Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page/Discussion"

Latest revision as of 03:14, 3 January 2009

This page is for discussion of the DIY Wiki main page, and the Wiki as a whole.

It also seems to be a favoured place for spammers advertising dodgy pharmaceuticals, ~~fake~~replica Rolexes and so on <sigh>

Previous discussions on this page have been Archived

Time to protect pages from spam?

Following up from discussion of spam in Talk:Main_Page/Archive_20080229 and looking at the current level of spamming I think it's time we protected all the wiki so that only registered users can edit pages.

Earlier I had hoped/suggested that keeping the wiki open would encourage casual visitors to start contributing with little edits such as typos, clarifications etc, and maybe move on to becoming more heavyweight contributors. However this doesn't seem to be happening anyway, and the quantity of spam is getting unmanageable.

The quality of the wiki would probably be improved more by having less spam and less work for regulars to do patrolling it, than any notional contribution from unregistered users. Also when/if unregistered users do contribute there's a danger their input may be mistaken for spam and their IP get blocked.

A wiki-wide change is probably a Grunff-config thing. If others (NT, JR) agree I'll ask him to do it.

--John Stumbles 20:37, 29 February 2008 (GMT)

OK by me --John Rumm 23:01, 29 February 2008 (GMT)

Mass block

Is there any way to block IPs en masse? Any way at all would be a big help here. NT 10:36, 9 April 2008 (BST)

Alas not that I am aware of.

We could also do with a global config file change to disable anonymous edits altogether. The policy of setting protection on individual articles to limit edits to registered users only, seems to have worked reasonably well[1] - but it is a bit slow to work through them all. Also it does not stop them creating new articles.

I am tempted to protect the talk main page and see what happens. It will probably cause them to look for new articles to spam - but we can revert and protect any they find as it happens, so the workload may not be too much. It would certainly cut down the noise and leave them an ever decreasing pool of articles to fiddle with.

[1] I have only seen one edit to a protected file - and that was from a user that we had pre-emptively banned anyway. I am not sure how that happened - but it may have been because the user had tried it once before and got a limited duration ban which expired after my permanent ban was set. Perhaps the expiration of the temporary one overrode the permanent one?

--John Rumm 13:24, 9 April 2008 (BST)

Difference between revisions of "Talk:Main Page/Discussion"

Latest revision as of 03:14, 3 January 2009

Time to protect pages from spam?

