Recently, changes were made to the Fedora Project Wiki to reduce spam. The wiki had been under attack by some very determined spammers.  They were even  willing to create FAS IDs to be able to post spam in our wiki.

Countering spam

Kevin Fenzi sent an email about the changes to the devel-announce list on 16 July 2016. In his email, he noted the increased spam was initially being fought using Basset, a spam-blocking program by Patrick Uiterwijk. While the program is great at detecting spam and blocking accounts, it was not completely accurate and the delays in processing were causing confusion. This was creating extra manual work for the Fedora Infrastructure team as they sorted out the confusion.

Wiki is now CLA+1

Therefore, the decision was made to require wiki editors to have both signed the FPCA and be in an least one group other than the CLA group.

This will have no effect on the majority of Fedora contributors. However, there are a small group of people who need to edit the wiki and aren’t in any groups. These editors are typically either trying to update the Common Bugs page or are doing work that isn’t covered by any particular group. In these cases, please open a ticket on the Fedora Infrastructure Trac. There is a special wikieditors group that will be used only for these cases. If you are already in another group, you do not need to be added to this group.

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Background image courtesy of Andy Tootell – originally posted as Untitled on Unsplash.