Last modified: 2012-12-21 01:16:13 UTC

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Bug 9034 - Bundle anti-spam extensions in distribution packages
Bundle anti-spam extensions in distribution packages
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Product: MediaWiki
Classification: Unclassified
General/Unknown (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Low enhancement with 1 vote (vote)
: ---
Assigned To: Nobody - You can work on this!
:
Depends on: 10596
Blocks:
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2007-02-20 03:03 UTC by Jason Spiro
Modified: 2012-12-21 01:16 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments

Description Jason Spiro 2007-02-20 03:03:12 UTC
MediaWiki does not come with good anti-spam protection included in the source
tarball.  It needs to.

Why?

Because, out of the top 10 PageRanked MediaWikis[1], 7 of them require logging
in to edit, and that's bad:  "People often naively suggest lock-down as best
solution to wiki spam. It does reduce spam, but it is a poor solution (and a
Lazy Solution), because you are introducing something which massively
inconveniences real users. Having to choose a username and password is a big
turn off for many people. The wiki way is to be freely and openly editable. This
'soft security' approach is one of the key strengths of the wiki concept. Are
you going to let the spammers spoil that?" --[2]

To get more wikis to be freely editable, MediaWiki would need to have spam
protection built in.

[1] http://www.wikihow.com/ , http://microformats.org/wiki ,
http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/ , http://wiki.43folders.com ,
http://wikitravel.org/wiki/en , http://wiki.laptop.org/ ,
http://wiki.mozilla.org , http://www.knoppix.net/wikinew ,
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki , http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/

[2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Anti-spam_Features
Comment 1 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2007-02-20 16:43:10 UTC
It might be time to start packaging a few extensions as part of core MediaWiki,
yeah.  In particular, since a lot of people expect the same functionality as
Wikipedia, maybe we should include all the extensions Wikipedia uses, at least
those that consist of a few PHP files and at most one or two *small* images:
those will compress to negligible size anyway, so why not?  We can include some
lines at the bottom of LocalSettings.php commented out by default, with comments
indicating how to enable them.

Extensions are nice because they modularize functionality (which can give slight
speedups to those who want it, remove unnecessary expansions of wikisyntax,
etc.), but there's no reason not to include some of the most useful/popular in
the default tarball for easier installation.  Potentially we could even move
some stuff from core, like the less useful core parser functions or <gallery>,
to "extensions" that are enabled by default.
Comment 2 Jason Spiro 2007-02-20 21:33:45 UTC
(In reply to comment #1)
> It might be time to start packaging a few extensions as part of core MediaWiki,
> yeah.

Do all the useful anti-spam features come packaged in extension form, or are
they enabled in other ways?

[snip]
> We can include some
> lines at the bottom of LocalSettings.php commented out by default, with comments
> indicating how to enable them.

I propose the anti-spam functionality be on by default. :-)
Comment 3 Rob Church 2007-02-20 21:38:29 UTC
$wgSpamRegex is core; the Spam Blacklist is an extension.
Comment 4 Rob Church 2007-06-05 18:59:09 UTC
Note the existence of http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam, which offers a tiered guide to dealing with the problem of spam using escalating measures of protection.

It would be a good idea to bundle the Spam Blacklist with distribution packages.
Comment 5 Jason Spiro 2007-07-05 23:18:18 UTC
(In reply to comment #4)
> Note the existence of http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam,
> which offers a tiered guide to dealing with the problem of spam using
> escalating measures of protection.

Cool.

> It would be a good idea to bundle the Spam Blacklist with distribution
> packages.

What tool do you use to make the MediaWiki .tar.gz packages you release on www.mediawiki.org?  Is the tool in SVN?  Could I send a patch to the tool to include the extension preinstalled in your .tar.gz packages?
Comment 6 Brion Vibber 2007-07-06 13:03:03 UTC
svn and tar.

That's not relevant -- what's needed is improvements to the installer script to be able to enable any bundled extensions during installation.
Comment 7 Jason Spiro 2007-07-06 15:45:59 UTC
(In reply to comment #6)
...
> That's not relevant -- what's needed is improvements to the installer script to
> be able to enable any bundled extensions during installation.

Oh.  Then I'm taking the liberty of renaming this bug from "Bundle anti-spam extensions in distribution packages" to "Please let install.php auto-enable extensions bundled in a MediaWiki tarball".  Or was that a mistake and I should have filed a new bug instead?  If so, feel free to rename the bug back.
Comment 8 Aryeh Gregor (not reading bugmail, please e-mail directly) 2007-07-06 17:54:35 UTC
install.php being able to enable bundled extensions is necessary but not sufficient for this bug to be properly fixed.
Comment 9 Jason Spiro 2007-07-15 22:50:12 UTC
(In reply to comment #8)
> install.php being able to enable bundled extensions is necessary but not
> sufficient for this bug to be properly fixed.

OK.  So I now filed Bug 10596 (Please let installer auto-enable extensions bundled in a MediaWiki tarball) and made this bug depend on it.
Comment 10 Jason Spiro 2008-01-09 01:56:09 UTC
Please bundle SpamBlacklist.  Here is an extension config.php you may use.  Public domain.  No warranty.

<?php
$extension_config = array();

$extension_config[] = array(
    'name' => 'SpamBlacklist',
    'label' => 'SpamBlacklist',
    'description' => 'Click here to install the <a href="http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist">SpamBlacklist</a> extension. It downloads and installs a blacklist of websites that users of your wiki will be forbidden to link to.',
    'file' => 'SpamBlacklist/SpamBlacklist.php',
    'config' => '',
    'download' => 'http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SpamBlacklist'
);

Note that you will be unable bundle it till Bug 10596 is fixed.
Comment 11 Chad H. 2009-07-23 03:06:20 UTC
Moving this to an extension request.
Comment 12 Chad H. 2009-07-30 19:14:08 UTC
Moving back to MW -> general/unknown per requests elsewhere. It's not really an extension issue ;-)
Comment 13 Mike.lifeguard 2009-07-30 19:28:33 UTC
This should use the blacklist on Meta. Better yet, SpamBlacklist would be rewritten before we start bundling up experimental extensions - see bug 4459.
Comment 14 Sam Reed (reedy) 2012-02-09 22:36:06 UTC
ConfirmEdit is bundled.. Anything else can be bundled with reasonable consensus

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