Offer to rehost (Re: wiki.cs.uiuc.edu - no pages available)

[hidden email] wrote:
 >
 > I may have missed something, but what has happened to
 > wiki.cs.uiuc.edu. It was a repository of a lot of useful information.
 >
 > Is the server being rebuilt? Have the Smalltalk enthusiasts left? Has
 > it been moved elsewhere?
 >


It hurts to see this resource rot away.

My IP numbers have been banned from editing the site so often that I
stopped using it.


My impression is that at the UIUC they lack the resources to maintain
this wiki properly. So here goes:



I herewith offer to host the uiuc wiki sites
--------------------------------------------


But with some limitations:


-I am not a commercial entity, so problem fixing may take some time.

-The current spam blocking mechanisms will be altered because they are
too broad.

-File upload capability will be turned off (but currently existing files
will remain available)

-The domain name where the wiki is hosted will change




Does anybody have a VW captha implementation I could hook into WikiWorks?




Reinout Heeck
-------------

Hi Reinout and others,

I have an idea for a while to add an import facility to Aida/Scribo Wiki
so that it will be able to import WikiWorks content. That's what I can
contribute to the effort to make this Wiki alive again.

Even that Aida/Scribo CMS is ongoing project currently, it is based on
proven BiArt technology and there are already Scribo based fruits
on-line, like http://www.aidaweb.si and a blog http://nico.bioskop.fr.
Not to mention that this is Smalltalk only and fully maintained
technology, used everyday in production. It is therefore a safe bet for
a community site like this Wiki too.

So I'm extending your offer: let you host an Aida/Scribo based Wiki with
imported WikiWorks content.

Janko


Reinout Heeck wrote:
--
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

Janko Mivšek wrote:
That would be interesting, WikiWorks is looking very last century...
However it would be two step process: first move the uiuc wikis, and at
a later time port to Aida/Scribo.


A couple of questions:

Has Scribo already been used to deploy a WikiWorks compatible (in the
sense of supporting all of WikiWorks current features) wiki, or is it
just a plan or laboratory software?

Does Scribo support anonymous authentication (a CAPTCHA system of some
sort - image based, question based, whatever)?.

Does Scribo have spambot detection heuristics (e.g. by measuring delay
between edit form request and submission)?

Does Scribo support IP blacklisting based on 'honeypot' pages? In my
wikis I see that several spambot networks create their own (new) pages,
so I want to turn these into a honeypot: if you edit this particular
page your IP/useragent combo will be blacklisted.

Does Aida support teergrubbing? I would love to penalize spambots by
teergrubbing once they are in the blacklist.



Cheers,

Reinout
-------

Two more questions re: Aida/Scribo:

Does Scribo require per per-session server side state? My wikis run in
limited memory (128 Mb) along several other services so memory footprint
should not grow by maintaining sessions. Another reason is that I detest
session expiry on editing pages, sometimes I take two days to finalize
an edit (mostly on  blogs though). Most blogs have horribly expiry
semantics: they just throw you into some 'main' page without explaining
what happened.
Session maintenance seems to be gratuitously thrown in by developers
these days but IMO it is a severe case of more is less.


What back-end storage does Scribo require? I would dislike if I need to
maintain a DB, I prefer a file based solution (or that Scribo implements
its own DB on top of the file system). This is because I['m getting too
old and am suffering a severe case of version fatigue:  updating
Postgres requires silly manual labor I just don't want to spend anymore.
 (As a sideways point in case: upgrading my MacOs ate my store
repository, Postgress got eradicated - it is all so overly tiresome...).



Both these points make me like WikiWorks a lot: it doesn't have needless
requirements that current software seems to add as a fad.

R
-

Reinout Heeck wrote:

Agree, this is most safe way to go.

> A couple of questions:
>
> Has Scribo already been used to deploy a WikiWorks compatible (in the
> sense of supporting all of WikiWorks current features) wiki, or is it
> just a plan or laboratory software?

