Sometime back I posted (prophetically on hindsight) on Wiki Spam - A Disaster waiting to happen in this blog. Please refer to the article for an interesting discussion on the subject and potential solution space.

At that time Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian commented and I quote:

As for the “disaster waiting to happen” - c2 gets attacked, wiped, deleted etc regularly, yet it is still around and still full of useful content - that is the best indication to me that it works :)


I replied back:

As I said it’s waiting to happen :)
It would be interesting to see how it copes against a script based distributed attack instead of few pain-in-the-neck humans.
The fact that it is safe today doesn’t in the least ensure that it will be safe tomorrow. In fact the same logic could’ve been used to say WTC is safe on 8/11.

Mike, if you are reading this, the disaster has happened. And all the kings men and all the kings horses (read Ward's Wiki moderators) couldn't handle the load of Wiki Spam. So Ward decided to shut down (for editing) C2 effectively to the world. It is now available to selected group of his favorite people based on IP addresses or so I have been informed. As far as I can see it is effectively closed to editing. And hence it ceases to be a Wiki.

Ward comments on apparent lack of editing in C2 at Wiki Is Dead. At this point it appears C2 is truly dead as a Wiki.

Long live C2! It was fun while it lasted.

The kicker is that you still get the edit form. However when you are trying to submit it asks you to type a code (CAPTCHA) which cannot be located anywhere. Apparently only few lucky people have access to the code.

BTW: I am surprised that someone as intelligent as Ward chose to restrict people based on IP ranges instead of using a image based CAPTCHA. I wish someone illuminates on the cause of this decision.