I visit pinwiki several times a day and have never been redirected. I use a bookmark on my Firefox browser.

Completely irrelevant. The site has malware on it SOMEWHERE. Could be it only redirects visitors every 74th time, name starts with T, wears size 8W shoe, or any other criteria.

Until it’s fixed you’re risking infection every time you visit. No one knows yet if the redirects are harmful or who is vulnerable.

Or only for certain browsers or responsive layout sizes/breakpoints.

I'll support this. Several weeks ago I posted that I'd not run into the problem when going to the fixed domain (not unlike @kenlayton). However, eventually I went there and got redirected... so Yes it happens but certainly not under all conditions. Exactly when? That's a good question.

If you google search any kind of pinball technical stuff there is a REALLY good chance that Google will return at least one result with a link to pinwiki that will result in a malicious redirect. I no longer click any link to the site but if you type in www.pinwiki.com and then navigate from there is appears to no redirect.

Direct loading of the site URL can lead to the redirect code happening. In fact your example has been covered multiple times in the thread.

The infection is likely in the php code the site uses. Loading the URLs directly or via redirect is not a difference in the infection. The only thing that differs is under the conditions it choses to activate.

Plus there is no incentive at all to upload new material to the site as it could easily get erased if someone (eventually) reverts the site to a backup/restore. As well, the upload option for pictures is no longer available, but anyways would likely suffer the same fate in a backup/restore scenario.

The only way I can use the site is by changing "User-Agent" to "x".

I've mirrored the site into a local cache, just in case. It's too important to get lost. But nearly entirely unusable for my browsers (plural). It's so bad I can no longer recommend pinwiki urls as solutions to common problems.

Adding my name to the chorus of volunteers to help.

It feels like the maintainers of the site are in over their heads. It would be a good idea to get some other eyes on it to see if they can help find / fix the problem.

From the sounds of it, it appears that Casey has been offline for about a month.

Just as an FYI, the domain expires on 4/21/2020.

It likely has auto renewal turned on. Guess I'll add a reminder to my calendar just in case though.

Thanks very much for doing that. I'm afraid we will need it.

ForceFlow maybe you could talk to robin about taking it over and making it part of Pinside.

I would be happy to help out and donate time and resources. It would be a shame to loose this amazing resource that so many people have worked on.

But the first question I have is this: Is all content licensed as public domain? Or is there ownership? And if there is, are they at all interested in my help?

Not specifically directed at you, but I have a question about this. In the good old days web browsers had an address bar, and if your address didn't exist you got a 404 error. Now the address bar seems to be more of a search bar. Does the search only happen if the address does not resolve properly, or does every address become a search?

A search happens if there isn't a pattern match for a URL. If there is a pattern match for a URL, it does a DNS lookup and attempts to load the website located at that address.

After testing in Firefox it looks like any letter pattern with a "." in it causes a DNS lookup AND does not automatically generate a web search. Good to know, thanks.

Followup: Google Chrome however, DOES generate a search. So this is browser dependent. I haven't found a way to disable address bar (omnibox) search yet.

The core technology hasn't changed... but what happens is there are lots of 'what ifs..' and alternates in the mix these days.

At the core... what you ask for is exactly what you get. Problem is.. there are multiple layers on top of that.

If you ask for pinwiki.com that resolves to an IP address just based on the name you asked for (not alternates). When you hit that IP address, your request includes the name you were requesting as well (the server knows what name you initially asked for). The server is configured to have content for that address or virtual host name and will serve that up.

Where it starts getting complicated is.. the server can be configured so multiple names can be point to the same content. It can allow pinwiki.com to point to /pinball and also allow www.pinwiki.com to point to the same /pinball directory. It can answer both names as if they were separate sites, but same content, or it can also do redirects.. where when it answers for www.pinwiki.com it sends a 302 redirect and says 'please use pinwiki.com' and then the lookups and connection starts over with 'pinwiki.com' as the target to lookup.

All of this has been the same for decades. Some sites would be very limited in what names they answered for... some would try to catch all variations. But if the site didn't have a config for the name.. you get no content.

The next layer on top of that is the lookup of the names themselves. You enter 'pinwiki.com' it may resolve directly to an address, or it may be an alias to another name. For pinwiki, pinwiki.com is the actual A record that points to an IP.. and www.pinwiki.com is a CNAME (alias) pointing to pinwiki.com. So requests to 'www.pinwiki.com' are actually sent to pinwiki.com - but because the request includes the original name you entered... the server still knows you initially requested www.pinwiki.com and can adapt its behavior on that.

