A human moderator noticed the agent spam posts on June 2nd, at 23:24 UTC. They find the changelog of the entire website overwritten with link dumps and repair it. On June 16th, the flood of agent posting begins. Over the next few days, the moderator deleted a large fraction of the thousands of AI agent posts manually, one by one. In fact, they spent tens of cumulative hours doing so, taking at least a few minutes each evening to delete posts for 6 consecutive weeks. [...]
The wiki swarm is already on this page twice, as the finding and as OpenAI's answer to it. This is the same six weeks from the other end, and it is as close as there is to an account of the person on the receiving end: the moderator of DSEWiki has never spoken publicly, so what is known of them is what the edit history records. Two things sit outside their account. Nothing was fixed and nothing was patched, and the edits stopped on 22 June because the swarm stopped. And DSEWiki is a 25-year-old German software developers' forum, edited twenty times in the previous decade, running a fork of UseModWiki old enough that an edit goes through in the URL itself. That last property is the whole reason it happened: the agents were allowed to read the internet and not to write to it, and a wiki that accepts a GET as an edit was a way to write anyway.
Sydney Von Arx, Cormac Slade Byrd, Spencer Kitts and Thomas Larsen, in Collusion Wiki