It is definitively not a laboratory software, this Wiki is actually in
use by me internally for a few years, with parser actually from
WikiWorks, using same wiki format, so it is already quite compatible.
That Wiki also has history, search, attachments etc. WikiWorks file
support is different and that's what I see now as the only difference to
consider a bit deeper.

I also have one own Wiki, based on WikiWorks and you gave me an
opportunity to speed up migration effort :)

> Does Scribo support anonymous authentication (a CAPTCHA system of some
> sort - image based, question based, whatever)?.

CAPTCHA not yet, but that's probably easy to add and needed elsewhere.
But it has non-expirable sessions, registered or not, so the
authentication can be done from anonymous to registered.
>
> Does Scribo have spambot detection heuristics (e.g. by measuring delay
> between edit form request and submission)?

No, not yet but again if needed we can add that. Aida comunity is
interested on such development because we need all that for Scribo
plugins like blogs too.
>
> Does Scribo support IP blacklisting based on 'honeypot' pages? In my
> wikis I see that several spambot networks create their own (new) pages,
> so I want to turn these into a honeypot: if you edit this particular
> page your IP/useragent combo will be blacklisted.
>
> Does Aida support teergrubbing? I would love to penalize spambots by
> teergrubbing once they are in the blacklist.

Again, all that defensive technics can be added later if really needed.
I have a feeling that kind authentication between anonymous to
registered can be good enough for us.

Janko

--
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

Reinout Heeck wrote:
Aida uses server side session state, yes, but very tiny amount per
session, 400B minimally. For instance, memory footprint of my image with
35 websites has currently 390MB, so one Wiki site should run without
problems on 128MB. Sessions state is otherwise cleared every night,
which includes removing guest sessions and additional session state,
used for helping Aida presenting domain model in HTML (instances of so
called WebApplications).

Aida has currently anonymous (guest) and registered sessions, with user
management included. We can add something in the middle (like saving
sessions of users who edit pages) to ease editing pages while still
preventing spam. And Aida/Scribo has even now most user friendly
session/user management already.

> What back-end storage does Scribo require? I would dislike if I need to
> maintain a DB, I prefer a file based solution (or that Scribo implements
> its own DB on top of the file system). This is because I['m getting too
> old and am suffering a severe case of version fatigue:  updating
> Postgres requires silly manual labor I just don't want to spend anymore.
> (As a sideways point in case: upgrading my MacOs ate my store
> repository, Postgress got eradicated - it is all so overly tiresome...).

File (XML) based store is in Scribo by default, image is used only as
kind of index and for serving of course. This is intentionally and by
design just for reasons you mentioned and for preserving content in a
format which is for sure readable for 10s of years to come!

> Both these points make me like WikiWorks a lot: it doesn't have needless
> requirements that current software seems to add as a fad.


Janko

--
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

Janko,
thanks for all the info!

I'm definitely interested, but it will be couple of weeks before I  
look into this. One last question for now:

Is your wiki implementation URL-compatible with WikiWorks? I'd hate if  
deep links into my sites go stale.

R
-

Reinout Heeck wrote:
> Janko,
> thanks for all the info!
>
> I'm definitely interested, but it will be couple of weeks before I look
> into this. One last question for now:
>
> Is your wiki implementation URL-compatible with WikiWorks? I'd hate if
> deep links into my sites go stale.

I will definitively adopt url management to be 100% compatible with
WikiWorks! Links must be preserved because Wiki content is referenced
from all around the web and not preserving them would cause just too
many broken links.

--
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si

I've been in contact with Ralph Johnson, no decision has been reached  
yet about rehosting some or all of the UIUC wikis.

Regardless, before Ralph can restart the UIUC wikis he needs better  
spam protection measures, he asked for help and I decided to take on  
that project. I need such enhancements too.

For all those interested: I started a project wiki at
   http://basis.desk.org:8080/Uiuc+WikiWorks+upgrade

All considered it seems it will take some time before the UIUC wikis  
will reappear :-(



R
-


On Feb 20, 2008, at 12:17 PM, Reinout Heeck wrote:

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