[Phpwiki-talk] Wiki spam and the future of phpwiki

[Philip J. H. <ph...@po...>]

I've been running phpwiki for several years on my site
http://www.hollenback.net.  I started with the 1.2 phpwiki and have
upgraded several times.  Currently I'm running a cvs version from some
time after the 1.3.10 release.

I've always been a big supporter of phpwiki and have always appreciated
the work everyone has put in to it.  But now, I'm at a crossroads: I'm
pretty seriously considering migrating my whole site (600+ pages) to
PmWiki.  Here's why:

1. The phpwiki development model is broken.  Particularly over the last
year, I have seen a tremendous amount of new, potentially cool features
added to phpwiki.  However, many of these features are broken in various
ways, and some just don't work at all.  Based on my use of phpwiki, the
buginess of the code base has increased significantly.  To phpwiki's
credit, I've never really seen a data corruption bug.  Instead, most of
the problems I see are things like plugins that don't work with certain
themes, random odd error messages on pages, etc.

I think new features are fantastic.  However, the lack of a stable
phpwiki release is really, really hurting phpwiki.  I know that a 1.3.11
release is very close and that is a good step in the right direction. 
However, the problem of all these new, not very well tested features
will remain.

2. Wiki spam is a major problem.  I finally had to turn off editing of
my site last week.  The reason: large amounts of wiki spam.  For the
last year, I've been getting perhaps one or two spam attacks a week on
my site.  I managed that by removing or reverting pages manually, not a
big deal.

However, last week someone created 500 spam pages on my site.  I was
able to remove them via the admin interface, but it was a very slow
process.  Clearly manually removing pages is not an effective answer for
that level of wiki spam.

I realize that the spam problem is not unique to phpwiki.  However, I'm
not seeing anything being done to address it.  For example, ip address
blocking is not implemented in the phpwiki version I am running. 
Obviously that's not a particularly effective way to deal with spam, but
it is a start.  What about blacklists such as the ones from chongqed.org
or Movable Type?  Captchas?  Typekey?  I'm guessing that if I'm having
these problems, lots of other people are too.  What is being done in
phpwiki to deal with the spam problem?

These issues bring me to the point of considering changing over from
phpwiki to pmwiki.  I'm not saying that pmwiki is necessarily better
than phpwiki, but I think it is more on-track than phpwiki.  I've set up
several wikis based on pmwiki and I've found it to be reliable and
relatively bug-free.  However, it definitely does not support the range
of features that phpwiki does.

I'm not writing this to bash on phpwiki.  It's a great tool, and I
really appreciate the work people have done on it.  All I'm trying to
say here is that the problems with phpwiki are making me consider moving
to a different wiki.  This change will not be easy, as I will have to
write up a parser to convert all my existing pages and deal with lots of
little details.  At this point, I don't see a lot of other options.

Thanks,
P.



--  
Philip J. Hollenback
ph...@po...
www.hollenback.net