[EM] Fwd: Electowiki account

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Kristofer and "Someone"

Replies inline below (first to Kristofer's comments, then to Someone's)

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 3:59 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> I'd also like to note that your mail (the one I'm quoting) is the last
> one that my mail client shows me the name of the person sending it in
> the From field. Everything sent to EM that's more recent than your post
> here shows up as being from the list rather than the person. Did you
> change anything? I find it useful to see who it's from, though I suppose
> some antispam systems may trigger falsely.

Yup, I did change something (a couple of days ago), but now (earlier
this afternoon) I've changed it back to the way that it was a few days
ago.  I was relying on some advice from my hosting provider to solve
an email bouncing problem, and it appears they recommended a
deprecated Mailman feature.  I may play with this some more in the
coming days.

> As for Electowiki, perhaps you could give someone else privileges to
> approve users -- or choose the Wikipedia model where anyone (possibly
> except spammers) can edit.

There's a long saga around this problem.  It used to be much easier to
edit, but spammers overtook the site.  For a while, i was able to keep
up by making periodic spam-cleanup sweeps, but the spammers got too
sophisticated.

> There also seems to be something odd going on with the EM archives.
> Although the index doesn't work (only ranges back to 2015, see
> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/
> ), it's possible to manually go to earlier points (e.g.
> http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2006-November/date.html),
> though in that case, the by-thread view seems to be busted.

Yeah, that's another one I need to pester my provider about.  I don't
have access to be able to fix that.

On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 6:20 AM, Someone <fdpk69p6uq at snkmail.com> wrote:
> a) I don't like mailing lists.  I'm just here to ask about wiki account.

Fair enough.  Is there a forum solution you'd prefer?

> b) When I first encountered it months ago, I was excited about fixing and
> updating things on it, and posting my own research on my user page. I
> started to make a list of needed edits, expecting to quickly get an account:

Ugh...sorry about that.  There's been a bug or two in a MediaWiki
extension that I'm relying on that I didn't have the opportunity to
debug.  In general, rather than making incremental changes to the
existing setup, I'm starting to think much more broadly about big
changes.

Most of the changes you suggested would be great changes for someone
with edit rights to be able to make, so perhaps you could contact me
offlist with the account name you'd like me to fix.  I may be able to
fix it.

> http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Template:Tenn_voting_example
>
> Fix the image

This one I fixed.  There may be other images that are similarly
broken. My restoration technique is somewhat cautious, which is one
reason I'm not making a bit sweep.

>  I imagine it shouldn't be as open as Wikipedia because there
> aren't as many users monitoring for spam, but MediaWiki can be locked down
> to varying degrees and you can give trusted users the ability to approve new
> users, etc.:
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgRateLimits

Thanks for the suggestions.  I'm pretty familiar with those pages, and
MediaWiki's spam fighting tech, and the challenge is what you allude
to.  Wiki-based spam fighting on an open wiki is really complicated,
and MediaWiki's spam fighting solutions are geared toward sites with
hundreds if not thousands of active editors.  With enough effort, it's
possible to use the software on a site the size of Electowiki, but
what I'm wondering is if the effort wouldn't be better placed
elsewhere (e.g. migrating to a different collaborative editing
solution)

Rob