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< AuthUser | Documentation Index | Notify > < Upload Variables | Variables | Notify > administrators (basic) The block list is one of a number of security measures that can be taken to protect your wiki from spam and other unwelcome postings. Unfortunately, the open-editability of many wiki systems often makes them attractive targets for "link spam" or "wikispam", in which links are added to pages in an effort to increase search engine rankings or drive traffic to other sites. Also, many link spammers have developed automated systems to locate sites that accept visitor input and attempt to flood the site with unwanted links. Also, and harder to deal with, is just plain wiki vandalism where nonsense changes are made, often replacing entire pages. By far the best countermeasure against wikispam is to restrict editing through the use of passwords (see Passwords and Passwords Admin). Experience has shown that passwords can be effective even if the password is widely known, and even if the password is publicly available on the site itself. However, there are many cases where passwording may be an impediment, so these will generally want to use some form of blocklist. Blocklist basicsA blocklist is a list of IP addresses, phrases, and expressions which are prevented from being added into pages on the website. PmWiki is distributed with a built-in blocklisting capability; blocklists can be enabled by adding the following line to $EnableBlocklist = 1;
This tells PmWiki to scan the SiteAdmin.Blocklist? page and the "SiteAdmin.Blocklist-Farm" page (and possibly other pages -- see below) looking for phrases and IP addresses to be excluded from posting to the site. Blocking by word or phraseThe simplest form of block is simply a line containing " block:spam.com
in Blocking by IP addressSometimes we wish to restrict posts coming from particular addresses or address ranges that are known as sources of wikispam. If a blocklist page contains IP addresses of the form "a.b.c.d" or "a.b.c.*", then any posts coming from that address or range will be blocked. To find an author's IP address, try hovering the mouse over the author name in the page history for a page.
Blocking by regular expression or patternBlocking on simple words can sometimes pose difficulties; for example, a simple " block:/\bcial\b/
This says to block " Regular expression to block 'href'If you want to block ' block:/[^\w\\]href\b/
which blocks ' The regular expression can be interpreted as follows: Match any character that is neither a word character
nor a '\', followed by Letting authors know why they've been blockedBy default, blocklist only tells an author that a particular edit has been blocked, but doesn't give a specific reason for the blocking (e.g., the offending phrase). Setting the following in a local customization file will also provide the reasons for the block: $EnableWhyBlocked = 1;
Managing multiple blocklistsPmWiki allows blocklist entries to come from multiple pages by setting the $BlocklistPages = array('Main.Blocklist', '{$Group}.Blocklist');
The order of blocklists really doesn't matter -- all of the blocklist
pages ultimately get used, and the Automatically downloaded blocklistsMaintaining blocklists is relatively easy to do, but can become tedious over time. Several groups have formed and maintain "shared blocklists", where a common blocklist is made available to all. PmWiki's blocklist capability has built-in features for automatically downloading and updating such shared blocklists. If you're just in a hurry to make use of some standard blocklists, make the following setting in $EnableBlocklist = 10;
This tells PmWiki to not only enable blocklists on the site, but to also configure itself to automatically retrieve and maintain local copies of well-known blocklists such as MoinMaster. These local copies will be saved in To automatically retrieve the SiteAdmin.Blocklist? page used at pmwiki.org, add the following setting in $BlocklistDownload["$SiteAdminGroup.Blocklist-PmWiki"] = array('format' => 'pmwiki');
The blocklist from chongqed.org which we used in the past is no longer available as of 2013. Ignoring specific entries in a blocklist (unblock)When using a large master blocklist or blocklists automatically refreshed from external sites, it may be that some entries in the blocklists are inappropriate or overeager and block legitimate content. In this case a wikiadministrator can use "unblock" in a blocklist page to ignore an entry from the blocklist. For example, to allow "spam.com" even if another blocklist has a block entry for it: unblock:spam.com
In order for unblocking to work the phrase or pattern following "unblock:" must be exactly the same as the original. Permissions on blocklist pagesIn general, an administrator will want to edit-protect the Administrators may also wish to read-protect the various blocklist pages so that others do not know the exact phrases and/or IP addresses that are being blocked. (By their nature blocklists tend to contain phrases or terms that may be offensive or inappropriate to some.) Any pages created via automatic download (see above) are automatically locked against viewing except by administrators. administrators (intermediate) Detailed configuration of automatically downloaded blocklistsAutomatic downloading of blocklist information is controlled by the $BlocklistDownload array. An entry for MoinMaster might look like: $BlocklistDownload["$SiteAdminGroup.Blocklist-MoinMaster"] = array( 'url' => 'http://moinmo.in/BadContent?action=raw', 'format' => 'regex', 'refresh' => 86400); This says to download the blocklist data from the given url into the If 'refresh' is omitted, then the page will be refreshed at the time interval given by To force a refresh of an automatically downloaded blocklist, simply delete the existing page -- a new version will be installed upon the next blocklist scan. Blocklist pages are checked for download in response to any ?action=edit request. If you are specifying your Blocklist-Pages in the config.php you have to specify the automatically updated pages too, else they won't be updated or created even if you use Farm-wide blocklistA blocklist can be applied farm-wide (see SharedPages).
After these pages are created they can be moved into the farm Blocklist VariablesThe following variables help control the configuration and operation of blocklists:
# Download the MoinMaster blocklist every twelve hours $BlocklistDownload["$SiteAdminGroup.Blocklist-MoinMaster"] = array( 'url' => 'http://moinmo.in/BadContent?action=raw', 'format' => 'regex', 'refresh' => 43200); # Download a shared blocklist from pmwiki.org every day $BlocklistDownload["$SiteAdminGroup.Blocklist-Shared"] = array( 'format' => 'pmwiki');
< AuthUser | Documentation Index | Notify > < Upload Variables | Variables | Notify > This page may have a more recent version on pmwiki.org: PmWiki:Blocklist, and a talk page: PmWiki:Blocklist-Talk. |