[yt-dev] What's going on with the Hub

[Matthew Turk]

Nathan in IRC mentioned the SSL warning; the certificate is
self-signed, and once the domain transfer happens I'm going to obtain
a proper cert.

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:01 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Last August we announced the creation of the yt Hub, at
> hub.yt-project.org, to replace the ailing Barn project.  It was
> somewhat successful; it received about 30 submissions, which is 30
> more than we had before it was announced.  Rick Wagner emailed me
> Sunday morning to let me know he'd been able to find a considerable
> amount of Spam on the site; while we had put in restrictions keeping
> it from going to the front page, or being "published" and sent through
> the RSS Feed / email subscription, it was still possible to find them
> while searching the site.  Britton spent some time clearing it out,
> and it turns out that in total we had 10,000 spam submissions on the
> entire site.  I attribute most of the traffic to clever google
> searches on the part of spammers -- the strings used on the hub come
> from the original software, pligg, which was vulnerable to spam.
>
> Back in March, I received a grant from Amazon in Education to launch a
> data pastebin, which has been happily up and running -- although
> underused, as it hasn't been announced properly.  Hooks into it have
> been inserted into the development branch, will undergo a tad bit of
> polish before 2.4, and will be played up in the 2.4 release cycle.
> (For instance, PlotCollection objects are already uploadable, along
> with projections, and slices.  We have a vertex-display method, but
> uploads are not nice yet.)  It's kind of neat, but only time will tell
> if this fits a niche for people.  I've slowly been adding on new
> stuff, and the next item is going to be "named pastes" -- something
> that we've kind of wanted for a while, but never implemented.
>
> Anyway, the convergence of these things has led us to try to implement
> project listing in the data hub.  This will be much less accessible to
> spammers, as the only upload mechanism will be via API, rather than
> web form.  We'll also have substantially more control over the
> presentation, methods of interaction, and the entire software stack.
> This brings with it some challenges, but I believe we can overcome
> them.
>
> As a first step, I've imported all the projects from the old hub, as
> well as the users for those projects.  (You can regain access by
> resetting your password; your passwords are all set to random values.)
>  This first step is here:
>
> https://data.yt-project.org/
>
> but I would like to migrate it to hub.yt-project.org and unify both
> offerings.  Project URLs will remain functional, although through
> redirects.  Note that the getting started instructions require a
> change I implemented in development tip this afternoon.
>
> I'd like to solicit feedback on this:
>
> 1) What suggestions do you have for views, style, appearance, etc?
> 2) What problems do you see as is?
> 3) What needs to be added?
>
> For what it's worth, I'm working to add editing of submitted projects,
> to refine the yt mechanism for submitting new projects (right now it's
> non-functional), and to add more documentation about how to use the
> hub.  The repo is hosted (publicly) on BitBucket under my account as
> yt.hub, so if you want to help out feel free to dive in.
>
> As a word of warning, as I fiddle with things and add new things,
> there may be interruptions in service.  Let me know off-list if you
> think you see one that's long-lived or broken.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Matt