Those imbecile spammers are killing my time yet again: now that I have established successful strategies to keep them out of my inbox and to stop them publishing spam comments here (Akismet filtered 179 comments so far and counting), they started targeting bugzilla. On Monday I noticed several new attachments to Bug #9 (of our local bugzilla installation) which I closed three years ago.

After identifying the attachments as spam, I dug around for a remedy. Unfortunately I had to learn that the bugzilla developers have not addressed this issue yet, but I found this script by Jonathan Cheyer that enables easy bug, comment and attachment removal for spam users. The script has a minor flaw though: it’s written in Ruby. Due to Adrian’s foresighted policy of minimized package installation however, this server has no Ruby installed. Running the script remotely is not an option either.

I figured I would have to port the script: my choice would have been Python but the database bindings are not installed either, so I had to do it the good old bash way. The script is not available for download as its state cannot be considered ‘releasable’ yet. I will happily give it to people asking for it, if they don’t mind destroying their bugzilla installation.

The script worked as expected – our bugzilla is spam free again. I just hope I don’t have to run it too often in the future.