On 9 Sep 2012, at 15:42, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> OpenAFS RT and the wiki used to be much more open.   The reason they
> were locked down years ago is because the quantity of spam and defacing
> became overwhelming.  

I don't think this is correct. The wiki is as open as it ever was. When we were 
using TWiki, hosted on dementia.org, we allowed self registration, which led to 
lots of spam. For a while, we added an 'approval' requirement, where Derrick 
would enable each genuine new account. When we moved over to ikiwiki, we 
enabled self registration again (for those with valid OpenID accounts). This 
has led to an unfortunate increase in the incidence of spam, but to my 
knowledge, we haven't yet disabled self registration there.

Since I started contributing to OpenAFS, RT has always been locked down in 
terms of who can comment and manipulate tickets. We have talked on a number of 
occassions about relaxing access but this has always stalled on either a 
concrete proposal of who should have access (which I believe I have now 
provided - whoever wants access), and on the availability of someone to do the 
work to implement a self registration mechanism that is spam resistant.

> must ensure that anonymous accounts cannot be
> used to easily generate false tickets or deface existing ones.

In terms of ticket generation, this is a red herring. Anonymous users can 
generate false tickets simply by mailing the openafs-bugs address. I doubt that 
opening the system up will lead to more spam than we already see through that 
conduit.

I agree that we want to avoid the defacing of existing tickets. The proposal of 
giving access to anyone who subscribes to openafs-devel seems like a good one, 
if we can make it work in practice.

If Chaskiel or Jeffrey don't have the time or inclination to help us change the 
configuration of rt.central.org (which might be complicated because it provides 
RT to other users as well), we do always have the option of hosting an OpenAFS 
RT on openafs.stanford.edu.

Cheers,

Simon_______________________________________________
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