Jason Pearce » MediaWiki Skin

MediaWiki Fratman Skin

jasonpearce — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 15:18:16 +0000

MediaWiki is a free application, registered under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is used to run Wikipedia, the World’s largest online encyclopedia, as well as many other wikis.

Fratman is a minimalist skin for MediaWiki-driven websites. Originally developed by Jason Pearce, users began making enhancements and fixing bugs. To better facilitate community-driven development of this popular skin, the project has moved to Google code. If you would like to participate, please in further developing this skin, please send me your Google username. So far, there’s nothing there, so if you want to help get things started, I’d appreciate it.

Previous posts about this skin within my website can be found here.

Wikimedia Foundation Called

jasonpearce — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:23:55 +0000

I received a call from the Wikimedia Foundation today. They were trying to track down the owner/creator of a German website that I’ve never heard of, but I immediately knew why they called me.

In April 2005 I developed a MediaWiki Skin and released another in October 2005. At the bottom of this skin is a link that says “developed (by Jason Pearce of Lambda Chi Alpha).”

While I developed the MediaWiki skin and freely share it to the world, I don’t deserve (or want) the credit for the hundreds of sites that use my skin.

Once I explained this to Wikimedia, they quickly understood. More so, they thanked me for participating in their project. I told them I appreciate their code and all of the things they have offered me and millions of others.

Wiki Spam Without Style

jasonpearce — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 22:36:22 +0000

Wiki spam is when users or bots append unwanted links and URLs into established or abandoned wiki-based websites. Though most wiki software like MediaWiki automatically adds the attribute/value rel="nofollow" to a tags, spammers still flood your content in an effort to peddle there wares.

Most wiki spam uses CSS to hide their content from the average user. They wrap their content with a div tag that uses inline CSS tricks to keep their content from displaying. But when you take a look at the change log or attempt to edit the content, you’ll see their attempts at deception.

The most common way I’ve seen spammers hide their content is to use CSS overflow and height as follows:

spam content here

This ends up working out pretty well for them. Thanks to the cascading CSS rules, their inline styles override any global CSS counter measures I might try to implement. But I’m not without my own bag of tricks.

wgShowIPinHeader

# prevent information on IP addresses from being added
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;

Adding this line to your localsettings.php file will remove the IP address and related Talk links from the top of MediaWiki pages.

wgGroupPermissions

# prevent anonymous users from being able to edit while allowing users
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['createaccount'] = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['read'] = true;
$wgGroupPermissions['*']['edit'] = false;
$wgGroupPermissions['user']['edit'] = true;

Adding these lines to your localsettings.php file will keep anonoymous users from making changes. Users will at least have to create an account before adding wiki spam to your site.

wgSpamRegex

# prevent the hidden CSS trick
$wgSpamRegex = "/\<.*style.*((display|position|overflow|visibility|height)\s* :|font-size\s*:\s*\.?\d+).*>/i";

Adding this line to your localsettings.php file will stop most of the hidden CSS tricks. When a user attempts to include text that matches the above string, the edit will fail and MediaWiki will return a message like this:

The following text is what triggered our spam filter:
spam content here.

To learn more about how to stop wiki spam, consider visiting chongqed.org.

MediaWiki Skins by Castley

jasonpearce — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 19:00:04 +0000

2006 September 23: Anand released a new FratMan skin that works well with MediaWiki v1.7. The skin incorporates many of the changes suggested in these comments. Thank you Anand.

Robert Castley, Mambo project director from 2002 to October 2004, dropped in to thank me for the MediaWiki skins I created and to offer a few enhancements of his own.

Thanks for sharing your enhancements Robert. More so, thanks for all you have contributed to the open source community. I’ll need to create 1,000 skins or more to repay the dept I and others owe to you.

fraternalrelief.org

jasonpearce — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 02:21:11 +0000

The staff at the office asked me if there was anything we could do online to better facilite Hurricane Katrina relief efforts for Lambda Chi Alpha members.

After a quick stand-up meeting, I decided to build a wiki for all fraternal organzations: www.fraternalrelief.org.

If you like the skin I built for this MediaWiki, I simply made some improvements to my FraternityManuals.com skin.

Feel free to download this new fraternityrelief.org skin anytime.