[OpenAFS-devel] Moving Forwards

[Simon Wilkinson]

On 9 Sep 2012, at 15:42, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> OpenAFS RT and the wiki used to be much more open.   The reason they
> were locked down years ago is because the quantity of spam and =
defacing
> became overwhelming. =20

I don't think this is correct. The wiki is as open as it ever was. When =
we were using TWiki, hosted on dementia.org, we allowed self =
registration, which led to lots of spam. For a while, we added an =
'approval' requirement, where Derrick would enable each genuine new =
account. When we moved over to ikiwiki, we enabled self registration =
again (for those with valid OpenID accounts). This has led to an =
unfortunate increase in the incidence of spam, but to my knowledge, we =
haven't yet disabled self registration there.

Since I started contributing to OpenAFS, RT has always been locked down =
in terms of who can comment and manipulate tickets. We have talked on a =
number of occassions about relaxing access but this has always stalled =
on either a concrete proposal of who should have access (which I believe =
I have now provided - whoever wants access), and on the availability of =
someone to do the work to implement a self registration mechanism that =
is spam resistant.

> must ensure that anonymous accounts cannot be
> used to easily generate false tickets or deface existing ones.

In terms of ticket generation, this is a red herring. Anonymous users =
can generate false tickets simply by mailing the openafs-bugs address. I =
doubt that opening the system up will lead to more spam than we already =
see through that conduit.

I agree that we want to avoid the defacing of existing tickets. The =
proposal of giving access to anyone who subscribes to openafs-devel =
seems like a good one, if we can make it work in practice.

If Chaskiel or Jeffrey don't have the time or inclination to help us =
change the configuration of rt.central.org (which might be complicated =
because it provides RT to other users as well), we do always have the =
option of hosting an OpenAFS RT on openafs.stanford.edu.

Cheers,

Simon=