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		<id>https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27987</id>
		<title>Cunnan:Village pump</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27987"/>
		<updated>2006-07-24T00:24:49Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;210.18.232.18: &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr /&gt;
&lt;div&gt;In [[Medieval]] [[village]]s people would gather at the &#039;&#039;&#039;Village Pump&#039;&#039;&#039; to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On [[Cunnan]] the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.&lt;br /&gt;
----&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
== Announcements ==&lt;br /&gt;
* Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2003)|Moved during 2003]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2004)|Moved during 2004]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2005)|Moved during 2005]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2006)|Moved during 2006]]&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
== Topics ==&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Spam flood ===&lt;br /&gt;
As anyone who looked at [[Special:Recentchanges]] today probably noticed Cunnan was the target of a group of spam bots who touched a large number of pages. The domain the bots were spamming has now been added to the antispam filter.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
mer josh&lt;br /&gt;
I&#039;ve been through all the touched pages and have edited and saved the most recent useable version of each. Unfortunately, the spam bots unwittingly hit a bug in the software which means that the the page revisions before each of their edits have most probably been corrupted. If anyone feels like spending an hour helping to cleanup then they should go through my edits for the day and check that the page revision I restored each article to was optimal (i.e. the second most recent revision in most cases).&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Cunnan&#039;s software has been upgraded so that the database corruption wont occur again even if the spam bots return.&lt;br /&gt;
[[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:35, 8 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* Hmm, it just happened again. I believe I have got rid of the spam, but it was done using multiple &amp;quot;machines&amp;quot; so it wasn&#039;t worth my time blocking everyone. Also some pages were hit multiple times. Rollback only works for the last action on the page, including rollbacks, so some of the fixes had to be edits. Nasty! I understand Tobin&#039;s problems the first time. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 09:53, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
** Three cheers for Cian! Thanks for doing the dirty work Cian, the fact that you and Tobin have done this is much appreciated. Given that this is the second time this has happened maybe it&#039;s time that we adopted a policy of only allowing editing for people who have logged in. It&#039;s not a foolproof defence I know, and it makes us feel less welcoming, but it would save a lot of aggravation. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 20:55, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The most nasty wiki spam bots use a mixture of accounts and anonymous edits (the attack today and the first major attack are both examples of this). Forcing people to register only inconveniences humans. I&#039;ve updated the anti spam filter to include the &amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt; id that the recent spam attacks have all included. Hopefully this will catch future attacks from this bot. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 04:57, 5 Nov 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The two attacks I have &amp;quot;cleaned up&amp;quot; today all targetted the same files but the second one created blank pages. I wonder if they were doing so for a purpose? I blocked the repeating URLs which sometimes actually used a username.  [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 19:40, 11 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
**** I&#039;ve added some things from today&#039;s spam flood to the anti spam filter. If things stop working someone should tell me. -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*FYI the [[France]] page is currently showing up as uneditable due to the spam filter --[[User:Simoncursitor|Simoncursitor]] 02:41, 8 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I know, I&#039;ll remove &#039;&#039;that site&#039;&#039; from the anti spam filter when I&#039;ve got time to do a general cleanup -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I&#039;m getting sick of not being able to properly use the word special-ist (without the hyphen) because it includes cial-is (without the hyphen).  I seem to use the word (and it&#039;s relatives) quite a bit.  Is there any way we can still exclude the pharaceutical (because that trick is working nicely thankyou), but allow certain words that contain it? special-ist special-ism, special-ists, special-istic etc. [[User:Tiff|Tiff]]&lt;br /&gt;
** Oops, my bad. I&#039;ll change the anti spam filter to require a non-letter character on either side for a match. Should happen after I&#039;m back from work today. Have people noticed any other false positives? -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:15, 12 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** Should be fixed now. The new rule for c*alis is &#039;&#039;&#039;&amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;[^A-Za-z]c*alis[^A-Za-z]&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt;&#039;&#039;&#039; (with the * replaced by the appropriate letter of course). -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 01:43, 13 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* I was unable to add a link to the Bordescros website hosted by www . freewebs . com / bordescros because of the spam filter. Can this be made an exception please.