[pmwiki-users] documenting deleting pages and groups

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Mon Mar 14 14:54:06 CST 2005


On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 03:24:27PM -0500, Martin Fick wrote:
> > Well, until now I've generally withheld the information from public
> > view because I didn't want vandals to start writing scripts to do
> > mass deletions that had to be cleaned up by an admin.  While it could
> > be argued that vandals can clear lots of pages by simply erasing the
> > page contents entirely, the difference is that those pages can be
> > restored by anyone with edit privileges and not just the site admin.
> 
> Well, since the pages are saved, maybe it should be
> possible to restore deleted pages by an ordinary user?  Is
> there a coneptual reason why users can't?

Only because the interface is a bit complicated -- there can be
more than one deleted version of a page.  Thus an author would have
to be aware of the multiple versions, find the appropriate deleted
version, and restore it.  This can be done, but so far it all
falls afoul of PmWikiPhilosophy #3, in that nobody's identified
a real need for this feature yet that couldn't be better handled
via other approaches to page deletion.

For example, if a site really want authors to be able to restore 
deleted pages, in some sense it's simpler to just remove the 
"delete" keyword entirely.  An author then deletes the page by
changing the page contents to be completely blank (and we could
probably get the search and pagelist functions to ignore blank pages).
Restores of deleted pages are then easily performed using the 
existing page history function, and we can have a simple script
to find and remove blank pages if we need that.

But the previous point still remains -- in PmWiki's history,
nobody's expressed that they've encountered a serious problem
with the way that PmWiki currently manages deleted pages.

Pm



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