Wiki Abuse

From: Kinkie <gkinkie_at_gmail.com>
Date: Sun, 13 Jan 2013 22:31:14 +0100

Hi all,
  sorry for hijacking the -dev mailing list for a wiki policy
discussion, it's however the most convenient forum to discuss this
(off)topic.

In the past months we have had some wiki-abuse. The write-access
policy we have since some time has prevented this from becoming a
serious issue, but in time the cruft of spammy accounts has started
creating a performance problem: we have now 28k registered wiki
accounts. Each of them requires some filesystem resources, which waste
space (not a big deal) but create a strain on the performance of the
server's filesystem. The result is slow page loads and starving of
resources the other activities of the server.

MoinMoin 2.0 (still a long way to go) will support email verification
upon registration; but the best MoinMoin 1.9.6 (the latest release)
has to offer is restricting the ability to create new accounts to Wiki
Administrators (currently: Adri, hno, RobertC, Guido, Duane, Amos and
me). I have implemented this (modulo implementation errors).

The next steps, unless anyone has better advice, will be to send a
notification to the users mailing-list, and remove all user accounts
which do not belong to the Editors group. The only adversely-impacted
users will be those who have subscribed for change notifications but
do not belong to the editors group.

Comments?
Thanks,

--
    /kinkie
Received on Sun Jan 13 2013 - 21:31:27 MST

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