All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part IV

[GethN7]

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help ... /x/9547049

Fixed.

[Bob Schroeck]

We just had a handful of spam posts that had external links. How'd they get past the filter?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

We just had a handful of spam posts that had external links. How'd they get past the filter?

 

The Orain and ATT filters are based on a list of regular expressions. If something isn't on it, it can slip past.

[Bob Schroeck]

I meant, how'd they get past the filter that's supposed to prevent first-time posters from submitting pages with external links?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

I meant, how'd they get past the filter that's supposed to prevent first-time posters from submitting pages with external links?

 

Sleeper account. Some spammers are wise enough to realize that they will be banned on sight if they spam immediately, so they will lie dormant for awhile, then spam.

I probably need to change our filter to prevent all but autoconfirmed users from posting links.

[Bob Schroeck]

And I'm back with a new verse for my old song...

Every edit I've tried to make today has been consistently rejected with the message

"Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in."

Even edits submitted within seconds of receiving the edit page.

Eventually I gave up and logged out, but when I tried to log back in I got this error:

Login error
All The Tropes uses cookies to log in users. You have cookies disabled. Please enable them and try again.

Now I certainly do have cookies enabled for ATT -- for orain in general, in fact. I tried resetting that, deleting cookies for the site, clearing the browser cache for the site -- all to no avail. Looking at Recent Changes, it would seem I'm not the only one affected -- nobody's made any edits since about 5:30 AM EST, not even spammers. So I'm wondering... what's going on?
Edit:  Oh, and one more thing, the wiki as a whole seems to be slow today, although some parts -- like the main page -- are slower than others. 
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

Update: Whatever it was, it seems to have stopped or been fixed by about 11:30 AM EST.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Update: Whatever it was, it seems to have stopped or been fixed by about 11:30 AM EST.

 

Weird backend issues were causing cookies to go screwy, has been fully fixed now.

[Bob Schroeck]

Cool.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[robkelk]

So... the fundraiser. Did I mention anywhere that I collect coffee mugs?

Am I going to end up with a unique mug? I hope not... Instead of a bucket of ice water, consider this a "coffee mug challenge."
--
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

[GethN7]

I just had a random insane idea for ATT and social networking, want everyone to let me know if they think it's nuts and/or ill advised or actually a good idea.

Having a 8chan board for ATT.

It would be a SFW board (no pic can be more risque than what we can post on the wiki proper), but it would just be a freeform discussion board on troping for the channers amongst us. Me, I'm kinda "meh" on chans, but I can't deny it would give us another outlet to express ourselves on and thus raise awareness of ATT, so if anyone has opinions, I'm all ears.

[Ankhani]

I'm not really involved in this, but I believe the general consensus from when the site design was being discussed was that "freeform discussion boards" were to discouraged on ATT. When compare/contrasted to TvT, I think it was pointed out the TvT Forums were felt as a negative influence on the site as a whole.

I'd have to go looking in past ATT Threads for specifics, but that is what I remember.
---

The Master said: "It is all in vain! I have never yet seen a man who can perceive his own faults and bring the charge home against himself."

>Analects: Book V, Chaper XXVI

[GethN7]

I'm not really involved in this, but I believe the general consensus from when the site design was being discussed was that "freeform discussion boards" were to discouraged on ATT. When compare/contrasted to TvT, I think it was pointed out the TvT Forums were felt as a negative influence on the site as a whole.

I'd have to go looking in past ATT Threads for specifics, but that is what I remember.

 

I remember that, which is why I suggested an offsite board. It will be managed by yours truly, but is merely another offsite outpost of ATT, not an entitiy unto itself.

Also, the board will still be for project related discussion, it just means people can do thing like post tons of images while discussing tropes without having to worry about wiki issues or image size limits.

Not to mention provides another outlet like our Twitter or subreddit to raise awareness of the wiki, or such is the proposed idea.

[GethN7]

You all may be aware of the fundraiser we've been having? Well, that ties into the fact we are also moving to a new server setup, and here's the short version of how much better things will be:

* MUCH more disk space and memory (can expand if need be, but by default will have almost eight times what we have now in some areas)
* FULLY FUNCTIONAL IN HOUSE SEARCH
* Say good bye to 504's and page crapouts
* We can finally add even more cool features that were barred to us due to resource requirements.

I and the other Orain Staff members have been putting our heads together and working this out for awhile now, and the good news is that ATT will be seeing a MASSIVE improvement in function in a few weeks.

Stay tuned for more updates.

[Bob Schroeck]

Huzzah!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Huzzah!

 

Well, partial update, but still good news.

The in house search may be off the table for awhile longer, since we've found our database overhead is obscene and searches consume a retarded amount of resources (and the cost of new setup with all the resources we'd need for purely in house stuff is prohibitive), so for now, John redirected the in house search to use google's search engine, which kinda sucks in that it won't be the most up to date, but it's definitely better than nothing, our site is fairly well crawled, and has no timeout issues.

[Labster]

Just FYI, John Lewis has resigned from Orain about an hour ago, his access was swiftly revoked, and he was deopped and kicked from #orain.  I'm still wondering who's actually gonna run the place now.  Et tu kudu?
It's like Cyndi Lauper always said, money changes everything. 
-- ∇×V

[robkelk]

It's good security practice to take the keys away from somebody who just left the organization, so revoking his rights and access doesn't worry me. (In fact, I'm happy to see that part of this.) The rest of it, though...
--
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

[GethN7]

Dusti is taking a more active role now, and we're getting some new tech staff on board in John's stead, according to him.