Mass block

Navigation menu

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@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 This page is for discussion of the DIY Wiki main page, and the Wiki as a whole.
-It also seems to be a favoured place for spammers advertising dodgy pharmaceuticals, fake Rolexes and so on <sigh>
+It also seems to be a favoured place for spammers advertising dodgy pharmaceuticals, <strike>fake</strike>replica Rolexes and so on <sigh>
-== Talk ('discussion' tab) pages -- signatures ==
+''Previous discussions on this page have been [[DIYWiki:Archiving pages|Archived]]''
+* [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 20070630|30th June 2007]]
+* [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 20070815|15th August 2007]]
+* [[Talk:Main Page/Archive 20080229|29th February 2008]]
+----
+== Time to protect pages from spam? ==
-Appending your signature when you add a comment, particularly when replying to something already written, makes it easier to identify who's saying what, a la web forums. --[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 11:59, 16 December 2006 (GMT)
+Following up from discussion of spam in [[Talk:Main_Page/Archive_20080229]] and looking at the current level of spamming I think it's time we protected all the wiki so that only registered users can edit pages.
-Here's a reply to the above --[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 12:11, 16 December 2006 (GMT)
+Earlier I had hoped/suggested that keeping the wiki open would encourage casual visitors to start contributing with little edits such as typos, clarifications etc, and maybe move on to becoming more heavyweight contributors. However this doesn't seem to be happening anyway, and the quantity of spam is getting unmanageable.
-<blockquote>It would be nice if the wiki kept track of threads and increased the indent for each reply but it doesn't seem to do that (although some users on wikipedia make it seem to do so using <nowiki><blockquote>tags around their text</blockquote></nowiki>). --[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 12:02, 16 December 2006 (GMT)
+The quality of the wiki would probably be improved more by having less spam and less work for regulars to do patrolling it, than any notional contribution from unregistered users. Also when/if unregistered users do contribute there's a danger their input may be mistaken for spam and their IP get blocked.
-<blockquote>
-This quickly gets messy if you try to hand-craft multiple layers of indentation as you have to put your own <nowiki><blockquote>tags</blockquote></nowiki> before the closing <nowiki></blockquote></nowiki> you're replying to.
-Kids: don't try this at home!
+A wiki-wide change is probably a Grunff-config thing. If others (NT, JR) agree I'll ask him to do it.
-</blockquote>
-</blockquote>
-== Trouble with category pages ==
+--[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 20:37, 29 February 2008 (GMT)
-I added a <nowiki>[[Category:Plumbing]]</nowiki> tag to the Plumbing page but when I followed the Category: link at the bottom
+OK by me --[[User:John Rumm|John Rumm]] 23:01, 29 February 2008 (GMT)
-of the page I got:
-<pre>
+==Mass block==
-Editing Category:Plumbing
+Is there any way to block IPs en masse? Any way at all would be a big help here.
-From DIYWiki
+[[User:NT|NT]] 10:36, 9 April 2008 (BST)
-Jump to: navigation, search
-You've followed a link to a page that doesn't exist yet. To create the
+Alas not that I am aware of.
-page, start typing in the box below (see the help page for more info). If
-you are here by mistake, just click your browser's back button. Preview
-Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data.
+We could also do with a global config file change to disable anonymous edits altogether. The policy of setting protection on individual articles to limit edits to registered users only, seems to have worked reasonably well[1] - but it is a bit slow to work through them all. Also it does not stop them creating new articles.
-Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and logging
-back in.
-</pre>
-If I just 'Save page' with an empty page and again try to follow the
+I am tempted to protect the talk main page and see what happens. It will probably cause them to look for new articles to spam - but we can revert and protect any they find as it happens, so the workload may not be too much. It would certainly cut down the noise and leave them an ever decreasing pool of articles to fiddle with.
-link I get the same error. However if I create a page with some random
-text and save that I get correctly directed to the newly created Category
-page. I can then edit it and delete the random text, save again and I
-still get to the new page (which is what I want). Odd.
-== Categories ==
+[1] I have only seen one edit to a protected file - and that was from a user that we had pre-emptively banned anyway. I am not sure how that happened - but it may have been because the user had tried it once before and got a limited duration ban which expired after my permanent ban was set. Perhaps the expiration of the temporary one overrode the permanent one?
-I find that what turn out to be the useful category headings are often not what I epxected them to be ahead of time. (I manage a few info libraries elsewhere.)
+--[[User:John Rumm|John Rumm]] 13:24, 9 April 2008 (BST)
-== Deleting images ==
+<!-- ATTENTION! real contributors - add your contribution before this anti-spam device ...
