Thu, Oct 20, 2005
Wiki Standards
#
At WikiSym 2005, we had a BoF on WikiStandards, organized by
StephanSchmidt, coauthor of SnipSnap. Discussion was spirited, as you
might expect, but I think we accomplished a great deal. (JY4)
We began by reviewing a list of things that could be standardized,
which was old hat for a lot of folks who've been thinking about this
stuff for a while. We quickly decided to move on, because we weren't
going to come to agreement in any short period of time. So we decided
to agree on a NeutralSpace where we could have the discussion. (JY5)
That discussion was more controversial than I expected. MeatballWiki
has been the primary forum for the Wiki community to talk about
interoperability, and I and others didn't see any reason for that to
change. Some folks felt very strongly about WikiSym being more
neutral, and so we ultimately decided to have our standardization
discussions there. My guess is that a lot of innovation will continue
to happen on Meatball and other places, while the drafting and
discussion of standards will happen at WikiSym. (JY6)
So here's the deal. If you're interested in WikiStandards -- and that
should be everyone in the Wiki community -- subscribe to the
wiki-standards mailing list. There's already been some excellent
discussion, and I think we're going to see some real specs soon. (JY7)
/tech/wiki |
Posted at 11:37pm
Fighting WikiSpam: Eaton and Shared Blacklists
#
WikiSym 2005 was awesome. Massive props to DirkRiehle and the
program committee for throwing an outstanding event and drawing tons
of great, great people. With WikiMania last August and WikiSym this
past week, the Wiki community is really starting to gel. And it's
about time. Can you believe Wikis are 10 years old? (JXD)
Now the bad news: I walked away with some action items. How do I get
myself into these messes?! (JXE)
The first action item can be traced back to an ad hoc meeting that
happened at WikiMania regarding WikiSpam. On August 6, a group of Wiki
developers -- me (PurpleWiki), AlexSchroeder (OddMuse), BrionVibber
(MediaWiki), ThomasWaldmann (MoinMoin), SvenDowideit (TWiki),
JanneJalkanen (JSPWiki) -- along with JohnBreslin and JochenTopf, got
together to discuss ways we could collaborate on fighting WikiSpam.
Our goal was to identify the simplest possible first step and not to
get mired in process discussions. (JXF)
Since all of us were already maintaining URL blacklists, we decided to
merge them and host it as a SourceForge project. We agreed on a
standard format (which I'll document and post soon), and we agreed to
send our respective lists to Alex, who already has scripts to slice,
dice, and merge. (JXG)
One of my action items then was to create the SourceForge project. I
did that immediately, but for some reason, the project was rejected.
Thus began a month-long go-around with SourceForge support where I
tried to discover why they had rejected the proposal. In the end, the
project was approved, and I never got an answer as to why it was
rejected in the first place. At that point, I was mired in other
work, and so I never followed up. (JXH)
WikiSym was the kick in the butt I needed to follow-up. On Sunday,
SunirShah hosted an antispam
workshop, which about 40 people attended. First, Sunir reviewed
techniques (many of which are listed at MeatBall:WikiSpam). Then we
broke out. (JXI)
In my breakout, I described what we had agreed on at WikiMania. Then
PeterKaminski described a very cute idea he had for making it easy to
fight WikiSpam. In a nutshell, Peter suggested we write a simple
drop-in replacement CGI wrapper that would filter a POST payload for
spam and call the real CGI script -- be it a Wiki, a blog, or anything
else -- if the payload were spam-free. Such a wrapper would enable
users to install spam-protection for any CGI script without having to
write a single line of code and without having to do any complex
configuration. It wouldn't require any special access to your web
server, since it would just be a CGI script. And you could easily add
other spam-fighting measures, such as throttling and IP blacklists. (JXJ)
I thought it was a brilliant idea. So Peter and I sat down
afterwards and whipped it up. Took about an hour. It's called
Eaton, it works, and
it's PublicDomain. PeterKaminski has already
blogged about it, and
there's some important commentary there from JayAllen, the creator of
MT-Blacklist. (JXK)
It's a proof of concept, and it won't scale. It can and should be
improved, and I'd encourage folks to do so. Nevertheless, it's
pretty cool. Bravo to Peter for a very clever idea. (JXL)
By the way, the first person to figure out the origins of the name
"Eaton" wins a cookie. (JXM)
/tech/wiki |
Posted at 1:27am
