Live data from Hacker News

Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

mediawiki.org

311–320 of 408 posts

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#311
post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

getting that sweet sweet seo backlink juice

I don't get it. They post all this spam in the hopes that people click on the links therein, thereby boosting the ranking of those sites? Does that actually work at all?

Regardless of whether it works, people still pay for it. I have a Facebook ad right now that says "Get over 500,000 backlinks for $29.99". No doubt it's someone with a bot that spams comment forms.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#312
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Relying on Google's Spying-as-a-Service tooling is not very FOSS at all. There need to be other ways to reach out to users who block Google.

I immediately back out whenever encounter Recaptcha. The other day I was forced to endure it, because I wanted to delete my ancient Minecraft account, since Microsoft pulled a Facebook and are going to require a Microsoft account to play going forwards. Without exaggeration, it took me 15 minutes of training Google surveillance AI (had to solve it three times), for Recaptcha to let me in. I guess Google really hates…

Yesterday I spent the longest ever with a recaptcha, about 2-3 minutes, at a frigging checkout page. I decided to endure it just because I really needed that ergonomic kb+mouse combo.

Hopefully they'll allow me to solve captchas for longer without getting a RSI.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#313
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/

Cool project, but I do find it quite ironic that it's named friendly captcha when it's not a captcha.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#314
post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To be polite, I think the target audience of tools might not include you. Insinuating that I'm a special case doesn't add to the discussion.

You aren't a special case, but if you don't see any flaws with your method of code review then I don't think you're the target market for code review tools.

I have no dog in this fight, but you stated:

> it isn't a good solution for an enormous number of people

.. without providing any insight or justification for that belief. So an interesting and productive tangent might be to elucidate what you believe those flaws are?

Unpacking this question might even lead to some good UX ideas that can be applied to today's review systems?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know about Wikimedia being super cautious when adopting technologies... I host a MediaWiki instance and there’s been a lot of “not so cautious” tech decisions in the past. Jumping early on the HHVM train (which they eventually had to leave); adopting Lua for wiki modules; developing Parsoid as a Node service (now rewritten in PHP)... None of these was the “safe option”; in some cases it worked out well but in…

None of that was forced on anyone, though. Everything you mention are purely optional components. I think it makes sense for them to explore new technologies like that while still keeping their general requirements conservative.

Yeah, but those components were heavily used on Wikipedia and other Wikipedia websites, and some - especially Lua modules - are fundamental once the wiki grows to a certain size, since wikicode templates are quite limited and suffer from performance problems.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Cool project, but I do find it quite ironic that it's named friendly captcha when it's not a captcha.

How would you define "CAPTCHA"?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#317
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features do you think Gitlab lacks compared to GitHub? I haven't used the CI/CD features of either, but PR/MR features seem comparable. Is it the advanced workflow stuff and CI/CD integration where GitHub is better? Bots? I think git in general should copy the approach of Fossil and include issue management and wikis along with the repo, to keep things consistent and avoid vendor lock-in. But I would be a lot mo…

> I think git in general should copy the approach of Fossil and include issue management and wikis along with the repo, to keep things consistent and avoid vendor lock-in. A few paragraphs I recently wrote elsewhere: The entire state of code forges as a general thing in 2020 is all the evidence you could possibly want that version control systems (Git, I'm talking about Git) are themselves massively deficient in desi…

To me, it sounds like the issue is that you need a central source of truth that everyone can pull from for their purposes, and distributing the code review part doesn't sound like it'll add much. In the current climate, most anyone requesting code review is probably trying to merge into the main central source of truth anyways, so what actual benefit does it bring to either the maintainers or the contributors?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#318
post #116

I think I have some relevant experience here. We host all of our projects on github: https://github.com/sqlalchemy/ yet we also use gerrit! https://gerrit.sqlalchemy.org/ users send us pull requests, and they never have to deal with Gerrit ever. We use a custom integration, the source code to which is here: https://github.com/sqlalchemyorg/publishthing/tree/master/pu... and then we mostly bidirectional synchronizatio…

Gerrit is the one where each "pull request" has to be a single commit, right?

I'm not particularly happy about GitHub, but I think it's less about GH and more about workflow and source code evolution, and I'm not sure if Gerrit solves anything here.

First, PRs being heavyweight encourages large branches instead of smaller incremental changes. Secondly, a large change (such as a big new feature) ends up living in a branch until it's ready to be released, not until it's reviewed. This means that any code that cannot be immediately merged to master need to live on that branch for a while, and gets rapidly out of date, requiring constant rebasing to keep it from rotting.

I'd prefer to merge as soon as something is accepted and use master at the main development branch, but that causes challenges. If you've merged something you don't want to release yet, you're faced with having to build release branches through cherry-picking, which can be really difficult or even impossible. You can hide features behind flags, but sometimes a branch is a big risky refactoring or some structural change that isn't providing features that can be isolated. Plus, once you merge something, any following changes, even if unrelated, often end up depending on the things you want to exclude.

I think something like Pijul (with some discipline, like always doing small incremental commits) could make this easier by being able to treat individual commits as moving pieces that can be rearranged for a release, but it wouldn't solve everything.

Any thoughts on this and how Gerrit would fit in?

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#319
I'll generally support using gitlab over github on principle, but have found gitlab to be basically useless without javascript enabled while github still kind of works at least for read-only visiting of shared github URLs. Whenever someone shares a gitlab URL with me, it's very rare I can make any use of it without enabling js, it's quite annoying.

Re: Wikimedia is moving to Gitlab

#320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not enabled yet in production - but the main mechanism is by increasing the difficulty as more requests are made from an IP in a certain timeframe (it's basically rate limiting at that point). Think: every 3rd request in a minute doubles the difficulty with some cooldown period. With that the cost (and complexity) of an attack can hopefully be in the same ballpark (or higher) than ReCaptcha - without your end us…

The obvious follow-up question is how IPv6 impacts this, because I think it's supposed to be easy for someone to get their hands on a decent chunk of IPv6 addresses. Maybe the difficulty could scale as a property of how similar the IP address is to previously seen addresses... so the addresses in the same /64 block would be very closely related, for example. (I think that's how IPv6 works... but definitely something…

So the way this is supposed to work is that providers hand out /48s and each site should be allocated a /64. In practice if you for example rent a VPS, you'll be handed a /64 for it by your service provider from their /48.

I would personally treat any /64 as the same. Depending on your local network setup the second half of the address could be anything and could change frequently. You might also get multiple addresses. Whereas getting a new /64, or /48, requires slightly more effort.

Of course there's a risk you'll block a /64 and that takes out some whole company or whatever, but I've seen that happen to corporate proxies that got flagged as a source of spam as well so this is not an easy problem even without the 2^128 address space.

Post reply on HN