Take Back the Wiki Re: [aprssig] APRS Wiki vandalism

[Tom Russo]

On Sat, Jul 07, 2007 at 11:06:04AM -0600, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <russo at bogodyn.org> flavor, containing:
> On Thu, Jul 05, 2007 at 10:39:59AM -0700, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <scott at opentrac.org> flavor, containing:
> > I agree, this software isn't working out and I'm regretting the choice.  I'd
> > have installed MediaWiki already if I had the time to do it.  If you (or
> > anyone else) wants to volunteer to set it up and start migrating content,
> > let me know and I'll set you up with an account on the server.  It's a
> > Windows 2003 server running IIS, with PHP and MySQL installed.
> > 
> > I'll see if I have a recent database backup for the wiki that might speed up
> > the recovery process.  If not, some of that might have to come from Google's
> > cache.
> 
> The wiki was vandalized again today, and until it's clamped down it'll just
> keep getting hit.

Ok, it was ridiculous before, now it's more ridiculous.  The wiki is getting
trashed every other day. 

Since it'll take a few people some solid effort to fix it properly, and those
people are very busy, we'll have to take back the wiki ourselves until it's
fixed.

If you have a page on the wiki that you own (it shows your login as owner in 
the footer), the best thing to do at this point is to edit the access control 
list and restrict editing to a reasonable list of folks.  There are some pages 
that you might want to keep editable, in those cases you might restrict 
editing only to those folks who have already contributed.  I've been 
restricting all of my pages to myself and ScottN1VG at a minimum, and a 
handful of others as seems appropriate.

This should reduce the need to restore every single page every two days.  The
downside is that it makes the wiki less useful as a dynamic, community-edited
documentation site, but it's already less useful as that because of the rate
at which it's being destroyed.

On the subject of restoration:

Someone went in and tried to help out by removing link spam from a few pages,
but did not do it using the reversion technique required to restore the pages.
The spam went away, but the content was not restored.  I put a link to the 
correct technique on the top level of the wiki, but since that gets trashed so 
often that doesn't help.  So here's how to do it:

On the page you want to fix:
  -  scroll down to the bottom and click the date/time string in the footer.  
     This will show you a list of all the revisions made to that page, sorted 
     by date.  
  -  click the date/time string next to a revision, to see what the page 
     looked like on that date.  
  -  Find the most recent one that is unmolested.  
  -  To restore it to that state, click the "Re-edit this old version" button, 
     add a comment in the comment box at the bottom, and click the store button.

The page will return to its unmolested version.  

Pleased don't just remove the spam from the most recent version and save it, 
because odds are that most if not all of the real content to the page was 
deleted when the spam was added.

Hopefully, Scott and Ryan will be able to establish the new wiki software with
more security pretty soon, and this will stop.  In the meantime, let's try
to do what we can to make the wiki at least a marginally useful resource to
someone.

-- 
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