[Phpwm] wiki?

[Alan Pope]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2006 at 03:31:41PM +0100, Marcus Baker wrote:
> Hi...
> 
> Alan Pope wrote:
> > I agree with Tony. A well configured wiki can be spam free. 
> 
> Sorry chaps, but from my own experience on a couple of wikis, you
> haven't got a hope.
> 

>From my experience we do. In my opinion if you get spam on your wiki, you
either:-

a) Chose the wrong wiki
or
b) Poorly implemented anti-spam measures

For example:-

http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?RecentChanges

Last spam, nearly a month ago. It's not that we've removed it all over the
last few hours, it hasn't been spammed since 25/7 (where you see "Rollback
by 1 revisions").

It's not a dead wiki either, getting at least one edit a day on average. We
have had periods of higher and lower activity of course. Summer is often a
quiet time. 

> Sometimes the PHPLondon spam gets so bad, the ISP thinks we are under a
> denial of service attack and shuts our site down anyway. I get 3000
> attacks per day against my blog alone (I've had to disable comments) and
> that's a lot less popular.
> 

So fix the code, don't let it happen.

> Expect some maintenance, probably half an hour per week, and agree to
> share it.
> 

Yup, distribute the admin workload, definately, but don't block it off
because you can't be bothered to imlpement decent spam protection.
 
> PHPLondon started a SF project to write one that actually bites back.
> Because we were also using it for our CodeFest tutorials, it ground to a
> halt when they did. As we have a mutual interest, or will have, once
> you've had a go at a popular wiki ;), maybe we can put a team together
> to code it.
> 

We already did this. The HantsLUG wiki runs on a fork of usemod which
contains a number of very effective anti-spam techniques. Ok (ab)usemod is
"simple", it's perl and it has feature gaps. It *is* a wiki though. It is
open, and suffers little spam. 

Feel free to port it to PHP, or even port the anti-spam features to a PHP
based "better" wiki. But don't dismiss wikis as unworkable, it's just not
true.

The following page has all the details of the patches that were developed to
make it work.

http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AntiSpam

Cheers,
Al.