== '''Information required''' == (Josh) Since the previous software running this site was working fairly well, why was it replaced in the first place? Could we have a little information on what's going on? [CMcC] thought it was all public information. The previous incarnation was swamped by spiders. It was designed with locks and a lock breaking mechanism with a timeout of 10 minutes. The spidering was such that the timeouts timed out on valid edits, enabling multiple edits to be partially committed, thus causing corruption of data. It was considered a good idea to try to harden the server - to exclude rampant spiders. There was a mood to change, and change was necessary to prevent the inevitable repetition of the corruption. After about a fortnight, nothing was being done, so I decided I'd be willing to port the backend to my [Wub] front end, on the basis that I needed to write some hardening of the type needed anyway, and that Wub shouldn't suffer from the same network issues. In the absence of any practical alternatives or anyone to fix the problem in the time frame needed, that's what I chose to do. I get the benefit of testing Wub in a heavy duty application. The wiki gets to be hardened against attack and accident. When someone comes up with a better working implementation, I'm more than happy to hand it off to them. To that end, the wikit stuff is currently in subversion, and will be constituted as its own project. I don't plan to do much in terms of extending wikit beyond the functionality it had, but some people like [jdc] seem to have plans and willingness to put them into action. Feel free to contribute! ---- (Josh) Thanks Colin for your great efforts! Great attitude! Great spirit of initiative! You rolled out your sleeves, you spit in your hands and you moved forward. Way to go! Unfortunately, in all modesty, I must admit that I am not versed enough in these sort of problems but perhaps others are and they might contribute solutions. They might even be able to contribute an algorithm of some kind. I doubt it though since you are playing in a very very specialized area. But let's remain optimistic. My 2 Euros: wouldn't it be a good idea to only let in participants with passwords the same way it is done in the chat? This way vandals won't be able to vandalize the wiki and we could go back to the old Wikit? It seems to me (and to a lot of wiki webmasters) that times have changed: there are way too many cookoos out there so we cannot leave the gate open at night like we did in the old days. This wiki has always been very peaceful thanks to the fine and dedicated participants from all around the world therefore participants have never caused a single problem here; vandals are the ones who screwed up the wiki. They shouldn't have access to the wiki in the first place. We should close the gate. [stevel] Josh, this is a regular question and there's a regular answer ;) Consider the analogy of a shop window. Occasionally you get vandalism, but the solution isn't to board up the shop window, but rather to replace on the rare occasions it is vandalised, and perhaps install some security lighting. The wiki is Tcl's shop front and so we want to avoid boarding it up. One design goal of the wiki is to avoid barriers to people contributing (even if that means occasional vandalism). That's why we don't require passwords. ---- [[Category WikiT]] | [Category Discussion]