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2008-05-23

was soll das?

2008-05-19

Das ist nicht schwer: 23 ist 19 + 4

2008-05-13

As I deleted the master BannedContent page when I introduced the question asking a few days ago, it was only a matter of time until all the symbolic links became invalid (“... /page/B/BannedContent.pg ... No such file or directory”). I hope this problem has been resolved now. – AlexSchroeder

2008-04-15

I’m sure there’s an upside but if my opinion counts for anything, the math question is insulting. at least ask me somethin I have to think about, like “what is the most pressing issue facing society today”. or “how us it that meg white keep getting hotter over the course of like five years?” also, I gave two correct answers to the question. they were “a whole number” and “an integer”. so the comp needs to catch up. such a silly non-conversational test is not worthy. has there been recent problems here with non-human editors, spam? I’m around.

kenn @ coolheadz aka
the madgoogler,
sugarbooger @ newsplopper (all that content is me)

p.s. if you have req. math question, can it not be 23? jordan and jim carey and… I dunno.

ok, so recent spam’s to blame for the crackdown.

also: my newly created sidebar’s not staying off to the right. what up w/ that? NewsPlopper:sugarbooger

MattisManzel:
Sugar, yes, we had more spam recently. Alex decided for the question asker. Asking me for “a question” I thought something with 23‘d be a good idea. I wasn’t referring to the movie which soon will be forgotten anyway. ;)
Concering the NewsPlopper:SideBar, pretty likely it’s something with the css. Try to copy in a different one. Sry for not knowing.

2008-04-14

I think I will install the Oddmuse:QuestionAsker_Extension. The spam is gettin on my nerves. – AlexSchroeder

2008-02-23

any body speak russian? I don’t know what exactly is being plopped on my wiki. anybody know where this person came from on CoolHeadz:2008-01-21? TheMadGuy

MattisManzel:
That one appears on other wikis too and is spam. Delete. Thanks.

2007-12-26

Hey, I understand the problems with spam and the need for some of the changes to try and prevent it. But… regarding the thing stopping a page from linking to another site more than ten times, could you change it so that this doesn’t include links to within odd-wiki. I can no longer edit my index of wikis because it is filled with links to other odd-wiki wikis… http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/LoseTheGame/Wikis

Thanks, Jonty

MattisManzel:
What I do is use http://tinyurl.com for number 11 and following links.

2007-12-14 HiveIdea

odd-wiki-hive

odd-wiki-hive: hive-idea the rss-feed for the idea behind the odd-wiki-hive
[en]

[de] Die Idee hinter dem odd-wiki-Nest ist es, ein offenes wiki-Nest zur Verfügung zu stellen. Aber: Das odd-wiki-Nest soll nicht zu gross werden. Wer auch immer darf gern ein wiki starten. Alle sind eingeladen zu migrieren, wenn sie feststellen, dass es für sie funktioniert. Lies die Seite [HiveIdeaDetailed? Nest-Idee in Genaueren] und sieh dir die Nest-Liste an, bitte.
[en] The idea behind the obm-wiki-hive is to provide an open wiki-hive. But: The odd-wiki-hive is supposed not to become too big. Anybody is welcome to start a wiki. All are invited to migrate when they discover that it works for them. Read the page [HiveIdeaDetailed? hive-idea, detailed] and see the hive-list, please.
[fr] L’idée dernière de la ruche odd-wiki est de fournier une ruche wiki ouverte. Mais : …

[de] Alle Ideen hinter den wikis im odd-wiki-Nest zeigt die Seite odd-Listen-wiki: alle wiki-Ideen im Nest.
[en] See all ideas behind the wikis in the odd-wiki-hive on the page odd-wiki-list: all wiki-ideas in the hive.
[fr] Voyez touts les idées dernière les wikis dans la ruche odd-wiki sur la page odd-liste-wiki: touts les idée wiki dans la ruche.


2007-12-09

it’s weird- I have this one image in my sidebar that *like*- NEVER loads- CoolHeadz:coolkid small. any insights? KennCattell

MattisManzel:
It was too large so it didn’t fit into the sidebar, resized it to 100 px width.

2007-10-18

Hi. I need some help

2007-09-02

how can I get a front page that looks like the community wiki frontpage. I mean, I need the content, but do I need to install anything to aggregate other pages? thanks, NewsPlopper:SugarBooger

MattisManzel:
No. It’s just the css. You can try out some css’ in the CssSandWiki:FrontPage. Welcome and have fun!

AlexSchroeder: Well, if you want to aggregate the beginning of individual pages such we’ve done on Community:FrontPage, you’ll need to install your own copy of Oddmuse and the Oddmuse:Front Page Extension. Ordinary page aggregation works on patterns matching page names or search results and is part of the standard. See Oddmuse:Journal Pages for more info.

2007-08-27

Thank you for your site. I have found here much useful information. Good site ! ;)

2007-07-11

Hooray, it’s back! – SamRose

I agee! – HansWobbe

Yep, it seems the hosting service provider had a fatal disk crash. – AlexSchroeder

2007-06-24

Yikes. Looks like a bot on the server managed to replace the CSS pages on all the wikis. I banned it. Maybe I should change the links (GET requests) to buttons (POST requests). – AlexSchroeder

MattisManzel:
Yawn! ‘Night Captain. Sleep tight and thanks for the muse.

