Community Help Wiki locked down (was: Re: Fwd: Fwd: WikiGuide destroed by spammers)

[Elizabeth K. Joseph]

On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 10:34 AM, Elizabeth K. Joseph <lyz at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> There are thousands of pages and it looks like this started on
> December 23rd. I'm not going to spend my whole day deleting pages when
> the spam accounts keep being created. Endless, time-wasting war with
> bots.
>
> I've submitted a ticket with Canonical IS (#27950) to see what they
> can do on the administrative side to shut this down.

I have good news and bad news about our https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ wiki.

Good news: The thousands of spam pages that were created have been
deleted and purged by Canonical IS. Thanks to Ryan Finnie of Canonical
for handling this so quickly after their holiday break! There were
also some spam edits on existing pages that Pasi (knome) took care of.
Please let us know if you find any more and we'll work to take care of
them.

Bad news: In order to triage this attack, the wiki has been locked
down. Right now, only members of these two groups now have access to
editing:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EditorGroup
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AdminGroup

They suggested we also set up a ContributorGroup of known users who
contribute that can still edit even when the wiki is on lock down.
This seems like a reasonable thing, but it does mean administrative
overhead.

I don't know how long the lock down will last, and right now I'm not
sure how logins look to folks not in EditorGroup or AdminGroup. That
may be worth testing by someone not in those groups, it would be good
to know if they are able to log in at all, or if it just shows all
pages as Immutable.

Given all of our problems generally with this help wiki and logins
since the switch to Ubuntu SSO, the overall future of this wiki may be
worth a discussion.

-- 
Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph || Lyz || pleia2