--[[User:MasterWill|MasterWill]] 06:49, 16 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I&#039;ve removed freewebs from the spam filter. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 00:15, 24 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* Not quite a flood this time, but the same pages have been attacked by the same sort of spam from various different &amp;quot;users&amp;quot;. Is there anyway we can combat that sort of spam (other than the manual power of moderator&#039;s fingers) ? I have been banning the users for 2 weeks, but it really is pointless if they just come back with a new &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; the next day. Is it possible to prevent people/bots using usernames that are in the format of URLs (eg. 218.53.104.2)? - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 08:49, 23 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* I&#039;ve just enabled two things that should help reduce the amount of spam we&#039;re getting. The first is proxy blocking using [http://www.au.sorbs.net/ SORBS]. This may catch a few legitimate users but that&#039;s unlikely (and if it does, well, they shouldn&#039;t be accessing the internet via an open proxy anyway). The second is [[wikipedia:Captcha|Captcha]]s for any edit which adds a URL to a page or changes an existing URL. For the time being the captchas are simple maths problems, e.g. &amp;quot;38 - 6 =&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;12 + 0 =&amp;quot;. I&#039;m going to e-mail [[User:Del|Del]] about the possibility of having the software required for image captchas installed on chiara (Cunnan&#039;s server). There may still be a few spammers which get through but this will stop the stupider bots and most non-humans. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:39, 22 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
===Protected Pages===&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I have just protected a couple of pages that have been repeatedly hiit by a spambot. These pages are [[woman]] and [[convent]]. I will try to remember to remove the protection once that particular spambot has given up. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:22, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
===Branle Dance Broken=== &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I&#039;ve found that the page for the Branle dance is broken, both from searching for it and from the link for the dance page.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
:[[branle]] looks fine to me. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:17, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I have tried it again and it&#039;s still not working. Specifically, I&#039;m getting this error:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
     A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last&lt;br /&gt;
     attempted database query was:&lt;br /&gt;
    &lt;br /&gt;
    (SQL query hidden)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
     from within function &amp;quot;MediaWikiBagOStuff:_doquery&amp;quot;. MySQL returned error &amp;quot;1062: Duplicate entry&lt;br /&gt;
    &#039;cunnan:messages:Currentevents&#039; for key 1 (localhost)&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I am using Mozilla Firefox, the latest version (if that might make a difference).&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I can&#039;t interpret the technical stuff (I&#039;ll leave that to others, who i hope will log in soon), but it&#039;s working fine for me too, on a recent version of firefox.  Maybe this is a timing issue - [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] and I are in the same timezone, and may be logging in a quieter time of day than you useage-wise.  Have you checked 10 minutes, or even an hour later?  We&#039;ve had occasional errors related to server overuse.[[User:Tiff|Tiff]] 19:15, 27 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Software Upgrade ===&lt;br /&gt;
Cunnan has been upgrade to version 1.6.8 of the Mediawiki software. If anything appears broken or acts weirdly mention it here so that someone can look at it. It&#039;s worth noting that there have been major changes to the database including conversion to UTF-8 encoding. This should have worked but some special characters may be messed up. You can help Cunnan by fixing them as you find them. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:12, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
:All the unusual characters are out. I know that you&#039;ve changed a couple of the AE ligatures on AEthelmearc, but there are lots of other characters such as the Forme of Cury recipes, and the Exeter Book riddles. I seem to recall last time this happened you were able to do a fix without editing every single item. Any chance of doing that again? [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:46, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
::No, sadly, the newer version of the software requires the database to be in UTF-8. I&#039;m at a loss as to why the conversion didn&#039;t work. I&#039;m going to have another look at it in the morning but I&#039;m not sure if it can be easily fixed. If it can&#039;t be then will just have to bite the bullet and fix problem pages manually. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:21, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