2007-05-23

Hi, is there any working css yet? I’m still having the editing problem with IE e.g. http://wikis.losethegame.com

I checked out that css garage but couldn’t find anything…

– Jonty

MattisManzel:
Hi, Jonty. IE6 remains a problem, IE7 is somewhat less troublesome it seems. Xtof posted a screenshot showing that background colors and language-filters work in IE7 (like on http://eartwiki.org/cgi-bin/hive/FrontPage) at least. I decided to put a cruel “Use a state-of-the-art browser. Unfortunately the Internet Explorer is no such.” on the changes. That’s as close to it as we get at the moment. Maybe the garage will get in use as we carry on. Thanks for your constantly unbreakable wiki-power and the despamming btw.

Even though IE is so crap it is still by far the most common browser people on my site are using. Maybe you could send me a message once the problem has been solved.

Thanks, Jonty.

2007-05-07

MattisManzel:
Concerns the oddwiki-hive main wiki.

Alex, could you add to the InterMap:

 DikiWiki http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/diki/
 KaboWiki http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/wiki2/
 ObmWiki http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/

and to the NearMap

 DikiWiki http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/diki?action=index;raw=1
 KaboWiki http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/wiki2?action=index;raw=1
 ObmWiki http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki?action=index;raw=1

Thanks!

AlexSchroeder: Can’t you do this yourself? I think these two pages are unlocked for all wikis in this hive.

2007-05-03

wikio css fixes

DavidCary, ok, check this out: http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/CssSandWiki/changes

Does this look better? Differences are:

Added:

 div.rc {
   width: 75ex;
   border: 1px solid #fff;
   padding: 20px;
   color: #fff;
   background: #333;
 }

This places the RecentChanges in the same type of box as regualr page content.

and removed:

 hr {clear:both;}

If hr (horizontal rule) css adjustment is needed, it may be possible to use a different value. Feel free to use this adjusted css, it’s located here: http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/CssSandWiki/StyleSheet

Thank you. That makes http://communitywiki.org/odd/TulsaMovieMaker/RecentChanges look much better. – DavidCary

2007-05-01

recent changes of a sub-wiki not showing new changes?

As you can see from http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/TulsaMovieMaker?action=history;id=HomePage , I modified one page a few minutes ago. I expected that edit to immediately show up on http://communitywiki.org/odd/TulsaMovieMaker/RecentChanges , but it claims nothing has changed in months. What can I do to fix it? – DavidCary

CSS wierdness?

There is something about a few of the different css for OddMuse that makes them shunt content to the bottom of the page when you add a SideBar. I am trying to figure this out myself. It happens in all of them, except TheSheep css, and Green (as used on CommuntiyWiki?). I am digging into this, and will report back here when I fins an answer. – SamRose

I was able to get the rc into a “content” -type box here http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/CssSandWiki/changes . I am trying to figure out how to get rid of the big top margin now… SamRose

links to new location of wiki that have moved

I would like a nicely-commented list of every living wiki here, and a link to that list on our main SideBar. (That list is http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/OddWikiList/HiveListPages , right?) (I thought we had such a link, and I’m surprised that I don’t see it now)

I also would like a nicely-commented list of all the wiki that have moved, and links to the new location (whether it’s another name on this site, or another site entirely). (Should I just stick that list at the end of the above list for now, until it gets long enough to split into its own page? Or does that list already exist somewhere?)

That way people who vaguely remember some wiki here can find out where the people from that wiki went.

DavidCary

MattisManzel:
Moin David. No idea about the recent changes. In the page history the change exists. Editing recent changes doesn’t help.

Alex moved the two links - hive-list and wiki-net hive-changes - I put in the bar on top to the home page. Just keep track there ;) There is also oddwiki-list: wiki-net hive-list you might like.

I’ve been thinking of daypage-sets for wikis that want to migrate to another hive on obm-wiki-hive / obm-wiki-center-en: talk / 2007-04-03

2007-04-15

(Continued from 2007-04-14.)

Thanks again, Alex.

Re editing: It seems that the “edit save” succeeds, but not gracefully – it stops and displays the “302” message on blank page, but the change is present on the edited page when it is selected and reloaded. Behavior is the same on Opera.

Re css: Identical wiki content on my home and work machines is rendered correctly by Firefox, but the ISP-hosted wiki viewed with Firefox appears as if there were no stylesheet. You suggested trying another browser, so I tried Opera (it works very well, with proper layout but no images) and Konqueror, (the colors are there, the layout is almost correct – but not quite, and there are no images).

Re images: The perl library you mention is the likely cause; will investigate, with ISP if necessary.

The ISP is using older apache and perl than I have on either my home or work machine. I will try to get the ISP versions onto my home machine and see how the prototype wiki behaves.

I really appreciate your support!

