[TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

Wed Mar 9 01:54:17 UTC 2011

On Tue, Mar 08, 2011 at 02:48:44PM -0700, Ryan Rix wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've been working over the last week or so to clean up the TOS wiki. This 
> falls in to two categories: despamming and updating content.

Thanks, btw, long overdue and needed. :/

> 1) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam -- No user 
> interface or workflow changes, just blocks stupid bots.

Seems reasonable, although I don't see why it hasn't been worked
around. Is it just that the bots can't tell which form field to not
fill in?

> 2) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit -- This one will add 
> captchas to pages based on certain (definable) triggers. Captchas... they 
> suck, they can be easily broken, but unless there is sizeable effort going 
> in to the spamming operation, they are pretty decently effective. We're 
> currently not a big enough target for captcha breakers, so I was thinking 
> to trigger captcha on 1) Account creation, 2) Page creation, 3) Bad login. 
> This pretty much hits on the behaviour of our current spammers.

I think we should implement this ASAP as a short-term solution. Open
ID is an idea we should explore for the near-term.

It's clear, as Frederick, Ian Weller, and others have pointed out,
that the "authentication race" isn't something we want to play. At
least, not until we have classes of young sysadmins-in-training who
SHOULD be learning to do this stuff.

> 3) http://bad-behavior.ioerror.us/ -- has anyone ever used this? I can't 
> really figure out what it does without digging deeper, but it's FOSS.

Put on potential future roadmap; maybe start an [[Anti-Spam measures]]
wiki page to keep ideas and facts on?

> 4) Ian and Ricky Zhou have made a pair of supybot (zodbot) plugins which, 
> collectively, can monitor a wiki for changes and report them to an IRC 
> channel. Do we want to create a #teachingopensource-wiki channel with such a 
> bot in it? Changes could be monitored there, and acted upon quickly and... 
> ruthlessly >:)

IMO we should do this but with one difference ....

... *pay attention folks* ...

... the bot traffic should be directed to #teachingopensource
directly. (After Ryan et al are done with the spam purging, turned off
during periods of [[User:FAKE]] purging.)

OMG, why!?!

Here is why:

1. We just don't get that many legitimate edits by comparison. Check
   out the number of active users and their number of edits.

   http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/Special:ActiveUsers

   Removing Ryan and myself because we were doing spam edits, I get 43
   legitimate edits in that last 91 days.

2. The IRC channel doesn't see much discussion, I would expect those
   edits to just land in a quiet channel and not really disrupt a
   conversation. The output from the bot for a new page looks like
   this:

   13:56 -wikiwatchbot`:#teachingopensource- [[A new wiki page name]] N 
          http://teachingopensource.org/w/index.php?oldid=1234&rcid=1111
          * Quaid * (+459) This is the contents of the Summary field
          as submitted by the person who saved this page, so there is
          good reason to make it a sensible log entry, eh?

   13:11 -wikiwatchbot`:#teachingopensource- [[An existing wiki page name]]  
          http://teachingopensource.org/w/index.php?diff=1234&oldid=1233&rcid=1111
          * Quaid * (+0) /* Section name */ 
          Here is the summary entry from an edit where the submitter
          left the commented section name that sometimes automagically
          appears.

   So, it doesn't provide a 'diff -u' for the whole page or
   anything. :)

3. Putting the edit flow in to an unwatched channel isn't very
   different from just peeking at
   http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/Special:RecentChanges

   In other words, if we're not watching [[Special:RecentChanges]]
   already, are we really going to personally log and check in on a
   different IRC channel?

4. Pushing edits to the channel will be helpful for participants,
   though. The folks who spend time on IRC, now and in the future,
   will see in real time what other people are doing, be able to jump
   in and help, spread the word, make derivative ideas, etc.

   Right now I don't know what is on the wiki because I only go there
   for what I am looking for. If I saw all sorts of edits coming in to
   the wiki channel (average of 2 a day, it seems), then I'd know more
   about what pages were out there.

My suggestion is, except during spam clean-up work, point the hose at
the existing IRC channel, harvesting the attention that is there
already. If it gets onerous in the future, then we can discuss moving
it to a different IRC channel, etc.

- Karsten
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
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