BattleMaster Community
BattleMaster => Marketing => Wiki => Topic started by: Revan on August 05, 2013, 04:25:04 PM
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So, we have the idea that maybe we can give people their Locals Board fix through a return to maybe using newspapers or what have you, but I think if that's going to have any traction the wiki needs to be adapted somewhat. At present, I would say it isn't as easy to find interesting content on the wiki as it could be. And there doesn't seem to be any way for us to obviously push the good content that will get people interested in frequenting and using the wiki more often. The wiki is probably fit for purpose if we just wanted it to be a static manual or aid to playing BattleMaster, but we also want to use it for changing in game content and world building and in that regard perhaps the experience could be improved.
Can we make it so that the wiki main page features some dynamic content alongside the static content? Could we get a list of new articles featured on the main page for example? (and emphasis on new articles by the way. Not recent changes that will flag up all the spam account creations or multiple changes to old articles or what have you). Additionally, could we have a featured articles section that gets changed every once in a while. I guess, essentially it would be a way to curate content and to emphasise the kind of articles we appreciate on the wiki. Could be good realm pages, good roleplay features, newspapers etc. The important thing though is that not only would these changes help create more of an audience for those who put the time into making new articles, but it gives people a reason to come back later to check for new content.
I don't know whether any of that is achievable at present with the current wiki version and extensions but I've had a little look and there are a couple of extensions that might be relevant to this:
Extension:RecentPages (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RecentPages)
Extension:FeaturedFeeds (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:FeaturedFeeds)
As for the continuing plague of spam accounts, the list of new spam accounts in the recent changes log can regularly exceed double figures each day. Even if we deleted them as soon as they were created, you would then get a list of deleted accounts clogging up the log as well. Ideally that also can be reduced for a better experience, but if I recall correctly, we simply don't have the tools. I had a little look at things that might help with that as well, but it could be a hiding to nothing:
Extension:Phalanx (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Phalanx)
ExtensionBlockandNuke (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BlockandNuke)
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Is there a newer version of the wiki software? That might help. I noticed that en.wikipedia.org has a new WYSIWYG editor, I think it's in beta.
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This is really important. The wiki has been and could be a really engaging part of the Battlemaster experience, and it saddens me that there's less IC content being posted on it than there used to be.
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Is there a newer version of the wiki software? That might help. I noticed that en.wikipedia.org has a new WYSIWYG editor, I think it's in beta.
It seems we are on version 1.19.0 (http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/Special:Version) of the MediaWiki software, but the latest version is 1.21.1 (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download). No idea what changes have been made between versions or what effort it entails to upgrade, but I imagine even just updating to the latest 1.19 version would be useful.
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As for the continuing plague of spam accounts, the list of new spam accounts in the recent changes log can regularly exceed double figures each day. Even if we deleted them as soon as they were created, you would then get a list of deleted accounts clogging up the log as well. Ideally that also can be reduced for a better experience, but if I recall correctly, we simply don't have the tools. I had a little look at things that might help with that as well, but it could be a hiding to nothing:
Extension:Phalanx (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Phalanx)
ExtensionBlockandNuke (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BlockandNuke)
Neither of these extensions will help us. Neither will actually block the creation of the bad accounts. We already have some filters in place to prevent some creation, such as a filter for new usernames that prevents the registration of usernames with numbers or symbols. We already have BadBehavior installed, which is blocking almost everything that the accounts that do manage to get registered try to post. That's why you never see any real spam pages. (They are very rare, and get nuked quickly.) We also have a Nuke extension that lets us nuke all pages created by any account.
The only real problem with the spambot accounts is the flooding of the Recent Changes page. There's nothing we can do about that unless someone knows of a way to remove the listing of new accounts in the Recent Changes log, or a way to stop spambots from registering accounts in the first place.
I haven't had a chance to look at your first suggestions yet.
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I was wondering if there should be IG news bulletin, which ruler could give permission to update? Kind of official news paper.
-Jaune
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I have already made some suggestions that would cut down at least somewhat on the spam accounts. However, since there is the small chance that they might conceivably prevent some new players who are completely oblivious and unwilling to click on a single link to find the answer to a simple question from creating new accounts, they were vetoed by Tom.
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The wiki needs to be updated. It will be when the server is moved, which will happen probably within the month.
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http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikilog (http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Wikilog)
Blog-wiki hybrid extension, may be the answer for our newspapers.
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urgs. Blogs are probably the worst "solution" we could come up with.
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Blogs aren't great, but since it uses all of the wiki functionality it could be a great asset.
