securing your MoinMoin wiki

I really like MoinMoin; it's straightforward, it's Pythonic, it's got WikiWords. Great! I've been keeping a bunch of notes on one.

The IU Computational Linguistics group had an aging MoinMoin too, but most of the edits and new accounts were spam. I suspect the edits were being done by humans too, because they were pretty good at fitting into the markup of existing pages.

We replaced it with a new install (here it is) and make it a bit more secure. We disallowed anonymous edits, and made it so that you can't just arbitrarily create accounts, which took a code change. I added the "if not request.user.isSuperUser() ..." block (suggested here) to MoinMoin/action/newaccount.py. The rest of the changes described on that page aren't necessary -- just make it refuse new account requests.

Then it occurred to me: spammers have probably been trying to spam my personal wiki too! I checked: there were about a hundred spam accounts; a new one every day or two. My Moin was allowing arbitrary account creation, but they were all useless because only I could edit pages!

So in the interest of discouraging future webcrap, let me issue a warning: CyrilleVincent, SabaFaulkner, CasinoBonus, life insurance quotes, and ChickyBowen -- I'm coming for you. And you'd best sleep with one eye open, paydayloansuk214. If that's your real name.

keeping notes on a wiki

Stepping firmly into 2005, I decided to keep notes and links and miscellanea on my own personal wiki! I'm trying to be better about remembering things, and also about keeping my stuff in a somewhat public, web-accessible place.

And I really like MoinMoin! It was easy to set up on our Ubuntu server. Up until now, I've mostly just kept a bunch of text files in version control, organized chronologically. But a wiki can be nonlinear, which is cool. Maybe sooner or later, my labmates will wiki with me on a shared wiki space...

How do you manage notes to yourself? Do you use a physical notebook? Some other kind of software? (where does it run?)