From Bulbapedia, the community-driven Pokémon encyclopedia.

The event known as The Great Bulbapedia Turkey Shoot was a large scale effort of vandalization of the Bulbapedia MediaWiki on April 16, 2005. Executed by a user or group of users going originally under the name of Ph34r, using numerous variants thereof after said name was banned, they were done with the stated aim of forcing the Bulbapedia admins to open up editing to anonymous users. This stated aim of course was almost certainly a lie, given that the person would resort to this rather than open dialogue with the Bulbagarden staff, and that if the demands had been met, larger scale attacks would have easily been possible upon the Bulbapedia.

There have since been other instances of vandalism in the same vein.

The name, The Great Bulbapedia Turkey Shoot, is a reference to the historical Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, an American term to refer to part of the Battle of the Philippine Sea during the second World War.

April 16-17, 2005

• Prior to 4:57 PM EDT: Ph34r begins vandalizing many random articles by adding the following notice:

Attention: This page has been taken over by ph34r. Down with Bulbapedia!

• 4:57 PM EDT: Woopert announces on the Bulbagarden IRC Channel that Bulbapedia is under attack. In addition, at 5:04 PM he sends a PM on the Bulbagarden forums to Bulbapedia Editor-in-Chief evkl.
• 5:17 PM EDT: "Ph34r" is blocked by Damian Silverblade.
• Prior to 5:32 PM EDT: The vandal re-registers as Ph43r and begins moving numerous pages to "[Original Title] is ph34red". He is then blocked by evkl at 5:32.
• 6:09 PM EDT: Ph34r is immortal to blockage is blocked by Damian Silverblade after creating numerous articles with titles all starting with "Ph34r and [...]".
• Prior to 6:54 PM EDT: Several Users, including Woopert and Jshadias, finish reverting the last of the edits done by the vandal's original username.
• 6:55 PM EDT: Ph34r is a freedom-fighter is blocked by Damian Silverblade.
• 7:30 PM EDT: Jshadias is granted sysop powers.
• 7:46 PM EDT: Ph34r attacks at 3pm tommorow is blocked by Jshadias.
• 8:14 PM EDT: "Ph34r attack at 3 pm tommorow" is blocked by evkl for a longer duration of time.
• 8:16 PM EDT: Ph34ration is planning is blocked by Archaic after moving the pages of several users, including BulbaBot, to "[Username] (Power Nazi)".
• 8:44 PM EDT: Bulbapedia is temporarily locked down, blocking edits from all users.
• 12:49 AM EDT: Users Woopert and Zeta are granted sysopship as a reward for their actions in handling the problem.

May 19, 2005

A smaller scale attack was executed on May 19, 2005. The attacker, going under the same name used identical-looking letters to enable themselves to pose as an administrator, however they did not gain access to the powers associated with it. The attack started on 20:50 (UTC), the attacker was blocked by Zhen Lin on 22:06 and all edits were reverted by 22:52.

• 20:50 UTC: The New Ph34r begins vandalising many articles by moving them, each time appending "is ph34red" to the new title.
• Before 22:06 UTC: "Ph34r" registers an account named Jshаdias, as an impersonation of a Bulbapedia administrator using an identical-looking letter.
• 22:03 UTC: "The New Ph34r" is blocked by Zhen Lin.
• 22:06 UTC: Impostor "Jshаdias" is blocked by Zhen Lin.
• 22:14 UTC: nYoo and Ferret are promoted to sysop status
• 22:52 UTC: Vandalism has been completely fixed.

May 23, 2005

A third attack was launched on May 23, 2005. The scope was much larger this time: pages were renamed en masse in alphabetical order, regardless of content. The attack started at 17:38 (UTC), although the vandal had experimented with using the custom JavaScript feature to make an effective bot out of his browser just 7 minutes prior. The vandal halted activity at 17:45, and was blocked by nYoo at 17:53, and most edits were reverted by 18:15.

Later that day, a different sort of sabotage was spotted - over a hundred new accounts were created with names such as 4b4f9f. It is presently unknown if these were also perpetrated by Ph34r.

While these accounts were being created, Ph34r did return in person to vandalise templates and articles, in addition to posting fake block notices on user talk pages. Bulbapedia was locked down shortly thereafter at around 01:20 (May 24, UTC), in order to assess the situation and perform clean-up work.

Around 02:30, the server went down under heavy load. It is unknown if this was caused by Ph34r's attempts to edit the database when locked, or by the perpetrator of the hundred-puppet-accounts.

From that day on, the large-scale editing stopped. However, there was a number of Ph34rs that appeared from that time on. These were at times vandals, others, however, were sockpuppets. Some never did anything whatsoever.