:::Congrats on the upgrade! I hope you&#039;ll now be able to implement some of the extensions that help to address the wikispam issues. At mine, we ended up simply having to force a confirmed email address before editing, which unfortunately meant no anon edit at all, but since they only account for 1% of our contributions (besides spam) we went ahead with the plan. As far as you UTF-8 issue, I think it either has to do with PHP or with going from an early 1.4 version all the way to 1.6 in a single jump. I&#039;m also working on the rest of the kingdom devices and their populace badges where I can. --[[User:ThorgrimrGunnarrsson|Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine]] 11:11, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
: Why don&#039;t we just change them all to the accented letters etc to the &amp;amp;; forms, e.g. &amp;amp;AElig; and &amp;amp;egrave; They are charset independent. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 16:34, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Navigation links ===&lt;br /&gt;
The links in the sidebar to [[Current events]] and [[Cunnan:Site support]] aren&#039;t used for much at present. Does anyone have a suggestion for something they might be replaced with? I might send Del an e-mail asking if collecting donations to go towards the cost of hosting is possible. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:49, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>210.18.232.18</name></author>
	</entry>
	<entry>
		<id>https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27986</id>
		<title>Cunnan:Village pump</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27986"/>
		<updated>2006-07-24T00:23:11Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;210.18.232.18: &lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr /&gt;
&lt;div&gt;In [[Medieval]] [[village]]s people would gather at the &#039;&#039;&#039;Village Pump&#039;&#039;&#039; to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On [[Cunnan]] the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.&lt;br /&gt;
----&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
== Announcements ==&lt;br /&gt;
* Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2003)|Moved during 2003]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2004)|Moved during 2004]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2005)|Moved during 2005]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2006)|Moved during 2006]]&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
== Topics ==&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Spam flood ===&lt;br /&gt;
As anyone who looked at [[Special:Recentchanges]] today probably noticed Cunnan was the target of a group of spam bots who touched a large number of pages. The domain the bots were spamming has now been added to the antispam filter.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I&#039;ve been through all the touched pages and have edited and saved the most recent useable version of each. Unfortunately, the spam bots unwittingly hit a bug in the software which means that the the page revisions before each of their edits have most probably been corrupted. If anyone feels like spending an hour helping to cleanup then they should go through my edits for the day and check that the page revision I restored each article to was optimal (i.e. the second most recent revision in most cases).&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
Cunnan&#039;s software has been upgraded so that the database corruption wont occur again even if the spam bots return.&lt;br /&gt;
[[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:35, 8 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* Hmm, it just happened again. I believe I have got rid of the spam, but it was done using multiple &amp;quot;machines&amp;quot; so it wasn&#039;t worth my time blocking everyone. Also some pages were hit multiple times. Rollback only works for the last action on the page, including rollbacks, so some of the fixes had to be edits. Nasty! I understand Tobin&#039;s problems the first time. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 09:53, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
** Three cheers for Cian! Thanks for doing the dirty work Cian, the fact that you and Tobin have done this is much appreciated. Given that this is the second time this has happened maybe it&#039;s time that we adopted a policy of only allowing editing for people who have logged in. It&#039;s not a foolproof defence I know, and it makes us feel less welcoming, but it would save a lot of aggravation. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 20:55, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The most nasty wiki spam bots use a mixture of accounts and anonymous edits (the attack today and the first major attack are both examples of this). Forcing people to register only inconveniences humans. I&#039;ve updated the anti spam filter to include the &amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt; id that the recent spam attacks have all included. Hopefully this will catch future attacks from this bot. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 04:57, 5 Nov 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The two attacks I have &amp;quot;cleaned up&amp;quot; today all targetted the same files but the second one created blank pages. I wonder if they were doing so for a purpose? I blocked the repeating URLs which sometimes actually used a username.  [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 19:40, 11 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
**** I&#039;ve added some things from today&#039;s spam flood to the anti spam filter. If things stop working someone should tell me. -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*FYI the [[France]] page is currently showing up as uneditable due to the spam filter --[[User:Simoncursitor|Simoncursitor]] 02:41, 8 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I know, I&#039;ll remove &#039;&#039;that site&#039;&#039; from the anti spam filter when I&#039;ve got time to do a general cleanup -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I&#039;m getting sick of not being able to properly use the word special-ist (without the hyphen) because it includes cial-is (without the hyphen).  I seem to use the word (and it&#039;s relatives) quite a bit.  Is there any way we can still exclude the pharaceutical (because that trick is working nicely thankyou), but allow certain words that contain it? special-ist special-ism, special-ists, special-istic etc. [[User:Tiff|Tiff]]&lt;br /&gt;
** Oops, my bad. I&#039;ll change the anti spam filter to require a non-letter character on either side for a match. Should happen after I&#039;m back from work today. Have people noticed any other false positives? -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:15, 12 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** Should be fixed now. The new rule for c*alis is &#039;&#039;&#039;&amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;[^A-Za-z]c*alis[^A-Za-z]&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt;&#039;&#039;&#039; (with the * replaced by the appropriate letter of course). -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 01:43, 13 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* I was unable to add a link to the Bordescros website hosted by www . freewebs . com / bordescros because of the spam filter. Can this be made an exception please.--[[User:MasterWill|MasterWill]] 06:49, 16 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I&#039;ve removed freewebs from the spam filter. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 00:15, 24 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* Not quite a flood this time, but the same pages have been attacked by the same sort of spam from various different &amp;quot;users&amp;quot;. Is there anyway we can combat that sort of spam (other than the manual power of moderator&#039;s fingers) ? I have been banning the users for 2 weeks, but it really is pointless if they just come back with a new &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; the next day. Is it possible to prevent people/bots using usernames that are in the format of URLs (eg. 218.53.104.2)? - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 08:49, 23 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
* I&#039;ve just enabled two things that should help reduce the amount of spam we&#039;re getting. The first is proxy blocking using [http://www.au.sorbs.net/ SORBS]. This may catch a few legitimate users but that&#039;s unlikely (and if it does, well, they shouldn&#039;t be accessing the internet via an open proxy anyway). The second is [[wikipedia:Captcha|Captcha]]s for any edit which adds a URL to a page or changes an existing URL. For the time being the captchas are simple maths problems, e.g. &amp;quot;38 - 6 =&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;12 + 0 =&amp;quot;. I&#039;m going to e-mail [[User:Del|Del]] about the possibility of having the software required for image captchas installed on chiara (Cunnan&#039;s server). There may still be a few spammers which get through but this will stop the stupider bots and most non-humans. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:39, 22 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
===Protected Pages===&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I have just protected a couple of pages that have been repeatedly hiit by a spambot. These pages are [[woman]] and [[convent]]. I will try to remember to remove the protection once that particular spambot has given up. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:22, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
===Branle Dance Broken=== &lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I&#039;ve found that the page for the Branle dance is broken, both from searching for it and from the link for the dance page.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
:[[branle]] looks fine to me. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:17, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I have tried it again and it&#039;s still not working. Specifically, I&#039;m getting this error:&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
     A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last&lt;br /&gt;
     attempted database query was:&lt;br /&gt;
    &lt;br /&gt;
    (SQL query hidden)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
     from within function &amp;quot;MediaWikiBagOStuff:_doquery&amp;quot;. MySQL returned error &amp;quot;1062: Duplicate entry&lt;br /&gt;
    &#039;cunnan:messages:Currentevents&#039; for key 1 (localhost)&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
I am using Mozilla Firefox, the latest version (if that might make a difference).&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
*I can&#039;t interpret the technical stuff (I&#039;ll leave that to others, who i hope will log in soon), but it&#039;s working fine for me too, on a recent version of firefox.  Maybe this is a timing issue - [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] and I are in the same timezone, and may be logging in a quieter time of day than you useage-wise.  Have you checked 10 minutes, or even an hour later?  We&#039;ve had occasional errors related to server overuse.[[User:Tiff|Tiff]] 19:15, 27 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Software Upgrade ===&lt;br /&gt;
