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 <r...@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 > _______________________________________________ > tos mailing list > tos@teachingopensource.org > http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos > > _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
