[Pmwiki-users] Pmwiki newbie asks: how far back is history kept?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sun Jun 13 14:42:47 CDT 2004


On Sun, Jun 13, 2004 at 04:26:46PM -0400, Ben Schmidt wrote:
> As a WIKI newbie I'm concerned with visitors making erroneous or 
> malevolent changes. The counter-argument, as I understand it, is that 
> while a problem in theory, in practice it's not proven to be a 
> significant problem.  And anyway, one can always restore a page to its 
> original state. My question is: How far back can I restore a page? 

In PmWiki, page histories are limited by time and disk space.
The time factor is controlled by $DiffKeepDays, which defaults
to 3650 days (a little less than ten years) of page history.
A wiki administrator can set this to be a more reasonable default
such as 15 or 30 days.  Thus, a malicious person can't get the
"good" versions of the page to roll off the history until the
time given by $DiffKeepDays has expired.

> On a related note, I understand that a full user-authentication system 
> is in the works for pmwiki? One that would offer individual 
> userid/passwords, password-reset via email, etc? Could someone share an 
> ETA on that? If I could know who was making changes, I'd be much less 
> concerned with my first question.

There's no ETA on this, at least from an official PmWiki release
perspective.  (Cookbook implementations are always possible.)
The status is that while it's fairly easy to create a system to
manage user ids and passwords (identification+authentication), it's 
not so obvious what to do with that information once it's available
--i.e., how does one specific the actions that (authenticated)
userids are allowed to perform on individual groups and pages?

My tentative plan at this point is to provide very basic
user authentication with a very simple authorization system
such as "any authenticated user can edit", and let people
make comments/feedback from there.  But I probably won't
get around to this until sometime after PmWiki 2.0 is
released.  However, after it's released I may be able to
backport it to PmWiki 1.0 (0.6) without too much difficulty.

Pm



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