As long as all of the posts can be formatted to look like a paper it could be an easier way of doing it, and having all the issues, or atleast all the recent ones on one page (with it easy to see the old posts too), it could put some more interest in the paper. I wouldn't mind bookmarking a few pages and reading the bi weekly paper or whatever.
Also a blog is good because if you are only interested in current goings on, it could show the last months worth of post. So between each issue there could be "breaking news" blurbs that could be sort of news as its happening events. Then there could be a full write up of those in the issues.
Not a perfect solution, but this isnt a perfect world. In a perfect world we would have a professional coder, ask for unpaid fulltime work because hes bored, so he could create us a fully custom battlemaster system with custom coded wiki and newspaper software etc.
This might be the next best thing, and it intergrates with our current system which means no extra links need to be added to the actual game, and it doesn't seem like it would be a huge amount of work to get running.
EDIT: Reading more into it even, since you can have collaborative "blog" posts it would be so much like a newspaper, much more than the current ones. Its not really even like a blog, in the traditional sense, and you can RSS or ATOM the newspaper (or all of them) to keep abreast of current affairs. Now if 2-3 realms on each island actually tried to make and maintain a newspaper (with this aswell, it would be possible to have a guild in game that is for a continent wide newspaper and have a collab project on the wiki aswell), then we could have 10-15 new newspapers, with semi regular newsupdates, with larger more comprehensive issues every now and again. Would be a great way to keep abreast of current affairs all over the battlemaster world, which seems to be the main reason people want to have the local forums anyway.
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A blog is absolutely horrible. It is the worst kind of journalism you can imagine. There's no focus nor control. Actually, it's not a newspaper at all, it's a diary.
Seriously, no blog.
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If you read up on the extension, its not really like a simple blog, its like a easy system of linking wiki pages. Your letting bias towards a system cloud your thoughts.
Its a slightly more efficient way of doing the current newspaper system on the wiki. It could have the same amount of moderation and make it easier and quicker for people to publish news, which is a main complaint that people make when you bring up the newspapers, is that it takes so much time.
This could be the stand in for the local forums, with easier moderation and the added bonus of being roleplay.
Journalism is what you make it, if someone wants to make it "diary" like then your not going to have many readers anyway. But if someone can make more issues of a wiki newspaper because it wasnt such a chore, then it could be a a great boon. Also the RSS options, mean that you could get more readers, and have a higher retention, because a little notification is telling them there is another issue or breaking news, and they dont have to refresh the page each day to check for new issues.
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A blog is absolutely horrible. It is the worst kind of journalism you can imagine. There's no focus nor control. Actually, it's not a newspaper at all, it's a diary.
Seriously, no blog.
Tom, please make an effort to separate the common modern content of blogs from the blog format.
The newspapers as they existed back in the day were, in fact, all pretty much blogs in their format.
I think this extension (with the proper configuration) sounds like it's an excellent way to make running a BM-Wiki newspaper much smoother and easier.
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I see I need to elaborate.
The problem with blogs is that they do not prioritize. New information goes to the top, old information drops off the bottom.
Now look at a newspaper. Any newspaper. You will notice a total disregard of temporal order. IMPORTANT news go to the top, while less important stuff goes to the bottom, or page 5. THAT is part of journalism as well, and the main reason people still read newspapers when they could also wade through Twitter themselves. Seperating out the important from the unimportant, merging things, summing up, putting related articles next to each other, the lot.
This is all about format and presentation, and it is crazy important. There's a reason people are employed full-time in the job of laying out the newspaper every day, even in an age where if the issue were just to fit everything, a short script would sort it out much faster.
A newspaper system needs to work with tiles and allow its users to place the content. Tags are nice to find related articles. And that's about it, it really isn't difficult, but it is a far call from writing an online diary. Heck, bug me some more and I'll write one, or better yet: How about we try to find a PHP coder for this particular task? Symfony2+Doctrine and there could be a prototype literally within a day. Make it a standalone system and it could even be sold, I'm sure a million school and hobby and club newspapers are looking for just such a system.
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Not sure if i understood right what you meant, but aint joomla and such pretty much what you are looking for?
Or is that "too heavy" solution?
http://demo.joomla.org/
-jaune
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Tom I don't think you looked at the examples and what I'm getting at.
Its not really like a "blog", and it can use all of the wiki formatting. So you could get a template, pop it in and have it as issue one. Each ISSUE would go to the top, with maybe small blurbs (formatted nicely and in character or whatever) if some important info comes up and needs to be talked about now, even though you don't have time for a full issue. You can still do the important info at the top of each issue yadda yadda (although i think your asking a little much, seeing as no one is doing newspapers right now, and any that have info are really incomplete because they take a lot of time.)
