[kde-community] Spam attack on wikis - comments needed!

[Myriam Schweingruber]

Hi all,

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 2:04 PM, Luigi Toscano <luigi.toscano at tiscali.it> wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 of July 2013 12:42:53 Anne Wilson wrote:

...

>> Now the questions:
>>
>> What would be your concerns if we implemented this?
>>
>> Would this stop you from registering as a contributor?
>>
>> Please add any other relevant comments.
>
> I'm an old time contributor (hi list! I'm mostly an Italian translator), and I
> think that:
> - an email is the really minimum amount of information required, also as point
> of contact and for accountability. When we translate PO files, we always put
> an email address. I was surprised (I discovered it during Akademy) that it was
> not required for wikis.
>
> - why don't require identity registration? I understand that the idea is to
> lower the threshold for new contributors, but identity is used also for other
> services (and it will be used more and more), and on the other side the
> registration shows a bit of interest in the community.


I am with Luigi here, requesting a valid email once for wiki
contributors is not too high a threshold, and it would show they are
really interested in contributing.

There is another argument in favor: we simply don't have the manpower
to clean out hundreds of spam comments and blocking spammers on a
daily basis, we would very much prefer to invest our time in actually
contributing to the wikis.

Having to handle spam just because some hypothetical contributors
doesn't want to disclose an email to a KDE server because they fear to
get spammed? That's a bit a snake biting its tail, and we active
contributors pay the bill for some hypothetical contributors, who can
very easily configure their mail application spam filter. Cleaning out
spam on the wiki is a hundred times more work, and I have yet to see
those hypothetical contributors actively helping with that.

I volunteer to help them configure their spam filters if needed :)

I remember the amount of work we had on the old Amarok wiki, we didn't
attract many contributors by keeping the doors wide open, but we sure
did get spammed a thousandfold, wasting our precious time...


Regards, Myriam

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