[Open-bio-l] OpenID working again

[Peter Cock]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:48 AM, Andy Jenkinson
<andy.jenkinson at ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>> Over on root-l we're looking at updating MediaWiki for all the
>>>> OBF hosted wikis as part of getting OpenID working properly.
>>>
>>> Yes I know, but I'm not sure if that will actually fix the spam problem?
>>> And are there any captcha settings we can tweak in the meantime?
>>
>> The idea is that account creation requires OpenID, which is more
>> hassle for spammers to go though, and should throttle them.
>
> What was it that was fixed yesterday, manual account creation or
> OpenID?

OpenID work certainly, but I'll defer to Chris F or Chris M (both in the
USA so not awake yet) regarding exactly where things stand now.

>>> Every now and again I spend an awful lot of time deleting pages
>>> and blocking accounts, which is sadly all rather pointless if they
>>> can create new ones.
>>
>> I've had days wasted on wikis like that too - although not recently.
>
> Yes there has been no spam on BioDAS since August, which I had
> associated with the login not working properly.

Indeed. It had its up sides.

>> Maybe we should go for moderation to create new accounts on
>> the BioDAS wiki and any others being hit hard by spammers?
>
> Yes that could work if done manageably, but with there being 31
> accounts created within 7 hours this morning, I'm not particularly
> keen on getting all those emails!

Personally I'd rather have 31 easily filed emails and do a mass
new user reject, than have to clean up after the fact.

>From the spammer's point of view, once they see new accounts
are moderated then that wiki would cease to be an easy target -
or I'd hope so anyway.

>> The OBF are also interested in moving the wikis to a hosted
>> solution - even paying someone else has some appeal. One
>> option is to use GitHub's wiki - since most of the Bio* projects
>> now use GitHub for their repositories.
>
> Hopefully the porting can be automated...

For most of the wikis that would be essential. If anyone on the
list is interested in trying this, please speak up and we'll sort
you out with access to the OBF server to take a database
dump from MediaWiki or whatever.

Thanks,

Peter