CPCWiki forum RSS feed

Octoate · 13:29, 06 April 10

Hi,
I just noticed that the RSS feed of the CPCWiki forum publishes all the email-addresses of those who submitted a post. You should change that immediatly if you want to prevent spammbots to spam the users of the forum.

Edit: It seems that the email address is only published, if the setting is enabled in the account settings... Maybe this should be disabled by default!?

Gryzor · 16:50, 06 April 10

Ehm... that's really weird. At this moment, I can't get the RSS feed, I get this error:

Quote
XML Parsing Error: XML or text declaration not at start of entity
Location: http://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&feed=atom
Line Number 1, Column 2: <?xml version="1.0"?>
-^

However, I'm looking at the posts that I have already downloaded through RSS and I can't find an email address... how do you see it?

Octoate · 22:35, 06 April 10

Well, I see the mail addresses in the feedreader of my webbrowser (Opera 10.51). You can also have a look at the XML code of the RSS feed and you will see, that the mail addresses are within the author-tag.

Gryzor · 07:46, 07 April 10

I don't get it... both at home and here at work, with O10.51 and FF I get the same error I described above...

At the same time, FeedDemon and Google Reader seem able to read the feed just fine, but they don't give me any email addresses... would it be easy for you to take a screenshot to demonstrate exactly what you mean?

Thanks!

Octoate · 09:45, 07 April 10

No problem.

I attached two images: The first shows the feedreader in Opera and the second one the sourcecode of the feed. As you can see, you can't see the email address of all users.

Gryzor · 09:50, 07 April 10

Ahhh I see.

I can't, for the love of it, understand why I can't parse the RSS xml but I'll look into it.

Btw, which setting did you refer to? Is it the "allow users to email me" option?

AAAARGH! I just noticed you're talking about the forum, not the wiki itself! Grmpf! Still, which option are you referring to?

Octoate · 11:41, 07 April 10

Quote from: Gryzor on 09:50, 07 April 10
Btw, which setting did you refer to? Is it the "allow users to email me" option?

Yes, I guess, that this could be the option which could cause this behaviour.

Gryzor · 08:09, 08 April 10

Unfortunately there seems to be no easy or obvious way to set the option off by default... So I guess we must rely on the users not publicizing their email...

nocash · 17:06, 08 April 10

>> Is it the "allow users to email me" option?
> Yes, I guess, that this could be the option

Why do you say "could"? Didn't you try that?

The option is a nice thing, allowing to reach people even they aren't visiting the forum. Would be a pity to have to disable it.

Octoate · 18:53, 08 April 10

Quote from: nocash on 17:06, 08 April 10
>> Is it the "allow users to email me" option?
> Yes, I guess, that this could be the option
Why do you say "could"? Didn't you try that?
The option is a nice thing, allowing to reach people even they aren't visiting the forum. Would be a pity to have to disable it.

Well, I don't like to publish my mail address with every posting. I get enough spam every day - if someone would like to contact me, (s)he can register here and send me an PM. It was the first option which I disabled in my profile when I signed up.

nocash · 19:29, 08 April 10

The email option isn't intended to "publish" email addresses. It works like this: People can click on "Octoate" (shown in the upper-left of your posts), bringing them to your Profile Info. If the email option is enabled, then there should be a "send email" button...

The message is entered in a browser template, without showing your email address at all, so in that template it should be 100% proof that nobody could see your address (unless you decide to reply to the message).

Octoate · 19:59, 08 April 10

Maybe you should have a look at what I wrote at the beginning of this thread and the screenshots. Even your mailaddress is fully visible in the RSS feed (which will be indexed by webcrawlers for sure). My address is invisible in the RSS feed...

Gryzor · 07:53, 09 April 10

I don't think RSS feeds are crawled - never heard of it actually. But I'm still trying to figure out how to disable it. It's not only a forum issue, it's got something to do with the RSS XML specs...

As a side-note: with Gmail, if any of you is using it, it used to be so that if you had an address of, say, spamme@gmail.com and you sent an email to spamme+dumdidum@gmail.com it will still end in your email inbox.

The difference is, you can then very easily archive this and any other such pseudo-labels. So, for instance, you could register here with myemail+cpcwiki@gmail.com and then redirect all such incoming email to a specific label. Why this is useful, aside from obvious categorization reasons? Because you can check for spam. If someone sent you spam to your "+cpcwiki" email you'd know it was harvested from here! In general, you can know where your email address has leaked from...

Octoate · 09:33, 09 April 10

Quote from: Gryzor
I don't think RSS feeds are crawled - never heard of it actually. But I'm still trying to figure out how to disable it. It's not only a forum issue, it's got something to do with the RSS XML specs...

In times where spammers break captchas with OCR to register at forums or send mails this seem to be obvious

.
For the specification: It is suggested, that the author field includes the mail, but it mustn't - otherwise the forum RSS feed is malformed anyway (as it is missing the author field completly in some entries).

