Talk:Main Page

Recent changes box
I usually find for small wikis with fledgling community developing it's a good idea to put 'recent changes box' on the Main Page  This helps people see what's going on (up to the point where the community grows and has too much editing traffic showing up on there)  It also helps people spot spam activity.

Stick this on the main page:   

-- Harry Wood 13:08, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Dead links
This link on the main page is dead: "http://okfn.org/participate/ – get involved in the Community " MarcusDapp 11:29, 31 January 2012 (UTC)


 * It should probably be replaced by http://okfn.org/community/get-involved/ Rswarbrick 11:19, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Recommended taxonomy for this wiki
Shared by Katelyn at okfn-discuss, see here. --Everton137 (talk) 12:36, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

Over the top anti spam measures
It's currently very painful to contribute to this wiki.

The anti-spam measures are completely out of control, it gets really hard to do anything meaningful when you have to keep typing those stupid characters for every single edit again and again and again.

I don't know how we expect people to help build this wiki with such insane controls.

Please tone this down significantly.

To make it clear, I do not want any kind of special status, I want regular contributors not to suffer like I am.

Captchas on wikis are a really bad idea, please use filters, account confirmation and other stuff, but not captchas.

Thanks,

--Solstag (talk) 05:19, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * I see what you mean. I just made an account and had to verify my humanity three times to edit my own profile. How serious is spam here?  Blue Rasberry   (talk)  20:16, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
 * About spams here, please, see here and Wiki revitalisation plan. --Everton137 (talk) 23:49, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

"How serious is spam here?" The answer to that is... It was extremely serious this time last year. I'm not sure if anyone else took it seriously, but the wiki was very nearly taken out under the sheer weight of traffic of spammer cramming the porn-pedalling links onto here. I gave up many hours of my time to purge the spam, and spent quite a long time explaining and persuading the sysadmins to put some roadblocks in place to stop more spam flowing in. I agree though, that the current anti-spam measures are very heavyhanded, but I would prefer that to a situation where I am having to single-handedly spend hours de-spamming this wiki again.

Obviously a more ideal outcome might be that we relax the ant-spam rules, and we have a community of editors taking a bit more care of this wiki. It really only requires a couple of people to pay attention, and zap spam when it comes in to stop it getting a foothold. But that's all it ever needed. This time last year, when the wiki was fully open, there was a period when I was reverting hundreds of spam edits on a daily basis, and asking for help, but I don't remember a single other person helping to revert the spam.

So I've tried. I've put a lot of effort in, but this is the situation we've ended up with.


 * 1) Captcha on registration
 * 2) Captcha on every edit
 * 3) Require the word NOSPAM (in edit comment or page text) when creating new pages.

If we're worried about new users who want to make a quick contribution, then all of these are problematic. If we're worried about new users who want to dive and work on the wiki extensively (like you Solstag?) personally I think 1 and 3 should not cause you too much anguish, but I can well imagine 2 is a pain. Maybe it's time to relax that to just trigger on spammy words again.

"Captchas on wikis are a really bad idea" is all very well, but you're speaking from the point of view a wiki which has a functioning lively community. Having spent so long dealing with this in the past, I will not be happy if this wiki is left wide open for spam to flow in again, with nobody bothering to deal with it (Note: some spam is fine, if people are sharing the burden of manually zapping it)

-- Harry Wood (talk) 12:19, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Hi Solstag, Bluerasberry,

I'm cross-posting a note I sent to the okfn-discuss mailing list about this topic:

Here's the deal: this time last year, our wiki was absolutely flooded with spam, to an extent that might seem hard to believe. At its peak, we received hundreds of user registrations every day, and spam pages outnumbered real content on the wiki by a factor of 10 to 1.

The Foundation has extremely limited system administrator resource, so we haven't been able to dedicate as much time or effort as we'd like to keeping the wiki clean and easy to contribute to. Luckily for us, we have a fantastic community, including such people as Harry Wood[ and Chris Sakkas, both of whom have spent countless hours of their own time battling spam on the wiki and advising the system administrators on how best to configure the wiki to prevent spam.

The current configuration of the wiki is primarily the result of Joel's implementation of Harry's advice. While we still get some spam user registrations[3] things have in general calmed down and the wiki is once again a reasonably useful space for the community.

Obviously, there's substantial room for improvement. One problem is that the spam controls are somewhat draconian and get in the way of people trying to make simple edits to the wiki. If anyone has experience administering a mediawiki installation and wants to volunteer to help sort this out, while being aware that we *do not* want to naively roll back the spam protections currently in place, then please let me know and we can make sure you have the appropriate access.

--NickStenning (talk) 15:15, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

Captchas on wikis are a bad idea
Ni!

Hi Harry, Nick.

If you allow me to say that, I feel your pain when you talk about spam.

But in my experience captchas in wikis only kill spam as much as they also kill community engagement.

If you want to go to extremes, I'd expect much better results from making user registration require an invitation or rigorous approval than introducing captchas.

One question, am I right to assume that this was the same before the captchas were activated?

If so, then the largest problem - and good part of the solution - to this wiki's spam problem should be evident from this.

Abraço,

--Solstag (talk) 18:27, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * In fact, for the number of contributors here, it'd make more sense to have a more rigorous approval of new accounts than introducing CAPTCHA for editing. I proposed a look on the use of filters long time ago in the git hub ticket I pointed out above, but never checked how to do it and if that was enough. --Everton137 (talk) 18:37, 12 March 2014 (UTC)
 * P. S. I gave up to delete spam here when I saw it was consuming more hours I was willing to (for mental health reasons ; ). I remember the wiki of open spending was closed for registration because of spam. Once I needed to edit, someone quickly created an account. --Everton137 (talk) 18:40, 12 March 2014 (UTC)