LHC portal

Hullo there accelerites!

You may or may not have seen the LHC Portal Wiki. It is a great source of information and is being actively being updated by the community, which makes me very very happy.

But lo! Spammers, intent on killing our beautiful wiki are stealing its soul. The problem has now gotten to the point where some pages won't even load because PHP runs out of memory. After increasing PHP's allocated memory, I was confronted with this monstrosity: http://wiki.lhcportal.com/index.php/Talk:Experiments. This makes me very very unhappy.

So, kind LHC Portal community, I humbly ask for your help. There is a great deal of work needing done on the wiki, but if a lot of us lend a hand, we can make this part of the most excellent. There are a number of things I had in mind:

• Block, spamming IP addresses
• Actively monitor the wiki for spam
• Delete the existing spam
• Fill in missing pages
• Expand stubs
• Categorise the wiki properly
• Embed more media (pictures, videos, etc.)
• Sort out the formatting and standardise the style of the wiki

Ignoring for the moment that my list seems to be an acrostic of BAD FECES, I am looking for volunteers to help carry out these actions. Some of these, like the spam deletion, are pretty frakking urgent, and I (and the small yet brilliant team who are currently maintaining the wiki) just don't have the time to deal with all of this.

Anyone who wishes to help can get started right away. Simply register on the wiki (so we know you're not a spammer!) and get to it. You don't even need to give an e-mail address! For people writing or editing articles, the Wikipedia Manual of Style is your bible.

I am going to add some anti-spam extensions, like blacklisting and a captcha. If anyone has any requests for other extensions, enhancements or indeed any complaints, feel free to drop me a line over PM or e-mail!

I think that's about it for now, except to say a huge cookie-filled thank you to everyone who has contributed to the wiki so far. Seriously guys, there are like only a few of you, but you've done such a gosh darn good job.

Peace out,
~2.0

After 5pm today, I'm much less busy for the next few days. Count me in for some spam whacking.
Where do we dump targets for the ban hammer?

I fixed about 20 pages. Once you get the hang of it, it is quite easy. I do it like this:
- open a page
- if it looks messy, click "history"
- look for the first revision that looks suspicious (strange or no name, basically)
- click on the date
- if it is still messy, click on "previous version" until you see a good one
- click "edit"
- enter "spam removal" in the summary box
- click OK

cleaned what I could,
could not see a way to block IP addresses

posting access to the Wiki should be tightend up

Dave

someone with a ban-hammer need to visit the talk:beam section ...

Dave