Re: [boost] Unhackable Wiki

From: Jeff Garland (jeff_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-05 12:49:32

On Sat, 05 Mar 2005 09:09:44 -0500, David Abrahams wrote
> I don't see any reason our Wiki should be so vulnerable, and before 
> we make it official I would insist that we fix that.  The Boost list 
> never gets spammed, and moderators don't even seem to have to reject 
> any spammers.  All we need to do is use the same approval and 
> posting process for the Wiki.  Is something wrong with that?

Well it's generally against the philosophy of Wiki's to require a login to
modify pages.  It prevents the casual user from making minor updates as they
read a page, etc. Even Wikipedia, which is one of the top 100 sites on the web
and a huge spam target doesn't require a login to edit.

Since I'm the one that gets to deal with a large part of the spam, I'm already
looking at better ways to protect the Wiki from Spam.  The current process
involves waiting for someone to spam the wiki, reverting it, and banning the
address that submitted the content.  This is bad because of the time it
requires and some legitmate users can get blocked (that's come up a couple
times now after I got tired and started blocking out whole domains that have
repeatedly spammed).

Other Wiki's are now using content filters to prevent spam from ever being
committed.  At the core of the spamming is a desire to get links into google.
 So the filters essentially evaluate the content of the submitted pages
looking for off-wiki links and certain words associated with common spamming.
 I'm working on implementing such a filter for our Wiki now.  I'm actually
hoping to have this in place this weekend.

So I'd like to take this path and see if we can damp down the spamming without
requiring logins.  If it doesn't work then, I agree, we will have to go to
some kind of login which is harder to implement...

Jeff