– Bob Barry

The edit succeeds as specified: The page is saved, and a 302 response is issued which should redirect your browser to the new page. This is not happening either because of the browser you use (I doubt it), or because the CGI library doesn’t want to do it (I doubt it), or something else (webserver configuration). To conclude, I have no idea why this is not working. :(

As for the CSS, I’m still missing some info: Where is the CSS stored, and how does Oddmuse know about it?

– Alex

2007-04-14

(Continued from 2007-04-13.)

Thanks again, Alex - you were near the mark.

CGI runs under the http server with rights of user “nobody”. The target cgi-bin directory is owned by user “username”, and has permissions “rwx—r-x”. To enable a CGI script to write to the target cgi-bin directory, I FTP’d into the target cgi-bin directory and ran “chmod 777 .”.

If the wiki is starting from scratch, DataDir with proper ownership can be created by:

  • create wiki configuration file “config”
  • create cgi file “doit.cgi” containing “mkdir mywikidata; cp config mywikidata/”
  • FTP files “config” and “doit.cgi” to the target cgi-bin directory
  • browse the target “cgi-bin/doit.cgi” to create DataDir
  • FTP to target “cgi-bin”, to:
    • verify ownership and content of DataDir
    • delete “doit.cgi” and “config”
    • restore cgi-bin permissions, with “chmod 705 .”

But I had already built much of the wiki, so I did:

  • copy wiki to a working directory
  • strip the working copy of kept pages and temp files
  • clear the working copy admin files except pageidx
  • tar the working copy to “mywiki.tgz”
  • create CGI file “doit.cgi” containing “tar xzvpf mywiki.tgz”
  • FTP files “mywiki.tgz” and “doit.cgi” to the target cgi-bin directory
  • browse the target “cgi-bin/doit.cgi” to extract the DataDir and its contents
  • FTP to target “cgi-bin”, to:
    • verify ownership and content of DataDir
    • delete “mywiki.tgz” and “doit.cgi”
    • restore cgi-bin permissions, with “chmod 705 .”

This seemed to work: DataDir and contents were all owned by “nobody:nobody” when I finished. But since then, ownership has changed to “username:nobody”. I can view existing pages, and I can edit pages, but I can not save edits, and images and css do not work. I will talk to ISP support on Monday and try to find what kind of jail I’m trying to work in.

– Bob Barry


Alex - I deleted everything, and did it all again v-e-r-y c-a-r-e-f-u-l-l-y. I’ve checked ownership of DataDir frequently, and it’s staying “nobody:nobody”. Pages were read-only with EditAllowed=2, so I changed it to 1. Existing files are browseable but no images are rendered anywhere and css seems to be ignored. Edit of an existing page works fine until I try to save; than a blank page comes up with the message “Status: 302 Found Location: http://<wiki-url>/wiki.cgi/<pagename>”. I ran admin maintenance, and it completed without complaint. I looked at admin version and dependencies, and they don’t seem abnormal. Could the server be missing an essential perl or apache module? Is there any way to check? Is there any log or debug facility on the wiki? I deleted the DataDir of the prototype wiki on my home machine, and restored it by untarring the same file I used to create the wiki on the web page, and it works completely normally, so I’m sure that the content of DataDir (including modules) is valid.

– Bob Barry

How strange. It is true that Oddmuse uses a trick (like many other wiki engines) which is not strictly according to the specification of the HTTP protocol. When you edit a page, you’re issuing a POST request. The wiki then saves the data and redirects you to the “correct” URL for browsing. The CGI library probably uses a 302 status to implement this redirection, and the spec says this should not work, but acknowledges that it will usually work, depending on your browser:

If the 302 status code is received in response to a request other than GET or HEAD, the user agent MUST NOT automatically redirect the request unless it can be confirmed by the user, since this might change the conditions under which the request was issued.
Note: RFC 1945 and RFC 2068 specify that the client is not allowed to change the method on the redirected request. However, most existing user agent implementations treat 302 as if it were a 303 response, performing a GET on the Location field-value regardless of the original request method. The status codes 303 and 307 have been added for servers that wish to make unambiguously clear which kind of reaction is expected of the client.

Thus, I’m expecting that using a different browser should give you the expected results with respect to the 302 errors.

No images are rendered… That could be related to the MIME::Base64 Perl library. This is needed to decode uploaded files according to Oddmuse:Perl Modules.

I’m not sure what you mean by “css seems to be ignored” – are you creating a page called “css” and its content has no effect? If so, did you set $StyleSheet or $StyleSheetPage? Those two variables have precedence.

AlexSchroeder

For more information on why Oddmuse uses redirects at all, see "Redirect After Post" by Michael Jouravlev 2004. That article seems to encourage flouting the RFCs in exactly the same way AlexSchroeder describes. Although it mentions “Status 303” is the “proper” code to use, it implies that “Status 302” is the “common de-facto behavior” that many people use.

DavidCary

2007-04-13

(Continued from 2007-04-12)

Still trying to setup wiki on ISP-hosted web page, with only ftp and browser access: I renamed the DataDir “junk”, and created new DataDir containing config and empty admin files. First login attempt failed because DataDir/temp was not writeable by server; so chmod 777 DataDir/temp. Second login attempt failed because visitors.log was not writeable; so chmod 666 visitors.log. Third login displayed HomePage, but still with “This page is read-only”. Cookies are enabled on my browser. On password page, my passwords are recognized and admin functions allowed. But when I go to HomePage it’s still read-only. I sure would appreciate some tips. TIA, Bob Barry

I think the first thing to consider is that Oddmuse is telling you “This page is read-only” and this does not depened on write-permissions to the files. (In fact, this is a little bug: Oddmuse just assumes that it can write all the files and will run into an error when it tries to write the file.)

