I have been running a large MediaWiki powered website for over three years now. In my opinion, the most important aspect about a wiki is that everyone can contribute with ease. That’s why when I set up the website, I wanted to make sure that anonymous users could contribute. This worked great for roughly a year, with an occasional spam message and some vandalism, but nothing that couldn’t be managed. I found that it was possible to keep the spam at bay with some basic tweaks ad plugins for MediaWiki. This system worked great until again roughly a year later. Suddenly a massive amount of SEO bots were flooding the website, posting an unmanageable amount of spam. It was very hard to find a good solution for this problem, even a commercial one, as MediaWiki isn’t that broadly supported, not like WordPress or Drupal for example. I ended up stumbling upon CleanTalk.
Tag: review
Elementary OS 0.2 Jupiter
Elementary OS 0.2 Jupiter is the first stable release of Elementary OS and was release just over 10 days ago. I’ve been using the OS on one of my production machines for a week now and I’d like to share some of my thought about the OS.
Elementary OS is an Ubuntu remix, though things aren’t all that different. The only real difference between Ubuntu and Elementary OS is the interface. Elementary OS uses a custom built shell that runs on top of Gnome. The shell is clearly designed to resemble Mac OSX. The interface looks very sleek and tidy, is very responsive and overall I must say that it works really well.
As for functionality, the interface unfortunately doesn’t really add any, at the bottom of your desktop you will see a dock such as in Max OSX, opened programs will show up on the dock and you can easily stick them to do the dock to quick launch them. Aside from the dock, the interface seems to actually reduce the functionality of the Ubuntu desktop environment. The Desktop itself is completely gone, you can no longer put any files or folders onto the desktop and aside from this you no longer have multiple desktop support.
The OS still has a couple of bugs to iron out, often folders like Documents won’t launch and there’s a few other minor bugs.
Overall even though there’s some reduced functionality and small bugs, I must say I’m very satisfied with this new distro, the new interface looks very clean and is fun to use, it reduces that basic feel to Gnome while retaining the performance.
Note that you can use Ubuntu Tweak to bring back a lot of the functionality that was removed.