[cgiapp] The Zero Barrier (was: Re: Anonymous home page editing?)

[David Kaufman]

Hi Josh (and cgiapp-ers one and all),

I wasn't paying attention back when the choice of Wiki software was 
made, installed (or skinned so nicely!), but the responsibility has 
fallen to me to host and (occasionally) maintain it.

So when we decommissioned our previous server (last year?) and migrated 
the cgiapp wiki and mailing list (along with the rest of the company's 
web apps and mail systems) to this new machine, I had to reinstall the 
Wiki software, which I found was no longer maintained by the authors (at 
least not on CPAN -- they do seem to have a radically new version that 
requires a new fangled auto-magical auto-installer, neither of which are 
on CPAN (nor can be, iirc because it now ships bundled *with* with other 
CPAN modules) but I wasn't in the mood for radical) and it was also 
unclear to me whether the next new version was Considered Done yet, so I 
just got this creaky old wiki working again.

In the process I found that about a kajillion spam posts had been added 
that no one had removed (because no one had noticed), and poking around 
the wiki docs, I also found that this creaky old version actually had 
some nice revision control features --- I guess all wikis do -- complete 
with view-history, a nifty view-diffs button, dead simple roll-back and, 
of course, email notifications.

So instead of trying to fix the "anyone can edit" problem, I decided to 
try and fix the "no one noticed" problem: by telling the Wiki to post to 
this list each time anyone edits anything, the entire community is 
gently reminded that the wiki does still exist (perhaps the spammers do 
our community a small service, in this respect) and we're all nudged to 
help sweep up around the place.  While certainly not an appropriate 
solution for larger communities, busier wikis or higher volume mailing 
lists, for us, and for me, this small change has been a big win.

While I was initially annoyed that the Wiki change notices just say who 
and what page (I had toyed with the idea of setting up fully colorized 
html diffs in the email notices! but my laziness prevailed, as it does) 
in this case, the sparseness is kind of mysterious and teases me a bit. 
  Each time I see email from the wiki I wonder (albeit mildly) if what 
changed was some new interesting piece of *content*, or some new spam 
that I really should delete.  Usually, by the time I get around to 
checking (if ever), someone else has already fixed the spam.  This 
causes the intensity of laziness feedback loop to increase further each 
time: the less I do, the less I have to do!  Woo and hoo :-)

So for me, the Zero Barrier to contributing thing -- whether the 
contributions are writing and posting content, or helping to fight spam 
-- is definitely A Good Thing.

thanks,

-dave

On 5/14/2011 2:20 AM, Joshua Miller wrote:
 > Is there a reason the home page can be modified by anyone sans-
 > registration and sans-approval?
 >
 > I noticed some spam links were added, and removed them. It's easy
 > enough to remove, but seems like some sort of protection wouldn't
 > hurt (email address registration with captcha, or require manual
 > approval of changes or of users?). It probably doesn't matter a
 > whole lot, since it has low traffic and a small dedicated group.
 > Just felt a bit weird that it was so easy to modify.
 >
 > If the ease of modification (no registration) was shown to actually
 > increase participation significantly, then it'd make sense.... but
 > I don't see much activity on the site anyway.
 >
 > This is almost 100% a third party opinion, cause I normally just
 > lurk on this list, but if I were wanting to actively contribute,
 > I'd personally have no problem registering and would not be
 > offended if the registration had to be manually reviewed before I
 > could modify pages.
 >
 > Anyway... thank you to whomever does provide valuable content on
 > the site and this list :-)
 > --
 > Josh I.