So the question is: Why does Oddmuse think the HomePage is read-only?

  1. A local lock file exists: Starting in your data dir, check whether there’s a file called page/H/HomePage.lck and delete it, or
  2. A global lock file exists: Check whether there’s a file called noedit in your data dir and delete it, or
  3. The $EditAllowed option is set to 0: Check your config files and your module files (the weblog-1.pl module sets this option, for example) and remove the offending line.

As for permissions, I have a similar problem in that the wiki is run by a different user than my real account. So what I do I put the commands I want to run in a different CGI script, and run it, thus executing them as the same user that runs the wiki. Example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use CGI qw/:standard/;
use CGI::Carp 'fatalsToBrowser';
print header;
print start_html('Mu!');
# print pre(`kill -9 23564`);
# print pre(`ps ax --sort=-c`);
# `touch /org/org.emacswiki/htdocs/pics/static/BlankModeOn.jpg`;
# `chmod -R g+wx /org/org.emacswiki/htdocs/pics/static`;
# `rm -rf /org/org.emacswiki/htdocs/test_`;
# open(F,'> /org/org.emacswiki/htdocs/pics/static/BlankModeOn.jpg');
# print F 'test';
# close F;
print end_html;

As you can see, all sorts of stuff. :)

Hope that helps.

AlexSchroeder

Thanks for the suggestions. Neither page/H/HomePage.lck nor DataDir/noedit exists. My config is absolutely minimal, and had EditAllowed = 2 as recommended by “GreyWulf”. I couldn’t find info on EditAllowed anywhere, but changing it to “1” allowed edit. The next problem is saving the edited page: as each attempt complained about permissions on a different file, I changed the named file to “666”, until all were writeable. But with all admin files “666”, I still get error “Cannot delete the index file DataDir/pageidx. Please check etc”. I don’t see a solution to this. I used cgi a lot yesterday to find what I was working with and what was allowed (damned little!), but I don’t have the option of running as any other user.

– Bob Barry

Ah, $EditAllowed will lock all the pages except for comment pages; you need to have the editor or admin password set to edit a page in this case. You said that you did that, and still it would not work. That’s strange and looks like a bug to me. You can find more info about this option at the Oddmuse site.

As for the permission required to delet $DataDir/pageidx, you need to change the permissions of the directory itself: chmod +w $DataDir should do it. Also consider to change permissions recursively. I think a simple chmod -R +w $DataDir should do it.

Good luck in your restricted environment! :)

– Alex

2007-04-12

First the good news: I’m a complete newbie to wiki, and OddWiki got me off on the right foot. Many thanks to those who made it happen! Then I migrated the pages to my home machine (Gentoo), and it ran there without much trouble at all. Then I tar’d the applicable directories and scp’d them to work where I installed them on a Kubuntu machine with no trouble at all.

Then the bad news: The object was to get the wiki installed on a web page which is hosted by an ISP, where my only access is by ftp or browser. After a full day of tinkering, I finally got the HomePage to come up. I have a few comments to add to the “Getting Started Guide”. But I haven’t been able to get further. The HomePage is “not editable”. When I go to admin and enter either password, it is acknowledged by the password page, but when I click on HomePage, I find it still is “not editable”. I’ve enabled cookies on my browser, cleared cache, unlocked wiki, but HomePage cannot be accessed. I went back to ftp, and had a look at the wiki DataDir, and found that the admin files (maintain, pageidx, visitors.log, and the temp directory) are owned by “nobody:nobody”, whereas my files are owned by “username:username”. Ftp cannot chown, and when I tried to chmod the wiki admin files, I was refused permission. All files of the successful installations on my home and work machines are owned by the account running apache (“apache:apache” and “www-data:www-data”). I figured the next step would be to start over, and create the admin files before starting the wiki for the first time; but I doubt that I’ll be able to delete the existing DataDir because I don’t have rights to those admin files, and files written to temp may have unworkable ownership. Is there a way to cope, without access to the account the server is running on? And if so, can passwords be made to work?

TIA, Bob Barry

(Continued on 2007-04-13)

2007-03-31

I switched to some new css that Mattis advised me to use. When you try to edit the page with IE6 it goes all weird and there is no box to type text. Check it here for example – Jonty

PS This isn’t just me, other people that use my site have had the same problem.

MattisManzel:
Confirmed. No edit window. We had it running already pretty good (that is TheSheep had it). As we change other little things working fine in Firefox it causes disasters in IE. It’s a bit frustrating to check the wikis in IE, so I don’t do it that often … (despite having IEs4Linux now, which I recommend)
Sam has started the css-garage-wiki. That’s the future place for fixing it, I guess.

