Work on the Puppy Linux WikkaWiki Moves Forward.

[rockedge]

Somewhat quietly and in the background I've been working on the Puppy Linux wiki to revive it to keep the huge wealth of information in circulation. The age of the Wikkawikki software became a slight problem with the project being declared End-of-Life and put into hibernation at version 1.4.2

This is not so bad as it works well but Wikka has a very weak new user registration mechanism. On the Wikka there lacks any "Are You Human?" checks and that is from original design. This means we have to keep the new user registration generally disabled, and only manually enabled for brief moments. Even if registration was enabled for 15 minutes once the spam Bots found the site there could be 20+ new junk users registered and 100+ new pages of spam advertisement and other potentially dangerous pages and links. All in a matter of minutes so imagine what 24 hours would mean in accumulated junk.

I searched for a Captcha plugin or documented modification and found 2 potentially useful Captcha candidates. One a plugin module that requires no code changes to any Wikka core files. The other was steps and example code for a modification. Both use Freecap which is an open source PHP Captcha library but is no longer maintained or developed. It also uses the old style image with text solution which are easily recognized and solved by Bot's, and I could not get the generated images from Freecap to display properly by either the plugin or modification in the generated Login/Register page.

So I made a custom fix to add a Captcha type query to the Puppy wiki. It's a Question & Answer type of query method that is proving itself very effective on this and the old forum. On the forum we have 2 stage check process to filter out Bot's and automated spam-worm scripts that works well. That level of sophistication is not the case in the Wikkawiki code. But with this small addition of the Q&A query the new user registration form it should allow use to leave the registration open for legitimate new users.

This registration is now enabled for testing!!

Any signs after a few hours of Bot's defeating the mechanism or too many human spam operators muddying the waters the registration will be disabled again until a better solution is developed OR the base wiki software is replaced.

[bigpup]

I know what a Wiki is suppose to be and what it is suppose to provide.

But the only way to keep it useful to Puppy Linux, is going to require someone, with a team of people, to help them.
They are going to constantly have to edit it and keep the information up to date.
Similar to the group of people that help with this forum.

Basically it is going to require constant working on it.

I have not really used the Wiki, very much, and for the most part, find no real reason to use it.

This Puppy Linux forum is a much better source of up to date information.

Not sure if a Wiki is really needed.

[rockedge]

@bigpup This is true. Though there have been requests to keep it alive. I did not bring the wiki back online until recently. I will monitor it some more but as one sees by the different search engines, the wiki pages almost never make the first page of results anymore. After observing for bit how it behaves I might again disable any registration and just let it stand.

Anyone with an existing account can login using the user credentials.

I am mostly interesting in seeing if my code modifications work as intended. I know @vtpup has just recently added some new information into the wiki.

There are good reasons to retire the Puppy Linux WikkaWikki in the near future. And a conversion from this wiki engine's database to a next generation wiki database will require a custom made convertor script or generate it all as html and import that into something like MediaWiki, which will be a major project(s).

If it gets hammered by spam in the next few hours I will disable new user registration functions, existing users can login and create/edit pages. In this case possible retirement will be considered. Plus it's one less vector to breach security with.

UPDATE: so far after 3 hours zero bad registrations

[williwaw]

thanks for working on this. hope the new registration fixes work
would the retirement and conversion be otherwise necessary if the spammers could thwarted?

[rockedge]

If we can control the spam enough we can keep it going as is. Conversion to new wiki software probably will not happen.

I think we can keep the Wiki going for a while as it is with an eye on maintenance of the site. But so few queries come in for pages, it's become a luxury to continue to have.

[dogcat]

There seems to be a method to transform / convert a Wikkawiki database into a Dokuwiki database, the instructions are at https://forum.dokuwiki.org/d/18947-impo ... -wikkawiki

Reading through other Dokuwiki documents on their forum it looks like importing an older Dokuwiki database is handled mostly automatically by the importing Dokuwiki instance. https://forum.dokuwiki.org/d/21760-php- ... reaks-wiki

Just putting this here because of a recent mention of Wikkawiki in another thread. I have never used either of these wikis.