In November the access control to the Wiki was changed to require only a CAPTCHA for registration. All users who pass the CAPTCHA are allowed to edit pages. No verification of email address is apparently necessary, and there is no longer a restriction of editing only for those in the wikieditor group.
This has apparently been noticed already, and the wiki is starting to get spammed gently. So far it is not the rampant "tons of gibberish and lists of links" type of spam we were getting before the old wikieditor mechanism was put in place -- right now it's coherent text linking to outside commercial sites. It isn't frequent, yet. And it doesn't seem to be bot-driven yet, either, since it gets past the CAPTCHA. Unless the CAPTCHA is particularly bad. I suggest that all xastir users and developers who care for the integrity of the Xastir wiki be diligent in checking the "recent changes" list every few days and watching for spam. Fortunately, there is now a very easy way to roll back changes --- just click the "rollback" link next to the change in the recent changes list. Since I'm one of the wiki Sysops, I've been blocking any user (and their IP address) who spams in addition to rolling back their changes. Most users can't do that. So if you do roll back spam, please drop me a note and I'll go block the user, too. Chuck: I think it's time to rethink wiki access policies again. Perhaps the whole "wikieditor" technique was unmaintainable, but this new open policy is going to lead to the wiki being useless eventually, unless users and sysops spend a lot of time policing it manually. Perhaps requiring a verified email, at a minimum, before being allowed to edit? The registration page says that is currently required, but as far as I can tell, it isn't working. -- Tom Russo KM5VY SAR502 DM64ux http://www.swcp.com/~russo/ Tijeras, NM QRPL#1592 K2#398 SOC#236 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM In some cultures what I do would be considered normal. -- Ineffective daily affirmation _______________________________________________ Xastir-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xastir.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xastir-dev
