The dKosopedia has been upgraded with the most recent stable release of the MediaWiki software, and the site has migrated to a faster box with higher bandwidth.
The current software has some really nifty features. If you've used or contributed to the dKosopedia in the past, or have thought about it and want to know more, read on...
First things first. Yes, the software was woefully out of date (I upgraded from 1.5.7 to 1.11.0), and I have been promising to upgrade for a very long time, but it was last week's spambot attack that forced my hand. From looking at the user database, it seems that bots have been registering accounts at the dKosopedia since last April 10. Exactly six months later, on October 10, bots used those accounts to spam dKp pages. We saw it pretty quickly and shut things down with little damage.
After upgrading, I ran a maintenance script which zaps users who have made no edits. In our case, the vast majority of those are spambot registrations, and in zapping spambot users the dKp went from over 17,000 registered users down to a little over 3,000. Yes, 14,000 spambot users.
So, some new dKosopedia policies are in effect...
- accounts must now validate their email address before editing (like Daily Kos)
- account registration now includes satisfying a captcha test
- an edit that includes a URL must satisfy a captcha test
- creating a new page requires satisfying a captcha test
- all new account creations get reviewed by a list of sysops
This should keep the spambots at bay. It may also make editing a bit more difficult, I don't know. If you find this is the case please let me know.
There are some other changes. I've demoted about a dozen sysops who hadn't contributed for a long time. And I'm thinking about changing the licensing terms. I don't know a lot about Gnu FDL vs Creative Commons, etc. If anyone conversant with this issue wants to get involved, please do.
There are some pretty cool new features too. For example, you can now create sortable tables (see U.S. presidential election, 2004 for an example).
Anywho, we're up and runnning. Remember the dKosopedia motto: "You know more than you think you know, and we want to know what that is."