Pin Eight:Site news
The second upgrade out of three, a dump-and-restore into MySQL 5, happened on 2012-05-05. Editing was shut down for about a half hour.
As of 2012-05-03, Pin Eight has been upgraded to a hosting plan including a shell account. Unfortunately, a side effect of this migration was a rollback that lost about a day of edits. For the next two planned upgrades, including an upgrade to MySQL 5 followed by an upgrade to MediaWiki 1.19, I will make sure to make the wiki read-only during the transition so that nothing is lost.
To stem bot registrations, as of 2012-04-26, reCAPTCHA is replaced with QuestyCaptcha, which deals trivia problems related to literature that I've read. Each question links to a page with the answer on it, a page that generic spambots and non-English-speaking members of CAPTCHA solving farms in developing countries probably won't be able to parse. So far, I've added fewer than a dozen questions, which shouldn't hold up against a targeted attack like the sort of attacks a huge site like Wikipedia gets, but I have an inkling that these attacks really aren't targeted.
There was a problem with determining autoconfirmed status of a user account that was fixed in the middle of 2011-08. Main namespace spam should be slightly less common, except for the few spambots that know how to confirm e-mail addresses or create sleeper accounts.
Sometime in 2011-05, we installed an ABUSE filter to evaluate actions by users, such as edits. Learn more at Pin Eight:ABUSE filter. Also more bad news about SVG support on Go Daddy: <text> doesn't work at all.
As of 2010-10-13, SVG thumbnailing (the process to convert SVG to PNG so that IE can view pages that use SVG) is kinda-sorta working. But the rsvg version on Go Daddy's servers is still nowhere near perfect; this image looks much better when displayed natively in Firefox than it does with rsvg. There's also bad news: we got our first link spammer.
As of 2010-10-12, Cite.php has been installed. Editors can now use <ref> and <references /> as on Wikipedia. In addition, I have enabled .ogg uploads and turned off reCAPTCHA for emailconfirmed users.
