Looking over Sixth World Wiki I've noticed that the history seems to be stopping pre-crash2.0 for most things. Since I figure the folks who edit it hang out here I'd like to ask if this is intentional, or can I start updating things as I get bored?

I believe that the purpose of wikis is to edit them in a crowdsourced manner.

The more important thing being that the wiki is actually back. (If this is old news then I am silly)

The wiki being back up surprised me too, I was just wondering if there was some kind of protocol on these things.

The wiki was taken down because it was the target of more spam than Adam Jury could deal with in his spare time.

In response to a request from me, he put it back up (but locked) so that it can at least be used as a resource until the management situation is improved.

Oh, I had hope they managed to fix the spam issue. Thanks for getting it back up though, even if it is read-only, I really appreciate the resource.

Actually, I put it back online after based upon conversation in the Dumpshock News forum. No requests from you crossed my desk.

That said, yes spammers were overtaking the wiki. Future development of the wiki is under consideration as Adam is focused on Eclipse Phase and other projects these days.

-RJ

ok, I hadn't tried to edit it yet, I was wondering why it seemed so out of date.

Despite the risk of combining this with another thread that I just got Monitored on...

"THE ONLY GOOD SPAMMER IS A DEAD SPAMMER!"

So do you take wetwork?

Also, yay for the wiki being back up, and here's to hoping a solution will surface.

I guess we were all missing it equally. All I knew was that I asked Adam to put it back up (even if read only) and so it was less than two days later.

Would it be possible to allow only vetted users to edit files. That would let those of us that are willing to clean up files do so, while keeping out the spam.

If I knew anything about how wiki's run I would offer to do more than that, but I still have trouble trying to figure out things like conditional statements in infobox templates.

Shouldn't be that hard to disallow anonymous editing and have user registration include some sort of Captcha filter thingy, right?

Captcha is no longer a barrier, what with its algorithm being broken wide open a few months back.

You could use one of those captchas where it shows an image and a bunch of puzzle pieces that you have to make it like the figure.
Other than that, one of my jobs is breaking captchas

Actually, the phrase should be:

The Only Good Spammer is one that's being publically flogged & paraded naked down every the street of his/her home-town, being pelted by rotten food while pulling a fully-loaded 18-wheeler car-hauler with the air-brakes locked.

I like the captchas that ask you a human question like "what's the fifth letter of alphabet" or "how much is 2+2", that sort of thing. Beats deciphering distorted letters, which I get wrong like 9 times out of 10... And now I hear it's broken, so even a machine can do it better than me (no idea how they do that though...)

So have those other (like "normal human question") captchas I mentioned been broken too?

Other than that - it's great having the Wiki back! Thanks so much, even read only is of great help. But maybe actually having some yet-unbroken captchas would allow editing again? I guess if the whole Dumpshock puts their matrix-wise heads together we can come up with something to block the spammers, can't we?

p.s. after a second thought: could we do a "human question" captcha but with custom made questions? Like "what was the name of the late president-dragon, author of the known will" or "which are better - indirect or direct combat spells"? Okay maybe the last one raises some controversy but you get my drift. Wouldn't that be cool?

This is currently under consideration.

From what little understanding I have of the situation, it's the encryption algorithm itself for captcha that was broken, which would theoretically render all forms useless. Admittedly, my knowledge is like tenth-hand and minor even at that, so I could very easily be wrong.

Little known piece of CAPTCHA trivia. The version where you are given two messed up words side-by-side, uses all of us to fill in for OCR in scans for projects like Google Books.

One of the words is the actual test, the other is a word that OCR could not recognize. Since we guess both, we are tested for the website, and we help the book scanners.