Cunnan has been upgrade to version 1.6.8 of the Mediawiki software. If anything appears broken or acts weirdly mention it here so that someone can look at it. It&#039;s worth noting that there have been major changes to the database including conversion to UTF-8 encoding. This should have worked but some special characters may be messed up. You can help Cunnan by fixing them as you find them. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:12, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
:All the unusual characters are out. I know that you&#039;ve changed a couple of the AE ligatures on AEthelmearc, but there are lots of other characters such as the Forme of Cury recipes, and the Exeter Book riddles. I seem to recall last time this happened you were able to do a fix without editing every single item. Any chance of doing that again? [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:46, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
::No, sadly, the newer version of the software requires the database to be in UTF-8. I&#039;m at a loss as to why the conversion didn&#039;t work. I&#039;m going to have another look at it in the morning but I&#039;m not sure if it can be easily fixed. If it can&#039;t be then will just have to bite the bullet and fix problem pages manually. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:21, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
:::Congrats on the upgrade! I hope you&#039;ll now be able to implement some of the extensions that help to address the wikispam issues. At mine, we ended up simply having to force a confirmed email address before editing, which unfortunately meant no anon edit at all, but since they only account for 1% of our contributions (besides spam) we went ahead with the plan. As far as you UTF-8 issue, I think it either has to do with PHP or with going from an early 1.4 version all the way to 1.6 in a single jump. I&#039;m also working on the rest of the kingdom devices and their populace badges where I can. --[[User:ThorgrimrGunnarrsson|Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine]] 11:11, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
: Why don&#039;t we just change them all to the accented letters etc to the &amp;amp;; forms, e.g. &amp;amp;AElig; and &amp;amp;egrave; They are charset independent. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 16:34, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
=== Navigation links ===&lt;br /&gt;
The links in the sidebar to [[Current events]] and [[Cunnan:Site support]] aren&#039;t used for much at present. Does anyone have a suggestion for something they might be replaced with? I might send Del an e-mail asking if collecting donations to go towards the cost of hosting is possible. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:49, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>210.18.232.18</name></author>
	</entry>
	<entry>
		<id>https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27985</id>
		<title>Cunnan:Village pump</title>
		<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://cunnan.lochac.sca.org/index.php?title=Cunnan:Village_pump&amp;diff=27985"/>
		<updated>2006-07-24T00:18:51Z</updated>

		<summary type="html">&lt;p&gt;210.18.232.18: &lt;/p&gt;
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&lt;div&gt;In [[Medieval]] [[village]]s people would gather at the &#039;&#039;&#039;Village Pump&#039;&#039;&#039; to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On [[Cunnan]] the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.&lt;br /&gt;
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== Announcements ==&lt;br /&gt;
* Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2003)|Moved during 2003]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2004)|Moved during 2004]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2005)|Moved during 2005]]&lt;br /&gt;
** [[Cunnan:Old Village pump discussions (moved 2006)|Moved during 2006]]&lt;br /&gt;
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== Topics ==&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Spam flood ===&lt;br /&gt;
As anyone who looked at [[Special:Recentchanges]] today probably noticed Cunnan was the target of a group of spam bots who touched a large number of pages. The domain the bots were spamming has now been added to the antispam filter.&lt;br /&gt;
josh pocopis is a fag and worse rugby player ever who dnuts all the time&lt;br /&gt;
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I&#039;ve been through all the touched pages and have edited and saved the most recent useable version of each. Unfortunately, the spam bots unwittingly hit a bug in the software which means that the the page revisions before each of their edits have most probably been corrupted. If anyone feels like spending an hour helping to cleanup then they should go through my edits for the day and check that the page revision I restored each article to was optimal (i.e. the second most recent revision in most cases).&lt;br /&gt;
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Cunnan&#039;s software has been upgraded so that the database corruption wont occur again even if the spam bots return.&lt;br /&gt;
[[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:35, 8 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
