[Pmwiki-users] Preventing "comment spam"

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 10:11:50AM -0500, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2005-01-31  08:55 AM -0600, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >The point is that almost any desired policy can be obtained via judicious
> >settings of $UnapprovedLinkFmt and $UrlLinkFmt.
> 
> But in the interest (and for the well-being) of those of us admins whose 
> eyes glaze over at the first "$" sign, could this please be done by 
> switches in config.php?

I'll come up with something.  The problem with using switch
settings over setting variables directly is that (1) they add
a small amount of processing overhead which individually might
not be much but collectively could become significant, and 
(2) one then has to worry about the interactions of switch
settings with other variable settings.  For example, if config.php has:

   # turn on rel='nofollow'
   $EnableRelNofollow = 1;
   # ...
   # external links are class='extlink'
   $UrlLinkFmt = "<a class='extlink' href='\$LinkUrl'>\$LinkText</a>";

it's not obvious what should happen here -- do we honor
the setting for $UrlLinkFmt (which doesn't have rel='nofollow')
or $EnableRelNoFollow?  

Switches often become a "spooky action at a distance" that 
are difficult to debug and trace as the configurations
become more sophisticated.

But, as I said, I'll come up with something here.

Pm