The point is, it would save 10min of the authors time doing the linking, it would be a nice way to specify writers and do collab work, it would be easier to monitor and a list of papers could then be linked from the front page, and the RSS and ATOM features would make it easier and likely attract more readers because they aren't having to physically check back all the time to see that there is a new issue.
Really, what have you got to lose by testing it out and seeing what the community comes up with. If you are expecting people to be pro journalists/editors your already aiming way to high. Also this saves people some time, and they can still go over the top and flashy with nice templates and such if that's what they so choose. Better to start of with something that is easy to use, lay down some guidelines, and see what people create.
In saying all of this, a custom solution would be good, and yes it could be sold. It would just be if people used it or not at that point.
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I see I need to elaborate.
The problem with blogs is that they do not prioritize. New information goes to the top, old information drops off the bottom.
Yep.
This is exactly what every newspaper on the BM Wiki ever looked like.
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Now this runs a bit off from the topic... but
Would it be possible to make newspaper in the game? And that paper would be available anybody on the continent with 1-X gold fee. If you pay that fee, you get the newspaper and maker gets the gold.
-Jaune
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If a custom newspaper platform made in PHP was created then yes Juane, you could.
A simple variable in PHP saying if they paid the fee or not would be enough to get access, that should be easy enough, and you could even have it that you bought certain issues of a paper and not others.
A cool idea then would be to make each issue 2 gold and have 1 gold of that go to the publication house (could be like a guild) and 1 go to the "delivery man" so that money could be made to upgrade the paper, increase distribution etc (maybe even go toward regions, which then could become famous for their publishing houses). Could be an interesting new feature, and would encourage people to make good papers so they could keep publishing. If the paper doesn't sell, the nobles would have to support it from their own pocket etc. It would give people something extra to use their money on, keep news in the game, and be a good talking point.
Seems like a lot of work, but it would bring some variety to the game, and give an interesting take on economy.
Hell this could even be extended, so that guilds once they were a certain size could create "guild newsletters", kind of like a mini paper that contains information pertinent to the guild and they could sell for 1 gold to members (because the messenger system for guild members is already in place). It would give updates to members, create a reason to get into a continent wide guild (cheaper news), and present it in a fun, roleplaying type way.
And hey if a realm didn't want to use the system, they just don't build a publication house.
Might be complicated but it would be fun, and would answer a lot of questions, keeping news ingame etc, and really, it wouldn't be game breaking, and would open continent wide news up to those who don't wanna join a guild.
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Hell this could even be extended, so that guilds once they were a certain size could create "guild newsletters", kind of like a mini paper that contains information pertinent to the guild and they could sell for 1 gold to members (because the messenger system for guild members is already in place). It would give updates to members, create a reason to get into a continent wide guild (cheaper news), and present it in a fun, roleplaying type way.
You could also use the current guild mechanics of grant/fees, create a guild dedicated to a newspaper and publish only to full members.
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Hmm that would make a good reason to join the guild, make it a bit more fun, professional and permanent, and if you wanted to get a large spread you would have to make good content to convince people to build a lot of your guild houses.
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Or is that "too heavy" solution?
By about 5 tons. I have plenty of experience with several CMS systems, and quite frankly, they're all !@#$. If you know nothing about programming, or don't have the time and energy, they are great to set up some kind of site. But if you have something specific in mind, that deviates from the templates and modes available, they're horrible.
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This is exactly what every newspaper on the BM Wiki ever looked like.
That is simply not true. Most of the newspapers I read did a great job in creating an actual layout with meaning and then posted that as an edition/issue. Then they went to the next edition. They were very much closer to real newspapers than to blogs.
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Again:
If you want this to happen, find me a volunteer who understands Symfony2 and Doctrine. I know exactly what I want the system to look like and it could be standalone or in-game. But please don't make me do it myself, I have 100 projects on my desk right now that need my attention and I'm horrible at managing them when the amount goes beyond a certain limit (that they have long passed).
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Again:
If you want this to happen, find me a volunteer who understands Symfony2 and Doctrine. I know exactly what I want the system to look like and it could be standalone or in-game. But please don't make me do it myself, I have 100 projects on my desk right now that need my attention and I'm horrible at managing them when the amount goes beyond a certain limit (that they have long passed).
If we have a volunteer who is already familiar with PHP at all, I can think of a lot of things we can put him (or her) to doing to help BM that should (IMNSHO) have much higher priority than coding up a nice way to make newspapers for the Wiki...
