[Pdx-pm] there's kwiki maintenance and then there's kwiki maintenance

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 12:19:00AM -0700, Eric Wilhelm wrote:
> I could take kwiki or leave it for this usage.  

I use Wiki as a way of maintaining my websites.  The biggest 
problem with them is that they are spammer magnets;  on one
site, I have 20 spammers signing up per week.  The attacks are
only semiautomated - I have captchas and security questions,
and they are answered, apparently by Real Human Beings working
for $2 per day in the Phillipines.

The signups are useless - all my content is locked down to a
subset of approved editors - but it does not stop somebody
from evaluating the security questions and training the bots. 
In one case, I modified Kwiki to ask an arithmetic question,
something that needed a calculator to solve - they apparently
modified the spambot to include a calculator, or used a human,
just for my website.  This is deeply disturbing.

Wiki works if you have a community so active that dealing with
the spammers is ten minutes of work a day divided by a large
number of participants, thus a few minutes per year per participant.
Otherwise, my approach would be a "mirrored wiki", with edits 
occurring on a passworded, non-public site, with content mirrored
to an immutable read-only public site.  Perhaps the IP addresses
of edit attempts on the public site could be sent to blacklists.

Given the horrendously unsupported nature of Kwiki, I moved my
websites to moinmoin (python, horrors).  Moin has an active 
community, a better security model, works out of the box, and
the plugins are for esoteric added features, such as mathematics
markup.  While I would prefer an all-Perl solution, I must run
web-connected python for Mailman and other tools.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs