[Phpwm] wiki?

[Marcus Baker]

Hi...

Alan Pope wrote:
> a) Chose the wrong wiki
> or
> b) Poorly implemented anti-spam measures

Well (a) is certainly true, but it's now heavily patched. We went
through several attempts at (b). We are reluctant to implement e-mail
double opt-in, because one of the main aims is an initial sign up to
meetings and we want a low barrier to entry for this.

There is also option (c), which is that you have underestimated what you
are in for. We'll see.

> 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").

Is this spam attempts, or successful attacks? Our triggers usually catch
most spam attempts and we have several thousand blocked domains and IPs.

> 
> 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. 

It's not edits per day, it's page rank that will get you hit. We hit PR8
once last year and that's when the spam went nuclear.

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

You're not listening. This is incoming requests. We actually have to
write out the IP block lists as Apache .htaccess files because it was
the only mechanism that didn't spike the server load so bad that we
ground to a halt anyway. We are in the process of moving everything to
our own server to give us more control.

> Yup, distribute the admin workload, definately, but don't block it off
> because you can't be bothered to imlpement decent spam protection.

Er...we did. We still get that half hour to do.

> But don't dismiss wikis as unworkable, it's just not
> true.

I didn't. We run the whole group from our wiki, remember? I said you
will get a half hour of work a week.

> Al.
> 

yours, Marcus
-- 
Marcus Baker
marcus at lastcraft.com