[lisppaste-devel] Lisppaste maintenance and administration

[Michael Compton]

Hi all,

I'd be willing to lend a hand with lisppaste.

The more streamlined the administrative tasks can be made the better,
and with a group of people willing to deal with the tasks when they are
available should reduce the risk of administrative burnout; I think it
will be too much to ask only one or two volunteers to burden all the
responsibility. 

Some sort of automated administrative ticket system or mailing list
would allow people to react when required, if such a thing is possible.

On Sun, 2010-05-30 at 12:31 -0400, Alastair Bridgewater wrote:
> [I attempted to send this last night, but forgot that I wasn't
> subscribed to the list from this address. Problem fixed, so the
> message is being re-sent.]
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> As was discussed recently on #lisp (ccl channel log for 2010-05-29,
> starting at 19:59:55), lisppaste is presently running in a rather
> diminished capacity, largely due to abuse by people attempting to spam
> freenode. This abuse requires maintainer/administrator attention to
> deal with, which is in short supply.
> 
> Actions already taken on this front are, per Brian Mastenbrook, as follows:
> 
> > <chandler> The XML-RPC interface has been disabled until I feel that it won't be abused.
> > <chandler> The set of content regexps has been beefed up, and a user-agent blacklist added for the robot that was pasting before.
> > <chandler> When a banned content/title/user-agent is triggered, the IP that triggered it is immediately banned.
> > <chandler> If a single IP submits more than N pastes in M seconds, that IP is immediately banned.
> > <chandler> I've removed the bot from most channels and will add it back as people ask for it. For many channels, the spam pastes were the first pastes in a year or more.
> > <chandler> Oh, and it now randomizes captchas (sorry, Krystof).
> 
> Brian also announced an intent to kill the system should there be
> further problems with spam, and hope that someone else would volunteer
> to take over.  Subsequently, Erik Huelsmann expressed an interest in
> helping with the maintenance, and both Brian and myself stated that we
> wouldn't mind doing some of the maintenance/development work, provided
> that someone else handled the day-to-day administration and dealing
> with spam attacks. Brian also expressed a willingness to answer
> questions and provide advice on how to proceed.
> 
> Some development ideas were batted about, including an additional
> angle on spam filtering, which I'm sure will be revisited soon, along
> with the start of a discussion of development philosophy.  We also
> agreed that lisppaste-devel was the appropriate place to hold further
> discussion. I will be preparing a separate email tomorrow covering
> some of the suggestions made during the discussion, as well as the
> issue of paste storage improvements.
> 
> Wrapping up, I had two unanswered questions for Brian,
> 
> 1. What do we need to know about administrating the system?
> 2. How can the administration be made better/easier?
> 
> Any questions, comments, corrections?
> 
> Thank you,
> 
> --Alastair Bridgewater
> 
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