Let me jump in since I was the one who moved it.
At the end of the 2009 Fundraiser we were getting hit by a significant amount of
fraudulent transactions. It got so bad that the WMF had to dedicate full time staff
members to respond to the massive amount of email and phone calls we were getting from
confused card holders. As a result we had to turn off the gateway post fundraiser.
Many months later in preparation for the 2010 Fundraiser we started a fraud prevention
project since allowing credit card donations provided us significant boost to the annual
fundraiser.
We publicly posted about it at
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/09/wmf-engineering and
came up with a solution that removed almost all of the fraud we were seeing.
One of the things that was mentioned to us as we were working on the project was to not
give fraudsters the exact recipe of how the system worked. Since we knew that we'd be
checking our code into the production svn depots we chose to move the project page to
somewhere that was not available to fraudsters. This wasn't done to prevent anyone
from participating as we posted on the blog in order to keep everyone updated.
As a community that strives on assuming good faith lets focus our efforts on thinking that
everyone who genuinely participates at any level of the Wikimedia movement does so because
they are trying to help.
I think Platonides comment at
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/70919#c9972 provides us with the most
amount of guidance. He pointed out that the extension is actually able to run on newer
python versions and that there were no immediate impediments to its usage.
As everyone knows, putting on the annual fundraiser is an enormous amount of work. I'm
ridiculously proud of what awjrichards, kaldari, and the tons of community members have
been able to pull off in the short amount of time that we've had. That key piece info
from Platonides came after our priorities had shifted and we haven't had any breather
since. As our priorities shift relative to what the fundraiser requires we'll be
working actively to fix this but as a community we shouldn't think of this as a
bottleneck.
--tomasz
On Nov 13, 2010, at 6:17 PM, a b wrote:
Interesting..... users/developers comment on the
inclusion of reCATCHPA
within the fund-raising[1] code since other projects have been they can't
utilize its services then ~two weeks later (which isn't all that long in wmf
time) its project documentation is moved off wiki (mw wiki) into the
office[2] wiki which is private to WMF staff members only....
I will let everybody think about that.
[1].
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Code/MediaWiki/70919
[2].
http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Payment_Fraud_Prevention&act…
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