[Open-bio-l] OpenID working again

[Peter Cock]

On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Andy Jenkinson
<andy.jenkinson at ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
> On 19 Apr 2013, at 10:02, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 9:46 AM, Andy Jenkinson
>> <andy.jenkinson at ebi.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> Hi Chris,
>>>
>>> It all works on biodas.org…
>>>
>>> Except I am suspicious of the number of accounts created today:
>>> http://www.biodas.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges
>>>
>>> I notice the captcha is, shall we say, not too troubling.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Andy
>>
>> Thanks for that heads up - I checked (most of?) the other wiki
>> pages and touch wood none of them have been hit like that yet.
>> It may be that something is more open on BioDAS or your were
>> just unlucky.
>
> The wiki is uncontrollably full of spam from when this was a
> problem in the past, so it's probably on some list somewhere.
>
>> 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.

> 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.

Maybe we should go for moderation to create new accounts on
the BioDAS wiki and any others being hit hard by spammers?

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.

Peter