Closing down the wiki

[guest]

Although I've enabled what anti-spam measures I can (including the use of Google's ReCaptcha) the new wiki is suffering from spoofed registrations on an almost daily basis. Out of a total of 64 'members' fewer than half were genuine, or at least plausibly so, before I deleted the rogue ones. I've also been forced to disable the ability to create new pages (which is an important feature of a wiki) because of acts of vandalism which took a lot of time and effort to put right.

Although I've always considered the wiki to be a valuable resource, without the ability of users to create new content its usefulness is much reduced. So I propose to close it down, unless somebody has a better idea.

Richard.

[DDRM]

Hi Richard,

I agree it's a very valuable resource, and it would be a shame to lose it.

Obviously part of its value is in the ability of other members to contribute to it directly, but might a partial solution to be to lock it to amendment by others, and to have any changes submitted to you for approval/posting?

I realise that's not quite the point of a wiki....



D

[guest]

might a partial solution to be to lock it to amendment by others

I'd still have to regularly review the list of members and delete those that look 'suspicious', so it wouldn't really tackle the principal annoyance. Also, for reasons you will understand, I don't want to introduce more things that are dependent on me (for example to approve posts) because of the uncertainty surrounding how long I will be able to carry out that role.

What I could do, with some effort, is to create an additional 'user group' for newly-joined members and only 'promote' to an 'allowed to edit' status those who have demonstrated that they are genuine. That still involves me, unfortunately, but it would be a one-off process which thereafter allowed editing and creation of new pages without further approval. I'll look into that.

I realise that's not quite the point of a wiki....

Quite!

Richard.