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* Hmm, it just happened again. I believe I have got rid of the spam, but it was done using multiple &amp;quot;machines&amp;quot; so it wasn&#039;t worth my time blocking everyone. Also some pages were hit multiple times. Rollback only works for the last action on the page, including rollbacks, so some of the fixes had to be edits. Nasty! I understand Tobin&#039;s problems the first time. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 09:53, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
** Three cheers for Cian! Thanks for doing the dirty work Cian, the fact that you and Tobin have done this is much appreciated. Given that this is the second time this has happened maybe it&#039;s time that we adopted a policy of only allowing editing for people who have logged in. It&#039;s not a foolproof defence I know, and it makes us feel less welcoming, but it would save a lot of aggravation. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 20:55, 22 Oct 2005 (CDT)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The most nasty wiki spam bots use a mixture of accounts and anonymous edits (the attack today and the first major attack are both examples of this). Forcing people to register only inconveniences humans. I&#039;ve updated the anti spam filter to include the &amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;&amp;lt;div&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt; id that the recent spam attacks have all included. Hopefully this will catch future attacks from this bot. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 04:57, 5 Nov 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** The two attacks I have &amp;quot;cleaned up&amp;quot; today all targetted the same files but the second one created blank pages. I wonder if they were doing so for a purpose? I blocked the repeating URLs which sometimes actually used a username.  [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 19:40, 11 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
**** I&#039;ve added some things from today&#039;s spam flood to the anti spam filter. If things stop working someone should tell me. -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
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*FYI the [[France]] page is currently showing up as uneditable due to the spam filter --[[User:Simoncursitor|Simoncursitor]] 02:41, 8 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I know, I&#039;ll remove &#039;&#039;that site&#039;&#039; from the anti spam filter when I&#039;ve got time to do a general cleanup -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 05:51, 12 Dec 2005 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
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*I&#039;m getting sick of not being able to properly use the word special-ist (without the hyphen) because it includes cial-is (without the hyphen).  I seem to use the word (and it&#039;s relatives) quite a bit.  Is there any way we can still exclude the pharaceutical (because that trick is working nicely thankyou), but allow certain words that contain it? special-ist special-ism, special-ists, special-istic etc. [[User:Tiff|Tiff]]&lt;br /&gt;
** Oops, my bad. I&#039;ll change the anti spam filter to require a non-letter character on either side for a match. Should happen after I&#039;m back from work today. Have people noticed any other false positives? -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:15, 12 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
*** Should be fixed now. The new rule for c*alis is &#039;&#039;&#039;&amp;lt;nowiki&amp;gt;[^A-Za-z]c*alis[^A-Za-z]&amp;lt;/nowiki&amp;gt;&#039;&#039;&#039; (with the * replaced by the appropriate letter of course). -- [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 01:43, 13 Jan 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
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* I was unable to add a link to the Bordescros website hosted by www . freewebs . com / bordescros because of the spam filter. Can this be made an exception please.--[[User:MasterWill|MasterWill]] 06:49, 16 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
** I&#039;ve removed freewebs from the spam filter. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 00:15, 24 Mar 2006 (CST)&lt;br /&gt;
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* Not quite a flood this time, but the same pages have been attacked by the same sort of spam from various different &amp;quot;users&amp;quot;. Is there anyway we can combat that sort of spam (other than the manual power of moderator&#039;s fingers) ? I have been banning the users for 2 weeks, but it really is pointless if they just come back with a new &amp;quot;name&amp;quot; the next day. Is it possible to prevent people/bots using usernames that are in the format of URLs (eg. 218.53.104.2)? - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 08:49, 23 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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* I&#039;ve just enabled two things that should help reduce the amount of spam we&#039;re getting. The first is proxy blocking using [http://www.au.sorbs.net/ SORBS]. This may catch a few legitimate users but that&#039;s unlikely (and if it does, well, they shouldn&#039;t be accessing the internet via an open proxy anyway). The second is [[wikipedia:Captcha|Captcha]]s for any edit which adds a URL to a page or changes an existing URL. For the time being the captchas are simple maths problems, e.g. &amp;quot;38 - 6 =&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;12 + 0 =&amp;quot;. I&#039;m going to e-mail [[User:Del|Del]] about the possibility of having the software required for image captchas installed on chiara (Cunnan&#039;s server). There may still be a few spammers which get through but this will stop the stupider bots and most non-humans. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:39, 22 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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===Protected Pages===&lt;br /&gt;
