Posted on

23-May-2012

Wiki taken offline
The number of “users” that create an account on the VMS wiki to post spam content, chnages from day to day, but there is hardly a day that there aren’t any. It’s no big deal to spend 15 minutes a day – or twice a day – to disable these accounts and remove spam. But no day should be forgotten, or the data is captured by search engines – with all consequences. And I use the latest version of MoinMoin….
Wordpress – even the older version that I still have to use (no time to update) – offers the ability to disable creation of accounts, and if enabled, the email address needs to be valid. Anyway, each new user can only post comments – if enabled – and that is scanned for abusive content, deleting it when that is found; and there is also me to accept the comment – or refuse it…
Alas, MoinMoin – even this latest version – lacks such facilities, and my knowledge of Python is nill…
There is a way to prevent users to post messages: but that requires an HTTPS connection and setting things up in the configuration; I’ve tried it, but the documentation on the MoinMoin site isn’t conclusive and I ended upo with a wiki that didn;t start at all…

And with the holidayes approacjing, I thought it better to disable the wiki completely, until I have implemented a workable solution. For instance: generate a password and send it by email, to be changed manually on first access 🙂

Any help is appreciated!

The maintenance job has been changed to remove these disabled users automaticly – so that’s one more job I don’t have to bother about. But it’s better to prevent abusive accounts.

Posted on

02-May-2012

Maintenance
Nothing strange this time.
PMAS statistics for April
Total messages    :   7208 = 100.0 o/o
DNS Blacklisted   :   1522 =  21.1 o/o (Files: 30)
Relay attempts    :     53 =    .7 o/o (Files: 26)
Accepted by PMAS  :   5633 =  78.1 o/o (Files: 30)
 Handled by explicit rule
        Rejected :   4831 =  85.7 o/o (processed),  67.0 o/o (all)
        Accepted :    292 =   5.1 o/o (processed),   4.0 o/o (all)
 Handled by content
       Discarded :     82 =   1.4 o/o (processed),   1.1 o/o (all)
    Quarantained :    246 =   4.3 o/o (processed),   3.4 o/o (all)
       Delivered :    182 =   3.2 o/o (processed),   2.5 o/o (all)
Apart from this, there have been the usual bogus users that have been removed last month, I’ll clean the wiki cache so I get rid of these disabled accounts.

Now I have the T4-viewer-over-the-web installed (time to clean T4$DATA as well, that contains files from years back – it slows starting up the analyzer since it collects the whole lot….) I found something remarkable. A change, anyway: there used to be some peaks every 20 minutes, and all of a sudden, this was gone. But finding out what that statistic this was, is troublesome with this amount of old files…