[Freeipa-devel] FreeIPA wiki - fighting the spammers

[Martin Kosek]

On 08/19/2016 08:43 AM, Petr Spacek wrote:
> On 18.8.2016 16:25, Martin Kosek wrote:
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> As some of you noticed, we had lately an increasing number of spam attacks
>> against FreeIPA.org wiki. Even though we did not accept user registration
>> through the standard Mediawiki User Creation form (which is often misused by
>> attacked) and only allow Fedora users logged in by OpenID, the spam producers
>> started to favor this authentication mode too.
>>
>> This week and especially yesterday, the spam activity was high enough to
>> warrant a "drastic change" in how we allow wiki modifications. Me and Petr
>> Vobornik had to react quickly yesterday to hundreds of new spam-based pages
>> (thanks to Petr for deleting the spam pages, Stephen for altering us and
>> Patrick Uiterwijk for advising us!).
>>
>> As a prevention for future attacks, I also needed to chose the most simple and
>> convenient method to stop spammers from editing wiki. This is the result:
>>
>> - Anonymous and regular users are no longer allowed to create or edit wiki pages
>> - Anyone who wants to be able to edit wiki needs to be in a new "editor" group
>>
>> The full description of new group rights is here:
>> http://www.freeipa.org/page/Special:ListGroupRights
>>
>> I added the contributors active in the last 30 days to the editor group. If
>> more people are needed, wiki "Bureaucrats" can it through this form:
>> http://www.freeipa.org/page/Special:UserRights
>>
>> If you do not know who is in the Bureaucrat group, this is the list:
>> http://www.freeipa.org/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers&username=&group=bureaucrat&limit=50
>>
>> The model I had in mind was that new wiki contributors would ask for access on
>> #freeipa IRC channel, when they have some content to be added to the pages. We
>> should probably add that suggestion to the wiki somewhere.
>>
>> I hope this works for you. If you have comments on above or even better ideas
>> what is the easiest way to fight spam on our precious wiki, please let me know.
> 
> In general I agree.
> 
> My attempt to edit "permission denied" error using
> http://www.freeipa.org/page/Special:AllMessages
> failed so I do not know.
> 
> For the beginning, I added note about this new process to
> http://www.freeipa.org/page/Contribute#Contribute_documentation
> and link to the process page to
> http://www.freeipa.org/page/HowTo/Writing_how_to_documentation_on_the_wiki
> 
> 
> Now the question is how to make information about getting edit access *really
> visible*. Is this enough? I'm not sure.

Thanks Petr! I just made the warning into admonition box and fixed the wording
a bit. It seems pretty visible now.

Martin