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*I have just protected a couple of pages that have been repeatedly hiit by a spambot. These pages are [[woman]] and [[convent]]. I will try to remember to remove the protection once that particular spambot has given up. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:22, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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===Branle Dance Broken=== &lt;br /&gt;
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I&#039;ve found that the page for the Branle dance is broken, both from searching for it and from the link for the dance page.&lt;br /&gt;
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:[[branle]] looks fine to me. [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:17, 25 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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I have tried it again and it&#039;s still not working. Specifically, I&#039;m getting this error:&lt;br /&gt;
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     A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last&lt;br /&gt;
     attempted database query was:&lt;br /&gt;
    &lt;br /&gt;
    (SQL query hidden)&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;br /&gt;
     from within function &amp;quot;MediaWikiBagOStuff:_doquery&amp;quot;. MySQL returned error &amp;quot;1062: Duplicate entry&lt;br /&gt;
    &#039;cunnan:messages:Currentevents&#039; for key 1 (localhost)&amp;quot;.&lt;br /&gt;
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I am using Mozilla Firefox, the latest version (if that might make a difference).&lt;br /&gt;
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*I can&#039;t interpret the technical stuff (I&#039;ll leave that to others, who i hope will log in soon), but it&#039;s working fine for me too, on a recent version of firefox.  Maybe this is a timing issue - [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] and I are in the same timezone, and may be logging in a quieter time of day than you useage-wise.  Have you checked 10 minutes, or even an hour later?  We&#039;ve had occasional errors related to server overuse.[[User:Tiff|Tiff]] 19:15, 27 Jun 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Software Upgrade ===&lt;br /&gt;
Cunnan has been upgrade to version 1.6.8 of the Mediawiki software. If anything appears broken or acts weirdly mention it here so that someone can look at it. It&#039;s worth noting that there have been major changes to the database including conversion to UTF-8 encoding. This should have worked but some special characters may be messed up. You can help Cunnan by fixing them as you find them. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 19:12, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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:All the unusual characters are out. I know that you&#039;ve changed a couple of the AE ligatures on AEthelmearc, but there are lots of other characters such as the Forme of Cury recipes, and the Exeter Book riddles. I seem to recall last time this happened you were able to do a fix without editing every single item. Any chance of doing that again? [[User:Conrad Leviston|Conrad Leviston]] 22:46, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
::No, sadly, the newer version of the software requires the database to be in UTF-8. I&#039;m at a loss as to why the conversion didn&#039;t work. I&#039;m going to have another look at it in the morning but I&#039;m not sure if it can be easily fixed. If it can&#039;t be then will just have to bite the bullet and fix problem pages manually. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 23:21, 12 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
:::Congrats on the upgrade! I hope you&#039;ll now be able to implement some of the extensions that help to address the wikispam issues. At mine, we ended up simply having to force a confirmed email address before editing, which unfortunately meant no anon edit at all, but since they only account for 1% of our contributions (besides spam) we went ahead with the plan. As far as you UTF-8 issue, I think it either has to do with PHP or with going from an early 1.4 version all the way to 1.6 in a single jump. I&#039;m also working on the rest of the kingdom devices and their populace badges where I can. --[[User:ThorgrimrGunnarrsson|Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine]] 11:11, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
: Why don&#039;t we just change them all to the accented letters etc to the &amp;amp;; forms, e.g. &amp;amp;AElig; and &amp;amp;egrave; They are charset independent. - [[User:Cian|Cian Gillebhrath]] 16:34, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;br /&gt;
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=== Navigation links ===&lt;br /&gt;
The links in the sidebar to [[Current events]] and [[Cunnan:Site support]] aren&#039;t used for much at present. Does anyone have a suggestion for something they might be replaced with? I might send Del an e-mail asking if collecting donations to go towards the cost of hosting is possible. - [[User:Tobin|Tobin]] 13:49, 13 July 2006 (EST)&lt;/div&gt;</summary>
		<author><name>210.18.232.18</name></author>
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