Re: [pgsql-www] We need an Advocacy wiki

Gregory Stark wrote:
> "Greg Sabino Mullane" <greg@turnstep.com> writes:
>
>> Not sure what your definition of normal is; that depends on what you mean by
>> "registered". If it means just creating an account via web form, that's
>> harldy an impediment to vandalism. We can certainly give more people the power
>> to grant write-access to wiki accounts, if that's the perceived hold up.
>
> Do we have any history of vandalism on the -hackers mailing list? There is no
> approval mechanism for people subscribing to the list. Would people be happy
> if every subscription to -hackers required someone to approve your membership?

No, but we *do* have a history of vandalism/spamming on the website.
This includes the interactive docs, news posts, event posts and
professional services. That's pretty much every single part of the
website that actually has a submit button, except for the bug reporting
form - which goes through the majordomo moderation system so it's still
moderated.

But - it helped significantly when we started requesting community
logins for these forms. It's still not gone - there are people
advertising for UK hotels and a few other things that actually sign up
for a community account with a temp email address and post from there.
This is the main reason why we still have manual verification on all
these things even though they require a login.

That said, allowing people to sign up for an account in an automated way
that does require email verification would work, as long as there is:
1) A way to revoke and ban addresses
2) Somebody to keep track of things, and remove spam and revoke/ban
these users.

(this would be the same level of verification that we have for the
mailinglists - it's not like they're unvalidated)

But the work required for (2) is a lot less than a completely open
system of course. If there are a couple of people who are willing to
take that upon them (which there seems to be, given the activity on the
wiki) we could always give that a try?

//Magnus