[Haskell-cafe] HaskellWiki spam

[Don Stewart]

markl:
> 
> On Jul 11, 2010, at 3:17 PM, Henk-Jan van Tuyl wrote:
> > There are hundreds of HaskellWiki users created, their names all start with "Buy" and their user pages contain spam. I suppose the antispam measures were reverted when a backup of the site was loaded. (B.T.W. the site still displays the old logo.)
> 
> Yikes!
> 
> I see that the Haskell wiki is running Media Wiki 1.5.4 from 2005.
> Current version is 1.15.2 from 2010. That five year period seems to
> include many significant anti-spam fixes and numerous patches for all
> sorts of vulnerabilities. Migrating through that many revisions might
> be painful, but should be doable.
> 

Precisely.

The back story:

    * Yale has hosted haskell.org for the past decade or more
    * The machine is old and hasn't been upgraded in a long time
    * The last MediaWiki update on the machine failed when the db
      couldn't migrated, due to old versions of Debian
    * We needed a new machine
    * haskell.org now has a new machine aquired with GSoC funds
    * This will run a modern MediaWiki
    * Work is now being done to migrate to the new home, and the new
      MediaWiki

Ian Lynagh is coordinating the work.

-- Don