-I uploaded a bunch of image files for an article then realised I didn't need some of them, but there doesn't seem to be any way to delete them.
-They're shown in [[Special:Unusedimages]]
---[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 18:21, 3 January 2007 (GMT)
-There are a few redundant articles could be deleted too. Whatever the method, it may be best to delete the how to after its been done!
-[[User:NT|NT]] 19:14, 3 January 2007 (GMT)
-You [[User:NT|NT]] and I can now delete images and pages (thanks Grunff!) --[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 15:22, 21 April 2007 (BST)
-== Revert ==
-How do you do a 'revert' then? Could be handy to know.
-[[User:NT|NT]] 06:07, 4 February 2007 (GMT)
-Go to '''history''' and find the version you want to go back to, go into '''edit''' and save it without making any changes to the text (but do fill in the '''Summary''' to say you're reverting it, and why, of course!)
---[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 12:15, 4 February 2007 (GMT)
-Ohh - easy! Thanks.
-[[User:NT|NT]] 22:08, 4 February 2007 (GMT)
-== DIY pages on wikipedia ==
-There are some middling to bloody-awful DIY related pages on wikipedia which need some work:
-* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_it_yourself Do_it_yourself] could do with UK-ifying and putting in some decent links (like to here!)
-* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY_culture DIY_culture]
-* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handyperson Handyperson] <groan>
-== Naming & Capitalisation conventions ==
-Some time ago I put in the Naming section:
-<blockquote>
-When referring to one article from another it helps to have a consistent naming convention. Perhaps we should follow  Wikipedia's naming convention [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions]] especially regarding capitalisation of article names and whether they should be in the singular or plural [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Naming_conventions#General_conventions]]
-</blockquote>
-However no-one (least of all me :-)) seems to be doing that so maybe we should change this to reflect actual practice which seems to be to Capitalise All  Initials and use plurals for subjects which are a class of things e.g. '''Round Tuits'''
-I agree, for one reason or another it hasnt been followed, and its less confusing to stick with what we've got, so thats what I do for now.
-[[User:NT|NT]] 05:27, 15 February 2007 (GMT)
-OK I've changed it to reflect more-or-less what we've got now, although what we've got isn't consistent as to whether we capitalise all words in an article name or just the main ones, but wtf, life's too short :-)
---[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 11:25, 15 February 2007 (GMT)
-== Taking a local copy of the Wiki content ==
-Don't let's everyone do this all the time for the sake of the server but this saves copies of most of the useful & interesting pages. It actually fetches '''all''' of the pages then throws away a lot which makes it not very server-friendly.
-As well as HTML-formatted article pages it also keeps edit and version pages:
-* from edit pages you can re-create an article directly from the markup contained in the page's edit box.
-* version pages show the evolution of articles
-  <nowiki>wget -w -r --convert-links http://wiki.diyfaq.org.uk --reject '*&section=*','*=Special:*','*&diff=*'</nowiki>
-The --convert-links option is supposed to make links within pages work as local copies but that doesn't seem to work for me: urls are of the form
-  index.php?title=Article_Name
-Maybe that has something to do with it?
-The --reject option prevents wget keeping various pages [http://info2html.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/info2html-demo/info2html?(wget.info.gz)Types%2520of%2520Files]. The following arguments are regular expressions matching file names:
-; *&section=*
-: edit pages for sections of articles (only the edit page for the whole article is kept)
-; <nowiki>*=Special:*</nowiki>
-: [[Special:Specialpages|Special] pages
-; *&diff=*
-: diffs between versions
-My wget version is
-  GNU Wget 1.10.2
-== Import or Link to Wikipedia content? ==
-Where Wikipedia has an article on something of interest to us here the question arises whether to link to it or copy it.
-* I suggest that where the Wikipedia article covers everything we'd want to cover (or could be expanded to do so within [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines Wikipedia policies and guidelines]) we should link to it (and contribute to it if necessary). The problem if we were to copy it is that as the Wikipedia article is developed, expanded, corrected etc our copy gets out of sync, left behind and stagnant (or vice versa if it's our copy that gets the attention). It seems reasonable to copy an extract of the Wikipedia article as a taster or sample of the target of the link since people (at least ones like me) tend to think twice about following a link unless they're ''really'' interested, and/or find an article consisting solely of a link to something else a bit unfinished.
