Please disable page creation on the wiki temporarily

[John Ralls]

On Nov 23, 2012, at 4:47 PM, Christian Stimming <christian at cstimming.de> wrote:

> Who of us can modify the mediawiki permission settings for our gnucash wiki? I urge you to please temporarily disable the page creation permission ("createpage") for normal users. Currently we have 10-20 new spam pages per day, and deleting them regularly is a pain in the neck.
> 
> It was somewhat more bearable if it's done by multiple persons, but currently I'm alone with this. See http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
> 
> According to http://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Special:ListGroupRights, the user group "all" has the permission to create pages "createpage" and create discussion pages "createtalk". Both should be disabled for some days so that I get some relief of the daily spam deletion tasks. Thanks!

I haven't done a spam battle on a wiki in a while -- the last time was the wxPerl wiki a few years ago. We had page creation disabled and the spammers would just rewrite random pages. 

It's kind of un-wiki-like to restrict edits to known users, but it is an approach that works: Limit edits and creations to logged-in users (which we already do) and set a captcha and an email confirmation loop (which I don't think we do)  for new userids.

The core devs should all have the privs to kill userids, and we should all review the changes (can it be made into an email notification or RSS/ATOM feed?) daily so that Christian isn't the only one doing cleanup.

Regards,
John Ralls