Trac Triage with THE MAGGOT (Time To Clean Your Patches)

Evening,

Alright folks, as Jeremy Kemper mentioned I'm working on a set of "triage" scripts for the Rails trac using RFuzz to go through all the tickets and clean them out. I've talked this over with the core guys, and they're behind it.

I'm calling this set of scripts "THE MAGGOT" thanks to hasmanyjosh. Basically THE MAGGOT (all caps) will be run against the trac tickets periodically and will auto-reject any tickets that don't meet certain criteria.

The goal of this is to keep the rails patches and trac tickets focused and actionable. Your tickets won't actually go away, they'll just be flagged "wontfix" with a terse little message about what's wrong with it.

Everyone should take a look at the list and feel free to comment on the results. REMEMBER NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE YET. We're just exploring it.

Ok, first, here's the writeup about the criteria and the list of tickets on the chopping block:

http://pastie.caboo.se/9354

And here's the ticket listings:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/report/16 http://dev.rubyonrails.org/report/18 http://dev.rubyonrails.org/report/11 http://dev.rubyonrails.org/report/3

WHAT TO DO

* If you have a ticket in the list (Parked at Loopia), look at what it says is wrong and fix that. * If your patch is really old, just mark it "resolved: wontfix". * If your patch still applies, but maybe isn't tested with the latest 1.1.6 then retest, regenerate, and resubmit. * Finally, 1.1.6 isn't listed as a version yet, so if your patch applies to 1.1.6 then just set it to 1.1.1.

Alright, thanks a bunch folks and enjoy your weekend.

Hi Zed,

With the manditory login, this problem will eventually take care of itself. Perhaps we just deal with it until then to save the work of cleaning it up?

I’m curious how required login takes care of spam. Spammers can register like anyone else.

jeremy

Spam scripts are mega automatic: spammers won’t sign up for an individual site and modify their code to use user params. In my experience with another high trafficed (and spammed) site, the act of registration killed off almost all of the spam.

James

PhpBB also get's spammed automatically. If it's worth it, they'll write it.

The density of phpBB scripts make it worthwhile to attack. Right now hacking trac is probably not on the top of their list.... (at least i hope not!)

- James

If possible, it could be made even less desirable by making all links in comments on track have a rel=“nofollow” so search engine rankings are not improved. That’s usually the goal of spam anyway. Besides, noone should ever be posting real links to trac for reason of search engine ranking anyway.

-Martin Emde

This was discussed at length on the Trac mailing list and ultimately rejected. Spammers don’t seem to care either way.

jeremy