[OctDev] Re: Octave Wiki

[Todd N. <to...@gm...>]

Etienne,


Etienne Grossmann wrote:
 > ...
> # I believe that the only way for the Octave Wiki or generally any Wiki to 
> # become self-policing is for it to be opened to all users.  Without the 
> # ability for anyone to join in easily it may be difficult to grow a large 
> # user base and without a large user base spam may be a huge problem.  It 
> # is somewhat of a catch 22.  Without a large user base, spam may become 
> # uncontrollable.  Without opening up the Wiki for possible spam, it is 
> # difficult to attain a large user base.
> 
>   I don't see why a a large community would discourage spamming. Could
> you explain?
>  
  I didn't intend to mean that a large community would discourage 
spamming, only that a large community could more easily combat spam. 
The task of reverting pages would not fall down to a single user or two 
and the load of fixing pages could be spread across many multiple users. 
  I usually check the recent pages on any wiki I visit and revert to the 
last known good page if any of the first few pages look like spam.

> # A possible solution may be to allow some users who volunteer to act as 
> # Wiki administrators and maintain the BannedContent and BannedHosts pages 
> # (http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Banning).  This would make it easy 
> # to curtail spamming of the same site(s) and spam from the same few hosts.
> 
>   Thanks for pointing this out to me, I did not know (or remember)
> about the bannedhosts page. If you want to clean up after spammers and
> keep updated the bannedhosts, I could list you as an administrator (as
> soon as I find out how to).
> 
> 

We could also borrow the BannedContent page from EmacsWiki to start out:
http://emacswiki.org/cw/BannedContent

This would hopefully keep spam to a trickle until we could add our own 
regexes to match and prevent any new spam.  I'm not entirely sure how 
this would work as it may become a game of "Whack-A-Mole" with the 
spammers.  If they routinely use the same ISPs though it may be easier 
to block entire ISP's that spammers frequent while still allowing the 
majority of the users to access the Octave Wiki freely.

 From the OddMuse documentation, it looks like to add an administrator 
you need to modify the $AdminPass variable so that it contains several 
passwords separated by a space 
(http://www.oddmuse.org/cgi-bin/wiki/Passwords).


Thanks, Todd