User talk:MikeMol
Spam
Spam attack starting; time to lockdown the wiki? --IanOsgood 23:51, 9 October 2007 (MDT)
- I've disabled anonymous editing again. I'd enable captchas for anonymous edits, but I really need to get some sleep. Anyway, I've added 'block' to the Bureaucrats permissions, so you can IP block the IPs committing the defacements. Keep the blocks short for now; two weeks at most. --Short Circuit 00:03, 10 October 2007 (MDT)
- Is it really spam ? Or just someone testing out new bots ? Do you have access to the headers those clients use ? --CrashandDie 09:00, 10 October 2007 (MDT)
- They look like random strings intended for indexing by search engines. If I were doing that, it would be to test the effectiveness of my bot by letting it run for a couple weeks, then searching for the search queries. There have been contests where the sole purpose is to put one's "signature" on the most websites; Wikis just happen to be an easy target for defacement.
- The thing is, they can test their bots this way all they want; Only if they try to place a URL will they hit a CAPTCHA--at which point, their bot will fail. I'm not going to mess with the CAPTCHA settings until I see URLs start showing up in spam/defacements. Tonight, I'll grant anonymous edit permissions again, and we'll see where we are with just the bans. --Short Circuit 10:11, 10 October 2007 (MDT)
- Is it really spam ? Or just someone testing out new bots ? Do you have access to the headers those clients use ? --CrashandDie 09:00, 10 October 2007 (MDT)
- 3 spams in 1 day, not so bad, and quite manageable ! --CrashandDie 11:34, 11 October 2007 (MDT)
- It looked like it was getting worse. Either someone's got a botnet going out and defacing wikis, or someone's running a daily defacement script through Tor. I upped the captcha settings so that anonymous user page edits would get captchas, regardless of content. --Short Circuit 21:15, 15 October 2007 (MDT)
- 3 spams in 1 day, not so bad, and quite manageable ! --CrashandDie 11:34, 11 October 2007 (MDT)
- Good. It might not be really convenient, but it's probably a good thing. Plus, today we had a "real" spamlink page created, so it's better to prevent. Thanks ! --CrashandDie 11:17, 16 October 2007 (MDT)
By the way...Both of you should have "block" privileges as of last night. Feel free to use them when you see defacements and obvious linkspams. (I don't care so much about topical links.) --Short Circuit 10:19, 10 October 2007 (MDT)
Python indentation
Mike, please don't convert Python example code using <pre> to leading whitespace. Such code can not be copied to a Python module without extra work, and you can not easily add code to the wiki if you have to add leading indentation to the code.
This is also true for other languages, but in other language you can easily reformat the code in many editors, but in Python the code will simply not run with incorrect indentation. Using pre tags is much better solution for code (maybe not for html :-) )
Example - copy the line bellow and paste it in the Python interpreter:
print 'bad indentation'
>>> print 'bad indentation'
File "<stdin>", line 1
print 'bad indentation'
^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
- Ah. Sorry about that. I knew Python depended on indentation for scope, but I didn't realize you couldn't have a leading space in all cases. --Short Circuit 12:42, 21 October 2007 (MDT)