Yeah, IE is a pain in the arse. Every so often I go on my website in IE and there’s always something messed up. – Jonty

2007-03-23

Is there any way to make a login system? Or some way you can determine which users make which edits?

Jonty

Jonty, on OddWiki, the only way is for users to type there name in the username space, and OddWiki, it is not possible to create a login system.

But, if you migrate your wiki off of OddWiki, then it’s possible to set it up so that OddMuse will lock every page on creation, and then you can create a password that only authorized editors know about. I don;t think there is any other way to create a login system for OddMuse, which was created with the intention of being used as an openly editable wiki, and so has not attracted people interested in creating login systems for it. – SamRose


In the process of Migration for Xtof:HomePage wiki to XtofWiki on OBM WikiHive, per Xtof’s request.

wikicopy works well so far. It’s rather slow, but I am guessing that is because it would be bad to throw all of those requests at this server all at the same time. So, it’s probably best that it’s slow. – SamRose

Update:

Worked without a hitch. all of the pages under Adimistration need to be copied manually, because the migration script can’t copy locked pages. So in short, it works great!

Will do with SocialSynergy:FrontPage wiki, too. – SamRose

Good to know! :) As for the locked pages: I guess you could set Oddmuse:LockOnCreation to the empty list, and then they can be copied as well. And if you set Oddmuse:SurgeProtection to 0, you can then use the -t 0 option to wikicopy to speed things up. – AlexSchroeder

I tried migration before but I don’t think I can support a wiki on my hosting service. And I don’t really have time to buy some different space and sort it out at the moment. I didn’t want a login system to protect pages, I was interested in knowing who made each edit. I have been thinking about making a wiki-game but it would require knowing who made each edit. Also, Mattis mentioned that the old pop-up “Edit this page” box doesn’t work with IE6 but that there was a new one which does work, do you know which wikis use this so I can steal it :) – Jonty

2007-03-21

It’s become a big problem for forum owners to protect them from spam. Automated programs are sending their ads in huge quantities today.

We’re small community of coders, upgrading forum’s source code to prevent spam-programs to post ads at your forums.

Our technique is probably one of the best. There’s no need in such ugly methods as ‘capcha’ or ‘secret question’. For average user there would not be any visible effects. No need to make e-mail activation (that usually makes number of successful registrations less), no even need to make your users register at forums to post messages.

More info only at icq: xxxxxxxx Send messages even if not logged in.

– Anon

AlexSchroeder: Strange. This message looks like spam. :)

MattisManzel:
To me too. Maybe Anon could explain a bit more on it? icq has a lot of spam, doesn’t it?

SamRose: Also likely a way to impregnate unsuspecting windows computer users with Spyware, Malware, or Viruses. xxxx-ed out icq number so that unsuspecting will not contact it and probably get a virus

AlexSchroeder: Yeah, same post, different day. Spam.

2007-03-17

Dear Alex and OddWiki community,

Mattis mentioned to me that you ran into an issue a while back with new wikis in hive not showing up in hive recent changes. I am running into this with http://socialsynergyweb.net/cgi-bin/wiki/BarCampBank/HomePage on obm wiki hive. Any advice greatly appreciated. Also, I have on my ToDo? list to write a page about my experiences setting up and managing an OddMuse WikiHive, that could potentially be useful for OddWiki. I’m still learning of course. Finding OddMuse increadibly powerful, and discovering amazing capabilities every day :)

Also, will be trying a migration of xtof wiki, and will update about how that works (looks like it will be very straightforward and easy). Hope you are all having a good spring. – SamRose

Something that I’ve never managed to solve is this: If there are empty lines in rc.log and the old variant of it, Recent Changes will no longer work. I’ve had to remove such empty lines manually in the past. I have never figured out what caused it and have stopped seeing any complaints, so I assumed it was solved. – AlexSchroeder

2007-03-14

When I try to access early revisions of a page it says “Revision 4 not available” for example… does this mean that early revisions are permanently deleted?

Jonty

Yes, old revisions are deleted after a while. See Oddmuse:Kept Pages for details.

AlexSchroeder

2007-03-06

Several questions:

  • Can I ban users from editing? If so, how?
  • For what are cookies for? I don’t really understand how it works… Of course, I know what cookies are for and how they work usually, but I don’t understand how they are used in my wiki…

– Anon

You cannot ban users from editing on these wikis because you don’t get administrator access. If you install your own copy of Oddmuse on your own server, that is easy to do, of course.

As for the cookies: Why do you need to know? It should “just work” out of the box.

AlexSchroeder

What if someone starts making harmfull edits which are not detected by Banned Content? How can I stop him?

– Anon

Tricky. You might post it here, but unless it’s obvious spam, I won’t be able to help you. Banning IP numbers usually means banning entire an ISP, since the people you want to ban can just get a new DHCP lease from their ISP when their IP is banned. So you end up banning the entire range. This kind of banning might affect innocent users.

Basically, if you’re in need of a protected environment, you should set up your own Oddmuse wiki, such that you can edit BannedContent? or BannedHosts yourself, or find another wiki hosting service. This “wiki hive” is not for you, unfortunately. :(

AlexSchroeder

2007-02-28

Is it possible to ask wikicopy to copy multiple wikis source wikis to multiple seperate destination URL’s all in one shot? – SamRose

Sam; What about an approach of simply using FTP to sync the source?

