[TriLUG] wiki update

Pete Soper pete at soper.us
Wed Apr 3 01:16:06 EDT 2013


Here are some notes about the spamming of the Splat Space wiki which 
started some weeks ago and that has added a great deal of spam content 
to the "outer edges" of our valid content. The spammers are able to get 
through the "capcha" interface and give themselves accounts at the rate 
of a dozen or two a day.

There was mild agreement that as Alan Dipert's interests are diverging 
from Splat Space it would make sense to move the wiki off Alan's 
personal domain server while at the same time purging the spam and 
invalid accounts and exploring use of a smarter capcha system such as 
capcha+blaklists (suggested by Chris Covington).

There was general consensus that temporary limits on wiki access would 
be well tolerated and there seem to be general support for a very basic, 
manual policy for granting wiki accounts (but I might not have the 
details right, please chime in with corrections/expansions):
    1) Members get accounts
    2) Members grant accounts to non-members through the kind of 
familiarity/trust arrangement like we use for group-buy participation by 
non-members.

There was by no means formal consensus reached with any voting or 
counting of yays and nays, etc.

(post-meeting) I propose these next steps:
    1) Turn off general access to wiki mods for all but a few 
volunteers. (Chris and I have volunteered, but others welcome)
    2) The few folks weed out the bogus content, accounts
    3) Access extended to all existing members.
    4) Process for non-member access implemented.

  Move to independent managed host such as a VPS could come any time 
after step 2 above. Should start lining up hosting right now.

-Pete




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