[Biojava-l] Changes to the wiki-enabled portions of our website(s)

[Chris Dagdigian]

Hi folks,

Over the past few months there have been several incidents where people 
have abused the collaborative editing features contained within the 
wiki-enabled portions of the Open Bio websites (bioperl.org, biojava.org, 
biocorba.org, bioxml.org and biopython.org).

The most recent incident happened within last 24 hours when someone deleted 
and/or attempted to change the bioperl wiki docs that outlined our release 
07 roadmap and module checklist.

Although we have enough logs & audit data to start tracking these people 
down we haven't bothered - simple web vandals are not worth our time. The 
CVS integration within Wiki makes it easy to roll back the malicious 
deletions & changes whenever we detect them. Special thanks are  owed to 
Jason Stajich who wrote some behind-the-scenes scripts that automate the 
rebuild/recover process.

The problem has now become one of  administrative time and effort -- we 
have better things to do than monitor our wiki constantly. At the same time 
the obvious benefits of  having anyone within our projects be able to 
create and update web content make it essential to keep the system around.

Hence a compromise (and a bit of a social experiment):

We are making the assumption that the web vandals are just random surfers 
who chanced on our site and could not resist the temptation of web links 
that say "edit this page" and "delete this page".  We are hoping that they 
are not also subscribers who are reading our mailing lists :)

So-- I have now password protected the "edit" and "delete" portions of all 
the various Open Bio project wiki sites.

The 'experiment' is that  this email is going to disclose the username and 
password so that all of you can continue to help improve and update our web 
content. We are hoping that this semi-public password will be enough to 
keep our site safe from the casual sort of mischief.

Wiki edit/delete access info:
======================
username: wiki
password: wicked


Our backup plan if this experiment fails is to change the password and 
reveal it only to people who ask for it. I'm hoping that we will not have 
to take this step as it will have the effect of slowing down our content 
creation and updating progress.

Regards,
Chris (and all the Open Bio admin folks)




Chris Dagdigian -- Blackstone Technology Group
(Work  ) dagdigian@computefarm.com  (Home) dag@sonsorol.org
(Web   ) http://ComputeFarm.com, http://open-bio.org, http://sonsorol.org
(More  ) Full contact info and schedule -- http://sonsorol.org/dag/contact.html