The next layer on top of that is your DNS providers. Lets say you typed piinwiki.com instead of pinwiki.com. In the old days, you would have just gotten a 'name not found' error. But because there is so much money in search and content funneling... the ISPs started to monetize the mistakes. Instead of having the request return a 'not found', they would resolve the bad name to a search engine website... and load content like 'oh, did you mean pinwiki.com?' and load a bunch of search results. So instead of getting error pages, you would get redirected to search results by your ISP.

And not to be outdone... the browsers started to get into the game too. So your address bar changed from being a static 'what goes in, is what goes out' to a more dynamic 'request' tool. In modern browsers, they look at what you enter in the address bar and can make decisions on what to do.. 'is it a specific web address, just load that' or is it 'that looks like a phrase... so lets load a search engine page with that as the input' or 'I tried to load that page, got an error, so instead let me push you to a search engine and see if you find something to fix your mistake'

TLDR - Modern browsers and ISPs are the main reason you get search results when you type things in. The core networking, name resolution, and webserver stuff still largely works the same. But there is a lot of stuff between what the user puts in, and what goes out to the network in modern computing.

Great questions, ChrisHibler can you perhaps help with them?

Thank you for all the detailed information. It helped me understand things.

People have been reporting this problem for quite a while now. Yet it still has not been fixed. I guess when the web traffic to that site drops to nothing, then it will get fixed.

@kenlayton, that won't have a bit of impact. No one makes money from PinWiki. Or at least I don't think anyone does.

I'm as frustrated as everyone else. Except that I'm NEVER redirected.
Right now, the upload image link isn't available and that is preventing me from adding the content that I would about every week. As I learn/fix things, I take a picture and upload the experience. I haven't been able to do that for quite some time.

I'm retiring from Boeing in about 1 month.
I've talked with some other principle authors about what to do about it.
Web servers and mediawiki aren't in my skill set right now...but I'm considering it. Cost is a consideration. I have no idea what it would cost to host the PinWiki. And, I have to get in contact with Casey to figure out how to transfer the (probably massive) database that is behind the Wiki.

@tacshose, @robin, Who owns the intellectual content of the Wiki? This is always a sticky question. When we started the Wiki, there was a LOT of discussion about how the license should read. We did what we did. Maybe that was good. Maybe that wasn't the best. I was, and still am, principally concerned with content and not legalese or making profit from the Wiki.

There ya go...I hope to get this resolved soon. Patience...
--
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
http://ChrisHiblerPinball.com/contact
http://www.PinWiki.com - The Place to go for Pinball Repair Info

I found out yesterday that the startup I was working for is closing up shop so I am job hunting and don't have to do anything IT related for the foreseeable future. I wasn't really in the mood to basically come home and do more work that I just did all day long. Now that I don't have to do that though I'm going to dive in and come up with a solution. I don't know when I'll start but it'll likely be sometime this weekend. I have some things I have to take care of before that.

Basically, I see four things that would be required from someone to successfully operate the site moving forward:

1) Technical expertise
2) Available time
3) Established in the pinball community (to ensure the site doesn't get abandoned in the future)
4) Be able to absorb the hosting & domain renewal costs

It's one thing to simply raise a hand and say "I can do it" and another to actually plan for a long-term commitment like this for the community.

In my case, 1, 3, and 4 probably aren't a problem, but 2 might be. So, even though I'm a regular contributor, I would be hesitant to put my hand up to volunteer for operating it just because I might not have the available time to maintain it properly.

If Casey is no longer interested in operating the site and is willing and able to help with transitioning it to someone else (or ideally, a team of more than one), that would make things a lot easier. If he's not available or unwilling to do that, then the process of migrating the existing data/content/images could be very time consuming and difficult.

The transfer also feeds into this question. I don't see a transfer of ownership as a problem since the pinwiki entity would still be pinwiki. What *might* be a problem is if the site is re-established with a new name and domain name.

There is this policy for Gottlieb materials: https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=PinWiki:Privacy_policy

And this was hidden away on the site and not really linked from anywhere other than search pages: https://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=PinWiki:Copyrights

Sounds like a move to let robin take it over and integrate it into pinside is the way to go. He has the time, expertise, and means to get it right again.

