[TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

[Jeff Sheltren]

I'm all for captchas.  They are somewhat annoying, but go a long way
in blocking spam from my experience.

I have nothing against a wiki monitoring channel, but likely wouldn't
go in there myself.

-Jeff

2011/3/8 Ryan Rix <ry at n.rix.si>:
> 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.
>
> There's still a lot to do in that first category. For now I've purged the
> spam that is not under the User: namespace; there wasn't much, but there was
> some there. There is a *lot* more under the User: space, and a lot of
> parked spam users waiting to be exploited.
>
> When we collectively have enough bandwidth (do we need to wait until after
> sigcse?), I'd like the infra team to spend some time implementing some
> antispam ideas for the wiki. Nothing too intrusive, to start out with, but:
>
> 1) http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleAntiSpam -- No user
> interface or workflow changes, just blocks stupid bots.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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 >:)
>
> Feedback on these options, including usage experience is much appreciated,
> both from our infra team, and the TOS community at large. is a captcha as
> outlined in 2) amenable?
>
> On to other stuff... I've been updating some of the content, phasing out old
> stuff, I removed a few dead projects and stuff from the homepage and
> "side"bar, etc etc... There are some pages I can't really pin down as
> anything important, but they are written by known-good people in TOS. I've
> dumped these in to
> http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/Category:Area_51, per ctyler's
> suggestion. If you own a page in there, see what you can do to either add
> context to it, or move somewhere that makes more sense (under User:XXXX/
> maybe?)
>
> I also created a new page as a landing page for those interested in TOS,
> per Mel's request for sigcse:
> http://www.teachingopensource.org/index.php/Join
> It tries to funnel everyone towards this list.
>
> How do we feel about the antispam measures i've outlined?
>
> Best
> R
>
> --
> Ryan Rix
> Red Hat Commarch doer of stuff
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