[Box Backup] Wiki spambots

[Ben Summers]

I think moving the wiki content to Trac sounds like a good plan.  
We'll get some useful extra features, and have one less thing to  
defend. Thanks for volunteering to do the hard work.

The content on the wiki is a bit trashed. We did turn off the ability  
for anonymous users to edit pages, so the bots just register  
accounts. Annoyingly, they remove content as well as appending stuff,  
so you have to go quite a way back in the history to reconstruct a  
good copy.

My thanks to Stephen Mosher and Hostworks for the current wiki.

Ben

PS: There's no need to get my approval for everything. We have a  
strong community of sensible people, and I can't imagine why I would  
disagree with any consensus.



On 22 Nov 2006, at 08:14, Stuart Hickinbottom wrote:

> 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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