[Pmwiki-users] Spam resistance (was: Danger, Will Robinson!)

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Nov 26, 2004 at 03:36:01PM +0100, Hugo Fjelsted Alr?e wrote:
> This is good news! 
> 
> As far as I understand the links are added to the list on ApprovedUrls 
> after they have been approved. Is it possible to add the links before 
> approval - when the page is saved? 

I suppose it's possible, but I think automatic approval would defeat the
purpose of having approvals in the first place.  Wiki spammers seem to
be content with having their links appear even for just a few hours.

> Then the manager(s) would only have to look in one place to find 
> and approve external links.

We could/should probably create a way to list all pages containing
(unapproved?) external links.  For me, I was just planning to approve
links as part of my normal walk through Main.AllRecentChanges.

> Perhaps the  ApprovedUrls page could be even sorted so that 
> not-yet-approved links were at the top. 

Well, if a url appears in ApprovedUrls then it's "approved", so we can't
really have not-yet-approved links at the top.  But it probably make sense
to have the most-recently-approved links appear at the top.

> What happens with links that are not approved - are they removed from 
> the page or are they shown differently or?? 

By default they appear unlinked and with an "(approve links)" link behind
them that invokes ?action=approvelinks for the page.  But this is
customizable via the $UnapprovedLinkFmt variable.

> And are they listed somehow so that one does not need to 
> (dis-)approve them again if they have previously been disapproved.

Well, depends on what you mean by "disapproval".  We could probably add
a "RejectedUrls" page with URLs that are to be formatted via
$RejectedLinkFmt, but for me, personally, if I'm going to disapprove
a link I'd rather just remove it from the page entirely than go through
the trouble of marking it as disapproved.  Yes, I can see that there
might be an advantage to being able to pre-emptively prevent some links
from reappearing on the page, but I don't know of a good way (from a UI
perspective) of then displaying all of the options available for unapproved
links:
   - approve one link
   - approve all unapproved links on the page
   - approve one site
   - approve all unapproved sites on the page
   - reject one link
   - reject all unapproved links on the page
   - reject one site
   - reject all unapproved sites on the page

Pm