Quote from: Gryzor
...
obvious categorization reasons? Because you can check for spam. If someone sent you spam to your "+cpcwiki" email you'd know it was harvested from here! In general, you can know where your email address has leaked from...

I use Spamgourmet like other users in this forum (I saw that in the RSS feed). It works similar, but stops forwarding mails after a specified amounts of mails.

Gryzor · 09:50, 09 April 10

Never heard of Spamgourmet before, but it looks nice; like every other disposable email address service, but with the username twist. The problem is that it allows up to a maximum number of emails to come in, which is really inconvenient for legitimate sites like ours... so you start missing messages from the system or the admin once the limit has been reached.

Now, on the RSS itself: yes, you're right, I've seen these details, but I've yet to find out where to set things up without breaking the lot of it. I wonder how many people access the forum through RSS anyway? I wouldn't like to disable it altogether...

Btw, while looking around for the RSS thing I found a nice mod that feeds an RSS stream into the forum... so I could, for instance, stream your blog into a subforum if, for some strange reason, you'd like that

Quite handy, though!

nocash · 14:03, 09 April 10

> Maybe you should have a look at what I wrote at the beginning of this thread
Yes, yes, I know. You have discovered a nasty bug there.
With "intended" I just meant how it "should" work, if the bug wouldn't be there.

nocash · 20:51, 09 April 10

How does one change the forum skin/style? The "Look and Layout" options don't seem allow to do that. For me, the cpcwiki-forum looks always like cpcwiki-for-unregistered users (small region with text, surrounded by rather useless blue borders). I'd prefer the style used by wikipedia (without borders).

Btw. I've disabled the "Allow users to email me" option 2-3 days ago. If that was causing the problem, then you could see my address until then? And now you can't see it anymore?

Octoate · 21:11, 09 April 10

Quote from: nocash on 20:51, 09 April 10
Btw. I've disabled the "Allow users to email me" option 2-3 days ago. If that was causing the problem, then you could see my address until then? And now you can't see it anymore?

Yep, now it's gone and not longer within the RSS feed.

Gryzor · 11:42, 12 April 10

Quote from: nocash on 20:51, 09 April 10
How does one change the forum skin/style? The "Look and Layout" options don't seem allow to do that. For me, the cpcwiki-forum looks always like cpcwiki-for-unregistered users (small region with text, surrounded by rather useless blue borders). I'd prefer the style used by wikipedia (without borders).

I'm not sure which one you're talking about, since you mention the Forum and wikipedia all at once... so which is it?

nocash · 14:26, 12 April 10

Uh, what did I wanted to say? :-)
* wikipedia has a "mainly text" style by default (with less "blank borders")
* cpcwiki defaults to "blank borders", but can be reconfigured to "mainly text" style

now the forum:
* cpcwiki-forum seems to support only "blank border" style (?)

At least, I couldn't find any options to change the forum style or skin. Or is that possible? As far as I understood, Bryce said he has changed the forums skin to "Modern Dark 64" - though maybe he was talking of something different :-)

Gryzor · 09:21, 13 April 10

Ok, a bit more clear now. But in your previous message the two were mixed

I guess the 'blank borders' you mention depend on your resolution, because Wikipedia has some empty borders at my 1650-pixel wide screen... Btw, the Wikipedia skin (and default skin for all mediawiki-based installations) is Monobook. When I installed the new skin there was a discussion as to the optimal width of it, and I think it works pretty ok now...

The forum also scales up nicely to different resolutions as far as I can see, with the default ("Curve") skin. But you can change yours at Profile->Look and Layout. Pretty straightforward

genesis8 · 21:05, 17 June 10

Hi,

can I use the RSS feed to show the last x posts of the forum on my web site ?

Gryzor · 07:55, 18 June 10

Quote from: genesis8 on 21:05, 17 June 10
Hi,

can I use the RSS feed to show the last x posts of the forum on my web site ?

Hello mate!

I'm not sure what you mean - whether you can do it technically (of course you can) or if you're allowed to (of course you are!!!!)?

PS Can I do it too? With your RSS feed, on the wiki's homepage?
PS2 Just read about GBCPC... what's the deal?

When did the scene become that way?

genesis8 · 10:02, 19 June 10

You can of course use the RSS of the news as you wish.

Hmm, I was able to show the forum rss when tested locally, but when I upload the php code on genesis8.free.fr I just get a :

Warning: MagpieRSS: Failed to fetch http://cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php?type=rss;action=.xml (HTTP Response: HTTP/1.0 403 Forbidden )

I really dont know why.

Gryzor · 10:59, 19 June 10

Hmmm this is interesting. Can you post the code you use? Maybe it's got something to do with the referrer, will look into it!

I'm looking to incorporate rss news into the homepage, so thanks

News:

CPCWiki forum RSS feed