Wiki upgrade to V1.19 LTS

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Gobberwart
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Wiki upgrade to V1.19 LTS

Unread post by Gobberwart » Wed Feb 05, 2014 8:31 pm

Since there's been a major spam issue with the wiki for a while now, I've done some research and decided that the best bang for buck upgrade path is to go from our existing version Mediawiki v1.16 (old and unsupported) to v1.19.11 LTS (long term support) which is a couple of versions old now but is officially supported until May 2015 so all half-decent extensions should continue to work until at least then without us needing to upgrade the server. Anything that doesn't isn't worth having in my opinion.

Apart from a bunch of new features and bugfixes which you can read about at the mediawiki site if you're so inclined (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Release_notes/1.19), the main benefits in terms of spam are:

1. Captcha works again. At this stage we're playing with a simple custom question/answer scenario on create account and page creation.

2. In case spam gets through, there's an extension called "Nuke" which lets admins perform bulk page deletes on recent changes, so no more tedious page-by-page deletions. Unfortunately, someone will still have to go back through anything that's dropped out of the "recent changes" list, but it'll solve the problem moving forward - although with a bit of luck the captcha should reduce the instances of spam anyway.

3. The other anti-spam extensions we had (bad-behaviour, spamblacklist etc.) have been upgraded to newer/better versions, so they should be more effective as well.

I've just spent the last four hours backing up, upgrading and testing the Wiki with the new version and from what I can see... so far so good. If you come across any issues, let me know here and I'll see what I can do.

Hopefully that does the trick.

Now, I'm off to work on the actual game :)
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Topic author
Gobberwart
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Posts: 3396
Joined: Wed Jun 20, 2007 12:41 am
Location: Melbourne, Australia
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Re: Wiki upgrade to V1.19 LTS

Unread post by Gobberwart » Thu Feb 06, 2014 3:29 pm

4. I've also added the "ConfirmAccount" extension, so nobody can create an account without approval from someone with an elevated level of access (what's called a "bureaucrat" in Mediawiki). Since nobody can create page without having an account, that should keep the spamming little bastards under control for sure.
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