VyOS Networks Blog

Wiki registration

After some discussion, we have switched wiki account registration off. All real contributors are welcome though, and everyone who wants an account can request it by contacting dmbaturin or syncer on IRC or Slack, or sending a message to wiki@vyos.io (Unless you have been in the community for a while, please tell us which features you want to write about, to satisfy our curiosity and confirm that you are not a spammer).

The reason for this move is that in our quest for a spam-free wiki, we’ve had to deploy increasingly intrusive anti-spam measures, which by now made it hard for legitimate users to edit anything. Unfortunately, MediaWiki is a very attractive target for link spam due to its nearly unlimited formatting capabilities, and without proper measures, it can be filled or even completely replaced with spam overnight. Large and popular installations like Wikipedia may have resources and expertise to maintain the security vs. ease of editing balance and deal with anti-spam measures failures, but our wiki is small and niche and doesn’t benefit from enough eyes and hands to quickly spot and revert spam edits, or check flagged revisions.

Another reason is that, contrary to our hopes, casual editing never took off, and most of the work has been done by few dedicated people, rather than a crowd of users each documenting just a few small bits (and we appreciate all that work).

Perhaps for a dedicated person, having to request an account is not much of an obstacle, especially if it allows every registered user unhindered editing.

I’d like to reiterate that no account request from any VyOS user will be declined, the difference is in the registration process only.

Subscriptions for wiki contributors

While we are at it, earlier we’ve said that wiki contributors are eligible for free access subscriptions just like those who contribute code and testing.

This remains in force, and we’ve made up something of a guideline: everyone who documents one moderately sized feature (e.g. site to site IPsec, or firewall groups), or ten small features (e.g. op mode commands) in sufficient detail gets a yearly subscription, same is true for articles about VyOS and how it's used

Support portal

We are also introducing a documentation and support portal at support.vyos.io

Right now it’s bit empty, but we’ll be populating it during the next couple of weeks with information from wiki and forums. We hope that this increase overall experience for users

The portal will be based on edited versions of wiki articles and it will focus on the documentation for the LTS releases. The wiki will be a living document that will be assumed to apply to the latest rolling release by default, where experimental features from rolling releases can be documented and existing articles can be freely edited to reflect config syntax and behavior changes, without a need to create separate revisions.