On Mon, May 21, 2007 at 03:36:44PM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Monday 21 May 2007 15:24:44 Christopher L Conway wrote:
> > It would be great to have a resource like the Haskell Wiki for the
> > OCaml community. Such things are not difficult to maintain once they
> > are set up (although someone will have to volunteer for spam patrol).
>
> Having had all links to ffconsultancy.com removed from Wikipedia
> (even my PhD thesis!), we discussed this at length in our company
> recently. Spammers and vandals are a major problem for Wikis. I
> think we dreamt up a good solution: replace the standard "type in
> these letters" with a Turing test.

Since forcing people to sign up with an email address, the wikis at
http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/ and http://cocan.org/ have been spam
free, although people who signed up have complained about getting
notified of all the changes[*] so perhaps that's another sort of spam.

You are right though that CAPTCHAs do not work.  Seriously.  Every
time I've looked at a case of Wiki spam, it's been done by a human
being presumably sitting in a sweat-shop in China or wherever.  Human
beings have no problem typing in CAPTCHAs.

Forcing them to learn OCaml in order to contribute is a good idea.  If
they did it, then even if we get spammed, at least we get more OCaml
coders ...

Rich.

[*] They can turn this off.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat