Reading Wiki: A disaster waiting to happen?, I got an idea to add to my Perfect Wiki list. Why don’t wikis have a transaction like system? If someone wants to attack a wiki, why not make it more difficult for him to do that, and easier for the administrator to undo it, maybe with a few clicks?
I think a wiki should record everything a user does in a single session as a single transaction, in extreme cases add an approval system for each one, the administrator can then undo everything a certain user has done with just on click, “Undo” and the wiki rolls back to a state before vandalism.
Cool, huh? My list keeps growing more and more.
Comments (4)
My Wiki (http://www.wormus.com/leakytap/) is spammed to death… the neat thing is that for every f***ing spammer there are a couple people who are willing to delete the spam… so it has gained a life of it’s own, and except for pages which I WANT to have control over I’ve left it on its own. Keeping up with deleting all the spam myself is impossible.
I am planning on upgrading though…
Well, PmWiki doesn’t seem to have easy ACL support, and it’s probably famous enough to have automated scripts that can spam any PmWiki wiki.
Hopefully, we won’t have to face wiki spam on Codeflakes.
How do you address the challenge when there are thousands of scripts doing a automated attack posting thousands of entries each from hundreds of machines?
Well, DDoS attacks are difficult to cope with, but there are general patterns to them. I think it is possible, althought very difficult, to add some AI to “the perfect wiki”, where it can detect thousands of scripts trying to vandalize. I don’t think even Wikipedia is as busy as DDoS.
Maybe the other solution would be to simply revert to a specific date and lose all new changes, not very nice, but still works.
Probably Captcha might help in eliminating automted registration too.