Zsh wiki and spam

Zsh wiki and spam

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

Hi,

I'm an old and new zsh user, having recently started using the shell for
interactive sessions again after a long time with ksh88/ksh93. As a new
user, I naturally went for information about how to use and customize
the shell according to my needs, and I saw that the manual mentioned a
Wiki ("http://www.zsh-wiki.org/").

Having looked at the Wiki pages for a while I determined that they
were largely unmaintained and suffered from spam edits (mostly French
and Indonesian language links and text, but also a few English spam
links). I went through most (all?) pages and removed the spam (I'm the
"kusalananda" user) only to have some of my edits immediately reverted
by spammers ("justgerardz", "justgerrardz").

Is the Wiki dead? In that case, maybe the reference to it should be
removed from the manuals?

Thanks,

-- 
:: Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri, Bioinformatics Developer, BILS,
:: Uppsala University, Sweden
::----------------------------------------------------------------------
:: My other car is a cdr.

Re: Zsh wiki and spam

[Oliver Kiddle]

Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> I went through most (all?) pages and removed the spam (I'm the
> "kusalananda" user) only to have some of my edits immediately reverted
> by spammers ("justgerardz", "justgerrardz").

I've e-mailed the administrator of the wiki so hopefully he can block
those users. It's a constant battle and I don't think there are any easy
solutions.

That reverting seems to be being done by some automated script bot. The
two similarly named accounts you list were even fighting each other over
a few pages - install:start for example.

I suspect this particular script is only capable of reverting back one
edit. A few months back I removed spam and improved a page as a single
edit and the script just reverted to the last spam page.

On some pages, I've just made two changes: first to revert the spam
and then add some arbitrary changes. I'm hoping that doing it as two
edits will stop it reverting the spam at least for a short while.

> Is the Wiki dead? In that case, maybe the reference to it should be
> removed from the manuals?

There's plenty of scope for the content to be improved but it isn't
dead.

Oliver

Re: Zsh wiki and spam

[Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri]

On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 12:30:02AM +0200, Oliver Kiddle wrote:
> Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri wrote:
> > I went through most (all?) pages and removed the spam (I'm the
> > "kusalananda" user) only to have some of my edits immediately reverted
> > by spammers ("justgerardz", "justgerrardz").
> 
> I've e-mailed the administrator of the wiki so hopefully he can block
> those users. It's a constant battle and I don't think there are any easy
> solutions.
> 
> That reverting seems to be being done by some automated script bot. The
> two similarly named accounts you list were even fighting each other over
> a few pages - install:start for example.
> 
> I suspect this particular script is only capable of reverting back one
> edit. A few months back I removed spam and improved a page as a single
> edit and the script just reverted to the last spam page.
> 
> On some pages, I've just made two changes: first to revert the spam
> and then add some arbitrary changes. I'm hoping that doing it as two
> edits will stop it reverting the spam at least for a short while.

I've checked, it doesn't matter. The bot (or whatever it is) just
overwrites the page with its copy of the contents.

Removing the spam accounts would help, for a while. Another idea is to
disallow edits without comments, and to make sure all accounts have
valid mail addresses. The next step would be to designate an active zsh
user or users as administrators that are able to grant editing rights to
others.

In its current form, the Wiki is useless since the bots keeps reverting
changes.

Cheers,
Andreas

> > Is the Wiki dead? In that case, maybe the reference to it should be
> > removed from the manuals?
> 
> There's plenty of scope for the content to be improved but it isn't
> dead.
> 
> Oliver
> 

-- 
:: Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri, Bioinformatics Developer, BILS,
:: Uppsala University, Sweden
::----------------------------------------------------------------------
:: My other car is a cdr.