SPUG: spugwiki defaced

[Andrew Sweger]

I'm sharing my reply with the SPUG list as others may have similar
questions.

On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Tim Maher wrote:

> Why doesn't that also mean that anyone could reinstate the defaced
> page too?

Anyone can and may (and probably will). It would be no different than
someone reverting a page to an extremely old version with incorrect
information or one that was accidently damaged while editing and
subsequently corrected in the revision history.

> Did you remove it from the RCS database?

I did not. I could easily go in and "outdate" the offending revision, but
that depends on me to police the system and determine what qualifies. This
is not something I'm willing to do without wads of cash being shoved into
my eager hands. I feel that the policing of Wiki's is a community
responsibility. If a Wiki becomes littered with graffiti or a message
board for unwelcome behavior and the community can't or won't maintain it,
then the need for that particular Wiki has passed. (I have different
comments regarding the rise of bot-scripts that spray spam on Wiki's and
blogs.)

The front page was replaced with, what I assume is Portuguese, "Eu estive
aki". My Portuguese skill is non-existent, but could this possibly
translate to "I stow here" (estivar = to stow; aki a misspelling of aqui =
here)? But then I'd think it should be, "Eu estivo aqui," but that would
make more sense as maybe, "Eu armazeno aqui." Who knows? That IP address
isn't welcome at my server for now. (I mostly used the English-Portuguese
and Portuguese-English Freedict dictionaries and a basic understanding of
Spanish language mechanics. And iptables to block the IP in question.)

-- 
Andrew B. Sweger -- The great thing about multitasking is that several
                                things can go wrong at once.