[Haskell-cafe] Re: The site has been exploited (again)

[Gwern Branwen]

On Sun, Jul 11, 2010 at 2:28 PM, Mike Dillon <mike at embody.org> wrote:
> begin Mike Dillon quotation:
>> Being that there is only one active admin on the Haskell.org wiki
>> (User:Ashley Y), I believe the fact that this page is editable by any
>> user is a policy decision to allow the community to contribute. The
>> page could be protected, but then only two administrators could edit it
>> (assuming John Peterson decided to become active again after two years
>> of not working on the wiki):
>>
>>     http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3AListusers&group=sysop
>>
>> As for whether or not moving this particular wiki to a Haskell-based
>> solution would be a good idea, I don't see it being a win. I don't know
>> of any Haskell-based wikis that support MediaWiki syntax, so the effort
>> would involve converting all the existing content to some other format.
>> Being that MediaWiki's syntax is the most widespread wiki syntax at the
>> moment, I don't see how that would do anything but make it harder for
>> people to contribute.
>
> One more thing. On a wiki with active administrators, this user would
> have been blocked. That hasn't happened. The last block was in August
> 2009:
>
>    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/?title=Special%3ALog&type=block
>
> If there is not someone regularly watching the wiki at all times, it
> would probably be prudent to protect some of the higher profile pages
> once there are more admins able to edit them.
>
> -md

Ashley has made me admin; I've spent the last 1.5 hours deleting all
the vandalism and indef blocking the accounts. I have Recent Changes
in my RSS reader, so hopefully in the future there will be no greater
than 24 hours delay before vandalism is dealt with. A MW upgrade will
also help (eg. currently checkuser* seems to be unavailable).

* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser

-- 
gwern