[Lilug Planning] wiki account creation

[Mark Drago]

Jesse,

You can get at some of this data straight from mediawiki:

http://lilug.org/wiki/Special:Log
http://lilug.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers
http://lilug.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=30

It's not exactly what you asked for, but it tells a similar story.
There were a lot of spam posts which have now stopped entirely,
otherwise there's somewhere between 5 and 10 edits a month.

I'm all for using something besides a wiki.  The reason we setup the
wiki originally was to make it easy for any member to update the site.
 This was because we were having a problem where there was only 1 or 2
people that had access to edit the site and the site easily fell out
of date and members complained.  Having the wiki there turned the
problem on its head, because rather than complaining that the site was
out of date, the motivated member could actually update it.  That's
what I like about the wiki.  Github pages would probably provide the
same thing and if someone's up for doing the switch I'll do what I can
to assist them.

Mark.

On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 01:44, Jesse Farinacci <jieryn at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> I think that your suggestion is a good one. I wonder if this is
> related to the rash of bounces to the mail server, with about a
> hundred @latino addresses. I don't want to create more work for you,
> but perhaps you would be willing to generate a report which shows page
> activity? With and without spam changes? I suspect that the Wiki is
> fairly unused, and if that is the case, we'd be better served with
> static pages (possibly gh-pages)...
>
> Thanks for dealing with this crap, Mark,
> -Jesse
>
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 10:03 AM, Mark Drago <markdrago at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>
> --
> There are 10 types of people in this world, those
> that can read binary and those that can not.
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