This happens regardless of browser or ISP, and it's been going on for months.
I've finally captured this with video, and a proxy to show the requests. -sent details via email. If you don't see it, check your spam folder for [email protected] .

Compromised wikis serving malware often look at referrers and user agents. They don’t want the site owner to realize the site is compromised. Nor do they want search engines to detect malware.

Still getting page hijacks.

At this point the only way I can view the site at all its changing my user agent to a completely bogus value ("User-Agent: x").

I've been a bit of the mind of trying to convert the content to straight markdown - permitting the web site to be staticly generated. Host it on something like GitHub, and the edits could be reviewed (for abuse) then merged. As a static site, there's nothing to compromise. No PHP crap. Github would even host the static content.

However, that conversion .. is painful. I did spend time looking at it. There's only a couple MediaWiki to markdown converters; they assume you have a backup of the web site (I don't run that web site). And we'd still need to update all links to be useful. It's possible, it's "just" work. More than I can do as weekend project proof of concept to offer. I did look at just a blind pandoc conversion; the resulting markdown is more than a bit ugly. If I were to really tackle this I'd more likely than not attempt to write a proper converter that understands at least enough of the MediaWiki actually used on the site to markdown.

I genuinely hope that the folks running the site 1: realize they're still 0wn3d, 2: will reach out for help, and 3: before either they or the community give up. It's such a valuable resource - *when* you can get to it.

Chris,

I *really* want pinwiki to continue to be the place to be. It's really incredibly valuable. I know for me personally it's helped save weeks of delays, and thousands of dollars outsourcing repairs. I've learned an immense amount from the site; and the step by step on troubleshooting is *fantastic*.

Several people on this thread have also offered MediaWiki help. Perhaps someone can also help with a general security review of the host, to make sure the compromise is not via something external to MediaWiki.

Barring that, I only ask (and perhaps you can relay): If at some point Casey wants to throw in the towel, please don't let the content die. If nothing else let us help migrate it, with blessing. There are alternative ways to maintain things, that are less dynamic and more secure. But, I know change can be hard.

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.

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).

Fingers crossed.