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Great news, boys and girls!
10-28-2014, 02:23 PM
Search is fully restored - We now have a completely functional in wiki search engine again, and new pages will be automatically added, big thanks goes to John Lewis for riding herd on the search server until it fully indexed our wiki. (it was BIG) Poor guy lost a lot of sleep and sanity getting the job done, so if you see him, buy the poor man a beer, he earned it.
Spammers have just been epically screwed - We have a custom abuse filter that will simply reject any edits made by any user with less than five edits that tries to add an external link to anything. Users will not be blocked (to avoid screwing over innocent newbies), and a note has been added to the New User Message template. Please report any other issues to me in the Tech Wishlist and Bug Reports forum or on my talk page.
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Those are two very good things to hear! Thank you Geth and thanks to John as well!
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Wow. Three and a half hours since the last improbable new user to register on the wiki -- I think the filter's not only working, the spammers noticed immediatetly and gave up. Fantastic!
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Wow. Three and a half hours since the last improbable new user to register on the wiki -- I think the filter's not only working, the spammers noticed immediatetly and gave up. Fantastic!
Important Note; This will not stop spammers who DON'T include external links, such as those fools who spew screeds on BS no one cares about in word salad, but most of our spam (95%) has been link spammers, so it should be more managable.
Also, if anyone wants to troll spammers, do what I do: report the website links in the spam to Google so their page vanishes from Google Search results. I did this to those French spammers (who were spamming links to a blackhat SEO spamming tool site), so this is also a sweet method of achieving Death by Irony ![[Image: banana-dance.gif]](http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumimportfiles//banana-dance.gif) .
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I spoke too soon -- eight more since my post, but I see no signs that they've been able to post anything.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:I spoke too soon -- eight more since my post, but I see no signs that they've been able to post anything.
They can't 
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Special:AbuseLog
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Heh.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I noticed that one spammer even tried to create an article titled "Link Building: How to Promote Your Content as Link Bait". Are they getting sentient or something?
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Hm. Ran into a problem: http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips returns Quote:Internal error
[e2f60925] 2014-10-28 18:32:58: Fatal exception of type MWException
-- Bob
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...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Hm. Ran into a problem: http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Goodbye,_Mr._Chips returns
Quote:Internal error
[e2f60925] 2014-10-28 18:32:58: Fatal exception of type MWException
Fixed.
Some pages screw up horribly for some reason if a picture caption has link=PAGENAME in it for some weird reason, probably a bug in the parser an earlier MW release caused, so just hit edit and remove it, that will fix the issue.
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I can hit edit on a page that returns only an error? Didn't know that... cool.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
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So... after more than 24 hours of pretty much perfect performance, we're back to minimally-formatted pages with no menus? What's today's malfunction?
-- Bob
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...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:So... after more than 24 hours of pretty much perfect performance, we're back to minimally-formatted pages with no menus? What's today's malfunction?
We're fine, believe it or not. In fact, the issue is that we recently updated to the latest maintenance release of Mediawiki, and the page issues are probably caused by having old pages cached. It will clear us soon, or you can try purging the cache to speed things up.
Also, this is actually a good thing, as this version of MW closes a nasty memory leak that was causing our resource use to spike randomly.
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Oh, cool. I was busy handling other matters this morning, so I'll see what I get after I'm done with lunch, then. Thanks.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Maybe I should have asked before doing this but... it's done now.
"Tropers/Fast Eddie" is no longer a Wanted Page on ATT. If this is a problem, blame me.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Problem? I see no problem here.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Another Troper
Unregistered
Hay guys, did ya read this?
http://fucknotvtropes.tumblr.com/post/1 ... -ago-and-i
"Hello. I have seen your Tumblr a few weeks ago, and I agree. I'm a Troper, but I want to improve the site. I'm rich (no, seriously. Very rich) and I'm thinking of buying TV Tropes (because I can). I would like to ask you: How do you think Fast Eddie would sell the site, and what you'd like me to change it? I'm serious. I'm not a random anon troll or a red panda. Answer me sincerely. "
What if that was true?
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Even if it's true, it's unlikely. TVT is a constant flow of cash into Feddie's pocket, and the lengths to which he goes to protect that revenue stream from any threat real or imagined demonstrate that he's not going to give it up easily, even for a huge lump sum. After all, advertising is the gift that keeps on giving, where a sale is once and only once.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Even if it's true, it's unlikely. TVT is a constant flow of cash into Feddie's pocket, and the lengths to which he goes to protect that revenue stream from any threat real or imagined demonstrate that he's not going to give it up easily, even for a huge lump sum. After all, advertising is the gift that keeps on giving, where a sale is once and only once.
I agree. His greed is so great he'll run roughshod over copyright law (until he get sued) and he keep any content up (until it wounds his cash flow) in an attempt to make money off his so called "nonprofit" website, and in his place, I'd consider it foolish to sell off the site unless I got enough money I'd never be able to spend it all before I died.
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Almost definitely not true, of course. One does not open negotiations to purchase a business by posting said intent to a public site of any sort. (EDIT: Unless the business is already up for sale.)
As for FE... never interacted with him (never had a TVT account), so I couldn't say.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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Quote:His greed is so great he'll run roughshod over copyright law (until he get sued)
I have to admit that the amount of my writing to which he's laid an illegal copyright claim rankles me every once in a while. I keep wondering if SFWA would be able to point me at a friendly IP lawyer...
-- Bob
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...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Page templates have been displaying as "script error" since the middle of yesterday afternoon or so... hopefully this is a side effect of more optimization/improvement?
Edit: Whatever mechanism generates thumbnails when image markups call for them has been intermittently failing all afternoon.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Quote:I have to admit that the amount of my writing to which he's laid an
illegal copyright claim rankles me every once in a while. I keep
wondering if SFWA would be able to point me at a friendly IP lawyer...
If anyone's going to do this, it's going to have to be you. I have history of some of our edits, but you have a log of the pages you created right back to the very beginning. Started well before anyone was thinking of forking or lawsuits or anything, and we have independent evidence of that. And those pages would have to be wiped completely, because the license flows down from the initial creation and they're all derivative works.
The thing is, that would get All The Tropes major publicity. A wiki fork suing its original wiki for CC license violations? Tech news would be all over that. Right now, I don't know if we could handle the load, as the technical side is having problems (though Orain is now talking about purchasing its own hardware). Still I've been leaning more towards legal action, or at the very least some DMCA notices against tropes of legend.
There is a risk that we could be taken down as well, but I doubt it. I think there are more realistic remedies to the situation. One is that you grant a CC-NC-BY license in exchange for a sum of money from TVT. That's counterintuitive to the whole CC culture, but it's likely the best legal way out of this mess from their POV. My content is likely not worth the lawsuit, but there might be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for you, Bob. A small one, but one that might make it worth while. Unless you want to go for the content burning, which would be more fun but less worth the court costs, you know. Statutory DMCA damages are a possibility, and they're huge, but I don't think Gus has that much money. But I would be interested in what a real lawyer has to say.
-- ∇×V
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So would I, so would I...
-- Bob
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Well, that's mildly annoying... I would have thought [[allthetropes:Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism] would have been a valid link on another Orain wiki, but I had to use [ http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Sli ... pomorphism Sliding Scale of Anthropomorphism] at http://poserdazfreebies.orain.org/wiki ... opomorphic instead.
Not a big worry, just an observation...
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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