News You Can Bruise for 2004 December 16

Despite the fact that I'm a big jerk who laughs when wikis are spammed, I've been thinking about the problem since yesterday. The reason I got all those copycat wiki spammers stepping on each others' toes (and, incidentally, mine) in the NewsBruiser wiki was not because there was spam indexed in the page history, as with some other wikis, but because there was spam right there on the front page. Because I was lazy. My wiki was living in sin. The price of having a wiki is eternal vigilance, and I wasn't taking it seriously.

So in addition to the anti-spam measures I took yesterday, this morning I updated my subwiki installation and started toughening it. I put in robots meta tags similar to those in NewsBruiser, and email notification of changes so it'll poke me if it gets spammed. Unfortunately un-spamming a page in subwiki is pretty difficult, which is why I was so lazy in the first place, so now I need to write a 'revert' function. Then I can have a 'click here to revert' link in the update email like I do with "click here to mark as spam" in the NewsBruiser comment emails.

I wish Bayesian techniques would work well on wikis, but it seems like a just-change-the-links attack would be even easier to do for wiki pages than for weblog comments.

"Instead of writing ad hoc HTML browsers, use Beautiful Soup". AWESOME

Anthony Baxter, who's contributed patches to Beautiful Soup before, sent in a special parser class for dealing with the aggravations particular to SOAP-generated XML. The class name is BeautifulSoap.

Let me know if you like this solution. In the default theme you can link to a NewsBruiser comment by referencing the time it was posted: here's one of Zack's posts. Older entries don't have this feature in the static files because I haven't rewritten the static files yet.

I have no idea why I tried this before and found it really difficult. Either I fixed the problem while doing something else, or I was trying to have the permalink be the ordinal of the comment (which might change if comments get deleted) instead of the post time. I'd rather have a human-recognizable anchor than one that would be ambiguous if two people should happen to post comments in the same second.

Oh yeah, today I took the day off and my mother and I went places. We went to the pirate store and next-door Paxton Gate (both closed because we got there too early), then to Greens for lunch and then to the zoo. Now I'm working on NewsBruiser even though I should be working on my CodeCon demo.