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Please post any ideas you have about the wiki here, or if you need help:

Site Ideas/Comments

• AmigaDev leads to "Plesk", instead of AmigaDev. It should be deleted. -- George Wyche
  • Cheers for pointing that out. Plesk is an administrative tool for servers (nothing to do with Amiga I'm afraid) and I've had a look and it looks like AmigaDev (like so many other Amiga sites, sadly) has gone for good, so I've removed the link.

• Site could use a few graphics, I'm willing to hack some together if theres interest and preferably with some idea what to do. -- X-Caliber
  • Maybe, but I'd keep it as it is for the moment. If we did use graphics it would be very simple. IMO most wikis don't really need them (except perhaps a logo) and it could just eat up my bandwidth. Thanks though - and I might take you up on the offer for a logo. -- alx
    • It can be kept low bandwidth. JPEG artifacting can even be a stylization effect. -- X-Caliber
      • OK - I'll have a think about that... -- [alx]
        • Using the same image file many times should only hit the server once as well. -- X-Caliber.
      • JPEG artifacts dont look stylish, they're minging. Simple logo, GIF 32 Dithered. Sorted
        • What do people think of the logo? Hopefully it'll blend in a bit better when we have a basic CSS sheet going. That will probably be the only graphic on these pages.
        • I've just added a CSS sheet (I've never done them before ) - what do people think? --alx

• I'd like to see a stylesheet implemented for those of us that can see them. Take a look at the css-discuss wiki to see an example. I'm happy to help out with its production gnarly
  • Looking at the documentation it should be possible - I'll have a look -- alx
    • Ah, documentation. I'll delve further into them... gnarly
      • I really will look one day, bit busy at the mo tho gnarly

• Um, I seem to have found a bug. Lets say I go to the Magic Menu page. I click on the title and it goes to [1] - surely that %2b should be %20, because %20 equates to a space in a URI? Hence the distinct lack of search results? Or am I talking out of my backside? --- gnarly
  • I don't really know unfortunately, as I'm not that experienced at CGI etc. The spaces convert internally to undercores, if that's anything to do with it? I'm not too worried if it is a bug though, as I doubt many people will try clicking the title. Any more ideas? -- alx
    • Looks like a bug to me. Will fix that. -- Alex Schröder
      • Great - thanks! BTW how did you manage to find this? --alx
    • The Oddmuse manual has referrer tracking enabled, and you link to the manual from the main page. So when somebody follows that link, there will be a link back to your site for a short time. Anyway, if you find more bugs, let me know on the Oddmuse wiki -- then I can fix them. -- Alex Schröder
      • Just installed the latest script and made everything a bit neater as well (config file) - thanks for a great script, if you're reading -- alx

• Great to see this Wiki back online. Quick note that the links for GNU FDL and wiki help shown on the edit page are pointing to the old server. -- Pteppic
  • Cheers - got it sorted now (and with relative links so it cannot happen in the future) -- alx

• Hello, I'm the webmaster of MorphWiki. I think that there is no problems about copying some articles across wikis because if there are documents with other license than Creative Commons By-Nc-Sa it could be written in the last headline of the page, so no problems adding documentation under commercial or other free license (Anyway I like FDL). I'll create a page in my site to insert links to other sites. Bye -- AlieM?

• I get an error when submitting edits that states that the posting contains banned words or text. Going to far as to assume that I am a spammer.... [Argo]
  • Thanks for pointing that one out - I'll investigate. The spam-blocking bot is fairly new to the site after having a spate of automated vandalism, but I should be able to tweak it. Cheers for contributing, anyhow -- alx
  • Just looked at the documentation for the bot - it works on banned words, link blacklisting and host blacklisting. It let me put in the same text and I cannot see why there'd be banned words there anyway. You only tried adding a link (with your sig) once, and that was to A.org which isn't banned. I can only presume that for some reason your host was blacklisted by Spamhaus yesterday - if you cannot access the site currently, then send me an email or PM on A.org and I'll attempt to disable that aspect of the system. -- alx

• The SpamFryer page has been obliterated (at the end of May) with links to fake pharamacy rip-offs. I'd fix this myself if I could, but don't see how to roll back. Pity as if this was something users could do the damage would be less effective. I was visiting to check and update the page and the link there from my own pages on mooli.org.uk SimonGoodwin

Thanks for pointing that out - I usually check the Wiki every few days for this sort of thing, although it's annoying whenever it happens. It's done by unscrupulous website owners looking to boost their rankings in search engines; we had a huge amount of it about a year back (often on the SpamFryer page, as it happens), however Joey sorts most of it out now. If you ever come across this kind of thing it's usually easy to roll-back; take a look at Removing vandalism.

 

Cheers for updating the page! -- alx

 

• The SpamFryer page is again massively spammed at the moment (form several different IP), so I suggest to lock the page until someone really ask to add something useful there. -- AmigaPhil (2009-04-22)

Thanks for pointing this out. Unfortunately, the level of spamming this time has been such that the revert histories have been obliterated, however I should be able to restore a version from the manual backups (this may take a few days, and they're not particularly recent, although I don't think there have been many legitimate updates recently. If anyone's got a more recent version of the page then I'd really appreciate it if you could let me know!

