Pop Top Arm Repair Posted.....

[neil n]

Edit at will!

Here it is:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Pop_Top_Arm_Repair

Anyone know how to change colour of text?

Enjoy,

Neil.

--
Neil Nicholson '81 VanaJetta 2.0 "Jaco"

http://tubaneil.googlepages.com/

http://groups.google.com/group/vanagons-with-vw-inline-4-cylinder-gas-engines

[Steve Williams]

I've updated the Vanagon Wiki to the latest version of Mediawiki:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/

I also simplified the home page.

The new version includes many ease-of-use enhancements. But please note:

** Many ease-of-use enhancements are not yet turned on! **

I'd like to enable all of the improvements, but our WYSIWYG editor
won't work anymore! See below an email I wrote to another of my
communities explaining the details.

I propose we turn off the WYSIWYG editor, so we can turn on the rest
of the Mediawiki enhancements. If I hear no objections by Friday,
I'll go ahead and do that.

>Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2010 07:04:54 -0800
>To: Grumman-Gang
>From: Steve Williams
>Subject: Bondline Updated: Easier to Contribute
>
>I've updated Bondline to make it easier for everyone to contribute:
>
>http://www.bondline.org/
>
>Mediawiki, the software behind Wikipedia, has released many
>easy-of-use improvements in 2010. I hope you'll find it's easier to
>navigate Bondline and, in particular, easier to contribute!
>
>If you have a minute, try it out and contact me or Bob Steward with
>feedback. To get familiar, you might create an account and then
>create your own user page with a photo of your plane. Here's mine:
>
>http://www.bondline.org/wiki/User:Sbw
>
>P.S.: Before this update, we had a WYSIWYG editor on Bondline, but
>it doesn't work with the current Mediawiki software. I hope the new
>wiki editor is easy enough for everyone. if not, we can try to find
>a new WYSIWYG editor.
>
>If you're curious about Mediawiki's Usability Initiative, you might
>enjoy listening to this panel discussion, which I helped to produce
>in October, 2009:
>
>http://chi.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail4278.html
>
>Skip to around 50 minutes to listen to Naoko Komura of Mediawiki
>Foundation discuss the rigorous usability research that went into
>these improvements.

[Sudhir Desai]

Works for me.

[Steve Williams]

I forgot to mention:

You may not see the new design if you're logged in. Go to:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:Preferences

Select the "Appearance" tab, select the "Vector" skin, and push the
"Save" button.

[Marius Strom]

?Very nice, Steve. Thanks for updating it.

A question for the crew: last week, I posted on TheSamba a stupid Bentley
question. To wit, I asked basically if there was an exhaustive inventory of
where stuff was in the car. My example was the "Refrigerator 12-Volt Heater
Relay" (yes, I know it's in the secondary battery box), but no where in
Bentley does it explain physically where on the car to find it.

How would we create such a list on the wiki? What's the best way to
structure that sort of data?

[Steve Williams]

Overnight a bot posted five spam pages, each with a photo. Looks
like we may have to add a CAPTCHA to account creation.

I'll be on the road today, so if the other admins will keep an eye
out for more spam, block the user, and delete the pages, that'd be
helpful. I use the Recent Changes RSS feed to get alerted to every change:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom

[Sudhir Desai]

10-4

[Steve Williams]

I installed the Mediawiki ConfirmEdit extension and configured it to
require a CAPTCHA to create an account.

Now to go clean up the spam since Sudhir (I assume) did so last night.

[Sudhir Desai]

I was unable to clean up the spam completely, since my account does
not allow for deleting images.
I think I still have just a normal account.

[Steve Williams]

Back in December, I wrote:

>I've updated the Vanagon Wiki to the latest version of Mediawiki ...

>The new version includes many ease-of-use enhancements. But please note:
>
>** Many ease-of-use enhancements are not yet turned on! **
>
>I'd like to enable all of the improvements, but our WYSIWYG editor

>won't work anymore! ... I propose we turn off the WYSIWYG editor,

>so we can turn on the rest of the Mediawiki enhancements. If I hear
>no objections by Friday, I'll go ahead and do that.

Hearing no objections, I've just made that change. Sorry for the delay.

In addition to many user interface changes, there are new user
preferences. No rush, but everyone should log in and experiment with
the new preferences:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:Preferences

I especially like "Use enhanced recent changes" on the "Recent
changes" tab on the Preferences page.

[Steve Williams]

I just deleted several more spam pages posted overnight. I guess
they've got a sweatshop set up somewhere to process the CAPTCHAs.

[Sudhir Desai]

Same accounts, or entirely new ones? And is there a way to bypass captcha in MediaWiki environments?

[Steve Williams]

At 07:33 AM 2/14/2011, Sudhir Desai wrote:
>Same accounts, or entirely new ones?

