[Xastir] Wiki clean-up.

[Tom Russo]

Folks:

As you may know, info.aprs.net had a massive spam attack recently, and was
getting dozens of spam pages produced per day.  Scott Miller disabled new
account creation there (because it's running too old a version of MediaWiki
to support the necessary add-ons to lock it down in a less draconian manner),
and I have been spending the last month or so deleting hundreds of spam pages.

I just took a look at www.xastir.org, and it's not in such bad shape as all
that, but it is getting the occasional spam page posted --- four last week ---
and there were several dozens of old spam images on there, too.  We're not 
getting the automated spam attacks that Scott's sites all were getting, but 
there is definitely some abuse.

I have cleaned out all the spam on www.xastir.org, deleted all images that
are not related to APRS and deleted all accounts that have produced spam or
spam images recently.  I have spent some time in the last day or two deleting
accounts that look like they might have been bot-produced.

I am being rather heavy-handed in account deletion.  If the account was used
recently to create spam or upload non-APRS imags, it has been deleted.
If the UserID does not look like a call-sign or real name, and has had no 
user contributions, then I'm deleting it on the presumption that it's
a bot-created account that was once created for spamming, but for which all
the spam has already been deleted, or as part of a spamming probe from the
days where we were getting random gibberish inserted into pages  (there were 
lots of gibberish names, and also some that sorta-kinda-semi looked like 
callsigns if you're not really paying attention (e.g. Kxy5z --- wrong format)).

The time is probably near for the wiki to get locked down a little tighter ---
we're clearly still allowing automatic account creation without confirmation,
and the time will come when this gets hit hard, just as all of Scott's sites
did.  Fortunately, our wiki is running a newer version of MediaWiki that 
supports all the good add-ons that will help secure it, but it'll take
Chuck's intervention to enable them.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY   SAR502   DM64ux          http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236        http://kevan.org/brain.cgi?DDTNM
 "The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off."