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archived vandalism discussion

Page history last edited by Tim 15 years, 11 months ago

The Archived Vandalism Discussion

Took this stuff off the main comments page since the issue has been resolved, thanks to quick work by the PBwiki team. Like a 30 minute episode of The Wizbits, all loose ends have been neatly tied up, and no lasting damage has been done. Thanks again to the PBwiki team for giving us the tools we need as a community to stay here in this most Epic corner of the Intertron. -timl
Vandalized again. This is ridiculous. It should be obvious to everybody by now that pbwiki is no longer sufficient for our needs. We need to move to a more advanced, more secure system. The fan community has created a great work, and it's getting to the point where a single vandal could force hours of cleanup daily. Eventually people, seeing their creations destroyed, will leave. We need to move to a wiki where only the administrator has powers of deletion. And we need to move to one as soon as possible. ~patkelly
Agreed. Even a semi-open community would work better that complete openness; at this point it's clear we can't just rely on cleanup to keep things dandy. Until the difference in effort between vandalism and keeping the wiki clean tilts in our favor, we're going to have to change things. TychoCelchuuu
We have backups, so nothing is really lost, but I agree completly. PBwiki is great, but it was never designed to deal with something of this scale. We could set up a MediaWiki account, but would that cost more? And by more, I mean anything? Plus, who would volunteer to admin? Pressing questions for our time. ~Lucres
It's funny to look at the pbwiki upcoming changes. Email notification support is high priority where as Further Access controls for view / edit / comment / admin is medium priority. That's funny because an RSS plugin for outlook is already email notification support. How about working on features that don't already exist before working on the ones that do. Just my 2 cents. -Tim
So if we're moving, then, there are three issues to deal with: First, finding the right Wiki. MediaWiki seems the obvious choice, and the software is free. On the other hand, where would we host it? Second, moving it over. Tim, I believe you made a program to crawl for red links. Could you make one that would crawl, copy, and paste onto a different Wiki, or is this too challenging? Forgive the question, my programming skills are limited to graphing calculators. Thirdly, like Lucres said, who will administrate? Jerry "Tycho Brahe" Holkins seems the obvious choice, as this is his brainchild, but between PA, all the PA projects, and his child I doubt he'd be willing to moderate this. Are any of us willing? -patkelly
The MediaWiki program seems to have an automatic transfer function, though I can't vouch for how well it works. If we used MediaWiki, we'll have to provide the domain (elothtes.com is the obvious choice), and we would have to pay for the bandwidth. I'm not sure Tycho would have time to admin for us, since Penny Arcade is a full-time job. I would volunteer myself, but I'm not sure I know enough to be useful. Sure, I know the Wiki commands pretty well, but does anyone know how to set up the back end of a website like this? ~Lucres
The program I wrote crawls the backup zip rather than the wiki, but a wiki with a transfer program would be ideal. As for the administrative duties, I think that the admin password should be shared among The Council of Elders, since there always seems to be one online or reachable 24/7. If it becomes necessary I can set up a wiki, assuming that we have a place to host it. -tim
Below, we can see that Dev purchased the elothtes.org domain for us, and has pointed it to this page. That takes care of the domain. Hosting, though, is a problem. And I agree with tim, I believe we can all share admin duty. I believe admin duty should be given to a decent number of us. There are a good number of people here that seem trustworthy, all present company included. -patkelly
Right. This wiki has worked wonderfully as a community project so far; sharing administration is something of a no brainer. Remember, we're moving to avoid the worst of the worst, not to restrict this thing to the best of the best. The more open we can keep things, the better, and shared admin is an easy way to do that. It also helps to alleviate the crushing responsibility of managing something like this, in that you can shunt some of that to someone else. -TychoCelchuuu
I agree that some sort of step is essential at this point; we're getting hit way too often. I would kind of like a comment from one of the official Penny Arcade people, though, since it's (originally) their project. -Montykins