  • Some of the techies I’ve been discussing my “needs” with have suggested that it would be “trivial” to have raw wiki source files for a set of pages automatically replicated among a set of wikis. This would provide a type of ‘mirroring’ which we have been discussing. So far, I have not thought of enough dis-advantages to this approach to justify eliminating it.

And I have found several advantages that suggest I should keep an open mind about this method. – HansWobbe

I see what you mean Hans. We could easily try this on a test server, or mirror actual wikis, etc. If you’d like to try this, let me know. It would be worth playing around of with some of the simplier ideas from our brainstorms about this, just to see what we can come up with.

I was actually asking about wikicopy in relation to a different problem, related to the work that MattisManzel has been doing in OBM and kabo WikiHives?. He’s been manually copying over some templates of WikiHive centers and WikiHive lists to new WikiHives? we’ve been creating. I thought that the wikicopy script could make this process easier when launching a new WikiHive, by copying certain Empty wiki template wikis over, with pre-created pages, saving the time of copying and pasting. So, I wondered if you have to use wikicopy on one wiki at a time, or whether you can do a whole bunch of seperate source and destination wikis all at once.

Sam; I don’t yet know how oddmuse stores its pages (e.g. I suspect its in some database like MYSQL), but several of the wikis we use simply store data in files. For those, a simple copy of the (sub)folder is all that is needed to create a new copy. In my environments, there is less concern about large volumes of users (where a DB is generally essential) than there is about ‘flexibility’ for individual Authors (who generally do not know enough about CSS). – HansWobbe

Hans, thanks for your response. Actually, I know for sure that you are right, OddMuse stores pages in files, with no database at all. When you set up OddMuse, you create a directory where it stores that data. The wikicopy script allows you to copy those files in one shot from one server to another (see Migration). I guess I’ll just have to try it out. But, I think I can do what I am asking here, I just don’t know the exact UNIX command line structure, but I think I can figure it out. I am mostly asking here for he benefit of other people.

Eventually, I am going to write a page about my experience setting up OddMuse WikiHive installations.

Oddmuse uses files to store data, but wikicopy doesn’t need access to these files. It uses ordinary HTTP requests to get pages from one wiki and post them to the other wiki. The URL acts as an API, so if I knew how other wiki engines worked, it would copy pages from Oddmuse to MoinMoin? or other engines, too. (It wouldn’t translate markup, however. You’d have to do that with lots of search & replace operations.) What I’m having trouble with is understanding “copy multiple wikis source wikis to multiple seperate destination URL’s all in one shot.” How is that different from saying “wikicopy A B; wikicopy C D; wikicopy A F” and so on? Using a sync mechanism on the level of files is tricky, because you’re bypassing RecentChanges. Using wikicopy fixes this. It adds the necessary log entries. – AlexSchroeder
Thanks for the clarifiaion, Alex. I seldom make use of the Recent Changes in the Personal Wikis I run, so I completely over-looked the fact that they could be important in an active Community. Of course, for a simple useCase of trying to distribute snapshots of pages, a simple file copy might be quite adequate. I’ll ponder this over the next few days. – HansWobbe

MattisManzel:
Copy all in one shot. That might mean setting up a new wiki-hive becomes almost as easy as setting up a new wiki. You run the script and it creates and fills in the basic page structure on:

  • xxxx-wiki-hive - the main wiki, has no talk
  • xxxx-wiki-list - the second half-sphere to the main wiki, the two belong together, has no blog. All living wikis have list-pages on it.
  • xxxx-wiki-center-en - the wiki-center in English. English wikis have home pages for presentation, support, talk on it. A list page is transcluded into the home page for a wiki.
  • sand-wiki-en - an entire wiki to try out.
  • empty-wiki - the basic empty page structure + instructions how to copy it over to a new wiki.

For every further language you need the center-wiki, the sand-wiki and the empty-wiki translated.

Imagine many hives. I’d like that.

But you know about it, me I’m just watching. --mm

AlexSchroeder: Well, you can use the Migration instructions to copy a wiki from this site to another. It doesn’t help you with the tech setup, unfortunately. It just copies the pages. :)

HansWobbe: One possibility I am pondering is the creation of a “distro” that could combine all of the required software into a single Object (which could take the form of a CD or a TAR or ZIP file). My Objectives are …

  • To have a set of standard “templates” that could simply be copied as a first step in creating a new wiki. Think of this as a quickStart that allows a novice to get up and running and then learn how to tweak the parameters as desired once the Need and Knowledge are acquired.
  • Since the Content is stored in separate files, an initial set of these pages could be be included.
  • Furthermore, Content could be transfered between independant wikis using either the COPY (no Recent Changes) or wikiCopy methods.

Perhaps this approach be extended to reduce some of the work Mattis is doing too?

SamRose: hans, I think we can actually do your distro cd idea right now with the tools and scripts that exist. We’ll have to try it out. Me and Mattis are already going to try out the Migriation/wikicopy script for hive set up.

