[Pmwiki-users] robots

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Sat Jan 10 08:09:11 CST 2004


On Sat, Jan 10, 2004 at 10:29:48AM +0100, bram brambring (zonnet) wrote:
> Morning,
> 
> You are quite right about the security/annoyance issue. However this is part
> of the wiki concept. With an automatic refresh tag it's more brutal, but
> visitors can already add 'nice' pictures with a link to other pages.

Yeah, it's the level of "brutality" that concerns me.  With standard wiki
you can offend with a picture but that's about it.  With meta tags (and IE)
you can infect someone's computer, do some fairly sophisticated social 
engineering, etc.  

> Opinions differ, but my idea is that Meta tags are still important to guide
> robots, to get a better ranking.

I'm not arguing against meta tags, just about having them be arbitrarily
available to anonymous authors.  But perhaps instead of arbitrary metas
it's better to let the WikiAdministrator restrict the set of meta tags
that can be specified, much the way that the upload code allows an admin
to restrict the filetypes that are uploaded.

> I didn?t want to touch the core pmwiki.php so it did the MetaTag thing as in
> the CookBook.

This is the correct approach.  :-)

> Maybe it is possible to have a separate piece of text, only editable from
> the attr menu. Or that meta tags are only processed when in a group
> MetaTag.{pagename}, these files can be included in other pages. And then it?
> s easy to protect them.

Both of these are excellent ideas, I'll add them into the pool of ideas as
I'm considering the meta code.

Pm



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