It was originally their idea, yes. It was then given to the fanbase to nuture, to grow, and to keep watch over. If what we need to do in order to keep our charge is to move it to a more secure location, I believe that should be more than acceptable. By the way, how is copyright handled on this? Is pbwiki under the GNU Free Documentation License? -patkelly
I don't have much to add other than to point out that hosting, while never free, is pretty cheap. How much bandwidth are we talking about? Go Daddy.com (full disclosure: I work there) has 250GB of monthly bandwidth for about $4 a month. On the other hand, depending on how involved the PA people want to be, I'm sure the ElotH:TES bandwidth would be a drop in the bucket for their servers. But regardless of where we go, I agree that it's pretty clear we need to go. ~Kenneth Pike
I don't think we should impose on the PA servers, since we don't know how big this site may eventually get. If hosting is that cheap, could Google ads cover the cost? Could we set it up so the Google revenue goes directly to purchase bandwidth? That would be pretty cool. ~Lucres
Google ads would be a perfect idea. If we somehow made extra money, we can just set it up to funnel that to the PA guys who could stick it in Child's Play. If we find some good cheap hosting, I could see Google paying for the lion's share of it. -TychoCelchuuu
About that fund-raising thing. I've wondered for a little while if people would be interested in supporting Child's Play via the consumption of fan-made ELotH:TES posters or shirts (all proceeds going to CP, I mean). Just ignore this little thought if it's off-topic, but speaking as one fan-artist, I would love to help out somehow in that capacity. --R.S.
Places like CafePress allow proceeds to be donated to charity, as long as you have their non-profit tax ID number. Presumably, their competitors would offer similar options. Definitely doable... are there copyright issues, though?
Crud, there probably are... If it goes directly to charity without passing through our hands maybe there would be no problem, but I honestly have no clue. Anyone know? --R.S.
I think Yahoo has a pretty good hosting plan. That's what I use, so of course I am not biased. - Dryope
Could we maybe just change the password on this pbwiki? The problem isn't so much where the page is hosted as that it's too public. Although that solution does involve getting PA involved instead of solving it ourselves. -Montykins
As far as Tax IDs for charity go, each hospital listed under the Child's Play website has its own Tax ID, which would mean settling on one, or setting up different storefronts for each. Also, through most of these online "make your own merchandise" companies, you set a price for the products above the manufacturing price, and the difference is the profit (or in this case what goes to charity). The cost of the items are not supercheap, and I think not much would wind up going to charity. We might be better off served by simply pointing to the Child's Play website and asking people to donate, which is pretty much what we're doing now with the banner. Of course, that doesn't stop the fact that some of us want ELotH:TES merchandise...
Montykins: The way I see it, either the new password would be so restricted the openness that created the project would die, or it would be so open that changing it would do nothing. We want everyone to be able to create--we just don't want everyone to have the ability to outright delete irrevocably as per the current situation. -patkelly
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Good point. I agree it should be moved. -Montykins
I'd recommend using the MediaWiki software (runs Wikipedia), it has pretty much any feature you'd want. ~kertrats
I just think on the whole, MediaWiki has a better system and interface, so it seems like everything would definitely be less of a problem (plus the admin-delete only system is really appealing). Definitely for the move. -saintb(oy)
Does MediaWiki have several administrator levels? I mean, is there, say, a moderator-pass and an admin-pass? I mean, seriously. Supposing a potential vandal acts nice and clean and posts a half-dozen decent articles and gets an admin-pass, then deletes willy-nilly. How could we stop him? If there's nobody who could strip someone of privileges, I would recommend a pretty high standard for who gets the highest level. Not who gets to post, everyone should be able to make new things. I just don't think too many should get to remove things. But then we have to worry about who gets that. I mean, some people are obviously committed, and after that there's a real continuum of the amount of time people have spent here. Who has proven themselves worthy of the right to deny privileges to others? But who thinks the current situation is acceptable? -Lone Pawn
I'd just like to throw out there, it might be worth a try asking the pbwiki people if they can help whassisface CEO down there suggested we email the dev team if we have comments: team@pbwiki.com . If they can't actually make admins, maybe they can at least help with the migration to a new wiki. -toshi.m
