[TOS] Need TOS wiki spam prevention!

Sebastian Dziallas sebastian at when.com
Wed May 18 09:08:59 UTC 2011


2011/5/17 Ian Weller <ian at ianweller.org>:
> On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 11:06:30PM -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
>> (1) How does Wikipedia prevent the same thing?  (Spam coming from
>> accounts that were created by bots, etc.)
>
> Wikipedia prevents it by having a very large editor base and people
> running Wikipedia-specific bots.
>
> One thing we can do that is "easy" is stop allowing anonymous edits and
> require a confirmed email address on your account to edit the wiki. I
> put easy in quotes because it's not just a one-off config change; we
> have to:
> - that our OSUOSL VM can send email with confirmation links
> - that people know this policy is in effect
> And there's the caveat that spambots can confirm their own email
> addresses.
>
> rrix told me on IRC that he would be working on this real soon now, now
> that school is out.

That sounds very reasonable to me.

I'd like to point out that we have had this conversation several times
before (Ian, I didn't mean to pick your email as the one to respond
to; so don't feel attacked). And I've heard the argument that captcha
is bad and that openid is cool several times before. But what it comes
down to is this: who cares enough about it to actually implement and
maintain it?

Because right now, we have severe issues to be dealt with. The planet
has been broken for two months. The *front* page of our wiki was
obfuscated for at least a week before anybody spoke up on the list or
fixed it. The mailing list has been preventing new members from
signing up and joining the community for I don't even know how long.

I don't mean to pick on the infrastructure team or anybody here. I'm
glad that we've people looking into these things who respond as soon
as possible (for example, Chris who locked the front page as a first
measure). And I know that we're all busy. However, I feel that these
are issues that actively hurt our ability to communicate.

There needs to be somebody responsible for making sure that these
things are in shape.

-s



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