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Spam and anti-spam; good HLS news 28 May 2006

Posted by Zach in HLS/LSRI, activism, prisoners, spam.
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I just got back from a required expedition in the Adirondacks for my last college credit… it will be nice not to jump through any more hoops (aside from work, which is better IMHO because it's confined to 8 hours a day).

So, spam: since the hosting switch, we've been able to implement the anti-spam tactic suggested by an anonymous editor (setting $wgSpamRegex to in LocalSettings.php), plus implement two other anti-spam measures (as of this evening):

  1. Blocking edits from open proxies, which it seems the spammers are using
  2. Re-installing the SpamBlacklist extension, which we lost when we migrated hosts. 

I have a feeling #1 will take care of a lot of the spam we're seeing right now. It's a little unwiki (see the discussion on the page linked above), but I think we should at least try it for a few months.

<h2>HLS dropped from Pink Sheets</h2>

 So [[Huntingdon Life Sciences]], aka HLS aka Life Sciences Research Inc. (their new name) aka LSRI, was recently dropped from the Pink Sheets (a third-tier stock exchange), after a few months on the Over The Counter Bulletin Board (a second-tier one), and about seven months after not being listed on the NYSE. This is a pretty huge victory for the anti-HLS campaign; I have a feeling that if we don't screw this up somehow and if they don't pull something amazing out of their hats, we could see HLS go out of business within a year or two. 

In other good news, vegan prisoner [[Eric McDavid]] is being given decent vegan meals, after a very long a debilitating hunger strike and 100 days in jail.

Spam blacklisting & bots 30 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam.
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Gabriel emailed me back and said the SpamBlacklist extension works “quite well”, and that he can activate it on our wiki if we like. I’m assuming we like. I think he’s going to have it use the Wikimedia blacklist, which is a tiny bummer (wanting to be independent of Wikimedia and all), but it’s not a huge deal I don’t think, and I’d rather not hassle him about it. I’ll post here when he says it’s up and running.

I had also asked him about whether it’s helpful to tell indexing bots (e.g. search engines) not to index history pages or the Recent changes page. I got this idea from chongqed.org. The reason for doing this is that even if you eliminate wikispam from all current pages, it still is there in the pages histories and in the Recent changes log, and so if robots are indexing those, there’s still an incentive to spam even if it gets removed quickly. Gabriel
made some changes to our robots.txt file which should remove that incentive.

The only thing now is to make sure spammers know this – perhaps we could put a little notice on the front page if we start getting spammers again. (They seem to have dropped off the past couple days.)

Issues on the future of the wiki 22 January 2006

Posted by Zach in blogs, meta, spam.
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Existence: I just saw some questions on the future security of the wiki that TheChin! asked back in November on the Community portal page. Basically he was wondering if the wiki was going to keep existing and if the founder was still interested.

It most definitely is, and I most definitely am – which was a big part of the point of starting this blog.

So that answers the gist of his questions I think, but I wrote a more detailed response (financial, hosting, why I was gone), which you can read there.

Blog: This blog should be moved onto wikiveg.org soon, but where should it go? I lean towards having it on the front page. Discussion here. (Note: We’re definitely customizing the skin; I would customize this one but wordpress.com doesn’t give you that option.)

Spam: It might be too soon to tell, but it seems like the spam is dropping off a bit(?), perhaps as the spammers realize the wiki is active again…

License: Currently we are using a dual GFDL and Creative Commons “by-sa” license. My thinking was this:

  • Advantage: This allows us or other people to export content to both CC-by-sa and GFDL wikis.
  • Disadvantage: This doesn’t allow us to import any content unless it is already license as *both* CC-by-sa and GFDL.
  • Advantage: However, we have the flexibility to “switch” from the dual license to a single GFDL or CC-by-sa license, if we ever feel like the above disadvantage outweighs the above advantage.

I realize the last point seems counterintuitive, because it seems like that would be changing the license, which you can’t do according to the “share alike” (“sa”) clauses in the CC-by-sa and the GFDL. But as long we continued to make the old content available under both licenses (which we could do by just saying on the license page that “Content before [date of switch] is released under both the GFDL and the CC-by-sa”), we wouldn’t be relicensing any content; we’d just be releasing, from that point on, any new content under the one license as opposed to both.