MediaWiki does have multiple admin levels-Wikipedia, for instance, has 3 that I know of-admins (obvious), bureaucrats (same as admins but also have the ability to add and remove admin privileges from other users), and developers (superpowers). ~kertrats
I'm not an expect on the subject, but I'm not sure we need multiple admin levels or any of that. What we need is a level of overall security that simply (and sadly) isn't part of the PBwiki solution: users must NEVER be able to delete pages, users must NEVER be able to delete files. Unfortunately, PBwiki does not offer what this project needs, so yes, we need a new system. The reason I'm concerned about admin levels etc. is that I wouldn't like to see ELotH:TES become the property of a few, instead of being the property of everyone who happens to pass by. I would never have become part of this community if I had had to go through more trouble than just look up the Wiki password, and even though my contribution so far is fairly small in the grand scheme of things, I dare to think the wiki would be poorer without me. The same goes for a lot of other contributors I'm sure. Another problem, on a meta-level I guess, is that even though I'm sure everyone who contributes to this Wiki is legally void of any rights to their work, they IMHO have a moral right to it. Would it be right to establish administrative rights over something that people contributed under completely different terms? -Belda P.S. I know this is obvious to all of you, but let's just keep in mind that this vandalism is just a sign of frustration among fanboys of lesser fantasy books/games/shows. It is truly sad that fans of such mediocre writers as Tolkien can't admit the betterness of the ELotH:TES saga.
I don't think it would necessarily be right for someone to have admin rights, but it's necessary at this point. If anyone can revert and delete pages willy-nilly, you get -- well, what we have right now, with near-daily vandalism. So it sounds like the consensus is to switch to MediaWiki and the current hurdle is to find a host. Right? -Montykins
Yeah. I agree. Let's just try to keep things as open as possible regardless of the solution we end up with. I'm 100% with Patkelly in that people will leave if their work is destroyed - but people will also leave/never join if their work (or ability to contribute) becomes subject to the review of some select few. -Belda
I'm not for review of joining or contribution, and I don't think anyone here is. Nowhere did anyone claim that the right to contribute should in any way be restricted. I believe in a two-tier system, one that does not restrict but rather secures everyone's right to contribute and see that contribution not be deleted by vandals. As Roig Syndrome showed, we need the ability to delete pages. And I think most people should be given moderation rights; most are trustworthy. And we need a few at the top who can revoke that right to ensure no moderator abuses his or her power. In a sense, yes, people's work would be under "review of some select few." But in the same sense, as it stands, people's work is under review of not only some select few, but the general public at large as well. And anyone who feels the urge can review and destroy said work, and can destroy it in such a manner that recovery is virtually impossible. As it stands, everyone has administrative rights over everyone else's work. A more sensible way to look at it, I think, is that restricted moderation secures the right to free contribution by ensuring that one's contribution will be lasting. We would of course have no more of a signup procedure than now stands. We would of course allow all to add. We would of course not have a single restriction to any form of creative expression or creative addition. It is only the ability to destroy that would be restricted. Surely, Belda, you can agree that this is the only ability or freedom that ought be restricted, as it is the only freedom that endangers the all-important freedom to creativity. And it in no way would become the properties of the admins. If an admin believes he or she has the right to impose his personal taste on the wiki, he or she should be stripped of his or her power. ~patkelly Edit: Whoops. I'm on a friend's computer, and I signed this post with his name, then realized my error as I read over it and hit edit to switch it back. Embarassing enough. But then I see that I stole edit lock from a Mr. David Lovett, who is at support@pbwiki.com. Um, Mr. Lovett, I sincerely apologize, as I doubt you would be the type to hit edit and then leave it hanging, and were likely addressing this very issue. Again, my apologies. ~patkelly
Hey, no problem - sorry for taking so long :( ~David Lovett

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