A useful Moin Moin anti-spam tip, via Upayavira at the ASF: adding ACLs to pages so that only certain users can edit them. This is an easy way to interfere with the wiki spammers who get past the existing (quite good) Moin Moin anti-spam subsystems. They tend to aim for the common Wiki pages, such as WikiSandBox, RecentChanges, and FrontPage, so if you make those pages uneditable, that’ll cause them more trouble — and hopefully cause them to move on to easier targets, instead of defacing your wiki. Here’s how to do it (at least for Moin Moin >= 1.5.1).
Open a shell on the machine where the Moin Moin software is installed. Edit your “wikiconfig.py” file (in my case this is at /home/moinmoin/moin-1.5.1/share/moin/jmwiki/wikiconfig.py), and change the “acl_rights_before” line to read:
acl_rights_before = u"JustinMason:read,write,delete,revert,admin"
Replace “JustinMason” with your wiki login name, of course.
Create an administrative group of trusted users. Do this by creating a page called “AdminGroup” containing
#acl All:read These are the members of this group, who can edit certain restricted pages: * JustinMason
Now, for the sensitive pages (like FrontPage etc.), edit each one and add an access-control list line at the top of each page containing:
#acl AdminGroup:read,write All:read
That’s it. Users who are not in the AdminGroup will no longer be able to edit those pages. That should help… at least for a while ;)
Update: you should also use this in wikiconfig.py:
acl_rights_default = u'Known:read,write,revert All:read'
This blocks non-logged-in users from writing to pages.
Comments closed