[aprssig] Wiki: Ok. I give up.

[Tom Russo]

On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 02:54:36PM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <scott at opentrac.org> flavor, containing:
>  I'm sorry - I've been putting off replacing the software, and no one else 
>  has admin access to the server.
> 
>  I finally got MediaWiki set up.  It's temporarily at wiki.n1vg.net, and will 
>  be moved to info.aprs.net shortly.  Hopefully everyone can help with moving 
>  the content over, since I don't have any automated way to do that and 
>  wouldn't want to just copy all the spam anyway.
> 
>  I've restricted anonymous edits, and installed a simple captcha system.  If 
>  that proves inadequate there are some other measures that can be implemented 
>  - MediaWiki has plenty of extensions and tweaks available.

Excellent!

I've begun migrating some data from the old, but it's tedious, and I'm gonna
let others get in on the act now.

BTW, migrating is not trivial, and one has to be kinda mindful of the 
differences between the old and new software.

It is not enough to just cut/paste from the old wiki to the new, because
MediaWiki uses slightly different markup than WikkaWakkaWiki does --- most 
notable is the format for marking up internal links.

WikkaWakka:
  [[pagename Descriptive Link Name]]
MediaWiki:
  [[pagename|Descriptive Link Name]]

If you try to use the WikkaWakka format directly, you'll get links to pages
named "pagename Descriptive Link Name" instead of links to "pagename" with
the text "Descriptive Link Name".  Something to watch out for.  I had to move
a handful of pages that were victims of this subtlety.

Two other things:
External links in MediaWiki are done like this:
  [http://host.name/path Descriptive Link Name]
where WikkaWakka used [[ ]] instead.  So when migrating content, make sure to
delete the extra brackets.

External links in WikkaWakka automatically used the URL as the text if there
was no descriptive text.  MediaWiki uses numbers instead if there's nothing
additional, so every time you encounter a link in the old wiki that looks 
like [[http://foo.bar.us/url]]] you have to convert it to 
[http://foo.bar.us/url http://foo.bar.url] to make it look the same in the new 
wiki.

There are numerous other formatting issues to work out properly,and it'll 
take some time and effort to get every page looking good.  But with enough 
participants,  that should get taken care of eventually.

Oh, there's a configuration niggle, too:  the wiki is currently set to 
disallow embedded external images.  The AlohaCircle page, for example, did 
that on the old wiki.  To enable that (a potentially dangerous thing unless we 
monitor new users carefully), one has to change the $wgAllowExternalImages  
option in the MediaWiki config file.


>  Tom Russo wrote:
> > I just spent a half-hour cleaning up spam from the info.aprs.net wiki 
> > again.
> > Most of these things could have been prevented if folks had set access 
> > control
> > lists to their owned pages, but at this point that's moot --- some of these
> > pages seem now to be owned by spammer user ids.  I didn't know that page 
> > ownership could be changed like that, but apparently it can.
> > I give up.  Obviously, this wiki is unusable and is no longer a good 
> > resource
> > for APRS users, and I won't waste any more time reverting spammed pages, 
> > nor
> > will I trouble this list about the wiki's problems.  If anyone else cares 
> > to tilt this windmill, feel free to monitor the "Recent Changes" page and 
> > revert spammed pages to your heart's content using the reversion 
> > instructions at  <http://wikkawiki.org/RetrieveInfo>.  You will need to do 
> > so on a daily or weekly basis, until page owners lock their pages or until 
> > the wiki software is changed.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
"And, isn't sanity really just a one-trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is
 one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh, oooh,
 oooh, the sky is the limit!"  --- The Tick