[PD] [PD-announce] pdpedia is back!

[Ico Doornekamp]

* On 2008-07-15 Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org> wrote  :
>
> On Jul 13, 2008, at 2:36 PM, Ico Doornekamp wrote:
>>
>> * On 2008-07-11 Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at eds.org> wrote  :
>>>
>>> On Jul 11, 2008, at 4:05 AM, Ico Doornekamp wrote:
>>>>
>>>> * On July 11th, Hans-Christoph Steiner Wrote
>>>>
>>>>> After a little holiday due to an OS upgrade, pdpedia is back!   
>>>>> Please
>>>>> let me know if it isn't working for you:
>>>>
>>>> Works fine, although the wiki seems to be under the attack of  
>>>> spammers
>>>> already: a lot of pages have been replaced with links, spam and  
>>>> other
>>>> gibberish.
>>>>
>>>> I know some of the tricks how to avoid this in mediawiki, drop me a
>>>> private mail if you're interested.
>>>
>>> Here's some of wikipedia/mediawiki's advice:
>>>
>>> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Anti-spam_features
>>
>> I recommend the ConfirmEdit plugin (which is also listed on the above
>> page) using only the 'addurl' and 'createaccount' triggers. This
>> requires the user to fill out a captha when adding new links to a page
>> or when creating a new account, while editing of regular content is not
>> affected. On a mediawiki page I administer this plugin was able to keep
>> out the >200 spam edits which were performed every day.
>
> That one sounds rational.  How long have you been using it? 

Since august last year, and fortunately not a single spam or vandalism
since. We also run the 'SpamBlacklist' plugin, but this one was not able
to keep out the spam on its own.

> I am sure that many anti-spam techniques will reduce spam in the short
> run.  The trick is to make sure that the spammers don't then shift to
> some other kind of spamming which is more work to manage, like
> creating accounts.

Indeed. Our wiki used to be configured to only allow edits from logged
in people, and all the vandalism was done through logged-in accounts.
This why having a captcha for creating accounts might help as well.

I see in the pdpedia 'recent changes' page that most of the spam is
confined to two or three pages only, but it still messes up the history
overview and makes it unreadable because of the tens of edits per day.

Another question on the wiki: as a PD newcomer, one of the things I'm
looking for is a more or less 'formal' description for each module's
parameters, inputs and outputs. Most of the help pages have a short
description and some example of a modules usage, but there does not seem
to be a single structural way to describe each module. Would it be an
idea to define some templates and examples for this purpose and ask the
users of the wiki to use this to describe modules ?

Ico

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