Wiki is being hammered by spammers

[Wojciech Arabczyk]

Hi,

Sorry for dropping in. I'd be glad to host the wine wiki with whatever choice of
software stack you decide to go with on one of my servers.

Background info:
- lifetime sysadmin with experience in hosting ect.
- linkedin profile: https://de.linkedin.com/in/wojciecharabczyk

With kind regards,

On 13 January 2016 at 09:05, Austin English <austinenglish at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 2:00 AM, Kyle Auble <kyle.auble at zoho.com> wrote:
>> On Tues, Jan 12 2006 at 12:42:09 CST, Rosanne DiMesio wrote:
>>>
>>> In the past hour, I've restored the Front Page three times, and deleted
>>> over two dozen newly created spam pages. Earlier, Alexandre deleted many
>>> more spam pages. Something needs to be done now.
>>
>> Besides the day-to-day, I have another project on my plate right now so I
>> can't really help much with the wiki right now. After seeing the emails over
>> the past few days, I checked the RecentChanges page though, and it has
>> become truly insane.
>>
>> I can think of a few things we can do, but there's the issue of getting in
>> touch with Dimi. When I started working on the wiki back in 2012, he was
>> pretty quick to respond and helpful, but the few times I've tried emailing
>> or CC-ing him since around 2014, I've never heard back. I get the feeling
>> he's just totally swamped at his company or with other things in life; one
>> of the developers that knows him well might need to get in touch by phone or
>> in person.
>>
>> As for what we can do, these come to mind...
>> 1. Disable automatic account creation, at least for now. Unfortunately, at
>> least for the version of Moinmoin we're still on, this is even grungier and
>> more restrictive than it first sounds. There wasn't (and still isn't?!) a
>> standard mechanism like "we'll notify the moderator and after looking over
>> your email and IP, they click a button to send you your account info." You
>> have to disable /all/ account creation through the wiki, and personally
>> email the moderator, who then manually adds your account and emails you your
>> info. There are apparently bits of orphaned code or plugins that may help,
>> but I haven't tested any of them. The clearest docs I could find revolve
>> around this page:
>> https://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/DisableUserCreation
>>
>> 2. All the spam is bad enough. What genuinely unnerves me is that at least
>> one page they tried to create causes an error in Moinmoin. Yes, it's
>> annoying because the page doesn't load so it can't be deleted through the
>> wiki, but what takes the cake is that it's giving debug output, with a
>> traceback through the MoinMoin code /and/ certain system details about the
>> server. Yikes! So we can just adjust the config file to disable that in our
>> version of Moinmoin right? Well, that's where it gets worse; we're
>> apparently one minor revision short of that fix (so we need to update first
>> or patch it ourselves):
>> https://moinmo.in/MoinMoinQuestions/ConfigFiles#Disable_ErrorLogs_in_webbrowser.2C_enable_only_in_flat_files
>>
>> 3. Which leads to my 3rd suggestion. After we bandage up those problems, I
>> have to nominate replacing MoinMoin with some other wiki-engine, especially
>> if we plan on directing users to the wiki even more. I don't know if
>> MediaWiki would be the best for us (long-run, I'm intrigued by some of the
>> wiki-plugins I've seen for Django, Rails, etc.), but as the most
>> battle-hardened and tool-rich (=> easy to import?) one out there, it might
>> be a good stop-gap.
>>
>> I've fiddled with Python way more than PHP, which is probably both cause and
>> effect for my Pythonist biases, and I do like the way we could match the
>> wiki theme with the rest of WineHQ (though at least in Moinmoin v1.5, the
>> theming and particularly the hard-coded CSS handles could be really
>> brittle). And it does seem lots of interesting work is being done on the
>> Moinmoin-2.0 branch. Yet their stable docs are still a labyrinth, many of
>> the useful features in 2.0 haven't been backported to 1.9, and I really
>> don't know where they're trying to take the project anymore.
>>
>> Anyways, sorry for the long email. If anyone has questions about patching or
>> migrating the wiki though, I can try helping with tips and provide some old
>> prototype scripts I've written. I just probably won't be able to get my own
>> hands dirty writing code or testing for a while.
>>
>> Oh yeah, I also wanted to say that restoring the front page from the Wayback
>> Machine was really a master-stroke, Rosanne. When I first saw the email from
>> Michael S. saying it had been wiped, I just thought, "I'm glad I'm not the
>> one trying to fix that because I have no clue where to start."
>>
>> Kyle
>>
>>
>>
>
> I'd really like to see a wiki that has HTTPS support and theme
> matching the rest of winehq. I don't remember Newman's feelings on
> hosting another service though.
>
> --
> -Austin
>
>