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That is simply not true. Most of the newspapers I read did a great job in creating an actual layout with meaning and then posted that as an edition/issue. Then they went to the next edition. They were very much closer to real newspapers than to blogs.
I apologize, I did not make myself entirely clear.
I must admit, I am making an important assumption: that the extension will allow using the actual "blog posts" themselves as an includable piece of a larger wiki page, so that the newspaper can, in fact, have both a newspaper-y layout and a simple backend for posting new entries.
Can anyone tell us whether or not the Wikilog extension will permit this?
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The example just has the typical "top to bottom" blog format: http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak (http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak)
So I guess that's out.
A newspaper guild would make publishing easier, but wouldn't help with the "blog" part at all. Still, it's an interesting idea. aspirants would be "readers", members would be "writers", and elders would be "editors".
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If a custom newspaper platform made in PHP was created then yes Juane, you could.
Standard wiki page text can be pulled into the game directly. Or at least Tom has said this in the past. We have debated getting rid of the IG region descriptions, and just linking to the region pages on the wiki. Or pulling the wiki text in and displaying it IG. If it was desired to bring the newspapers IG, which I don't think is a very good idea, we could just provide the wiki link. No real reason to provide the text IG.
Having to pay with IG gold to read the paper? That's a really bad idea. I can't imagine that anyone would regularly read it if it cost them to do it. I sure wouldn't bother.
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If you want this to happen, find me a volunteer who understands Symfony2 and Doctrine.
Tom, you're going way overboard with this. We don't need a full-fledged content management system to do wiki newspapers. All we need is someone who has a good knowledge of wiki authoring to make some templates, and write up instructions of how to use it. I created some very automated systems for the Dwilight Daily. I started trying to redo the TattleMaster with semantic forms and semantic data, but just couldn't make it lay out right with the semantic wiki template system. If someone could make that work, then you wouldn't need any coding at all.
In addition, I think you're trying to design a system that just doesn't fit the way that wiki newspapers are done. They are done blog-style because that's the way that content is created. With only one or two people working on a paper, you don't get complete "issues" released all at once. You get one article a week, not 6 or more where you have to lay it all out, and have headlining stories, with bylines and filler.
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I must admit, I am making an important assumption: that the extension will allow using the actual "blog posts" themselves as an includable piece of a larger wiki page, so that the newspaper can, in fact, have both a newspaper-y layout and a simple backend for posting new entries.
Can anyone tell us whether or not the Wikilog extension will permit this?
You can use transclusions to include the text of one page on another. (Templates are actually just a fancy, pre-defined method doing transclusion.) This is how I made the Dwilight Daily. You can create one page and then transclude it into as many different pages as you want. You don't have to do anything fancy to make a page transcludable. Any page can be transcluded into any other page. So whatever extension you created to enter the articles wouldn't have to do anything special.
There is a way, using semantic forms, to create a form users can use to edit a page that prompts them for all the required information to embed the semantic data. You can then use semantic queries to display the desired articles on a page using transclusion.
You shouldn't need to redesign anything, or code any kind of special CMS application. It just takes someone who has the time to figure out how to use the tool we already have to do it. I tried to do it with the TattleMaster, just never had the time to really polish it up and make it work easily enough.
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The example just has the typical "top to bottom" blog format: http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak (http://juliano.info/en/Blog:Memory_Leak)
So I guess that's out.
A newspaper guild would make publishing easier, but wouldn't help with the "blog" part at all. Still, it's an interesting idea. aspirants would be "readers", members would be "writers", and elders would be "editors".
I don't know. It might collate articles in a traditional blog format, but click through to the posts themselves and you have just a normal wiki page that you can do anything with. That could work fairly well for newspapers. You can have a short summary on the main newspaper 'blog' for each new edition and then you click through to get the meat of the latest issue.
Tom, you're going way overboard with this. We don't need a full-fledged content management system to do wiki newspapers. All we need is someone who has a good knowledge of wiki authoring to make some templates, and write up instructions of how to use it. I created some very automated systems for the Dwilight Daily. I started trying to redo the TattleMaster with semantic forms and semantic data, but just couldn't make it lay out right with the semantic wiki template system. If someone could make that work, then you wouldn't need any coding at all.
In addition, I think you're trying to design a system that just doesn't fit the way that wiki newspapers are done. They are done blog-style because that's the way that content is created. With only one or two people working on a paper, you don't get complete "issues" released all at once. You get one article a week, not 6 or more where you have to lay it all out, and have headlining stories, with bylines and filler.
