[Rubygems-developers] Wiki Spam -- GRRRRRR!

[Jim Weirich]

Twenty minutes ago I discovered 30 pages of Wiki spam on the RubyGems wiki 
pages.  I just got done cleaning this up.  This is the third time this week.  
Shoot, they even spammed us on Christmas day.  Grrrrrrrrr

We have lost content on the wiki from excessive spam.  It is costing us 
developer time.  And it is doing serious damage to my mental health.  

Something has got to be done.  We are rather limited in what we can do with 
the RubyForge wikis.  It is an old version of UseMod without RSS, and no 
access to the Ban lists. And the RubyForge conversion to RuWiki is still a 
ways off (heavens, Ruwiki doesn't even support viewing history yet... that 
would make spam 10 times more annoying than it is now).

Here are some ideas.

(1) Move the wiki off of RubyForge and setup a tarpit like the one on 
RubyGarden.

(2) Make the RubyForge a shadow wiki.  The real wiki exists elsewhere in a 
secret location and we automatically update the public shadow wiki from the 
real, but hidden, one.

(3) Abandon the wiki for documentation purposes.  Convert the existing docs 
RDOC, or Textile or Markdown and generate static web pages.  If we need user 
feedback, put it one small wiki somewhere else.

(4) Give up and start coding in Python.

(OK, I'm not serious about the last one).

If someone else has some more ideas, I'd love to hear them.

-- 
-- Jim Weirich    jim at weirichhouse.org     http://onestepback.org
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"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, 
not tried it." -- Donald Knuth (in a memo to Peter van Emde Boas)