[Box Backup] Wiki spambots

[Stuart Hickinbottom]

I'm quite happy to get cracking (I've some time this weekend when I can
probably get a good deal, if not all, of it done), but before I do I'll wait
a couple of days to make sure that is what everyone wants. In particular,
I'll wait for Ben to confirm that's OK (or not) as I think the right thing
to do would be to also include more of the content of Ben's original pages
as I don't think all of that made it into the wiki.

I can clean up the spam as I go.

I can't remember who was administering the Trac system but it would be good
for them to let me know their email address (to
'stuart-at-hickinbottom-dot-demon-dot-co-dot-uk) as there'll probably be a
couple of things I'll want to ask about along the way (eg making sure the
spam protection is turned on, and there might be a couple of Trac plugins to
add).

Finally, for it to be worth it we'll need to get the existing wiki cleared
down once the Trac one is up and running - I can edit the mediawiki to
direct users to the new one, but it'll take the administrator of that to
close it down fully.

Stuart

-----Original Message-----
From: boxbackup-admin@fluffy.co.uk [mailto:boxbackup-admin@fluffy.co.uk] On
Behalf Of Martin Ebourne
Sent: 21 November 2006 22:37
To: boxbackup@fluffy.co.uk
Subject: RE: [Box Backup] Wiki spambots

On Tue, 2006-11-21 at 18:19 +0000, Stuart Hickinbottom wrote:
> I don't, I'm afraid, but I wonder whether this is the right time to
migrate
> the contents to the Trac wiki? Trac 0.10 is supposed to have some
anti-spam
> support built-in that uses the same techniques as WordPress (which seems
to
> be quite effective in my experience).
> 
> I'm not sure about mediawiki, but with Trac you can restrict updates to
> registered users whilst allowing anonymous users to create their own
> accounts. That, coupled with its Akismet spam detection, might turn the
> tables for a while at least.
> 
> I wouldn't mind helping with the migration if that was the consensus as
I've
> quite a bit of experience with Trac myself.
> 
> I never really understood the rationale behind keeping both (although it's
> probably on a wiki page I've just not read!). 

No, simply that the media wiki site was first, and trac only came after.
A combination of "if it's not broke don't fix it", and the effort cost
was quite sufficient to keep the status quo.

I certainly think it would be a good idea to move the content from the
old wiki to the trac wiki, don't see any advantage of having separate
ones. Maybe mediawiki is slightly prettier, but the trac one's perfectly
acceptable, if it helps protect against spam will be well worth it, and
at the very least will allow much easier linking to the trac tickets/svn
checkins etc. And one less account login as well of course.

If you're volunteering to get started that seems perfect!

Cheers,

Martin.

PS. As to the so-called captchas, I seem only to have about an 80%
success rate with those. Sometimes they seem completely indecipherable.
Maybe I'd fail the turing test too. ;) I personally don't really like
most of those systems because they discriminate against people with a
whole range of disabilities.

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