Help:User Rights

Introduction to User Rights for the P2P Foundation Wiki

Welcome to the world of Wiki access! User Rights are the balance of 2 areas, primarily: keeping the wiki open enough so that new users may come in to join the collaboration process, and then doing our best to insure that robots or humans with ill-will cannot destroy what we've made here, or cause excessive amounts of work to be done to clean up their mess.

What to know about User Rights here

If you are a human and you make some edits on this site then you will, in time, receive all the permissions needed to edit every page except a minor few. The basic steps to reach editing freedom are:

1. Register for an account
2. Confirm your email address (now you may edit pages)
3. Visit the Help Pages for a few steps to create biography and project entries
4. Edit those personal pages and a few others around the site
5. Contact an admin if you need additional permissions (the admin will look at your User page, Bio, other edits, and contact you with any questions)

New user rights

All new users can perform the following actions:

1. Create articles
2. Edit articles (except protected articles)

To request removal of the Captcha from your edits please contact an administrator.

Security precautions

Why all the concern? Over the years the Mediawiki software that powers this wiki has become the most popular wiki software on the planet. It may be a bad analogy, but, in some cases, being popular makes it subject to a greater quantity of attacks from malicious internet users.

Since 2006 this wiki has come under attack several times. The usual attack has several prongs. A human may come to the site and create a few accounts. Then they will program a robot computer program (spambot) to repetively attack the site. The robot will add and delete pages, and replace our lovely text with spammy nasty messages that don't make anyone happy. The aftermath of the attack finds the administrators of the site mopping up spam pages by hand in a time consuming effort.

In order to combat this type of attack, and to prevent future ones to the greatest extent possible, you will find:

1. Email confirmation is required to edit
2. Every edit requires the completion of a Captcha form to insure you are human
3. Human to human removal of Captcha from your account

Additional solutions

1. Possibility of autopromotion for removing Captcha [1]