iSean

man oh man has the you know what hit the fan. i have written previously about writing a wiki-based textbook (here) and even started thinking about it back in July of 2006 (here). i even started an effort at one point here. this effort never really took off. i presented on wiki-based textbooks this past year at MACUL and generated a bit of interest. unfortunately, the effort never took off (and, that’s a subject for my sabbatical request being turned in on Monday). however, my wiki site has not gone unnoticed. i login every 4 - 5 months just to check on things. imagine my surprise when i arrived today and found that spammers started invading and creating page after page after page on my wiki. they started in august and it looks like they’ve added about 1000 pages of spam. and mediawiki (this is the wiki that drives Wikipedia as well) only allows me to delete 1 page at a time — and it’s a 2 - 3 step process even at that. egads. i shouldn’t be too surprised as my blog is using software (a plugin) that has stopped 24364 spam comments. wow!

you can see samples of my wiki’s spam by visiting the main page and click on ‘Random page’ on the left side menu. as you can see, the vast majority of my spam is written in Chinese with the Chinese characters and all. for all i know, it probably has a bunch of spam and then adds a sentence to say how dorky sean is. heh. i took some time to ban any users who have edited a page this month and then i turned off the ability to create a new account. but i have still have hundreds of users . . . errrr, spammers who have accounts and who i need to ban when i get the time. i wish i could get a user list with check boxes next to them and i could select all at once and hit Ban. i also wish i could revert my wiki site back to how it looked in early August since nothing productive has happened since then, but these options don’t exist. i searched Google and found a help site that explained how i could turn off allowing new users — but this forced me to go into a php file on the server — not for the non-geeky, that’s for sure.

i was pretty high on Mediawiki until this happened. egads it’s a pain. the only plus side is that i am no longer going to use this site and have a whole new domain site planned for the actual wiki-based textbook that i potentially write if i am granted a sabbatical. but, this certainly helps me decide to not make the site open unless potential authors are invited or send me a request so that i can check credentials. i still learn some lessons the hard way, unfortunately.

Technorati Tags: ed tech, mediawiki, spam, textbook, wiki, wikitextbook