ScrewTurn the perfect small business wiki

3/3/2008 1:15:26 PM #

Steve,

As someone who donates time in support of a wiki, I have found m time being mostly devoted to cleaning up vandalism. My two complaints are first, that the difficulty of blocking large IP ranges (China is the primary source of the vandalism) is a PITA, and second, that much vandalism could be avoided if it were possible to set the wiki to allow no editing or posting by a new member unless and until the member has been approved by the wiki manager.

Now I realize that is not in keeping with the egalitarian philosophy of wikidom, but as the wiki I am supporting is not intended as an egalitarian free-for-all, but as a means of disseminating freely a great deal of info on a narrow topical range, such alterations would all but eliminate the vandals who provide nastiness for me to remove almost every day....

Bill Meyer

3/3/2008 4:08:44 PM #

Hey Bill,
  For a public wiki I completely agree. I've had to lock down my screwturn wiki including the discuss pages because of this problem. I was thinking I might try to write a plugin that would add akismet checking for spam though that wouldn't stop garden variety vandalism.

One thing wiki's do require to be useful is a person who guides the structure of the content and makes sure that it's organized in such a manner that it's easy to find information.

Steve Trefethen

3/3/2008 9:20:04 PM #

Steve,

I'm interested to know what you mean by "lock down". I have looked to no avail for a means of requiring approval for new members. That would be the simplest thing, in my view. So far, I have had to restrict the main page editing to sysops only, and am watching another recently vandalized page to see whether I will need to do the same there. At some point, such blunt tools defeat the point of using a wiki....

We have structure and content under control, for the most part, though there are a few pages that are only found through a topic search, but those are getting cleaned up.

Bill Meyer

3/4/2008 11:54:10 PM #

Hi Bill,
  I've disabled registration for new users and disabled the "discuss" pages on my wiki so no one can comment on the page contents either. To me, that pretty much qualifies as locked down because I'm the only person able to edit the contents of the wiki.

Steve Trefethen

3/5/2008 2:50:36 AM #

Steve,
Sounds pretty well locked down to me ;)  Also more locked down than I think I need, but the site I am working on is running MediaWiki, and I haven't found any setting that would allow me to pass approval on new user registrations. For our purposes, that would seem to be the best approach, if only it were supported.
But I am a sysop, at a distance. I do not operate the wiki, and I assume that means I do not have access to everything that may be possible, even as a sysop.

Bill Meyer

3/5/2008 5:06:52 AM #

Bill,
  I used to run a MediaWiki at CodeGear as the internal wiki which was a huge hit btw. It's been too long now and I don't recall enough about it to offer you much assistance. My wiki is extremely easy to managed with just a single author.    I'm going to investigate implementing Akismet for the discussion pages which is what I'm using here on my blog comments for spam protection as it works wonderfully.

Steve Trefethen

3/5/2008 4:13:07 PM #

Steve,
Thanks for the continuing comments. I think what I probably need to do is install a media wiki on my own machine, and see what I can learn. Then perhaps, I can write up the steps for the guy who owns the wiki I support, so he can do what would make things easier to protect....

Bill Meyer

3/5/2008 4:19:20 PM #

Hey Bill,
  Yeah, I've been there. While at CG I used to maintain a VM that had an exact copy of the live wiki so that I could "play" around with changes before tweaking the production system.

Steve Trefethen

3/5/2008 6:45:58 PM #

Steve,
Definitely a hobby I do not need, especially if it turns out I need to run the wiki on a Linux box....

Bill Meyer

3/10/2008 9:53:06 AM #

I had a lot of bot spam on a public mediawiki website too. It was all stopped using http://recaptcha.net">ReCaptcha.

They have a mediawiki plugin that is very easy to install. The good thing is that you can leave all wiki features open and that you help to translate old books at the same time.

Jan Derk

3/10/2008 6:09:21 PM #

Hi Jan,
  Thanks for the comment. Funny you should mention captcha as I just added it to screwturn wiki for the "discuss" pages and reenabled them as I had discussions turned off because of spam. It's currently using the captcha control that comes with the wiki but I've also added support for http://www.akismet.com/">Akismet though that's not turned on, at least not yet.

That said, I did run into recaptcha when I was looking to add support to the wiki.

-Steve

Steve Trefethen