Open Source Software Engineering Tools
The upgrade of Tigris.Org is complete, and the system is back in service.
Please report any problems to feedback@tigris.org if at all possible. Of course, if it goes down, that won’t work, so feel free to tweet @tigrisdotorg, or add a comment here instead.
Update: Due to resource contention in the data center, the Tigris upgrade has been rescheduled one week. It will now begin on 2 April, at 8:00pm PDT.
Tigris.Org will be down for an upgrade starting 8:00pm PDT on Friday, 26 March, 2010.
Expected down time is 20 hours, due primarily to some large-scale clean-up.
Subscribe to announce@tigris.org (send email to announce-subscribe@tigris.org) for notice when it’s back in service.
See recent postings here for more details on what’s in store.
Have you found your bug in the Tigris stage site? Many brave souls have already dared the waters, yet not a one has identified a single problem! Could you be the first? Find out today! Log in to the staged version of your favorite Tigris project at http://yourproject.stage.tigris.org. Send bugs, complaints, and ecstatic praise to feedback@tigris.org.
Instructions and known problems were posted last week.
Unless some clever tester finds some major problem, we’ll be upgrading the real Tigris to this software version soon. We’re planning a weekend upgrade, either the weekend of March 26, or April 3. More on that as details develop.
Tigris.Org will be upgraded near the end of this month. This upgrade is primarily to fix a number of lingering bugs in all areas.
We now open the “stage testing” phase, which will run March 15 through March 26. During this time, a second system has been set up, running the new software, and all users are invited to help test it out. Try your favorite tricks, click your favorite clicks, and make sure things work.
Do your testing on stage.tigris.org — or yourproject.stage.tigris.org.
More details, and on-going progress reports, are available at the Stage Testing Plan page.
After the maintenance performed Friday night, it appears that downloads (such as from project “Documents & files” areas) are broken throughout the site.
Update (Monday, 2/22): Downloads are working again.
Due to an additional problem discovered in the Subversion support of the new release, the Tigris upgrade to CEE 5.3 has been delayed a few days. The new schedule is:
Update stage to patch 3 1d Wed 2/24/10 Wed 2/24/10 QA testing 5d Thu 2/25/10 Wed 3/3/10 Community testing 10d Thu 3/4/10 Wed 3/17/10 Production upgrade 1d Fri 3/19/10 Fri 3/19/10
Due to widespread defacement of project wikis, we have been forced to tighten security on Tigris.Org a bit. As of yesterday, users who are merely “Observers” in a project are no longer able to edit wiki pages. Project Owners who still want to grant widespread edit rights may add the new “Wiki Contributor” role along with “Observer,” to get the same permissions as before.
Why did we do this?
Well, you know … spam!
Over the last month or so, many projects have seen a rise in defacement of their wikis, by users with various fanciful names.
But Wikipedia isn’t so restrictive!
That’s true (though they’ve become somewhat stricter of late, and that trend may continue). But Wikipedia is a single wiki, with thousands of editors watching for this sort of thing. Tigris, on the other hand, is thousands of separate wikis, many with no editors actively watching them at all. The policies of each project are the responsibility of the Project Owner; central oversight and policy only comes into play at times like these, when there is widespread and unambiguous abuse.
How bad is it?
The defacements we’ve found to date are commercial / “warez” level spam, advertising businesses, some of whom have a less-than-obvious legal position, but none of which are pornographic or violent or otherwise deeply offensive. Similarly, we have not found any cases where the legitimate content of the wiki was damaged, only links to off-site web servers were added.
What can we do to clean up?
Every Project Owner should take a look over their project wiki for defacement. If it’s found, you’ll want to remove it; the “Page Information” link will be a handy way to do that. Page Information will also show you the user names of the culprits. You might want to rescind their membership in your project (although the security change I’ve mentioned here should be enough to prevent further defacement by Observer members).
