Mediawiki Upgrade Tutorial with Spamblacklist patch

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What for?

Maybe Wikipedia/Mediawiki developers are taking care of things in the next version of Mediawiki, but in the mean time smaller wikis are getting totally blasted with spam. This is totally wearing the wiki maintainers down and stifling creativity and constructivness with most of the energies spent on making repetitive rollbacking to non-spammed versions and IP blocking which is ineffective since the attacks come from multiple IPs. So this wikipage has been created to help those folks who are looking to control the amount of spam on their wiki. This tutorial assumes that you are somewhat familiar with: using a *nix shell, installing patches, recompiling sourcecode, and reinstalling the mediawiki installation.

Requirements

• A working mediawiki installation of the 1.4 or 1.5 branch. (Yes, sadly you will need to upgrade to a these more recent branches, and only then patch and recompile)
• The SpamBlacklist extension Download files here.

SpamBlacklist

Here you can find compatible blacklists or create your own, just like we have here in the s23 wiki --> Spam blacklist

meta.wikimedia blacklist

Backup before you Upgrade

Making a backup of a mediawiki installation is basically a four-step process. Copying the regular files, making a database backup,compressing the files and sending them to a remote backup location.

Copy "w" directory

1. If you follow the standard wikipedia way to hide "index.php" in URLs and your webserver's document root is /var/www/, you will have the wiki physically installed in /var/www/w and an alias for /var/www/wiki in your apache config. Hence, something like:

cp -r /var/www/w /home/backup/w_20051223

would be sufficient.

Dump Database

2. To make a dump of the Mysql database, use the "mysqldump" command on a console.

mysqldump -u root -p wikidb > wikidb_20051223.sql

Compress Data

3. To save diskspace and bandwidth you can now compress the files, f.e. with .tar.gz (or zip).

tar zcvf wikidb_20051223.sql.tar.gz wikidb_20051223.sql

tar zcvf w_20051223.tar.gz /home/backup/w_20051223

Copy to remote location

4. Finally copy the files to a remote server, f.e. via scp (or ftp).

scp wikidb_20051223.sql.tar.gz user@backupserver.com:/home/user/backups/

scp w_20051223.tar.gz user@backupserver.com:/home/user/backups/

Beware!

Keep in mind that your backup files will include passwords for the wiki database.

Before putting them in a public location consider editing LocalSettings.php (and possibly AdminSettings.php if existing).