Deleting Trac Spam with Selenium
The CFEclipse Trac wiki has been polluted with spam for quite some time now. We’ve finally got the spam under control but faced a big task of going in and cleaning up all the spam related pages. I started doing it manually and quickly realized this was something I could automate with a bit of creative thinking.
I cranked up Selenium IDE and recorded myself manually deleting a page or two. Looking at the resulting HTML test code I started hacking.
I had a list of all the spam pages via the Index page from Trac. I cleaned that up into a comma delimited list. Than I hacked up a short ColdFusion script to loop through the list and write out some HTML following the format of the Selenium test:
<tr> <!-- click spam link --> <td>clickAndWait</td> <td>link=401_buy_oxytrol </td> <td></td> </tr> <tr> <!-- click delete page button on spam page --> <td>clickAndWait</td> <td>//input[@value='Delete page']</td> <td></td> </tr> <tr> <!-- click confirmation delete button --> <td>clickAndWait</td> <td>//input[@value='Delete page']</td> <td></td> </tr>
In hindsight I could have probably hacked my CF loop directly into my Selenium script and saved (and run) it as a .cfm.
I had well over 100 spam links to delete. I fired off the revised Selenium script in Selenium IDE and set on a medium speed (I didn’t want anything to timeout) and it chugged through these in a minute or two.
Done! Probably not an intended use for Selenium but it worked and saved me a huge amount of manual labor.
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The Deleting Trac Spam with Selenium by Jim, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Very clever!