Moderation bullshit

Why do I suddenly get THIS when updating with new module versions?

You are editing your version of this article. It is currently awaiting moderation.
Once approved, it will be visible to other users.

see https://forum.vassalengine.org/t/wiki-and-tracker-spam/8390/1

Thus spake greenknight:

Why do I suddenly get THIS when updating with new module versions?

You are editing your version of this article. It is currently awaiting
moderation.
Once approved, it will be visible to other users.

If you have a better suggestion for stopping spammers, please let us
know.


J.

Would it not be better to moderate/verify new user accounts?

Ok. I’ll just host the module elsewhere.

I have experience with forum software (although it has been a few years), but not wikis.

For the forum: verify user when creating new accounts? time limit between new posts? ban on IP/hostname if spammers are know…

For the wiki: can you set of a number of users as verified OK for any given page?

Thus spake bdgza:

“uckelman” wrote:

Thus spake greenknight:

Why do I suddenly get THIS when updating with new module versions?

You are editing your version of this article. It is currently
awaiting
moderation.
Once approved, it will be visible to other users.

If you have a better suggestion for stopping spammers, please let us
know.

Would it not be better to moderate/verify new user accounts?

We already require email confirmation for new user accounts. Beyond that,
before a new user posts, we have no data at all on which to base a
conclusion about whether they’re a spammer.

If you’re suggesting that we moderate new accounts only—we already do
that in the forum. I don’t know of a way to do that with the wiki or
the bug tracker. If you do, please show me.


J.

Thus spake greenknight:

For the forum: verify user when creating new accounts? time limit
between new posts? ban on IP/hostname if spammers are know…

What do you mean by “verify user”?

We already ban IPs of known spammers. That’s not particularly effective;
the last time we were attacked, the spammers seemed to have endless new
IP addresses. Banning IPs doesn’t work against distributed attacks.

Rate-limiting posts wouldn’t affect the forum spammers we’ve seen, as
they typically make one or two posts per user they create.

For the wiki: can you set of a number of users as verified OK for any
given page?

The forum is MediaWiki. Where would I find this in the MediaWiki docs?
How would we know which users to add?


J.

Is this the Moderation extension used?
mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation
It says only new users require their edits to be moderated, and ‘good’ users will gain privilege of unmoderated edits.

Looks like what we are using

Thus spake bdgza:

Is this the Moderation extension used?
mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation[1]
It says only new users require their edits to be moderated, and ‘good’
users will gain privilege of unmoderated edits.

It is. How do we set it up for that?


J.

The flag automoderated needs to be granted to users, having made good edits, manually.

If the configuration has:

$wgAddGroups['sysop'][] = 'automoderated'; # Allow sysops to assign "automoderated" flag
$wgRemoveGroups['sysop'][] = 'automoderated'; # Allow sysops to remove "automoderated" flag

then sysops can do this granting. I don’t know what group your moderators belong to, but if they can grant this flag to users they can do so when moderating edits, and not have to moderate those users again.

This is a cross post that I left on the subject “Wiki and Tracker Spam”.

[i]Apparently they are at it again? I can not post updated modules for my Next War: India Pakistan as it’s saying I need moderator approval. Problem was it wouldn’t let me upload the file so approving would do no good. I tricked it by asking it to preview page and it allowed me to upload file there. I am trying to upload version 1.5.

OR

Long time module poster here so hopefully I am not blocked.

Cheers
Kevin Davidson[/i]

If we are still having this problem may I suggest a general announcement of some sort to let us friendlies know what’s going on. It took me a bit digging through the forum to figure it out.

Is it really not possible to white-list users?

Lats week I was again able to A) upload files and B) edit the wiki, without any moderation.

Now moderation is back on.

Intentional?

Thus spake greenknight:

Lats week I was again able to A) upload files and B) edit the wiki,
without any moderation.

Now moderation is back on.

Intentional?

Yes. We briefly tried auto-promoting accounts into the group which
doesn’t require moderation, but turned that off again due to problems
with it.


J.

OK. Just got curious :slight_smile: