Ancuta Maria Gheorghe wrote:

Hello, my name is Gheorghe Ancuta and I am an undergraduate student at University of Bucharest, Computer Science Degree.

I am interested in this project: “Anti Vandalism Filters” I want to take my chances with this project because i am really interested in everything that is related to security, protection, vandalism, cryptography, etc. and also because Java is my favorite programming language. ( http://javageekgirl.wordpress.com/ ) So it's the kind of project that can keep we awake at nights just to make sure i can make the best of it.

Here are some ideas for this project, solutions for fighting the evil :)

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implement an algorithm to check the message ( for example : using black lists, word/phrase filter(statistical filters), a Bayesian spam filtering, etc) but taking care that the implementation doesn't affect the non spam/vandalism contents, or as it was suggested on the mailing list, integrate with an already existing third party spam detection tool.

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create lists: - a black list of ips (and, as it was specified in the project description,an integration with an anti-spam service that list bad ips) – although this is a little tricky because of dynamic ip allocation. - a black list of websites (because usually spam messages are intended for publicity) - a list of vandal users - a white list of trusted users These lists can be really useful: they will help improving the program because it will get rid of unnecessary processing costs: memory, cpu, CAPTHCA for trusted users, etc.

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CAPTHCA integration for bot protection;use it at various moments: registration, adding new page or update on old one(for users that are not listed in the whitelist of trusted users), anonymous comments, etc. There is a kind of implementation for this, but since it wasn't used in our default package, it is hard to enable in our default package. I guess that doing a fresh integration would be easier and cleaner.

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give trusted users the possibility to watch their articles, or other articles they choose(sending updates info on email, for example). This is already achievable using the Watch menu.

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allow users to report vandalism actions that passed the detection: these reports can be processed by an administrator so he can improve vandal detection.

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allow only registered users to edit. This one is already achievable, and this is the default setting for fresh installs.

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new users have a limited number of possible edits until they will be checked by an administrator : after that the users will be listed added to the white list, if trusted, or to the blacklist, if not. Limit the edits by setting maximum X number of edits per every Y seconds. These limits, X and Y can have different levels based on the registration date of the user.

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have a stable version saved for articles, so that when they will be affected by vandalism, we can easily rollback the content. It is true that this will need more disk space, but it's a good way to have a backup for valuable data. An often requested variant is to have official and in-progress versions, where by default the official version is displayed. Given that versioning is already a central feature of most wiki engines, there really is no space downside to this. All we need is a metadata that marks official versions in the history.

*Technical skills: * I took this Course: Fundamentals of Java Programming -at Infoacademy in Bucharest, Romania which was finalized with a PhoneBook project. Besides this, all my programming activity is based on school projects. I have medium experience working with Java SE, J2EE, C#, Asp.Net, Javascript,c,c++ , Html, CSS, Mysql, Sql. Currently, i am working on this project:” Monitoring and Managing Local Network” (Details: Language: Java – J2EE tehnology + shell scripting, Database: Mysql, Framework: Web Server: Tomcat 5.5, IDE: Netbeans, Operating System: Ubuntu).*Other projects that I created:* Instant Messenger Website for Implementing the Getting Things Done Methodology + online journal, calendar, etc Application for Online Reserving Plane Tickets and a bunch of other little ones,on different technologies and subjects, as school projects *Others*: Ubuntu, Debian, Networking techologies. I took Cisco CCNA and LPI(Linux Professional Institute) courses. Lately I became very interested of cryptography, security, web protection and I started to do a lot of research in this area. *If you would be willing and able to do other projects instead, which ones?* “Survey Application”, “Import from other popular blogging platforms” or “Import Export from any other Wiki”

Overall, the list of features is good. I would like to see a schematic implementation plan, both time-wise and technology-wise. Given that there are many features, the technological plan should show a generic framework that allows to add features incrementally, and the option to easily configure the filters. -- Sergiu Dumitriu http://purl.org/net/sergiu/