I'm hosting a few large PDF files linked in various places in pinwiki (since they were too big for the uploader). So I get a decent accounting of some of traffic and bandwidth requirements from just those files.

Probably $25-$50/mo. But if someone is already hosting websites (such as myself) adding one more mildly trafficked site doesn't really add much in terms of cost.

The only thing is that some people might take issue with the fact that the site would no longer be independent, but instead would fall under the pinside umbrella. But I'm really not sure how much of a concern that would be.

Can someone give me an example? Anyone can add this nonsense to their website.

Honestly, at least that counts for its maintenance and long-term survival. It also opens up usability options for features like linking tech pages for specific games from club threads and other great cross-features.

I was pissed when Pinball 2000 repair pictures and information I provided to marvin's free repair guides were abruptly taken private without asking and they started charging for them, but I'd be completely down for this change since I think it benefits the pinball community overall, and if it's not a moneymaker for Chris, anyway, it removes that technical and financial burden from him.

PBR/Mondial doesn't allow full copies of anything to be posted anywhere.

I'm guessing Casey might have talked to PBR and/or mondial about allowing limited/specific repair-related materials, like individual schematics, or various small pieces of other content to be posted. It's probably a similar arrangement like with IPDB.

I understand about full schematics or certain part catalogs but honestly I don't see alot of those things in the gottlieb sections. Partial schematics are gonna be a stretch to the copyright

I can contribute a month’s worth of hosting, whatever that ends up being. I’m sure others can as well, if money is a real concern.

I’ve got a scrape of the site, pairings of URL + content. It would be a tremendously easier task for a clean backup made from the built in media wiki scripts for someone else to audit (for malware) and import (or convert). If needed, what I crawled could be used (but it’s rendered HTML right now, not wiki source).

This would be a relatively low traffic site, and could easily be hosted on a cloud provider for just a few dollars a month.

Hosting web sites is very very inexpensive these days provided traffic isn't massive and you're not running web apps that require a great deal of processing power and ram. I can't imagine the wiki software would require either. A bare bones, shared platform server for no more than $50/yr would likely handle it. If you need, or desire to get into and learn dedicated hosting, a "LAMPS" droplet at Digital Ocean is as little as $5/mo. I run an online forum with nearly 20k members on a $10/mo package there (but we occasionally go over data and pay a bit more) so still not particularly costly. Often, when online groups or forums going on about how very expensive it is to run a web server they're either overpaying or they're misleading users on purpose to generate donations.

If someone decides to relocate pinwiki to a new server, I would suggest rebuilding the pages and database from scratch. The SQL database may be compromised along with the PHP pages.

pair networks helps with the image hosting of ipdb - maybe they could help with the smaller footprint of pinwiki

I would highly recommend steering clear of Digital Ocean. They are a huge hub of malware distribution and brute force hacking. I've banned all their IP blocks since the websites and network devices I maintain were constantly hammered by attacks from Digital Ocean servers. I don't think they are policing their servers too well. Additionally, I just saw an article that they're having some financial trouble, so it sounds like there's some internal turmoil happening there as well.

Personally, I'd like to see under the hood first before making any sweeping determination.

A wiki with as much interconnected content and media files/images as pinwiki would be a bit of a project to build from scratch. All those links would be broken, and it would be fairly time consuming to put them all back in the right places.

The point wasn’t to recommend Digital Ocean, it was to illustrate that hosting, in general, isn’t very expensive. I haven’t had any problems at all though, maybe I’ve been lucky.

If Pinwiki is moved to Pinside and keeps its format as a collaborative wiki, all hell is going to break loose. Content that has remained static for years on Pinwiki is suddenly going to get edited to hell and back by everyone on Pinside. This is not necessarily a bad thing - far from it - but the good thing about the current wiki is it is relatively consistent in style and layout as there are only a few contributors. On Pinside, there will need to be editors who are tasked with policing the changes made to the content. Editing policies and writing guidelines will need to be developed. It's not as simple as moving the entire wiki to Pinside from a content hosting perspective.

There will have to be giant FAQ page to determine the meaning of HUO... *sigh*.

I think there is a need for a long-term, stable home for this community-provided content. Pinside could be that home. As for ownership/copyright I would strongly prefer that all contributed content be considered in "the commons" and free to use by anybody anywhere anyhow. As noted above, we've already lost too much content to copyright and personality squabbles.

