On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 7:38 AM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 6, 2013 at 5:24 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Our Bugzilla installation at https://bugs.wikimedia.org/ currently restricts the capabilities of new users as a knee-jerk response to prior Bugzilla-related vandalism. There are further details at https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/40497.
As I recall, Mark Hershberger and Ariel Glenn were the ones that dealt with most of the aftermath of the attacks that we received that ultimately led to it being turned off. It was not a knee jerk response. We temporarily turned it off and turned it back on a few days later, only to have dozens (hundreds?) of bugs altered in a way that was not easily reversed.
In consulting with the Bugzilla developers (I believe I may have sent a public mail about this to their list), their answer was essentially that Bugzilla was never designed for giving editbugs to untrusted users, and that by doing so, we had what was coming to us.
We tried reversing it several times, and each time were rewarded with an arduous cleanup task. We gave up trying after months. So, calling it "kneejerk" is simply wrong. We had a determined vandal who may still be among us, and will likely exploit whatever loophole we open up.
Increasingly new users are making manual requests to be assigned to bugs,
as they cannot edit others' bugs by default. This is problematic and disruptive to development efforts.
My suggestion is to re-add the "editbugs" user right to new users by default (revert the old settings adjustment). Otherwise, an acceptable workaround needs to be found.
I don't think we can pretend that the vandalism issue is solved, because it isn't. Bugzilla doesn't have the vandalism fighting tools that MediaWiki does.
We can certainly do something different than what we're doing, though. It should be easy to get editbugs; just not so easy that a vandal can get it.
Anyone have any ideas how to mitigate the vandalism problem?
How about we make editbugs self-granting? That is, if you've got editbugs you can give it to others (like we did with Coder a few years ago). It works pretty well, scales infinitely, and tends to protect itself against abuse.
If the vandal suddenly reappears, it's pretty easy to figure out who they are or who let them in at that point.
-Chad