Mattis has made some “empty” wikis on different hives that are templates. It’s just a matter of copying those over to a cd. They can even have “template” pages set up (like HowTo, etc etc).

On a related issue, I noticed that OddMuse has an extension called “Page Syncronization” see: OddMuse:Page_Syncronization

This is another idea for syncing OddMuse wikis, just thought I’d let you know about it.

I’ve been going around in circles gathering information about various ways of building a distributed wiki. And here I see you’ve gone ahead and done it. Excellent. – DavidCary

2007-02-19

Hi. I am sort of new to this, so I have a couple of questions:

  • How do I enable cookies? (I want to be an administrator or something in my own wiki)
  • Can I lock from editing a certain page on my own wiki (such as the main page) from all users except me?
  • How do you bann users?

I´d really apreciate any answers…

– Anonymous

You don’t have to “enable” cookies. They will be used automatically.

If you set up a wiki on this site, there is no way for you to be an administrator. If you need administration powers, you need to set up your own wiki on your own server, or find somebody who does it for you.

Similarly, since page locking and banning requires administration powers, you cannot do it on this site.

AlexSchroeder

More details on 2006-10-09. Should we make a FAQ ?

2007-01-20

Regrets, regrets.

A couple of months ago I found what looked like a nice wiki for computer hardware. So I moved http://communitywiki.org/odd/ComputerComponent/NoteBook to that wiki. Alas, that wiki has gone offline.

I hoped I could restore that page by hitting the “View other revisions” button on page http://communitywiki.org/odd/ComputerComponent/NoteBook and reverting, but alas – there don’t seem to be any other versions.

I didn’t expect both wiki to suffer dataloss.

Is there a better way to recover the data than to resort to the the Web Archive ?

DavidCary

Well, we don’t call it “dataloss” because it happens on purpose: Old revisions are expired after two weeks. KeptPages and all that. :)

From my last archive on a local disk:


… (text moved back to http://communitywiki.org/odd/ComputerComponent/NoteBook ) …


AlexSchroeder

Well, you can’t deny that data was lost. Even though all the systems on your side were working perfectly. :-)

I’m all in favor of ForgiveAndForget. But in this case, “two weeks” was much shorter than I expected. (Actually, I think I moved that text to the other wiki 2006-10-17; so it’s been over 2 months.)

Thank you. I’ve restored the page now. – DavidCary

2007-01-14

I’m sorry for the many outages these days. It seems that our server is running out of disk space every now and then, which essentially closes shop.

I’m not complaining too much, because it is a non-profit run by two nice guys costing only USD 2 per month, however…

AlexSchroeder

2007-01-12

Whenever I try to edit a page on my Imaginexus wiki, I get the following:

Edit Denied

The page contains banned text.

Contact the wiki administrator for more information.

Rule “^[A-Za-z].* .*\n$” matched “In one thousand years “ on this page. See BannedContent? for more information.

- Jonty

The solution is to write at least two lines of text. Yes, it’s a weird rule. :( The reason is that a lot of spam basically says “Great site! Bla bla.” At least we had a flood of such vandalism or spam on the Emacs Wiki, for example.

AlexSchroeder

I don’t think that’s the problem… My initial edit involved much more than 2 lines and I just tried again and it still doesn’t work. However, entering one word “Testing” did work… See at http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/Imaginexus/notebooks

- Jonty

Weird. Works for me. What exactly are you trying to post?

AlexSchroeder

Ahh ok I found what I was doing wrong. When you said “at least 2 lines” I thought you just meant enough text to fill at least 2 lines, but you actually have to press Enter at some point to start a second line. Is there anyway you could put something explaining this when the problem occurs, because I imagine quite a lot of edits may involve typing a block of continuous text without pressing Enter…

- Jonty

MattisManzel: Hi Jonty. Make a page MessagesFromOddWiki on your wiki and copy in Mattis-Manzel-wiki: messages from oddwiki. It’s the messageboard for all oddwikis and the latest message explains about it.

2007-01-02

On the CIC Oddwiki, RecentChanges is taking me to CW:RecentChanges..?

?!

LionKimbro :)

AlexSchroeder: That’s because you created the InterMap & NearMap pages before creating the RecentChanges pages. edit it now to create a local copy.

2006-12-28

Hm… I think something has been seriously wrong with our maintenance script. A long time ago I must have made a modification that stopped it from running completely. At the same time, somehow one of the wiki processes started eating all the RAM on the host machine, forcing the provider to kill it. I’ve started the scripts again, but I’m still wary of runaway code. Oh well. We’ll just have to keep an eye on it. Sorry about the downtime.

I also noted that the last update created an incredible amount of “activity” on the Status page. There must still be a bug in the maintenance script that I need to fix. – AlexSchroeder

2006-12-22

 Cannot open /home/alex/oddwiki/Xtof/page/L/logo.pg: No such file or directory

Hi Alex, this message is currently displayed on my machine when I try to access xtof’s bliki. Any idea ? Have a nice week-end & happy Xmas to you – Xtof

Hm, I noticed. All wikis seem to be broken. I’ll have to investigate… – Alex

MattisManzel: Yes. The main level works. All wikis though show something like the message xtof listed above. Thanks Alex. Happy Weihnachten to all.

