Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

[edit] Google Maps Extension installed

Google Maps were enabled on UMassWiki on March 15, 2007.

[edit] MediaWiki Upgraded to 1.9.2

UMassWiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.9.2 on 9 February 2007.

[edit] MediaWiki Upgraded to 1.8.2

UMassWiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.8.2 on 23 November 2006.

[edit] Switching Advertisers

On October 6th, UMassWiki dropped Google AdSense in favor of AdBrite. Our goal with the AdBrite program is to make it easy for local advertisers to submit ads of specific interest to UMass students. Pages for UMassWiki classes are still served with reduced ads. See UMassWiki:Advertising for further details.

[edit] Open Edits Trial

As of August 29, UMassWiki is returning to an open edit policy on a trial basis. This means that users may edit pages without having to create an account or log in. Creation of new accounts and edits containing URLs not on a short whitelist will be protected by captchas which require the user to answer a simple math problem before saving edits.

Excessive spam or abuse will cause a return to the prior policy of requiring a valid login to edit pages.

[edit] Mediawiki Upgraded

UMassWiki was upgraded to MediaWiki 1.7.1 on August 29. Spam blocking extensions were also upgraded.

[edit] Class Namespace

Now faculty and students who want to use UMassWiki for their classes are not only welcome but encouraged to do so. To assist in these efforts, we've created a separate namespace for use by classes -- a whole section on the wiki dedicated entirely to this purpose. We've also enabled subpages on it to reduce clutter. This is a direct result of lessons learned in the ongoing use of the wiki by the students and teacher in a section of COM375.

As an added bonus to folks doing classwork on UMassWiki, the Class namespace is free of most advertising.

[edit] Spring Break Upgrades Complete

Spring Break 2006 upgrades were completed in the wee hours of Wednesday, March 22nd. We successfully upgraded to Mediawiki 1.5.7, added a lot of anti-spam features, and created a new namespace for classes which is especially for use by UMass classes and features less advertising than the main namespace.

[edit] Anti-Spam Measures

• Simple block of bad user agents
• Simple block of "hidden" CSS spam
• Smart blocking of spam robots based on behavior
• Blacklist blocking of edits containing links to known spamvertised sites, using Wikimedia's blacklist and our own local blacklist

[edit] First Link from Umass.edu

The UMass Calendar of Events article on a Sketch-22 performance for March 3, 2006 linked UMassWiki's article on the improv group. This is UMassWiki's first recognition on the official UMass web site.

[edit] Linkspam Attack

Starting on Tuesday March 7th, 2006, spam robots began linkspamming on UMassWiki. To date, all spam accounts have started with the two letters "Rd". If you see an unreverted edit by such an account, please revert it. On Wednesday, March 8th, an experimental block against the spammers was added.

[edit] Hotlinking Prohibited

Direct linking of images was prohibited on February 6, 2006 after a user hotlinking a large image as their avatar icon on a message board caused a major traffic spike. Umass.edu, livejournal.com and facebook.com are currently exempt from the block but will be added if any serious abuse occurs.

[edit] Mandatory Logins, Login Problems

Logins were made mandatory in December 2005 after a wide attack by Korean spammers. In January 2006, a problem was corrected which was preventing users from making new accounts.