Re: [gNewSense-users] the community and aging packages

[Sam Geeraerts]

The captcha and Editor page were introduced to combat the large amounts
of spam we've had in the past. Web server logs show that they're
effective and necessary, because there's still an excessive number of
spam attempts, but they're not getting through. Well, not completely
anyway: the spambot is not smart enough to get past the Editor page,
but it is smart enough to occasionally solve the captcha (70 new user
accounts out of 30000 attempts per day).

You're right that the answers to the captcha aren't readily available.
I've been hesitant to put them on the wiki because that would make it
easier for the spammer to find the answers. I've added them to the FAQ
[1] now. Hopefully it won't increase the spammer's success rate.

MoinMoin suggests using a username of the format FirstnameLastname (as 1
word), but you're free to choose any name you like.

The Support page is one of the core pages of the website and editing is
reserved for a select group (see #acl line at the top of the source). I
got the impression that the !GNewSense group is more of a community
thing than a support channel. May I suggest you add the group's
information to the Communities [3] page? I've already added a header
for non-local communities.

[1] http://www.gnewsense.org/FAQ
[2] http://www.gnewsense.org/Support?action=raw
[3] http://www.gnewsense.org/Communities

P.S.: if the wiki is slow at times, also blame the spammers
https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?42280

Op Sun, 11 Jan 2015 12:34:13 -0500
schreef Bob Jonkman <address@hidden>:

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> 
> Sorry, the barrier for participation is too high.
> 
> What should have been a single, simple page edit has now become a
> requirement for an account on the Wiki (OK, that's reasonable), an
> obscure requirement to add myself to an Editor page (I participate on
> many community Wikis; this is the first time I've run into that). Now
> there also seems to be a requirement to join the Developer's mailing
> list, and another to join the Savannah project site.
> 
> It turns out that the Wiki signup page asked for my first and last
> names (reasonable), but that generated a user name of [[Bob Jonkman]],
> with a space.  Editing the Editor's page and my home page is nearly
> impossible, since the Preview button doesn't deal well with the
> embedded space. I munged the URL to use %20, but after two or three
> edits that becomes too onerous. And the Support page is still
> "immutable".
> 
> The Captcha is one of the strongest I've seen, requiring detailed
> knowledge of the gNewSense project (that's reasonable). However, the
> questions can't be readily answered from information on the wiki.
> There is no project history page to research the question "What wiki
> software was used before MoinMoin" (I found a casual mention in a blog
> post to PMWiki), and to answer the question "Who is the maintainer of
> Linux-Libre" I had to turn to Wikipedia since Alexandre Oliva is not
> listed on the gNewSense Credits page. And it seems ".odt" is not the
> correct answer to "What's the common file extension for OpenDocument
> format text documents?" Punctuation? Capitalization?
> 
> So, while I'm happy to contribute to gNewSense in a casual, trivial
> way this has just become too difficult.