[05:20] <evfool> hey all, is the diff update on a launchpad merge taking hours a normal thing? it says should be available in a few minutes
[05:24] <wgrant> evfool: Which merge proposal?
[05:24] <wgrant> It should normally take a few seconds unless something is wrong.
[05:24] <wgrant> So something is probably wrong.
[05:24] <evfool> wgrant: https://code.launchpad.net/~evfool/pantheon-files/ui-polish/+merge/225915
[05:26] <wgrant> evfool: Fixed.
[05:26] <evfool> thanks wgrant
[18:16] <reed> hi guys, how do you remove in bulk bugs containing spam?
[18:17] <reed> filed a question https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+question/251250 too
[18:18] <dobey> bugs can't be deleted
[18:19] <dobey> and there's no way to bulk edit really.
[19:51] <cjwatson> reed: We can and do hide individual bugs.  Whether you think that's "in bulk" depends on whether you're the one doing the work. :-)
[19:52] <reed> cjwatson, I'd rather not mark individually tens of bugs from known spammers :)
[19:53] <cjwatson> reed: Don't bother; we do it routinely across Launchpad
[19:55] <reed> cjwatson, that's what I wanted to hear :)
[19:55] <reed> I'm going to ignore the spammy bugs then, I've filed a question highlighting the spammy users
[19:56] <cjwatson> have replied
[19:57] <reed> thanks
[20:01] <cjwatson> reed: questions are the right way to draw our attention to this kind of thing in case we miss it though, so certainly feel free to do that - best if people don't just mark the bugs Invalid without telling us though, since that makes it less likely we'll notice and suspend the account
[20:02] <reed> cool
[20:02] <reed> I imagined it was best to leave the bugs untouched (/me lazy, too)
[20:07] <reed> cjwatson, sksharma872 bugs are still visible
[20:08] <reed> ah, the bugs are already marked private
[20:08] <reed> https://launchpad.net/~tantrikbaba800
[20:08] <reed> I doubt these were filed manually
[20:11] <dobey> you'd be surprised
[20:11] <reed> cjwatson, I added a couple of comments to the question, hope it helps
[20:24] <cjwatson> reed: Ah, please in future give the user name, not the display name
[20:29] <cjwatson> reed: The reason I think they're at least semi-manual is that there are small bits of variation, like occasional editing of bug metadata after initial creation.  I suspect perhaps somebody's paying people in an internet cafe somewhere to spam various websites?  I can't be sure ...
[20:29] <cjwatson> reed: The rate is also suspiciously low for a bot
[20:30] <cjwatson> reed: And it's very badly designed - the links are rel="nofollow", so as far as we can tell it isn't giving them pagerank or anything, all it seems to really be achieving is low-level annoyance
[20:32] <cjwatson> reed: (Happy to see evidence to the contrary - this is accumulated intuition from a few months of this)
[20:33] <reed> it's hard to believe that there are idiots out there filing bugs 'manually' like this...
[20:33] <reed> stupidity has no limits evidently though
[20:33] <cjwatson> People are paid to farm gold in world of warcraft ...