Also, in other news, since our stability seems to have improved dramatically since we started using Google for our searches, I'm adding some more new features soon, mostly to make editing as easy as possible.

[GethN7]

Okay, one of the features I wanted to add turned out to be too pathetic for our needs (it was an automated interface for tagging articles while editing, had terrible limitations ), but I'm considering adding the following:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MsLinks

Perfect for pages where there are items on our server people can download, like if we hosted a public domain work or PDF and wanted to include a handy download link. Would extend the editing interface features further.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Drafts

Save a draft version of an article on the server temporarily (on a user to user basis) so you can work on it independent of the main article and not have to create a new page in your userspace.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Replace_Text

A little utility for sysops to perform mass find/replace jobs without needing a bot.

[robkelk]

Oh, gods - my wiki's been carpet-bombed with spam.

Is there a command to delete all pages created by a particular user, or do I have to keep deleting them one-by-one?

(Answer on the wiki, please - I'm too busy to look here for a while.)

EDIT: And I just deleted a page that I deleted half an hour ago. I'm going to have to protect them all as I delete them...

RE-EDIT: Still whacking moles, but Arcane is helping now. Thank you! Luckily, we've categorize all the valid pages on the wiki, so http://poserdazfreebies.orain.org/wiki ... rizedPages is a list of what still needs to be deleted.
--
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

[GethN7]

Oh, gods - my wiki's been carpet-bombed with spam.

Is there a command to delete all pages created by a particular user, or do I have to keep deleting them one-by-one?

(Answer on the wiki, please - I'm too busy to look here for a while.)

EDIT: And I just deleted a page that I deleted half an hour ago. I'm going to have to protect them all as I delete them...

RE-EDIT: Still whacking moles, but Arcane is helping now. Thank you! Luckily, we've categorize all the valid pages on the wiki, so http://poserdazfreebies.orain.org/wiki ... rizedPages is a list of what still needs to be deleted.

 

I made your life easier, Rob. I checkusered most of the spammers, and they were all using the same IP addresses, all blocked, so this should get them to go away for awhile, put in a request with our stewards if you need any further help, k?

[robkelk]

Oh, gods - my wiki's been carpet-bombed with spam.

Is there a command to delete all pages created by a particular user, or do I have to keep deleting them one-by-one?

(Answer on the wiki, please - I'm too busy to look here for a while.)

EDIT: And I just deleted a page that I deleted half an hour ago. I'm going to have to protect them all as I delete them...

RE-EDIT: Still whacking moles, but Arcane is helping now. Thank you! Luckily, we've categorize all the valid pages on the wiki, so http://poserdazfreebies.orain.org/wiki ... rizedPages is a list of what still needs to be deleted.

 

I made your life easier, Rob. I checkusered most of the spammers, and they were all using the same IP addresses, all blocked, so this should get them to go away for awhile, put in a request with our stewards if you need any further help, k?

Thanks. I promoted a trusted rollbacker to admin and got his help in cleaning out the spam flood, so we're covered for now. I've also blocked all accounts created today (all 298 of them - we usually get one or two a week), so if the spammers try again with the accounts they didn't use, the new IP addresses should be blocked.

I have had a feature request in for a couple of months, to change the permission of creating new pages from "User" to "Confirmed" (or "Administrator"). That would help prevent a re-occurrence of this mess...
--
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

[GethN7]

Oh, gods - my wiki's been carpet-bombed with spam.

Is there a command to delete all pages created by a particular user, or do I have to keep deleting them one-by-one?

(Answer on the wiki, please - I'm too busy to look here for a while.)

EDIT: And I just deleted a page that I deleted half an hour ago. I'm going to have to protect them all as I delete them...

RE-EDIT: Still whacking moles, but Arcane is helping now. Thank you! Luckily, we've categorize all the valid pages on the wiki, so http://poserdazfreebies.orain.org/wiki ... rizedPages is a list of what still needs to be deleted.

 

I made your life easier, Rob. I checkusered most of the spammers, and they were all using the same IP addresses, all blocked, so this should get them to go away for awhile, put in a request with our stewards if you need any further help, k?

Thanks. I promoted a trusted rollbacker to admin and got his help in cleaning out the spam flood, so we're covered for now. I've also blocked all accounts created today (all 298 of them - we usually get one or two a week), so if the spammers try again with the accounts they didn't use, the new IP addresses should be blocked.

I have had a feature request in for a couple of months, to change the permission of creating new pages from "User" to "Confirmed" (or "Administrator"). That would help prevent a re-occurrence of this mess...

 

Per your request, I have changed the settings to the following:

users - can edit, but not create new pages.
confirmed/autoconfirmed - can edit and create new pages.

Also, I would like your opinion on the above extensions for ATT, let me know if you want them on your wiki as well.

[GethN7]

Okay, one of the features I wanted to add turned out to be too pathetic for our needs (it was an automated interface for tagging articles while editing, had terrible limitations ), but I'm considering adding the following:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MsLinks

Perfect for pages where there are items on our server people can download, like if we hosted a public domain work or PDF and wanted to include a handy download link. Would extend the editing interface features further.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Drafts

Save a draft version of an article on the server temporarily (on a user to user basis) so you can work on it independent of the main article and not have to create a new page in your userspace.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Replace_Text

A little utility for sysops to perform mass find/replace jobs without needing a bot.

 

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extensio ... dsOverview

Adding this to the list of considered extensions, adds a special page for all recent discussions, great for catching up if you don't want to sift through recent changes, roughly equivalent to TV Tropes' own version of this.