Trent

Trent Fisher

I discovered Wikis around 2003, I have no idea why it took me so long (coincidentally, WardCunningham's wife was my professor in college).

I am using UseMod at work. I have applied many patches and made a whole slew of changes, including:

• WikiPatches/TableOfContentsForUnnumberedHeadings (with a minor fix to enclose the TOC in a div)
• WikiPatches/OrderedListNumbering
• Plugin interface, such that {{module params...}} will run the "module" perl function.
• Customization to allow custom numbering of numbered lists.
• Added edit totals at the end of RecentChanges (helpful for measuring different peoples contributions at work)
• WikiPatches/AutoSignature (with mods)
• Record search terms in a file.
• WikiBugs/Anonymous111Registered
• Image inclusion mechanism inspired by CWICK
• WikiBugs/VariableParseParasYieldsOddOutput
• An option to add a search box to the top of the page.
• WikiPatches/SearchWithOperators (plus my own fixes)
• Many fixes to upload
• Formatting and CSS fixes (add many DIVs and remove a lot of stray
  and <p> tags). Basically, I'm trying to push the formatting details into CSS.
• WikiPatches/BacklinksImproved
• Add a "what links here" link to the goto bar
• Surrounding a table cell with = (like headings) will turn that cell to a <th>.
• Spam patches listed below

I have also started using UseMod on my personal web sites, after trying various other software. I came back to UseMod mainly because I know Perl very well (I installed version 2 on a VAX!) and I knew the guts of UseMod and could make it do whatever I wanted faster that I could figure out other systems (like MediaWiki or Drupal), and it could be deployed easily at my web hosting provider.

I have moved my code to here: http://code.google.com/p/usemodwikihack/

My web pages are at http://www.veganmilitia.org and http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~trent

Thoughts on Spam

One of my Wikis (http://www.veganmilitia.org/bcm/) got hammered by spammers, so I wanted to figure out strategies for dealing with such vermin. I read WikiSpam and some other pages, and found the whole discussion very confusing. After some thought I more clearly organized the various anti-spam strategies, and noted what needed to be done to UseMod to implement those strategies:

• Remove spam after it gets in:
  • Revert changes (but there needs to be an easier way)
  • Spam removal robots
• Prevent it from getting in:
  • Locking the site
  • Locking pages
  • Ban hosts from editing (existing UseModWiki 1.0 feature, once AdminPasswd? is set)
  • Ban content (WikiPatches/BannedContent, though I modified it to allow admins past the check)
  • Surge protection. (WikiPatches/SurgeProtector is a patch against 0.92)
  • Prevent non-registered users from editing (WikiPatches/NoAnonyms)
  • Captcha. A graphical one would require extra SW to generate the images (which many web hosts, including mine, do not have), or maybe questions and answers... I may code up the latter.
• Prevent spam from being meaningful (to the spammers):
  • Add nofollow tags on history pages (WikiPatches/RobotsNoFollow)
• Attack spammers:
  • Devalue spam keywords on search engines, see http://www.chongqed.org
  • Include bogus email addresses to "poison" spammers email databases (WikiPatches/SpambotPoison, though I implemented it differently)
  • Include "trap" email addresses, which can be used to augment spammer lists for the last two items.
  • Teergrube the edit submission... maybe delay 'n' seconds per external link? Or maybe integrate with surge protection, i.e. repeated posts will cause progressively longer pauses. Or maybe delay 'n' seconds for every external link.