Plans for The Transport Tycoon Wiki

[orudge]

Is there any mechanism to prevent souls from entering the forums that know nothing about Transport Tycoon or Locomotion? Otherwise what's the good of making sure people register to edit the wiki if you don't have to know anything about the games to register in these forums.

The point is to deter spammers, not to ensure knowledge of the game.

[Ammler]

IMO, the easiest would still be to allow openid login and maybe even provide openid for both tt-forums.net and openttd.org, then you don't need to invent something new.

[WWTBAM]

IMO, the easiest would still be to allow openid login and maybe even provide openid for both tt-forums.net and openttd.org, then you don't need to invent something new.

I like that as an idea and there seem to be more providers now.

[Rubidium]

How would openid deter spammers? If at all it gives them an easier way to spam as they only need to register at a single, possibly their own, server before they can spam "everywhere". Also I've heard some horror stories w.r.t. supporting openid, and even some sites that removed openid support because it was too much work to support.

[Ammler]

Well, just before you try to implement something own.

After all, also different login on every app doesn't hurt that much anymore, since your browser does keep passwords...

[Hyronymus]

You don't deter spammer with a log-in system. You make it more difficult for them, at most.

Besides, deterring spam isn't the main concern with content management systems like Wiki's. The main concern is to offer valid and correct content. You don't want people to argue about content over a Wiki.

[eis_os]

There is a different aspect, you can see who was responsible for what.
It's a lot easier to find the right person when you know who edited an article.
On the ttdpatch wiki it's the same.

A reason GRFCrawler shows the owner of an entry an allows to block certain users.

[wallyweb]

...since your browser does keep passwords...

I used to allow that until someone cracked my system and got into my passwords. Now they'll have to crack my head instead.

[Merri]

Nice to see an open wiki project getting set up. Personally I'm especially interested on writing some information on TTD translations (possibly a generic installation guide). For Finnish translation I have generic info + installation page as well as a tools info page on a relatively new and small site about Finnish games. I opened it up late last year as previously notable Suomipelit.com shut their site down - but it only had information on Finnish games, I expanded the idea to include Finnish translations, which is where I have my eyes set on. As you can see I'm running a MediaWiki there with a nice set of helpful extensions.

Edit! I also have a step-by-step installation guide with screenshots. It still needs a bit of more work, but it should be very newbie friendly.

It would be possible to lock the specification pages down a bit, to only allow it to be edited by a nominated usergroup. Might be worth doing.

Without any extension you can use Namespaces so that you first create a specific MediaWiki usergroup that has access to a specific namespace. If needed I can provide help for setting up LocalSettings.php via PM (so that I get email alert as I don't visit these forums often but I do care about TTD a great deal). Although I guess the MediaWiki help pages about these are pretty good, you just have to first know you have to deal the stuff via namespaces and that should get you started.

I guess you'll eventually must use namespaces quite a lot:

• TTDPatch
• OpenTTD
• NewGRF
• Forums ?
• Non-namespace for general information (page about TTDPatch gives a generic overlook on what TTDPatch is, while the namespace holds all the TTDPatch specific information pages)

Namespace URLs will be like http://www.tt-wiki.net/TTDPatch:Main_Page
While generic info pages will be like http://www.tt-wiki.net/OpenTTD

There is also a plugin that allows for per page access rights, but I guess that would be an overkill? MediaWiki allows to protect edits for admins only, so namespace usergroups + admin page protect should be enough. Namespaces should also help to keep content separate enough so that people know what they're dealing with!


As for login, I think using a combination separate logins with an optional possibility to use Facebook Connect for each site will be technically easiest to do while keeping maintenance easy as well. I once tried to keep a multisoftware login system, but it eventually broke as new versions kept coming out and some integration components dropped support for just what I was using. Too much hassle for too little gain, writing my own system would have required lots of hours just to get the security right. What I've done since is to reduce the amount of software, now I'm running separate logins MediaWiki and MyBB only. This on two sites, and I have a third one that has DokuWiki and MyBB integration (DokuWiki is very simple and supports user bridging out-of-the-box). No problems, easy updates and things work quite easily for everyone. I guess the lesson learned is "don't aim for a cool technical goal only for the sake of having a cool technical gadget"


I think I could spend a little time to create a MediaWiki TTD design based on Vector. Keeping it Vector compatible means familiarity for those of us who already know MediaWiki quite well - also, Vector is user friendly and clean so there is no need to break what works, just add flavor to make it "our own"


For spam bot registration protection you don't actually need any kind of CAPTCHA stuff. Just add a human readable non-googleable question. Math is very bad and easy for spambots, instead a TTD specific question like:

Which company's logo appears when you launch the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe? (tip: ten letters)

Is super effective against any spambot while not being too hard for any Transport Tycoon fan.

[orudge]

A wiki has been set up - more details can be found there.