BlogNomic: The First Dynasty of Desertfrog

I’d love to help, but I do not know how, or am unable to, delete spam pages. Could someone please tell me how/give me permissions to delete spam pages? Also, I assume that all pages in other languages are spam.

For now, I am marking spam pages with “spam - ” before their titles.

Only sysops and bureaucrats can delete pages.

Also, I’d be glad to port some pages.

Okay… so can someone admin me, either temporarily or for good, so that I can delete some of the spam?

Also, was some company using our wiki or somthing? How did that all get there?

Query: 218: 218.EcoDosh_Charter (276 views) <—Spam, or obscure page of some past use?

Ok, I think that we won’t lose anything by installing the new Wiki. So, I think it’s not a bad idea to get started with installing that version and having the two side by side until we decide how to port the data.

Wak: Just blank ‘em if you can’t delete them.

We’ll sort out adminness latar.

Wakukee, Excalabur; just copying the few good pages to a new wiki will be much easier than trying to delete all the bad ones first. There are around two thousand spam pages in there. (They were all added by spammers back when the wiki allowed people to create their own accounts - spammers run scripts that scour the Internet for open wikis, and then create pages with links back to their own site. It makes their site rank a little higher in Google, because blognomic.com appears to “trust” it enough to link to it. The reason we have the draconian “admin must create an account” signup process is that this was the only way to stop the spammers, under such an old version of MediaWiki.)

Thanks for doing this, 75th - a new version of MediaWiki would be great for BlogNomic. Once we can allow players to easily create their own accounts again, we can play around with wiki pages as gamestate without having the idlest 25% of players never using it. (And I’d quite like to look into replacing the GNDT with some sort of wiki page.)

I’d say the easiest approach would be to start by copying across the front page, and then to just keep looking for red links to see what pages still need to be copied. It might be a good idea to move the old wiki into a (weakly) .htpasswded folder, so that we can get still to it to copy things out, or check stuff, but there’s no danger of search engines spidering it.

Sounds like a good idea, don’t know if I’ll have time to port stuff.

I don’t know if this is a good Dynasty for an in-game solution; maybe that could be the purpose of the next Dynasty?

Qwaz: Bah, any Dynasty is a good dynasty.

Kevan: I agree.  Wasn’t thinking when I mentioned it to Wakukee.

We do have a bunch of orphaned pages, though: user pages, etc.  We’ll see how it goes.

@Kevan: you can use robots.txt to stop a page being spidered by search engines, but unfortunately it tends not to stop spambots.

@ais523: True, I suppose I just err on the side of pessimism as to how many search engines (and homebrew projects) actually respect robots.txt. But if Google are ignoring the folder, that’s most of the spammer’s effort wasted.

I say go for it.

I’ll probably help port some pages as well, depending on if I have time or not. Just let me know when it’s up

I can help out with porting. User pages should be fairly easy… look up each player, then look up their user talk, then port it. Low priority, though.

  We can do it this dynasty; we can increase Stamina or something.

@wak: Idk how many of us have really used our talk pages lol. I think those would be in the player in questions hands about moving anything on a talk page.

And I can help port pages. I have way too much free time lol. Now that I think of it, I think any of the core game documents that only has a title and nothing else should not get ported, since obviously theres no useful history on them. And theres that one spamish page from the pirate vs ninja dynasty that prob should also be left behind.

@Kev: most of those orphan pages look like utter spam. Idk if theres any useful pages in there but it looks like just a spam zone.

We keep the pages that have in-game history.  Including the spamish Pirate vs Ninja page that is a major part of that dynasty’s history.

@Rodlen: *shrugs* Just putting my thoughts in lol. I just figured that if theres nothing on the page to begin with then why waste time moving it. I know that any with info on them should move.

I do think it’s good to prefix the title of pages we look at, so people going down the Popular Pages page can quickly skim through to see which pages people have checked.

I suggest something obvious, like

!! MARKED: SPAM
!! MARKED: LEGIT
!! MARKED: LEGIT + PORTED

or something.

Or at least we can mark the legit ones that we port over.

Passwording the old wiki sounds good.

So, when can we get started with installing the new version?

If marking pages, I suggest you use a template; something like {{legit}} that we can put on non-spam pages, and then MediaWiki itself will tell us which pages have the template on.

arthexis: probably next weekend, though I’ll have a look tonight.  if it’s super easy, I may just do it. 

ais: build it and we will use it :)

@Excalabur: done. Type {{legit}} on a wiki page (preferably at the top), and it’ll be flagged as not being spam. (Little-known fact: I used to be an administrator on Wikipedia.)

I knew that! Yay, I have little-known knowledge!  : D

Nice work with the template, but it seems like it’s duplicating effort - instead of searching through the page list, then opening an edit window to add and save {{legit}}, we could (once the new wiki existed) search through the page list and open an edit window to copy the content out to the new wiki.

An {{already copied}} template would be useful at that point, though, so that we can be sure what’s been copied across.

Agree’d with the {{already copied}} template idea.

OK, I’ll add a {{copied}} as well. (Shorter template names tend to get less annoying when you type them hundreds of times.)

(Not that {{copied}} will be useful until a new wiki exists; but it’ll be ready for when that happens.)