EmacsWiki: Emacs Wiki Administrators (original) (raw)

We fight WikiSpam day and night! 😊

Join The Team

You’re welcome to come help us out – just ask one of the existing administrators for an admin password. For the moment, AlexSchroeder is your best bet. You can find his email address on his name page.

The only real job we have is maintaining BannedContent, BannedRegexps and BannedHosts. These pages contain Perl regular expressions.

Current administrators:

• AlexSchroeder
• JimThompson
• bkhl
• StefanKamphausen
• DavidHansen
• StephenEglen
• NascifAbousalhNeto
• PierreGaston
• YoniRabkinKatzenell
• XavierMaillard
• EmilioLopes
• DavidAndel
• DrewAdams
• LennartBorgman
• NeilSmithline (proving, yet again, that he should stop complaining before he gets himself volunteered)
• jlf
• XueFuqiao
• ChrisLeyon
• AndyStewart
• KeiranHarcombe
• Shreyas Ragavan
• Tunapunk

The Power of Administration

The powers of an administrator:

1. Lock and unlock the entire site in case of an attack.
2. Rollback all changes from a certain point in time (the result are a gazillion changes which can be reverted like ordinary changes).
3. Search and replace over the entire site (the result are a gazillion changes which can be reverted like ordinary changes).
4. Bans and locks have no effect on administrators.
5. Maintain BannedHosts, BannedContent and BannedRegexps to ban hostnames, IP numbers, or page content using regular expression.
6. Lock and unlock pages.
7. Change the list of URL abbreviations by modifying the InterMap page.
8. Change the list of sites connected via NearLinks by modifying the NearMap page
9. Run maintenance at any time.

Rollback Spam and Vandalism

Here’s a suggested workflow:

1. bookmark a link to RecentChanges including minor edits and rollbacks
2. click on the history link of suspicious edits
3. click the appropriate Rollback button

Next, consider what just happened:

If spammers added links, you will be presented with a list of these URLs and a text input field where you can provide a regular expression matching anything obvious such as “viagra”. Click on the Ban! button to add this regular expression to the BannedContent page.

If vandals made other changes to the page, you might have to ban their host name or IP number. Click on the Ban contributors link and click the appropriate Ban! button. This will add an appropriate regular expression to the BannedHosts page.

Banning Hosts

You can always ban host names or IP numbers. The easiest way to do that is to visit a page that has recently been vandalized. Let us assume that somebody has already rolled back the change (as described above) but no change was made to the BannedHosts page. There is a special admin link to facilitate this, however. Here’s a suggested workflow:

1. click the Administration link at the bottom of the page that has been vandalized recently
2. click the Ban contributors link
3. click the appropriate Ban! button

The “Ban contributors” page lists IP numbers, host names and usernames used. The IP numbers and host names that aren’t banned have a nice, big Ban! button next to them. Clicking the button adds a new entry to BannedHosts.

Note that these entries are probably useless against spammers that keep changing their IP numbers. You have to write a regular expression to catch them all by hand, unfortunately.

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