[20:33] <dobey> cjwatson: i don't think it's an internet cafe. most of these types of spam seem to come from low income countries where a lot of "mechanical turk" type of work gets contracted out to. there's probably an office in india that was contracted to post such messages all over the web
[20:34] <dobey> exactly
[20:34] <cjwatson> Well yeah, I'm trying not to racially stereotype and was looking for something sort of neutral
[20:35] <cjwatson> Looking at the six bugs filed by ~shfdjsjdgcck (now private), they're on the order of 30 seconds apart
[20:35] <cjwatson> (with a fair bit of variation)
[20:35] <dobey> cjwatson: yeah, i wasn't stereotyping. just stating where i see the same type of spam coming from on askubuntu for example, and that often the usernames seem to have very indian roots in portions of them (like tantrikbaba for example)
[20:35] <cjwatson> So it *could* be a bot, yes, in theory, but it also fits the profile of somebody creating an account, spamming with copy and paste for a short while, and then switching away
[20:36] <cjwatson> If they were single-digit seconds apart then that would be more bot-like IMO
[20:36] <dobey> if it were a bot, i'd suspect millisecond level distance between posts
[20:37] <dobey> or maybe i'm just to my bots being fast on my fast connection :)
[20:37] <cjohnston> sounds like dobey should share his connection
[20:38] <dobey> i do share it. all these laptops, phones, and game consoles need bandwidth :)
[20:38] <cjwatson> dobey: I'm accounting for Launchpad being slow ;-)
[20:40] <dobey> cjwatson: yeah. i'm just speaking from experience of a few scripts i've written in the past, where it would go through a whole lot of bugs pretty fast. faster than 1 per second at least
[20:41] <dobey> anyway
[20:41]  * dobey goes back to insane levels of abstracting
[21:17] <reed> bots can also rate-limiting themselves in order not to be spotted for the longest amount of time :)
[21:18] <reed> cjwatson, what should I do with all those invisible bugs filed by that moronspammer?
[21:22] <cjwatson> reed: You can reassign them to the "null-and-void" project if you like to get them out of your way
[21:22] <reed> cjwatson, one at the time? geez
[21:22] <cjwatson> (Our formula for hiding bugs is: reassign to null-and-void, set status to Invalid, set to Private)
[21:23] <cjwatson> reed: It's scriptable using the Launchpad API if you want
[21:23] <reed> geeez
[21:23] <cjwatson> I haven't yet got impatient enough to write a script for it
[21:23] <reed> do you have the script handy? :)
[21:23] <reed> ahhaha
[21:23] <reed> damn... i'd rather keep them there
[21:23] <cjwatson> Which username and project name was it again?
[21:24] <reed> https://bugs.launchpad.net/openstack-community/ and https://launchpad.net/~tantrikbaba800
[21:29] <cjwatson> reed: Entirely untested, but typing something like http://paste.ubuntu.com/7767586/ into "lp-shell production devel" should do it
[21:30] <cjwatson> (Will fail for any multi-task bugs, but I haven't seen any of those from this class of spammers yet)
[21:30]  * reed needs to remember how to login in launchpad from shell...
[21:30] <cjwatson> put BROWSER=firefox before that and it'll pop it up in a browser
[21:31] <cjwatson> (only needed the first time)
[21:34] <reed> cjwatson, what do you mean by 'lp-shell'?
[21:35] <cjwatson> reed: sudo apt-get install lptools
[21:36] <reed> ah, i was missing that, went to a python shell
[21:37] <cjwatson> You can do it there too with something like   from launchpadlib.launchpad import Launchpad; lp = Launchpad.login_with("antispam", "production", version="devel") at the start
[21:39] <reed> ClientError: HTTP Error 410: Gone
[21:39] <reed> to In [6]: spammer = lp.people['tantrikbaba800']
[21:40] <cjwatson> Oh, er, right
[21:42] <reed> because the user is suspended, right?
[21:43] <cjwatson> reed: Yes.  http://paste.ubuntu.com/7767617/ and fill in the bug_nums array at the start
[21:47] <reed> how should I specify the bug numbers? with the # too?
[21:48] <reed> KeyError: 1338070
[22:03] <reed> cjwatson, the code you pasted doesn't seem to work with invisible bugs
[22:04] <reed> cjwatson, http://paste.ubuntu.com/7767688/
[22:04] <reed> I give up, spent already too much time on this
[22:07] <cjwatson> reed: If even you can't see them, why are you trying to do anything else?  I thought you were doing this because you could still see them
[22:08] <cjwatson> reed: #1338070 appears to now be in the correct state, set by you 22 minutes ago ...
[22:09] <cjwatson> Maybe it just fails on trying to set the information type after changing the target to one where you can't see private bugs.  I didn't claim my script was robust :-)