Second Life wiki: editing locked for now

Crap Mariner has been working on a new Arts wiki page on the SL wiki – on which I’ll have more in a future article – when he contacted me earlier in August to let me know that SL wiki editing had been locked to a limited number of permitted editors / users.

The locking has since become more widely seen, prompting Soft Linden to issue an e-mail update as a result of enquiries on what is happening, made via the open-source dev e-mail list. In the e-mail, Soft states:

There is a ridiculously persistent party who uses numerous wikis to promote fake Microsoft support phone numbers. Given the fraud or malware potential, we couldn’t let that keep returning.

There’s a less intrusive long-term solution in the queue, currently blocked by other work.

Hopefully, whatever is blocking the long-term solution will be cleared soon, allowing full edit access to the wiki to be restored.

In the meantime, those requiring urgent access to wiki pages to maintain data  / information, are asked to create a support ticket (I’d suggest include which pages need to be accessed and why, rather than just raising a generic request to gain access). Third-party viewer developers who require wiki edit rights can also contact Oz Linden to request access to their wiki pages.  If you only require access to update you profile or add a discussion point to a page, etc., it might be advisable to wait until after the wiki has been re-opened to all, rather than filing a support ticket.

This isn’t the first time the wiki had to be placed in lock-down. In October 2014, a lock-down was initiated while the wiki underwent an extensive security update, resulted in limited edit access for users through until January 22nd, 2015. Hopefully, this current period of lock-down, which started in early August, will not be for as long.