As a non- (or not-yet-) developer who has tinkered with several pages in the GnuCash wiki over several years I hope you don't mind if I weigh in briefly on this discussion... [My password database says I created the twt username in 2008.]
On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 4:13 PM, Christian Stimming <christ...@cstimming.de> wrote: > Other wikis around have disabled the normal user registration altogether for > this very same reason, see e.g. http://elinux.org/Main_Page . Maybe this is > a possibility for us as well? The vast majority of edits in the actual content > is done by known developers from here. By this, we can argue that an increased > restriction of the write access doesn't do much harm, but would make our life > a lot easier. I am all for making it a lot easier. I really appreciate the work it must take to prune such frequent spam from the wiki. Since I am NOT a "known developer," however, I am concerned how I and other people who haven't (yet) contributed code might be reasonably validated for editing the wiki. I am also concerned how admins might reasonably prune or restrict the EXISTING wiki userbase. If my wiki account was compromised I would completely understand being shut out, but "a few months of inactivity between edits" could easily describe my normal behavior on the GnuCash wiki. :-) On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 6:59 PM, John Ralls <jra...@ceridwen.us> wrote: > > On Aug 10, 2013, at 4:13 PM, John Ralls <jra...@ceridwen.us> wrote: > >> I'm absolutely in favor of taking a more aggressive approach. By shutting >> off the >> "normal" registration, do you mean that new users would require an >> administrator to validate them? > > The mediawiki manual has a long page on preventing and removing spam: > http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam > > with links to other pages with still more information on the subject. I read the mediawiki page referenced above and it seems to me (unless some more automated solution can be devised) maybe the "gated community" solution they describe would not be too terrible. I don't know how it looks from the admin side, but I don't believe the hurdle of requesting permission would have stopped me from taking on the few pages I have worked on. On the downside, it pushes the "spam vs. ham" task to a wiki admin who might rather not have registration validation added to their plate. By the way, it was a pain when the GnuCash wiki started making me re-capcha my edits every time I update pages with links. HOWEVER if it deters even one spambot then it probably deters hundreds of others and I can live with it. But if I could get it turned off by getting on a "trusted" list I would appreciate it. _______________________________________________ gnucash-devel mailing list gnucash-devel@gnucash.org https://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