A contributor just added a link to the licensing discussion on Embodiment Wiki (which I just added to our WikiNode), which contains the interesting idea of having different licenses for different kinds of content. That’s something we could probably do if people wanted to; for example, having an “Essay:” namespace where each page would have whatever license the author wanted. I think the basic structure of the license though (most content as dual GFDL and CC-by-sa) should stay the way it is for now. More of my feedback if you want to read it is on the Community portal.

Point of view: There’s an ongoing discussion on the Community portal about what POV the wiki should have. (E.g. Wikipedia’s policy is NPOV, neutral point of view.) The most obvious choice seems to be “vegan point of view” (VPOV). But the question is, does that mean we exclude anyone who someone thinks is not vegan enough, e.g. vegetarians, or people who think used leather is vegan?

For that reason, I suggested “tolerant vegan point of view”, i.e. VPOV but not being too iron-handed on dissenting opinions. Tim suggested multiple point of view, i.e. not specifically VPOV. Now a new contributor has said that they think it should definitely have VPOV, but allow if not encourage dissent as to what counts as VPOV.

To me this seems pretty close to my suggestion of tolerant VPOV. It seems like so far then, there’s a faint consensus to have the POV be VPOV but not overzealously so. I think we can just leave it at that until some issue comes up, and we can discuss and clarify it more then.

Banning spammer IP addresses 18 January 2006

Posted by Zach in spam.
6 comments

And what do I find, upon my return from abroad, when I check the recent changes? More linkspam! It’s been taken care of by User:TheChin! (who I just a little bit ago made a sysop, as a sort of thanks), and I’ve been banning the offending IP addresses:

62.3.32.55
62.7.244.103
66.246.218.107
67.18.98.36
200.206.132.208
209.66.124.150
210.216.178.81
211.228.29.213

I wasn’t sure how long to ban them. Permanently? (Is there a risk of a legitimate user trying to use the same IP address, or do IPs not work like that?) 24 hours? That is the default setting, but that feels too short. I ended up banning them for a week. If that doesn’t work out, we’ll try something else. One option would be to require people to be logged in to edit pages, but I think we’d all like to avoid that.
If you’re a sysop (Suse, TheChin!, Tim), and you see link spam going on, feel free to ban the IP address of the spammer by going to the page Special:Blockip and pasting it in. It’s probably a good practice to mention where the spam was in the “Reason” blank, although I admit I didn’t trouble to do that just now.

If you ever want to see the list of currently blocked IPs, go to Special:Ipblocklist.

(And if you ever want to see a nuts-and-bolts page like those, click the “special pages” link, found on the bottom left of every wikiveg page.)

Sweeping out the cobwebs 4 January 2006

Posted by Zach in meta, spam, visuals.
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I haven’t done any serious editing of pages yet – the first item of business has been to clear up all the wikispam that has accumulated on the wiki while I’ve been away. Wikispam is a form a spamming that consists of putting lots of links on a wiki page to try to increase their ranking with search engines. I’ve seen wikis where this happens very blatantly; where a spammer just deletes a page and replaces it with links. This isn’t super effective since it’s really obvious to the next person who comes along that something needs to be fixed. On wikiveg though, the spammers cleverly put all the links under an HTML tag that made them *not* show up on the page unless you viewed the wikicode for the page. (Here is an example; the spam is at the bottom.)

I first noticed that this was happening a month ago I think, and I was expecting to have to spend a good hour tracking it all down and removing it. Thankfully though, another user, TheChin! had come by and eliminated pretty much all of it. He (or she?) was around as recently as December 29. I hope he or she comes back.

The next thing I’d like to do, though it’ll have to wait until I learn more CSS, is get rid of the (IMHO) godawful CSS skin/visuals I’ve got up there. I just threw together a few customizations of the standard MediaWiki skin back in May, probably between sleep-deprived essay-writing sessions. Originally I thought it would be a good thing to have a skin structurally very similar to the standard skin, for the sake of continuity with many of the well-known wikis (esp. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects), so that the learning curve would be minimal for people coming to the site. But I don’t think that’s a big issue anymore. I recently came across another MediaWiki installation using a highly customized skin, and while I’m not crazy about the skin itself, it still made me realize that the skin for wikiveg can look like whatever the hell we want. So, I’m going to try to learn some CSS in the next few months and come up with something really bold and nice-looking.