-* Where we should be importing content is as a basis for developing an independent article of our own, where it would be inappropriate in terms of Wikipedia's policies to develop their article in the direction we want to go. For example there's a [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIY Wikipedia article on DIY] which discusses the rise of DIY in the USA and suggests that it is a return to once-common practice: "since the beginning of time, people have used their own abilities and available tools and technologies to take care of their own needs, make their own clothing, and so on". We might be interested in developing this idea with reference to [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Bucknell Barry Bucknell], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Saunders Nicholas Saunders], [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Seymour_%28author%29 John Seymour], uk.d-i-y and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all. However Wikipedia's [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Simplified_Ruleset#Guidelines_for_writing_high_quality_articles Guidelines for writing high quality articles] state:
-:Articles should contain only material that has been published by reputable sources. Editors adding new information into an article should cite a reputable source for that information
-and
-:Articles may not contain any previously unpublished arguments, concepts, data, ideas, statements, or theories
-so this sort of material (including the Wikipedia DIY article as it stands, IMHO!) is not suitable for inclusion in Wikipedia since it expounds the authors' own ideas rather than reporting cite-able external sources.
-* In many cases there's a Wikipedia article telling us more than we probably want to know about something which we've got an article about (where our article is unsuitable for Wikipedia). A link to the Wikipedia article can be useful for those interested: see e.g. our [[Limescale]] article.
---[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 23:35, 21 March 2007 (GMT)
-That sounds like a good summary to me John. Import as I see it for articles where we want to start with what wikipedia has, but develop it in a different direction, and/or cut it down.
-The only problem with this approach is that we currently have so many large holes in our article repertoire precisely because various subjects have been covered well elsewhere. If in such cases we never import, this will probably never become anything like a complete diy wiki.
-What is the solution to this issue? I dont know.  All the following options have problems afaics:
-*Redirect to wikipedia pages or other external links in such cases
-*Import wikipedia articles (lack of updating from wikipedia)
-*Write an article from scratch (who would rewrite things and why)
-* Have near-empty articles with just an intro and a link to wikipedia or other site (works, but doesnt look good)
-Cant think of other options offhand.
-[[User:NT|NT]] 02:59, 22 March 2007 (GMT)
-I suspect we'll find that wikipedia articles are more general and theoretical and that we'll probably want to start with a reference to their article but then get into the practicalities in an article of our own. I think the Limescale article was a good example of that: their article covers the chemistry of it in great depth, ours covers how it affects us and what we do about it.
-Of more concern to me in terms of overlap is the [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Do-It-Yourself DIY Wikibook] which is setting out to do pretty much what we are doing (though naturally with a more global - read USAnian! - perspective). However theirs seems to be more wide-ranging (fish breeding, gauss guns ...) and I see us as having a much narrower but deeper concentration on serious UK-based 'domestic' DIY.
---[[User:John Stumbles|John Stumbles]] 11:57, 23 March 2007 (GMT)
-With a total of just 1 article with useful content, I'm not sure we need worry too much about wikibooks.
-I suppose there is no clear universally applicable answer to the question of what to do when something has already been covered well elsewhere. Maybe I'll import one good wikipedia article partly as a practical experiment & see how it works. Hopefully the 2 will develop in different directions, as our wiki and wikipedia do have different audiences and aims.
-[[User:NT|NT]] 15:16, 23 March 2007 (GMT)
-My mind is like a fog.
-I don't care.
-That's how it is.
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-==Protect==
-Might there be any mileage in protecting this page?
-[[User:NT|NT]] 18:57, 28 May 2007 (BST)
-Not much point, they would only go scribble on something else. At least its easy to keep track of the twats here.
---[[User:John Rumm|John Rumm]] 20:18, 28 May 2007 (BST)
-== Reformat glossary pages? ==
-The glossary pages currently do not have the word entries configured as headings. This seems to make it impossible to link to them such that the entry you are linking to is automatically positioned at the top of the page. Anyone know if there is a way round this, or do we need to make every entry a heading? (or do an alphabet heading for each section perhaps)
---[[User:John Rumm|John Rumm]] 20:23, 28 May 2007 (BST)
-If we did headise each word it'd double the article length. That's why I initially did it similarish to how it is now.
-Do we really want to link to words in the glossary? I never have as I suspect people would get fed up following links to simple basic minimal info stuff. I try to make each link go to something with more info than that.
-We could list the appropriate subject glossary as a 'see also' link for each article. We've only got one subject glossary so far, but over 40 articles in it already. I reckon that would work, what do you think?
-[[User:NT|NT]] 23:19, 28 May 2007 (BST)