Yet Another Wiki Spam Attack

Over the weekend, wiki.ucalgary.ca got hammered by a(n apparently) coordinated and distributed spam barrage. Hundreds of pages hit, new pages created, talk namespaces crapped into, etc...

I think I saw part of it happen in "real time" - I was watching a movie with Evan, with my Powerbook plugged into our TV (the only DVD player in the house), and every now and then I heard the system beep. After the movie ended, I saw the Watchmouse monitoring page for wiki.ucalgary.ca saying there was trouble connecting, and the main wiki.ucalgary.ca page was showing a MySQL connection error. Reloading the page made it go away, so I didn't pay much attention.

Paul and I just spent the better part of an hour going through the wiki and delousing it, and I sure hope we didn't inadvertently nuke a "real" edit, or spank a "real" user. The last thing I want is collateral damage in this silly battle against spammers.

I just can't put into words how frustrating this is - we run a service for the use of the University community, to enhance the practice of teaching and learning online - and spammers run repeated drive-by-shootings spraying their crap all over it. It's not just simple vandalism, though. It diminishes trust in the resource - why would a prof put stuff in it, if they can't protect it from spam?

There has got to be a better solution to protecting a wiki from spam. I've got the Spam Blacklist extension for Mediawiki installed (and keep adding my own regex patterns, and periodically grabbing the blacklist from meta.wikimedia.org) - but that only helps protect against known spammers. I'll be adding Bad Behavior (thanks to Paul for the link) to see if that helps.

Is there a tool available to go into a wiki and nuke any spam it finds? If spam keeps getting through the filters, there should be a way to yank it out again...