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

Matthew Turk matthewturk at gmail.com
Fri May 11 18:10:19 PDT 2012


Britton and I made the call to pull the plug on the old hub tonight.
I'm going to move the domains over either this weekend or on Monday,
so that what is now data.yt-project.org will live at
hub.yt-project.org.  The remaining task is to change the command
"hubsubmit," which is now the only way to post a new project (data has
always been API-only) to post to the new hub.

-Matt

On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 3:14 PM, Matthew Turk <matthewturk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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



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