[pmwiki-users] Programs should be allowed to edit pages (Was: PmWiki and Spam)

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

On Thu, 10 Jan 2008, Simon wrote:

>>         libocacnoc
>>
>> might be spam, although it makes no sense to me...

> Whether or not it makes sense is not the point. The problem is that is 
> rapidly impacts a lot of pages

Thinking some more on it, I don't think it is spam... Could be some kind 
of defacing, or preparations to spam/deace. Or, unfortunately and 
extremely unlikely, maybe some actually wants to put these "words" on wiki 
pages. I can't imagine why though. Maybe it's an alien and it makes sense 
to "it" ;-) .. or maybe it's a person that somehow has a good reason...

Generally speaking we _want_ everybody to be able to change the content. 
What is it that we don't want? For instance, we don't want:
* Spam 
* Content being destroyed
* Defacement
* ?

However, I don't think captchas is a proper solution as I think it is 
_valid_ that a script/program modifies a wiki page. A simple example of 
this is when I use Emacs to edit wiki pages (pmwiki-mode)... then it's 
Emacs rather than a browser that does the change. And within Emacs, it's 
easy for me (and _very_ useful) to create a macro that does a similiar 
modification to many pages... Introducing captchas would make this 
unpractical to say the least :-(

Maybe what we need is editorial control over certain pages instead?
Or perhaps that they are saved as drafts until someone (anyone?) approves 
the changes?

I don't have any solutions, just a caution that we don't introduce any 
captchas or similarly as a _permanent_ "solution".

Best regards,
Christian

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr