[TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

[Frederick Grose]

On Tue, Mar 8, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Jeff Sheltren <jeff at osuosl.org> wrote:

> 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


I find that authenticating through OpenID is less onerous than repetitive
edit confirmations, and allows TOS folks to not focus on the authentication
arms race.

See
http://mail.teachingopensource.org/pipermail/tos/2010-August/001479.html
or
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mediawiki-l/2010-July/034683.html

     --Fred
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