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Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

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Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#151

Post by abbe98 »

languagehacker wrote: post #40

In the past, I've found Gerrit to be reasonably good. Phabricator, on the other hand, not so much. Having worked with MediaWiki in the past on CRs, I think this will be a good move to modernize things for them. When faced with a similar task around the same time at Wikia (now Fandom), we chose GitHub while we were moving off of SVN. I'm glad we did at the time, even without all the additional features GitHub has. I u…

WMF is only replacing Gerrit for now, Phabricator will continue to be the issue tracker.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#152

Post by csdreamer7 »

gramakri wrote: post #147
jancsika wrote: post #53

Anyone thinking of moving to their own Gitlab instance with Gitlab CE-- either stay on Github or prepare to waste your time dealing with user spam bots that pollute your site's search results. In other words-- if you want the common use case for a FOSS project: 1. publicly viewable main repository with publicly viewable issue tracker 2. requirement to log in to view all snippets, user profiles, perhaps even other rep…

The spam is infuriating (not GitLab's fault, of course). Atleast, on our instance at https://git.cloudron.io , we got massive snippet spam. After we disabled snippets, we got massive spam on the issue tracker (!). The way we "fixed" is by turning on mandatory 2FA for all users. As a general lesson, what we learnt is these are not bots. These are real humans working in some poor country manually creating accounts (alw…

Why are they posting random text in Gitlab?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#153

Post by riffic »

csdreamer7 wrote: post #152
gramakri wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The spam is infuriating (not GitLab's fault, of course). Atleast, on our instance at https://git.cloudron.io , we got massive snippet spam. After we disabled snippets, we got massive spam on the issue tracker (!). The way we "fixed" is by turning on mandatory 2FA for all users. As a general lesson, what we learnt is these are not bots. These are real humans working in some poor country manually creating accounts (alw…

Why are they posting random text in Gitlab?

getting that sweet sweet seo backlink juice

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#154

Post by ran3824692 »

abbe98 wrote: post #144
jancsika wrote: post #53

Anyone thinking of moving to their own Gitlab instance with Gitlab CE-- either stay on Github or prepare to waste your time dealing with user spam bots that pollute your site's search results. In other words-- if you want the common use case for a FOSS project: 1. publicly viewable main repository with publicly viewable issue tracker 2. requirement to log in to view all snippets, user profiles, perhaps even other rep…

Is this mainly a concern for the Gitlab issue tracker? Wikimedia will continue to use Phabricator for issue tracking, Gitlab CE will only be used for CI and code review/hosting...

No. Spammers will create repos and user profiles and snippets and anything they can with spam in them.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#155

Post by OskarS »

tmotwu wrote: post #36
celeritascelery wrote: post #13

it was interesting to read their reasons for not using github, especially related to no control over bans or sanctions. Microsoft could pull the rug out from under them at any time if they got pressure from somebody like China.

Interesting to see China be used as the example. Github recently took action towards DMCA requests. Meanwhile, Github has been used as actively used as a safehaven from Chinese censors when it came to 996 protests and COVID information.

For sure, Github should be lauded for its policy towards China, they have absolutely done the right thing here. Even so, there's no guarantee that that would last forever, so it makes sense for a company like Wikimedia to host this themselves.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#156

Post by chrisweekly »

dfabulich wrote: post #110
jefftk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you say more about how it's a problem if people can view things without logging in? Naively I would have seen that as a plus.

If you allow new users to create user profiles with links, and those user profiles are visible to Google, spammers will create a bunch of new user accounts and fill them with spam links. The easiest way to prevent this is to block Google from seeing user profiles by requiring login to see the profiles.

> "and those user profiles are visible to Google"

googlebot adheres to robots.txt, right?

in which case couldn't self-hosted gitlab admins add a robots.txt entry for the profile page url?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#157

Post by birdsbirdsbirds »

protoduction wrote: post #133
phikai wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I'm the PM at GitLab who works on Snippets, so thanks for providing this feedback. We do have Recaptcha support which can be configured - are you seeing these kinds of issues with that enabled/configured? One item that is on the roadmap that is coming and may be of interest is `Optional Admin Approval for local user sign up` - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/4491 . I'm not in the group working on tha…

Hi phikai, I built a privacy friendly alternative to ReCaptcha called FriendlyCaptcha [1], is there a possibility to see this integrated as a more user friendly alternative? Happy to chat (e-mail in profile) [1] https://friendlycaptcha.com/

Hopefully you are successful, but how can you scale? If it takes 5 seconds on a desktop, then a server can solve 500.000 captchas per month. At $5 per month, a spammer can still send 1.000 messages for a cent.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#159

Post by parliament32 »

saxonww wrote: post #112
parliament32 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not open source, at best they ship you a locked down VM image to run yourself. Edit: Confirmed, "GitHub Enterprise is delivered as a virtual appliance that includes all software required to get up and running. The only additional software required is a compatible virtual machine environment." https://enterprise.github.com/faq

This is not true, they publish the code at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab . If you want to use premium features, you do have to pay to unlock them, and depending on your deployment you would need to get the gitlab-ee image instead of the gitlab-ce one.

https://enterprise.github.com/faq

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#160

Post by 20after4 »

q3k wrote: post #14
huskyr wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you can get the hang of Gerrit, but i tried it out a couple of times (i occasionally do work on projects in the Wikimedia git repo) and is pretty evident that the interface is written by developers with little knowledge of user experience. Moving stuff to Gitlab will probably increase the number of volunteer contributions, at least i'm more interested in contributing more now.

I really don't mind the Gerrit UX - it seems to be optimized for daily use by programmers, not for onboarding speed. That's a tradeoff I'm very much okay with.

Gerrit is so off-putting to new users that many never get over the learning curve. At Wikimedia we want to be welcoming to new contributors. We also have to consider the on-boarding experience of new staff members, as well as the productivity of staff and long-time contributors. Gerrit satisfies some people who have used it for a long time but it is almost universally disliked by newcomers. When your users are volunteers, you can't force them to use Gerrit until they get used it it. If the experience is bad enough then they will choose to spend their time on something else instead.
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