New accounts. I blocked all of the earlier accounts.

>And is there a way to bypass captcha in MediaWiki environments?

Not that I know of. It's actually quite common to see CAPTCHAs
solved by sweatshop operations.

It might help to require CAPTCHAs in more places. Right now,
CAPTCHAs are required only when creating a new account. The plug-in
can be configured to require CAPTCHAs when editing, and so on. But
that'd be a pain for everyone. It's a balancing act.

There are plug-ins for Mediawiki that use blacklists to detect spam
links. I don't know how well they work. They're a little more
complicated to install and run than the CAPTCHA.

I'll give it some thought. I welcome suggestions.

[Sudhir Desai]

what about banning ip blocks from editing?
(like brazil, or russia)

[Mike South]

We probably don't get new (legitimate) accounts very often--maybe those should be put into a moderator queue to be approved manually by one of us?  It seems like that would be orders of magnitude easier to keep on top of than a spam operation.

(Apologies if I'm simply stating the obvious fallback when we're still at the stage of "let's see if we can kill the spam technologically before we resort to manual account approval".)

mike

[Steve Williams]

At 08:05 AM 2/14/2011, Mike South wrote:
>... maybe those should be put into a moderator queue to be approved

>manually by one of us?

That's a good suggestion. There are plug-ins for that:

http://google.com/search?q=mediawiki+approve+new+account

Does someone want to look into those?

>Apologies if I'm simply stating the obvious fallback when we're
>still at the stage of "let's see if we can kill the spam
>technologically before we resort to manual account approval".

Not at all. It would be easy to keep up with new account approvals.

[Mike South]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Steve Williams <s...@sbw.org> wrote:

At 08:05 AM 2/14/2011, Mike South wrote:

... maybe those should be put into a moderator queue to be approved manually by one of us?

That's a good suggestion.  There are plug-ins for that:

http://google.com/search?q=mediawiki+approve+new+account

Does someone want to look into those?

I will read and recommend.

mike

[Mike South]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 2:18 PM, Mike South <mso...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 12:52 PM, Steve Williams <s...@sbw.org> wrote:

At 08:05 AM 2/14/2011, Mike South wrote:

... maybe those should be put into a moderator queue to be approved manually by one of us?

That's a good suggestion.  There are plug-ins for that:

http://google.com/search?q=mediawiki+approve+new+account

Does someone want to look into those?

I will read and recommend.

It looks like the thing to do is grab the ConfirmAccount extension:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/ConfirmAccount 

The default minimum biography is 50 charactes, settable as $wgAccountRequestMinWords, I think just asking them to tell us something about their interest in the kind of car the wiki is about would probably be enough?  If they don't say something about vanagons reject or purge the request or whatever.

I'm guessing the defaults will also work for most if not all of the other configuration variables:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmAccount#Configuration

mike

[Steve Williams]

At 12:49 PM 2/14/2011, Mike South wrote:
>It looks like the thing to do is grab the ConfirmAccount extension:
>

><http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/ConfirmAccount>http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ExtensionDistributor/ConfirmAccount

The spam escalated in the past few days, so I finally installed that
extension. New account requests must be reviewed by "bureaucrats" or
"administrators," who currently are:

- Me.
- Marius.
- Sudhir.

New account requests appear here:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/wiki/Special:ConfirmAccounts

I receive an email after a new account's email address is
confirmed. If Marius and/or Sudhir would like to receive those
alerts by email, I can set up a list for that.

A CAPTCHA is still required to submit an account request.

[Marius Strom]

any reason you've created a test account ("Steve Williams") that's on hold?

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Williams

[Steve Williams]

At 10:16 AM 3/14/2011, Marius Strom wrote:
>any reason you've created a test account ("Steve Williams") that's on hold?

Yes, I'm testing that it correctly disappears after one month on
hold. If you're a bureaucrat, you can see I noted that here:

http://www.vanagonwiki.net/index.php?title=Special:ConfirmAccounts/authors&acrid=1

It says:

>(marked "on hold" by WikiSysop on 17:08, 7 March 2011)
>
>Rationale given to applicant: Waiting for this account request to
>expire automatically after one month (as of 3/7/2011).

By the way, I haven't seen any spam on vanagonwiki.net (or on
bondline.org) since installing ConfirmAccount. No surprise.

[Marius Strom]

Ah, reading comprehension FTL on my part. :)

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Williams
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 11:11 AM
To: vanag...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Vanagon Wiki Vandalism

[Steve Williams]

At 10:46 PM 3/14/2011, Marius Strom wrote:
>Ah, reading comprehension FTL on my part. :)

Nah. When I went back to read it, I realized it wasn't clear. I
should have more clearly said, "This is a test!"