Wiki hit by spam

[Chris Messina]

Looks like the wiki's been hit by spam:

http://wiki.openwebfoundation.org/Copyright

My talk page was hit too — can we do mass revert?

Chris

--
Chris Messina
Open Web Advocate

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[David Recordon]

I'm not sure about mass reverting, the help page is http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Reverting.  I think Nate has an admin account, maybe others do too?

[Tantek Celik]

I have some experience with keeping up with RecentChanges on open web related mediawikis along with other admins in those communities (whatwg, microformats), and would be more than happy to help with the revert/banning of spammers on the owf wiki as well if someone with admin privs is willing to make me an admin.

Actually, I think it's probably reasonable to make all the board members admins on the wiki as well.

Thanks,

Tantek

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From: David Recordon <reco...@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:07:01 -0800

To: <open-web-in...@googlegroups.com>; Nate DiNiro<uncl...@gmail.com>

Cc: <open-we...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: [Open Web Board] Re: Wiki hit by spam

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[DeWitt Clinton]

+1 

I subscribe to the recent changes feed for a several wikis via Google Reader and I make a habit of reverting spam and blocking IPs several times each day as needed.  Sign me up.

That said, does it really need to be an anonymously writeable wiki?  Why not just have people ask first before getting write perms?  We'll say yes to everyone.

-DeWitt

[Tantek Celik]

DeWitt, from my experience with microformats.org, it *does* help to require logins for edits.

However, in the interest of keeping the barrier to contribution low (and encouraging), I would prefer to not require explicit human permissions to edit/write.

The whatwg wiki has a simple arithmetic captcha for edits with new external links, which I for one find to be simple and entertaining - that's one option to consider.

We've not needed such a captcha on the microformats wiki.

Tantek

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From: DeWitt Clinton <dcli...@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:30:51 -0800

To: <open-we...@googlegroups.com>

Cc: <open-web-in...@googlegroups.com>; Nate DiNiro<uncl...@gmail.com>

Subject: Re: [Open Web Board] Re: Wiki hit by spam

[DeWitt Clinton]

Fair enough; I don't need much convincing to keep it open and low barrier.

With many eyes the spam problem is easy anyway.

-DeWitt

[Chris Messina]

Running the Twitter Fan Wiki (twitter.pbworks.com) I've found that the registration barrier is insufficient. Spammers were still able to get through and trash various pages or upload nefarious content and whatnot. I had to move to an ask-for-edit permission policy — and only approve people if they can give me a hint as to what they want to edit.

Now, it's probably a result of Twitter's meteoric rise in popularity that I've seen this kind of abuse, but it's still smart to be careful about being too generous with permissions — especially if we don't expect the pool of editors/contributors to be all that wide.

But, if there are many people watching for abuse, I'll defer to others' judgment.

Chris

On Tue, Nov 24, 2009 at 7:51 PM, uncl...@gmail.com <uncl...@gmail.com> wrote:

I think we're good at the moment regarding tightening privledges. I'll take responsibility for fixing this one since I unintentionally missed adding some basic lockdown. I also need to add the OpenID and CAPCHA modules, any other suggestions?

I'm happy to add Board members as admins, but I'd also wouldn't want to see it tjrn into a free for all.

-- Sent from my Palm Prē

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[Tantek Celik]

Frankly the big difference here is pbwiki vs mediawiki.

Pbwiki has crap for UI/performance for quickly/easily blocking/reverting etc as compared to mediawiki.

I've had to similarly lock-down any pbwikis I primarily help admin because their user/changes management is so poor that I didn't have the time to deal with the cumbersome/insufficient UI.

However I have not had such problems with mediawikis with many more users (and much higher profile).

YMMV,

Tantek

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From: Chris Messina <chris....@gmail.com>

Date: Tue, 24 Nov 2009 20:45:10 -0800

To: <open-web-in...@googlegroups.com>

Cc: tan...@cs.stanford.edu<tan...@cs.stanford.edu>; open-we...@googlegroups.com<open-we...@googlegroups.com>

Subject: Re: [Open Web Board] Re: Wiki hit by spam