 

I think it's obvious that the current anti-spam protection (a bot doesn't let a user post if it thinks they're spamming) is insufficient. In a few weeks I'm going to try another approach: before a user is allowed to edit, they'll have to answer a short, simple Amiga-related question (e.g. "Who manufactured the Amiga - Apple, Atari, Commodore or IBM?"). I realise this will add another step to editing, but I hope any annoyance is outweighed by the way anything like this will hopefully be prevented from happening in the future. Please leave a comment if you've got any opinions on this! -- alx

 

Thanks Alex !

Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the sane page here. The page Google has in its cache is an already vandalised one; and web.archive.org has not archived the SpamFryer page at all.

If it can help you to find the right valid revision from archives, I think it's the one made by Allan (Rassmussen ?) on 2009-03-19 03:42 UTC (Vandalism revert).

(I suggest you clean-up the Revision history page as well, as it makes a call to another - suspicious ? - web site.)

 

As for a better protection of the AmigaWiki, your idea is nice.

It could also be done with the "alphabetical characters in a non-OCRable image" technique, as used on some other web forms...

Or restrict the edit access to registered users only (with email validation, like with many mailing lists) ?

If you go for the questions/answers trick (or the image one), you'll have to prepare enough pairs thought. With obvious or too few available questions, a hacker could easily find a few valid answers, then create a spam-bot script that will brute-force test them.

-- AmigaPhil (2009-05-04)

 

Thanks - I'm afraid that the last backup may be somewhat older than that (given the lack of activity of the site I've only been doing backups every couple of months or so - very little changes even over that period) but I'm hoping there won't be too much lost. I'll definitely remove the revision history as well - as well as being of no use, the >1000 spammed pages are taking up a lot of space on the server!

 

In terms of getting around spam in the future, thanks for the ideas! Captchas (those text images) are popular, but in my opinion the only ones effective enough to fool a bot are almost unreadable. We'd also need to provide an audio equivalent for any blind users, which could be somewhat trickier. I'd rather avoid registration unless we absolutely have to, as I feel the ability for anyone to quickly change something that's wrong or add a minor fact is a great thing about wikis. There's also the problem that Oddmuse (the wiki script we're using) isn't really designed to be locked down; there's no out-of-the-box mechanism to set-up users in this way. You could be right about question-answer pairs being easy to hack, although it's the same mechanism that the Oddmuse project wiki uses, and that seems fairly spam-free. At any rate, I can definitely try it and see if it helps at all (that'll have to wait for a couple of weeks until I've finished my Finals, after which I'm hoping to get some more general feedback from the community as to what, if anything, could be changed around here ) -- alx

 

Turned on the machine that holds the backups only to be greeted by a sparking sound, a nasty smell, and then nothing. You couldn't make this stuff up The hard drives are likely OK, but it'll probably be a couple of weeks now until I can get the files off them. I'll post any updates here. -- alx

Just a quick update to say that things are slowly moving, looks like the hard drives are fine however it may take a little longer to get the system with the backups up and running again. -- alx

A new power supply means the system now boots, but freezes after a minute or so. Good news is that the hard-drives appear to be OK (at least the sectors holding the OS). -- alx

--

Hi Alx, Please add the following loseList rules to the SpamFryer page when next you restore. They've each been found to eliminate at least four spams in late June/early July 2009:

From: MustHaveTool

Subject: "Windshield Wonder"

From: FreeCommunication

Subject: "Throw that expensive phone bill away..."

Those two are pairs alternatives from the same common recent spam, so either will work and both may catch more.

You might like to add these, too, though it's only come in three times in the last few days:

From: GetWallStreetJournal

Subject: "Wall Street Journal subsciption"

- the (irrelevant and misleading) context and spelling mistake makes it an easy and safe pattern to reject.

Sorry to see the spammers are again getting annoyed with this useful page - shows we're doing something right! Thanks for updating your tech to suit, Alx.

Cheers, I've updated the page and will hopefully get the automated Q&A spamblocker online this week. I'm afraid the only backup I've managed to get so far from the ailing desktop is a couple of years out-of-date so the rules there have likely been integrated into the main script. I'll try to find something more recent, but let me know if you want the "old" rules removed. Hopefully I'll be able to unlock the page soonish. -- alx

New SpamFryer rules from mid July and early August :

8 hits (all from "RWD"):

Subject: "Why Wait? Meet Russian Women Today..."

6 hits (each):

From: KillYourBillsTeam

From: BackPainSolution

5 hits:

From: FreeCommunication

From: GetWallStreetJournal

From: IndoorDogPotty

From: Printer.Ink

4 hits:

From: RossiCutlery

From: MustHaveTool

Subject: "Turn your car radio into a speaker phone..."

Please add to the locked page SimonGoodwin

Added BTW if you like I can create you an account which means you can edit the locked page? If so, let me know an email address and I'll forward you the password. -- alx