I've been a fairly heavy user of the BattleMaster wiki in my time. I can happily tweak and mess around with run of the mill templates and wiki markup to get the results I want. But I'm afraid using the semantic wiki was way over my head. It's too complicated for me. To be honest, I think you're about the only person who managed to get something going that really made use of it.
I really liked the way you had the Dwilight Daily running and I was intrigued by what you were trying to do with the Tattlemaster but I absolutely couldn't do something like that myself. I think we would, as you say, have to polish up some templates and get some instructions written up to see the automated systems you were using used by others.
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Tom, you're going way overboard with this. We don't need a full-fledged content management system to do wiki newspapers.
I didn't say we need one. We need a simple, specialized tool. I can write a prototype in a day, easy. All it needs to do is three things:
- a comfortable WYSIWYG editor to write individual articles
- a simple javascript front-end that allows a drag-and-drop layout process with a few pre-defined templates
- a very simple permission system to determine who can write articles for which paper
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I really liked the way you had the Dwilight Daily running and I was intrigued by what you were trying to do with the Tattlemaster but I absolutely couldn't do something like that myself. I think we would, as you say, have to polish up some templates and get some instructions written up to see the automated systems you were using used by others.
I was incredibly thrilled when sophisticated papers like these appeared.
I do think they will never be the norm because only a few people know the syntax and other details well enough to be able to do them. That's why I think a more user-friendly system would tremendeously lower the barriers-of-entry.
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Well having it so you can write individual articles and save them for later would be amazing, then when you have enough you could copy and paste them to someone (or work with a permission system), he could drag and drop them all and you would be done. Then I guess it would just be a matter of displaying them. Even a simple message system could be used to let people know there is a new issue depending on the realm of the people who wrote it. So if the main author is from X and the editor is from Y, both X and Y realm get a little message saying "The XY Times has released a new issue. Read it here."
If you created a prototype then it could be beta'd in game for a while, see how people like it and if there are any major flaws. If there arent any then leave it, if there are spend an hour and fix them.
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It really isn't difficult. But: I have to work on stuff that puts money into my bank account first.
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So, it's nice to see the wiki updated to the latest version but has something gone awry in some of the settings or extensions? All of a sudden we're experiencing a torrent of spam account creations.
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It's just another spambot attack. Bad Behavior is blocking all their edits.
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Yeah, we never figured out how to stop them registering accounts in the first place.
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Actually, I suggested using the already-installed QuestyCaptcha to make them answer some trivially-discoverable questions about the game (like "How many continents are there?" with a link to the list of continents, or "what is the class every noble starts out as?" with a link to a page clearly stating that...etc), but IIRC, you were afraid that our real users are just too stupid to handle that. :P
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Ok. I changed my mind, let's do that.
All we need is an answer bots can't answer. something as simple as "what's the game called? Hint: B.....M....r" would probably do.
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Ok. I changed my mind, let's do that.
All we need is an answer bots can't answer. something as simple as "what's the game called? Hint: B.....M....r" would probably do.
Actually, we already had that question, without the hint, and the bots were still getting in. Less than they have been since the server move, though, so I assume you didn't put it back in on the new version.
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And before Tim's suggestion, I discussed some superior captchas to Questy: http://forum.battlemaster.org/index.php/topic,4211.msg105635.html#msg105635
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Actually, we already had that question, without the hint, and the bots were still getting in. Less than they have been since the server move, though, so I assume you didn't put it back in on the new version.
Would a variation on that theme be able to fox them? Something like input the name of the game twice.
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Would a variation on that theme be able to fox them? Something like input the name of the game twice.
What would work are trivial but non-obvious questions, and a random rotation of 3 or 4 of them.
Something like "fill in the blanks: ......Master" and "fill in the blanks: "Battle......" - I think the name of the site is probably in the word-list the bots try.
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Can we do something with this? The spambots are flooding us with bogus users at an ever-increasing rate. There were over 500 new spambot accounts in the past 15 or so hours, and over 1,000 in the past 5 or 6 days.
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I can't do research right now, but if you tell me which extension to install, I'll do it within the next few hours.
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QuestyCaptcha.
I'll put in some relatively simple questions and answers. Not, I'm afraid, as simple as "What is the name of this game?" because they were breaking that one before we upgraded the Wiki.
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QuestyCaptcha.
I'll put in some relatively simple questions and answers. Not, I'm afraid, as simple as "What is the name of this game?" because they were breaking that one before we upgraded the Wiki.
It's already installed and active, according to the LocalSettings.php - check it out.