Re: Re[2]: FOSDEM 2006 - Saturday dinner

[MJ Ray]

comrade@obverse.com.au
> On Sat, Nov 19, 2005 at 12:32:39PM +0000, MJ Ray wrote:
> > See http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?AntiSpam
> > for some possible ideas. I don't know which are available
> > for mediawiki, but mediawiki is hard to edit anyway.
> 
> It's about as easy as any other wiki, IMHO. The big issue is
> getting writers and structurers involved, not really how many specific
> clicks are required or which particular syntax is more "efficient" or
> "easier".

MediaWiki is not a very good wiki because it complicates a
simple idea with non-wiki markup and lots of extra concepts
which aren't really necessary for a project information site
but might be for something big like, say, an encyclopaedia.

The particular installation also seemed to have other problems
which were locking out some users. It's been upgraded recently,
so maybe it works again now.

> Or are you talking about modifying MediaWiki? There's a big community
> out there, which is a pretty good reason to use it - someone else must
> have this itch well-scratched by now ;-)

Well, that too: "The MediaWiki codebase is large and ugly"
according to its own web site and I don't find it particularly
easy to hack. It was advocated by Stefan Urbanek, Alex Perez,
Gregory John Casamento and Quentin Mathé so I look to
them to maintain it or find someone else to do so.

As to the solution being out there: can you find it? The AntiSpam
features listed on mediawiki's web site lag behind other wikis,
maybe because its codebase is large and ugly to hack on.
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features

> I recall that one of the main reasons we moved to MediaWiki (and lost
> access to all the old content - search etc no longer works on the old
> one, many links fail etc) was to improve our ability to control
> spammers.

To be fair, that wasn't claimed in the proposal that I remember:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gnustep-webmasters/2004-12/msg00009.html
but maybe it was mentioned elsewhere.

Anyone got a GNUstepWeb Wiki?

-- 
MJ Ray - personal email, see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Work: http://www.ttllp.co.uk/  irc.oftc.net/slef  Jabber/SIP ask