls are the best trolls. But no, there were several repeated and intense attacks in which the vandalbot changed the titles of pages to random ones, and then blanked them, making it quite difficult to restore pages and links. There were at least two such attacks, and these plus the "undoing" of the vandalism increased the traffic. It was probably a third attack that made Recyclopedia exceed its bandwidth limit - thus it was, legally, a denial of service attack.
Looks like Wikipedia is getting what it deserves - blowback from the same tactics "Wikipedians" used against Recyclopedia:[1]