Perhaps robin could setup a new Pinside sub-section for this content with its own license terms that make it freely distributable, etc. We could even do a fundraising round on Pinside to help fund it and get it launched.

Pinside already has ‘editors’ that mark key posts. There is no reason all hell would break loose if the tech section was expanded to incorporate info from pinwiki. You simply restrict editing, the same way pinwiki and Pinside does now. I like Fytr ’s idea of a fundraising round.

Your confusing hosting with authorization for some reason....

Pinwiki is not some secret hidden paradise. As it is, anyone who has access to the wiki can edit it. Most of the current contributors are also pinside members. It's not going to turn into some wild west.

I'd have to disagree with you there. With dozens of authors, styling is fairly inconsistent, especially between manufacturer pages which were written at different times by different people. The system 3-7 page is significantly different than the Gottlieb pages, for example. I and a few others have tried to make edits over time to try to make things a bit more consistent (such as removing and rewriting things to remove the first & second person point of view style), but while still respecting the contributions made by other authors.

There are some loose guidelines that have been established, but I don't see the need for anything too formal since there really isn't a huge pool of authors, and most authors pretty much follow the same informal guidelines. While some of the earlier writing from years ago is a bit less consistent, most of the stuff that's currently being written is fairly consistent.

Actually, it is. Whatever server it lives on has nothing to do with who is doing the writing.

Exactly. I'm pretty sure it would be much too difficult to merge the login information anyway between the pinside and pinwiki accounts.

Nothing is stopping pinside from just starting their own wiki. There were competing projects back when Clay decided to put his guides behind a paywall it's just that pinwiki became the defacto go to, so the competing ones either died or if they haven't, are not really referenced.

There are a lot more authors there than people realize - it's just that when one of the "main" editors pulls an entire section in to edit and then applies the changes, it looks like they wrote the entire section, which is not true. Editing is certainly needed, because some contributions were more along the lines of a message board response vs. the formality that would be needed.

There are STILL bootleg pinrepair.com guides in several places on the web, I'm surprised there isn't a bootleg pinwiki somewhere.

If you look at the change history, you can tell which author changed what.

The thing is that the pinrepair guides are "done". They're static documents.

Pinwiki, on the other hand, is a living document that is being regularly updated. It's tough to fork and redistribute a living document.

No, but it's tough to start from scratch, and copyright issues come into the picture when copying work/media/images from one site to another.

slochar ,there is at least one. It is however a static site that would need to be refreshed. And there are a few wayback machine snapshots too.

There were really only two serious groups that emerged after Clay’s change. One was the PInWiki group. The other was by a fellow in California that has a lot of Bally experience, but that initiative died for whatever reason.

Not everyone has the expertise to write for something like the PInWiki. Just read some of the advice dispensed on FB pinball repair groups, pinball help videos on YouTube and even here on PinSide. While everyone’s heart is in the right place and they want to help, they simply don’t have the experience to be authoritative on the subject.

But...I do go on...
—
Chris Hibler - CARGPB #31
Http://chrishiblerpinball.com/contact
http://www.PinWiki.com/ - The new place for pinball repair info

I can't get into the main page or any sub URL's. Just redirects with malware.

Try using a user agent switcher and tell it a browser the malware can't recognize.

Myself, Mario V. (Pinthetic), Kbliznick, and a few others were the ones you were referring to.

It wasn’t a wiki and we were working very closely with Rick at BAA and Gottlieb licensing to retain copyright and present material that is copyrighted.

Some of the steam was lost because many of us had life changing events (having children, moving across the country, career changes, etc.) that took away time we had for the project.

I am honestly not surprised this wiki was compromised.... it was a prepackaged installer that didn’t get regular security updates. There was such a rush to get it on the web to “replace clay’s guides” that is wasn’t thoroughly vetted.

Hopefully you can get it sorted out for those who need it. It seems like it is a good source for a lot of people. Maybe a new captain of the security ship can get you steered in the right direction to alleviate a lot of the problems you are experiencing.

To be fair it's been up for years and been mostly ok. The malware landscape has changed a lot and sites that got by ok are now getting hit. Gone are the days when you could put up a site without concern for regular security updates.

I don’t disagree at all. It is just unfortunate that guys like Hibler that are the true backbone of that site, are now in a tough spot because of something that is beyond his control. That is a ton of time for these guys they aren’t going to get back if the ship can’t be righted.