[Lilug Planning] wiki account creation

[Mark Drago]

Hello,

While the captchas that were added to the wiki were helpful in cutting
down the spam it did not eliminate it entirely.  To get a sense of the
size of the problem, you could take a look at the list of accounts
which have been blocked:
http://lilug.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BlockList&limit=100 .  In
order to avoid ever having spam on our wiki (and to avoid having to
spend time cleaning it up), I added the ConfirmAccount extension to
our mediawiki instance this morning.  This means that when someone
wants to create an account they have to verify their email address and
after it is verified their request must be accepted by a
sysop/bureaucrat (administrator in mediawiki-speak).  Honestly, I
don't even expect spam account requests to come through, because our
account creation is now not the standard mediawiki account creation.
However, if a spam account creation request does come through the
admin can simply ignore it and it gets forgotten in 2 weeks.  If it is
not a spam request the admin can accept it and the user gets their
account.

An email is sent out after an account requester verifies their email
address.  Currently those emails are going to me.  They don't have to
and I'm open to discussing who they should go to or if they should go
to a list or something.

I just did (hopefully) the final cleanup of any remaining spam content
and user accounts on the lilug wiki.  There were 3 accounts that were
created in the past few weeks which didn't create any content (so I
can't verify that they're spam) and which I left active.  These
accounts are cecil, edwardddowlingiv, and torpidbest1.  I know for a
fact that edwarddownling has been attending meetings recently.  I
don't know about cecil, and honestly torpidbest1 sounds kind of
spammish.  If any spam content is created by these accounts I will
clean it up and block the account.

Let me know if you have any questions,
Mark.