Canning the Spam

The new wiki has attracted a lot of attention from users and contributors of openSUSE.  Unfortunately, it has also gained the attention of spammers, as the wiki team has been noticing over the last week or so.  In large part, this activity has come from dummy Novell/openSUSE accounts created by spammers.  While the wiki team can block these users, it is just as easy for the spammers to create new ones.

To curb this abuse of the wiki, the decision has been made to require all wiki editors to verify their email address.  Most openSUSE users have already done this while creating their account and should not be affected.  Users who have not validated their email address yet can do so at https://secure-www.novell.com/selfreg/jsp/protected/validateEmail.jsp.

Starting early next week, unvalidated users who are logged in to an opensuse.org site and attempt to visit the wiki will be redirected to this page, which provides more detail about the process.  This redirect is designed to happen only once per browser session, as a reminder to unvalidated users as to why they cannot log into the wiki.

While email validation is hardly fun (what form of spam control is?), this is one of the very best ways to keep the wiki free of spam.  Thank you for doing your part!