[Systems] Spam on cl.sugarlabs.org

[Bernie Innocenti]

On 08/15/2013 11:56 PM, Sebastian Silva wrote:
> Hola Bernardo,
> 
> Thanks for looking into this.
> 
> With regard to pe.sugarlabs.org, we actively use it, and are aware of
> the spam issue. I set up captcha for new users registrations for this
> purpose and it seemed to deter spam for a while, but it's not sufficient.
> 
> When Chris started the laudable initiative to manually clean the wiki I
> thanked him but expressed concern that we might be better off to just
> start a new wiki from scratch and move valid content from the old one.

That's quite easy to do: just dump a subset of the pages to xml and
restore it into a new wiki. There's a Special page to do that.


> Since the issue is common to all of our "local labs" wikis, at the time
> I proposed to unify the latin-american wikis into one sur.sugarlabs.org
> wiki, but none of the mantainers answered.

I think consolidating the local labs on sur.sugarlags.org is a great idea.

If the current maintainers of the other local labs don't respond for
extended periods of time, I think we should consider them MIA and try to
find new maintainers or turn off the unmaintained wiki. Feel free to
take action, you have more context than I do.


> I have been pondering the possiblity to move our wiki away from
> Mediawiki into something different that might be less maintenance / with
> a better workflow and am seriously considering moving to Hatta Wiki
> http://hatta-wiki.org/, but I'm still not sure because it lacks the
> ability to register new users (Hatta Wiki expects the web server to
> authenticate users - we could use LDAP at ldap.sugarlabs.org but not all
> of our users have shell accounts).

We can give ldap accounts to users with no shell access and no home on
sunjammer. The only downside is that there's no web interface to
manipulate the users. All we have is a crude password form that I wrote
10 years ago for my company (sorry for using php, there was nothing
better at the time).

It would be nice to investigate using a CRM to manage Sugar Labs
memberships and accounts. These things tend to be huge and complicated
(like CiviCRM), so I'm not sure it would be a good idea. That's why I
said *investigate* above :-)


> The main advantage I see is that it allows for offline editing and
> maintenance of simple text files (under version control) which seems
> much simpler for me than the web tools Mediawiki provides, that are
> practically useless on a slow Internet link.

I wrote my own minimalistic wiki backed by git for codewiz.org a long
time ago (this time using Python, and forking some existing code). I
think minimal wikis are a cool hacker toy, but I wouldn't recommend
using one of those if you want on-technical users to contribute.
Mediawiki has a huge userbase and lots of features to make editing
easier. It's also already familiar to everyone in the OLPC and Sugar
Labs communities.

Anyway, it's up to you: since you're the one doing the work, you get to
choose the tools. Feel free to play with any idea on sunjammer (taking
into account security and stability, of course).


> My concern about moving to wiki.sl.o is that what little identity each
> local group has had might be gone. Also wiki.sl.o is very
> english-centric and not too friendly for a spanish non-technical user to
> find relevant information.

Agreed. sur.sugarlabs.org would keep the spanish-speaking community
together while avoiding excessive overlap and maintenance burden.


> Meanwhile, did we get the new server? I setup a few services on the
> server hosted by my friend in Switzerland, but that need proper backup:
> tareas.somosazucar.org (our very own bugtracker!)
> tests.somosazucar.org (an instance of Jenkins testing bot for testing
> Sugar Network Webui on each commit)
> consulta.somosazucar.org (a LimeSurvey instance for creating online
> surveys - still to be used)
>
> Would you consider letting us have a virtual machine to mirror/backup
> these and setup a clean wiki?

Oh, did I forget to tell you about it? Yes, our two new servers have
been in production for a while. We do have spare capacity to offer to
local labs. Please post a new thread on systems@ with your requirements.

-- 
 _ // Bernie Innocenti
 \X/  http://codewiz.org