Given some recent unpleasantness (T302047) along with past incidents (T257687), it would be nice to add some functionality to Special:Random and API:Random to reduce their efficacy in allowing certain actors a quick and easy means of finding random wiki pages. There are a number of ways this could be triggered (block activity, AF activity, a mediawiki GUI setting, etc.) and a number of ways Special:Random and API:Random could have their behavior adjusted (throttle, return a small subset of pages, noop, etc). Yes, this can be handled by writing ad-hoc code within PS.php, but it would be nice to facilitate a quicker response time that didn't involve a production deployment. And yes, there are other ways for an actor to generate a large list of random wiki pages, but the aforementioned methods are well-known and easy to use.
Description
Related Objects
- Mentioned In
- T419273: Limit the forwarding actions for Special:Random
- Mentioned Here
- T419273: Limit the forwarding actions for Special:Random
Event Timeline
Perhaps the behavior adjustment could be to only return protected pages, or similar, so that its not obvious that the randomness is restricted, but it is harder to use for vandalism
This does not help if someone compromised an admin or common.js. This actually will make things worse since protected page is usually pages that users considered important in some means. E.g. if a malicious script try to delete random page and Special:Random returns only protected page soon it will delete the wiki's main page.
@sbassett , do you still think this task is relevant and should be done?
MediaWiki Interfaces was tagged because of the Action API tag, but we're not responsible for every endpoint, just the framework. Is there a better team for this? We could leave it in our Bugs & Chores, but I can't make any promises that we'll ever actually look at it.
That's a tough question. As you can see from comments/activity on this bug, the related T419273 and likely a couple other, older bugs, there's some healthy debate on this topic. Whatever the outcome, it will have to be a trade-off. Yes, we've seen Special:Random used for abuse. More than once. But it also has at least a few legitimate uses that we likely do not want to hinder (too much) for certain Wikimedia users. Sadly, I don't personally believe we've found a reasonable trade-off for this issue, if one even exists. So to answer your more immediate question, I don't think there is a quick and easy solution to resolve this issue, at this time.
I think I prefer T419273: Limit the forwarding actions for Special:Random. This ticket seems like it could get kind of complicated, although hard to say without a more fleshed out technical specification.