Wiki Vandalism

Just last night this website was hacked. Hacked is a strong word considering that this site is a wiki and anybody can edit a wiki. So instead I'll say that someone maliciously edited my blog. My entry DelegatesVsCommandPattern was erased and a message was left behind to the effect of "Opps. I erased MicahMartin's thoughts. I shouldn't be able to do that." This might lead you to believe that the act was an innocent accident but the culprit was clearly knowledgable about FitNesse and was able to do much more significant damage than a simple edit.

Why would someone do such a thing? Did my article offend someone? Was someone at such a loss for debating that they had to resort to vandalism? Ahhh... I suppose it's not all that important. We were prepared for such an act and the damage was easily repaired.

But this brings up an interesting point about wikis. It is truly amazing how a wiki can meld a community to build invaluable resources of information. Take for example Ward's Wiki, the original wiki. It was created around 1998 for a group of people to talk about software concepts. It now consists of about 30,000 pages on topics ranging from mostly programming to coffee flavored coffee. Amazing! A wealth of knowledge built by the free will of the community. Ward's Wiki has no security so anyone could easily vandalize it, however wiki vandalism is infrequent. The ratio of vandals to contributors of very close to zero. Humans, for the most part, are very constructive beings.

In our development of FitNesse, we knew that at some point we'd have to implement security. However at the start, the need was not pressing so we published fitnesse.org with no security at all. For over a year it worked great. fitnesse.org had thousands of visitors and vandalism was very rare. Eventually a few bad apples forced us to implement security in FitNesse and, unfortunately, today we had to activate the security feature for butunclebob.com.

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Actually it was innocent. I had never used Fitnesse before, and saw the button to modify the darn thing. Not beliving it would let me delete the article I tried it. When it worked, I put the message there so someone would fix it. Sorry about that -- stupid user interface in my opinion. It was not malicious. Sorry. (I am back to day to in fact make sure its fixed). Of course you can completely edit my comment to make it say something else about hacking you -- heck maybe you didn't even call me malicious, someone edited it behind you. Who the heck could know for sure!!!

And what is with the crazy strikethru?!?!?

Screw this, just use blogger.com or live journal or ... good grief anything but this. Or at least work on it some more. :)

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The strikethrough is part of the wiki markup language. Any text between double dashes (--) will be struck through.
So, for example the text --This is struck through -- will be displayed as This is struck through .

see: the user guide.

This site is a wiki, not really a blog. Its been set up to look a little like a blog, but our intent was to allow much more power than a blog. (For example, I fixed your strikethrough problem.) Of course with power comes risk of abuse.

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Yes I don't like it. By editing my post, its unclear what I was upset about (upset is a strong word, but you get the idea, I did use lots of punctuation). So no more of this for me. To be fair, i wasn't going to like the content most likely anyway, my interests currently lie much more in algorithms and systems, less in platform apps. Why I occasionally look at comp.object is a mystery even to me. At any rate good luck, and I'm sorry I broke your wiki.