The Ruse wiki software gets some updates.

Some Changes to Ruse

I’ve been really pleased with the way Ruse has been handling wiki related spam on the Ruby Garden site. Now that Ruse has been deployed for a while, I’ve tweaked a few things to make it even easier to clean up spam.

• Queued Review Mode: The original RubyGarden wiki took an annoying number of clicks to clean a page of spam. Ruse has the cleanup down to one click, but it takes an additional two clicks to get to the next page to review. (goto to review page, choose next page to review). The new Queued Review mode will now automatically advance to the next page for reviewing, bringing you to a true “one click per page” review mode. Click on the “Work from Queue” link on the review page.

• Bug Fix: The review page now correctly displays the differences for the version you are reviewing. The original behavior incorrectly showed the wrong revisions in the differences section (although the page content was correct).

• Minor changes and fixes: The size of the log page is now configurable (rather than the fixed 25 entry size). Demotion during review is now properly logged.

Future Directions

One technique that has proved very useful in preventing spam is the content filtering that Ruse is able to do. We download the “bad url” list from chonqged.org nightly and will reject all posts URL that match that list. Currently, we can add additional URLS to the blacklist by editting a configuration file on the server. Future versions of Ruse might add a web interface to the local blacklist.