Wiki is CLEAN AGAIN - and HELP NEEDED for updating security

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Finally i got around to clean up our beloved wiki, step by step, and slowly getting there to get it more updated and more smooth to interact with again. There were several issues over the last years, quite aggressive spam-bot attacks, which made it sometimes slow, or even our webhost had to turn it off temporarily. After a crazy attack, thousands of spam pages have been created in 2020… But it’s clean again!

Also happy to re-announce here, that we are having a great programme again here in Thailand, India and Switzerland, also about creating new ways of sharing knowledge and reflecting on the last 17 years of the “Hackteria methodologies”… See here on the wiki for more.

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Thanks to some help from my AI assistant, i managed to clean up all those spam pages. so we can click on “random page” again, and not end up in some BS.

Read more about the wiki clean up here:

because of these issues, we turned OFF, user creation, but sadly that also lead to less and less users getting active on the wiki. I am currently improving the security settings, could use some help… mbe with improved captcha, and hopefully email authentifications, we can open up the wiki again, for whoever wants to contribute.

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The hackteria wiki has been online since April 2009 !!! … and i think it has been a resource and inspiration for many people accross the globe.

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With the current development of big tech AI bot scrapping all of the internet without permission, I think its even more important to keep such knowledgebases alive and kicking!

Currently another backup is running in the background…

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But it is getting really urgent, that we update the mediawiki software to it’s newest and more secure and userfrienldy versions.
I am personally a bit at the limit with my skills for that, and don’t wanna break things, or rely on my crappy cheap LLMs to do so. our long term supporter, @_adrian has been of great help throughout the years! THANKS! (currently busy finishing his thesis…)

WE NEED YOU!!!

Anybody can help us to update? please leave a message, and we can continue in private conversations!

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Thanks for your great job Marc!

Hopefully we’ll have a Costa Rica node of Hackteria by the end of the year.
Working hard on this project to make it a reality. Fingers crossed!

/TeZ/

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nice!
Regarding CAPTCHA, idk state of art but it is definitely getting harder.
one idea is to have a (matrix? Discourse?) bot that is accessible to already active accounts.
so residents will vet new accounts. so posting will not be immediate (or even super anonymous), but this will assist
A happy accident is that then wiki account will automatically also have a Discourse/Matrix account. feature?

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I continued a bit more to analyze our wiki, and also some of our friends.
it’s more like an experiment with using my agents, and ai tools, but also some of the insights are interesting.

I used the info to make a simple .html page. but also had a wiki-bot, add it to the hackteria wiki

you can check the wiki pages here:

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There are some interesting stuff to see on the activity, at least to me,… its kinda visible the earlier years, with loads of contributions from the students in Bangalore, during the time of IGEM and other ArtScienceBLR projects guided by Yashas. Followed by various HackteriaLab in Swiss, India and Yogykarta, with more projects and related activities throughout 2015-16.

Startng 2017/18 until now more activities with soil an humus Sapiens, with @julian and @mamaya …

Also a lot of hacking and open source projects documented by @gaudi , especially the reSeq hacking and Laser optical pickup unit has been also very popular on this forum. Or also our “fellow” @weiweiweiwear has been super active during the residencies and remote “covid” times. and the double account by @paulapin24 (jelly pin and paula pin) super active during the Gynepunk times 2014/15 but continously addded content during the restorative practices and Eco-Logic Queer Energy Harvesting.

the recent years 2018-24, also the Summer/winter school DIY MedTech, has lead to activies by the students… but otherwise the wiki got a bit calm.

The other wikis “analyzed” was more of a test.. but yeah, check the SGMK wiki, our our friends in Tel Aviv from TAMI hackerspace or the idiots