[TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

[Gregory Hislop]

This generally sounds good to me.  Captchas are a pain, but a reasonable pain.

Thanks for getting this started.

Greg Hislop

-----Original Message-----
From: tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org [mailto:tos-bounces at teachingopensource.org] On Behalf Of Ryan Rix
Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2011 4:49 PM
To: tos at teachingopensource.org
Subject: [TOS] Wiki cleanup status report

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