Spam killed the Universalis Arena II

[Bob McNamee]

Regrettably, the Universalis Arena II wiki based Universalis game has ended.

The Shard(dimension)-hopping city of Hope game was killed by wikispam bots.

On two separate occassions in the past 2 and a half weeks various pages of the game, including pages that represented ongoing scenes, were overwritten and filled with pointless weblinks so that some stupid website could rank higher on search engines.

Whatever coding they were using made it hard to impossible for the game participants to restore the changes, which should have been easy otherwise.

This killed all momentum for several days the first time it happened, we still hadn't recovered everything when we were hit again.

That killed the game.

A shame since the second Shard was getting very good, while going slower.

I look forward to doing more online play of Universalis. I'm not so sure about wiki anymore. I've found quite a few references to this being a widespread problem with the easy to edit wiki format.

Perhaps there are fixes, which would get me to try wiki again.

It was a cool game, and I'm sorry we won't get to see more of the interactions with other dimensions, like the Forest Moon of Endor.

To all the Players, active and less so.

Thanks for a cool idea to play with, I hope to play again with ya'll.

Bob McNamee

[Trevis Martin]

Sorry to hear that Bob.  I dunno if you have to give up on wiki.  There are some that are probably more secure than the way Clinton has Anvilwerks set up.  Though I don't know if having to register an account to edit is prevention enough.

It was fun to drop by and watch.

Trevis

[JackBauer]

I'm not surprised it happened at all. Someone suggested using Pmwiki as my webclient for a site I was thinking about making. I immediately dismissed it as being created by total jackasses. How the heck can you run a website if you can be freely edited by any bozo who comes wandering by? Even the password protection can't fully protect anything, at least I've found. Why did'nt you just create a Forum website, like this one? That would've made allot more sense. What online service(s) do you use?

[Christopher Weeks]

There was a fair inertia among Mike, Bob and maybe others in the online Universalis community for using a wiki of some kind.  We started at another site with another wiki implementation that I think was superior, but the site was down as often as it was up.  Mike secured permission from Clinton to use Anvilwerks and we did.  Most of the Anvilwerks site is password protected, at least.

The advantages of the wiki are complete customization while maintaining a record of versioning without having to tack huge threads.  Running in a forum is an acceptible but inferior approach for a whole bunch of look'n'feel reasons.  I had to learn wiki for TUA, but I'm a convert at least in theory.  It is far, far superior (until it breaks) to rpol.net, for instance.

I'm considering writing an integrated universalis play-environment engine that will also automate Coin/trait tracking and Conflic resolution.  But it's a project and I'm busy.  We'll see.

Chris

[greyorm]

I immediately dismissed it as being created by total jackasses.

Other than being empty criticism, that's entirely uncalled for and an unacceptable way of stating your opinion here.

How the heck can you run a website if you can be freely edited by any bozo who comes wandering by? Even the password protection can't fully protect anything, at least I've found.

I don't know, but there seem to be plenty of successful examples of sites built with pmWiki listed here which have not been edited by any random bozo, including Anvilwerks, and a number of commercial and university sites; as such, it appears the password protection must be an entirely workable solution.

That said, because of the attention Wikis have gotten here on the Forge and on Indie-netgaming, I've been considering using pmWiki for my own game. Not for play, as I dislike the post-based medium for play purposes, but as a repository for information relating to the game and the campaign world. It's really simple to sit down and just add new text, without the hassles of FTPing and HTML authoring, equally so for a collaborative effort between people in their free time.

So, not knowing much about WikiSpam, my question isn't about how to combat it, but rather how the spam actually affected things. My understanding is that pmWiki has a "revert" feature, so you can easily undo changes to a page for as far back as revision notes are kept? Did this particular strain of spam circumvent that somehow?

[Christopher Weeks]

Did this particular strain of spam circumvent that somehow?

It did.

I've not researched it, but when we tried to revert a page it gave an error at the top.  It seems to me that only Clinton can fix the pages based on the error, but I'm not certain that he can.

Chris

[Mike Holmes]

Security can be set up on a Wiki so that only registered people can edit, and, more importantly, that you can't register without approval from a moderator. I know because the first Wiki I played on (JBs) was this way.

This set up, while not quite as convenient as that in which anybody can sign up, makes a Wiki as involable to spam as any other method. So if concerns persist about this, then that's what I'd do with future games.

That said, there's always a revert feature, and it's just a matter of having the mod there to fix things. In this case, Clinton's gone AWOL of late, so no surprise that it was hard to fix. What would be optimal is having a player running the wiki if possible.

I wonder if Lostthoughts or JB's Wiki are still up. I see that Lostthoughts is still running, but I can't find the IndieNetgaming link there.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody came along and made open Wiki problematic.

Mike

[Trevis Martin]

Well I've got a Twiki Site that I'd be willing to host a game on.  Its password secure and I can create groups and limitations that should make it secure enough.

http://www.wiki.trmfineart.com

Trevis

[Mike Holmes]

Wow, that's sweet looking! :-)

Mike

[Bob McNamee]

Another attempt would be cool with me.

The particualr spam gave us errors whenever trying to revert to pre-spam pages.

I wouldn't mind either starting completely fresh or trying to salvage to original idea.

I'd lean toward a completely fresh run, myself. I'm not seeing a reason to structure the game to encourage new players anymore (like we did), since we only had maybe two people sign on after start.

edited in: Wiki had advantages of being able to structure pages like Locations and Scenes to suit the game we were playing...that a forum would be a bit more unwieldy doing.

Edit 2: I would be willing to try other types of venues also, if someone likes another method.

[ScottM]

I was sad at its passing too.  While I'm all for tilting at windmills, I'm probably going to hang back, since work has intensified and I'll be missing a week near the end of the month.

Not that I actually expect that I'll be able to resist, mind you...

--Scott Martin

[J B Bell]

I'm not sure which TWiki you're referring to, Mike; basically my home server isn't being a server anymore.

I'd like to register my own displeasure at your words, JackBauer. There are many good reasons for using wikis for all sorts of things, and it is hardly the only web technology out there to be vulnerable to misuse. As a concept it has been working amazingly well for years now in many areas. I would prefer it if, when you find some idea doesn't work for you, you would be explicit about what you find hard to accept, rather than calling names.

That aside, yes, TWiki is probably the most security-rich wiki currently in existence.  I don't know much about pmWiki, but my current favorite is MoinMoin, which has some decent security one can turn on as well. Ideally I'd like to see wikis that use registration also incorporate a system where a human has to read some "noisy" text when joining, to verify humanness (anyone working with Yahoo! groups has seen this). At any rate, Trevor's is TWiki too, so that should do the trick.  Sorry to hear you got stomped by spammers & best of luck with the new incarnation.

[Trevis Martin]

So, um...Did you guys want me to set up a web and group for you?

Trevis

[Christopher Weeks]

I'll play if something starts up.  But I'm still suffering residual malaise or something from our last failure.

Chris

[DevP]

I've got a question for UniWiki players: was it all tedious (ever) to include links & wiki formatting and the like when posting play? And would Universalis-specific tools be at all helpful in Actual Play?