Greg, On July 17, 2006 7:55 PM you asked: > > May I know why the name "Sandbox" has been modified to "Sanbox20" ? > > Just curious. >
Apparently someone identifying themselves as 'scvblwxq' issued a rename of 'SandBox' to 'SandBox20' ... probably just a simple mistake. Perhaps they did not understand the instructions about how to create new pages. Or maybe they were just experimenting and did not understand the consequences of their actions: When you change the name of a page, all the links to the original page located in other pages will be updated with the new name and messages get generated for each such change. Maybe this is a bad design choice for the wiki that should be corrected. For example we could make changing links in other pages an option of the rename and default this option to 'no'. On the other hand it seems this kind of error does not happen very often. We are also having a few problems lately with changes made to the status of issues in IssueTracker. In this case, so far as I can tell from the web site logs someone connected to an ISP in Japan is occasionally running some kind of rogue robot program that is triggering these changes - this in spite of the fact that changing the status already requires that the use identify themselves before making changes. Of course this can be very easily spoofed by someone who knows a little about how these things work and there are a few people out there who are willing to exploit and abuse almost any openly accessible system. We can try to put blocks in the way of this kind of abuse or simply tolerate it. The current philosophy is that all (almost all) changes are allowed by anyone who is willing to identify themselves by setting wiki 'preferences' but any changes made to the wiki (except for 'SandBox' pages) will result in email notices being sent to the Axiom Wiki subscribers. Although this might be annoying to some Axiom Wiki subscribers, the result is someone is likely to notice any incorrect changes and use the 'diff' menu option to revert the change. The intent of this open access policy is suppose to be to encourage the use of the wiki and also to encourage those people who do use the wiki to feel some sense of "ownership" and responsibility for the content. This open access policy (more or less) in keeping with the original WikiWiki concept and quite at odds with the traditional way of implementing online collaborative interactive systems. Some people have suggested that we should adopt a more controlled access approach for the Axiom Wiki, but so far I have resisted this temptation because we already have a more controlled access mode of operation in the Axiom portal and my observation is that for the most part this greatly limits the number of people willing to contribute to this part of MathAction. In the present case of the change from SandBox to SandBox20 I just used the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) to revert all of these changes with a single 'Undo' request - that is one of the really nice features of having the wiki based on Zope. Right now, besides myself, there are only two other Axiom developers who have access to the ZMI level of Axiom Wiki and Axiom Portal (aka MathAction). ZMI access is limited to a small number of well motivated people because it requires a good knowledge of how to use Zope and like with any "management" interface it is possible to do both great good and great evil. :) To prevent this sort of error in the future and because the SandBox page is an important feature of this system, I have also set the security options for this page to allow renaming only by users with ZMI access. Sorry for the overly long "explanation" ;) As usual your opinions about design changes in the Axiom wiki are most welcome. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
