Hi,
Sorry for dropping in. I'd be glad to host the wine wiki with whatever choice of software stack you decide to go with on one of my servers.
Background info: - lifetime sysadmin with experience in hosting ect. - linkedin profile: https://de.linkedin.com/in/wojciecharabczyk
With kind regards,
On 13 January 2016 at 09:05, Austin English austinenglish@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jan 13, 2016 at 2:00 AM, Kyle Auble kyle.auble@zoho.com wrote:
On Tues, Jan 12 2006 at 12:42:09 CST, Rosanne DiMesio wrote:
In the past hour, I've restored the Front Page three times, and deleted over two dozen newly created spam pages. Earlier, Alexandre deleted many more spam pages. Something needs to be done now.
Besides the day-to-day, I have another project on my plate right now so I can't really help much with the wiki right now. After seeing the emails over the past few days, I checked the RecentChanges page though, and it has become truly insane.
I can think of a few things we can do, but there's the issue of getting in touch with Dimi. When I started working on the wiki back in 2012, he was pretty quick to respond and helpful, but the few times I've tried emailing or CC-ing him since around 2014, I've never heard back. I get the feeling he's just totally swamped at his company or with other things in life; one of the developers that knows him well might need to get in touch by phone or in person.
As for what we can do, these come to mind...
- Disable automatic account creation, at least for now. Unfortunately, at
least for the version of Moinmoin we're still on, this is even grungier and more restrictive than it first sounds. There wasn't (and still isn't?!) a standard mechanism like "we'll notify the moderator and after looking over your email and IP, they click a button to send you your account info." You have to disable /all/ account creation through the wiki, and personally email the moderator, who then manually adds your account and emails you your info. There are apparently bits of orphaned code or plugins that may help, but I haven't tested any of them. The clearest docs I could find revolve around this page: https://moinmo.in/FeatureRequests/DisableUserCreation
- All the spam is bad enough. What genuinely unnerves me is that at least
one page they tried to create causes an error in Moinmoin. Yes, it's annoying because the page doesn't load so it can't be deleted through the wiki, but what takes the cake is that it's giving debug output, with a traceback through the MoinMoin code /and/ certain system details about the server. Yikes! So we can just adjust the config file to disable that in our version of Moinmoin right? Well, that's where it gets worse; we're apparently one minor revision short of that fix (so we need to update first or patch it ourselves): https://moinmo.in/MoinMoinQuestions/ConfigFiles#Disable_ErrorLogs_in_webbrow...
- Which leads to my 3rd suggestion. After we bandage up those problems, I
have to nominate replacing MoinMoin with some other wiki-engine, especially if we plan on directing users to the wiki even more. I don't know if MediaWiki would be the best for us (long-run, I'm intrigued by some of the wiki-plugins I've seen for Django, Rails, etc.), but as the most battle-hardened and tool-rich (=> easy to import?) one out there, it might be a good stop-gap.
I've fiddled with Python way more than PHP, which is probably both cause and effect for my Pythonist biases, and I do like the way we could match the wiki theme with the rest of WineHQ (though at least in Moinmoin v1.5, the theming and particularly the hard-coded CSS handles could be really brittle). And it does seem lots of interesting work is being done on the Moinmoin-2.0 branch. Yet their stable docs are still a labyrinth, many of the useful features in 2.0 haven't been backported to 1.9, and I really don't know where they're trying to take the project anymore.
Anyways, sorry for the long email. If anyone has questions about patching or migrating the wiki though, I can try helping with tips and provide some old prototype scripts I've written. I just probably won't be able to get my own hands dirty writing code or testing for a while.
Oh yeah, I also wanted to say that restoring the front page from the Wayback Machine was really a master-stroke, Rosanne. When I first saw the email from Michael S. saying it had been wiped, I just thought, "I'm glad I'm not the one trying to fix that because I have no clue where to start."
Kyle
I'd really like to see a wiki that has HTTPS support and theme matching the rest of winehq. I don't remember Newman's feelings on hosting another service though.
-- -Austin