[cgiapp] Future of the wiki

[Mark Fuller]

Someone said:

> Something like Google Groups that was open source would certainly be
> nice.

I like phpbb. It's heavy, but it's the most widely used forum
software. The older I get, the more I subscribe to the ancient Chinese
proverb: 10 million flies can't be wrong.

Phpbb can be integrated with mediaWiki, to have the kind of shared
authentication I was talking about (participants gain wiki editing
status after some number of posts and some amount of time, to guard
against a spammer making 10 posts in one night just to spam the wiki).

As far as guarding against forum spam (which is the only risk, leading
up to validated users who are trusted to edit the wiki), I like a
tiered approach:

1. Captcha devices which bots have about a 20% success rate with.
2. Custom profile fields or Q&A which bots aren't programmed to
handle. (Change these occasionally to defeat bots that might be
customized to handle this particular forum.).
3. Assign new forum members to the group "newly registered users"
until they've made 5-10 normal posts over some minimum period of time.
4. For postings by members of "newly registered users," use
blacklisting services like Akismet, Spam Karma II and Spam Assassin.
  - These tools look at the "spamminess" of a post, and return true/false.
  - If they report a post of spam, place the user in a group of
"reported spammers" for moderator review.
  - If the service gave a false positive, report it to the service (to
make the service better), and take the user out of the suspected
group.
  - The result is only a few undetected spam postings for moderators
to remove, and report to the service to improve its accuracy.
5. After a participant makes it through that process, they're added to
the phpbb group "wiki editors" (which is required for them to be
recognized as authenticated at the wiki, along with the site cookie
indicating they're authenticated.).

Personally, I'd do this on the same host as the wiki. Not Google
Groups. Keep it together, and integrated so the two distinct
categories of collaboration drive participants/visitors to each other.

As I said before, maybe the above is overkill for the size of C::A's
following. Or, maybe C::A's following would grow if it moved to
something more feature-rich than a "mailing list." Something where a
user can see their posts, unread posts, unreplied posts, receive an
email notification when a forum has been updated. See new posts via
RSS/Atom feeds.

It's even possible to create a forum for Wiki changes, and feed
updates (diff output) to that forum as a topic for each page. Changes
to the Wiki would be more visible as people participate in the other
(normal) forums. And, they could watch that forum using RSS, like any
other forum. (This duplicates mediaWiki's own features. But, it helps
visibility when many people aren't going to visit the wiki often just
to see what's happening.).

Mark