AlexSchroeder: Yeah, should be fixed now. The last update of the main script broke the namespace extension, and it turns out that I didn’t have any unit tests for that extension, which allowed this breakage to go unnoticed… All together now: “Unit tests! Unit tests! Unit tests! Unit tests!” :)

SamRose: Whew! I thought I was going crazy when trying to install namespaces.pl. But, this explains a lot (I tried to pot a comment at oddmuse.org about it, but kept running up against spam filter.) Anyway, thanks a million!

MattisManzel: Unit tests, well done.

2006-12-02

Christophe, you tried to change the CSS page on the main wiki. Did you have something particular in mind? The theme you picked still needs some work to be usable. It doesn’t specifiy how the sidebar should be handled, for example. Since it didn’t look too good, I deleted the CSS page again. Let me know what you want to change. – AlexSchroeder

MattisManzel: On oddwiki-center: talk / 2006-12-02 I noticed that. Thanks for reverting, Alex. I thought it was quite beautiful already, just the sidebar that didn’t work. Maybe we should experiment with some css’ for the main-level? We can always remove it again. I have no experience except copying Laurent’s css into oddwikis. That one is rather not utile for the main level, I guess.

AlexSchroeder: You can always do local experiements yourself by using the css parameter. Example:

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd?action=browse;id=2006-12-02;css=http://emacswiki.org/css/cali.css

Return:

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd?action=browse;id=2006-12-02;css=

Or you can put it on a page such as OddWikiCenter:CssExperiment and then use:

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd?action=browse;id=2006-12-02;css=http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/OddWikiCenter/raw/CssExperiment?type=text/css

Return:

http://www.communitywiki.org/odd?action=browse;id=2006-12-02;css=

There you go.

Your own little CSS experiment!

MattisManzel: I was thinking about a css-sand-wiki already today, somewhere to wildy try out on the css. That’s what I obviously have to do.

Quite since the days of the first fete d’internet when xtof made his wiki I have a problem with certain wikis. When on them scrolling pages is slow as if something overloaded the cpu or so. When I go to the wikis and read everything behaves normal. But as soon as I enter edit mode the scrolling get’s slow, even the cursor on the old PIII laptop I currently also use. It remains slow when I quit the edit mode.

The problematic wikis are

How come? It appears on both my average boxes both in Berlin and in Italy. Has someone else recognized something similar?

AlexSchroeder: Maybe a particular CSS instruction that slows down rendering? That seems like a plausible explanation, since once you’re on the edit page, all the action happens in your browser, locally, until you click a button or a link.

Did you find the problem?

ChristopheDucamp : Will try to have a small wiki-biking with LaurentLunati within two weeks. Hope it could help. For the moment, I removed css on my PersonalWiki and feel naked. It’s cold here ;) At work, I’ve just an IE browser and no choice for any alternative… Nothing to do. I used to love my old css offered by Laurent which worked quite well in my oldschool browser. Let’s say now I cannot even work on BarCampBank?-bliki with the fresh new css just installed by SamRose. Mattis, I loved this old wiki-css design and feel now a bit sad : Laurent produced great efforts to help on blikis. But his motivation is difficult to strengthen when there’s absolutely no business, no sponsor. I really think money remains the key-problem to help us and drive any css-creativity, debugging and professionalism. My question would be how could we stimulate future wiki-css-designers ? Still dreaming of a BarCampBank? help for any NonProfit? effort in css-wiki-design. WikiBlogging should be stimulated to help the WikiWay. Sorry to be pessimistic, but I’m currently feeling obliged on a professional point of view to give up. Despite my WikiLove?, I’ll probably adopt soon a blogfarm in my business to make people work and cooperate. With a strong hope we could find soon a solution with Sam for next year… Cheers.

MattisManzel: No, I did not find the problem. Don’t worry xtof, I can edit these wikis and I did in the last months. It’s just a bit inconvenient with the slow scrolling, so don’t worry. I doubt that it has something to do with my specific setup or connection, but who knows? Someone else recognized this?
Say thanks to Laurent again and tell him about the problems I have, he might understand how comes. I don’t. Aren’t they concerned about security in the company not to let you install a firefox? I didn’t try IE7 yet, it renders oddwiki better, I heard.

AlexSchroeder: All I know is that RadomirDopieralski on #oddmuse lives in Poland and does CSS design work for DanielMacKay in Canada and gets well paid, as far as I can tell. If the wiki owners are willing to invest some money in it, CSS designers will get paid.

ChristopheDucamp: Laurent will be in Paris on 19th December. We will speak of CSSDesign and I’ll show him the little troubles I meet on my work-machine… Still convinced he could get paid well by corporate organizations and other alternative solutions like this tontine which could be dedicated to help on public projects. @Mattis I cannot understand security-decision in my company about browsers and don’t mind anymore ;) My real dream would be to find out any people able to share experience of “high security environments” and the way to convince IT management to adopt internal wikis. That’s the reason why I’ll try probably to organize a meeting in France with some BarCampBank?ers like CharlesNepote?. Charles has a significative experience of wikis and security environments ? All contacts would be welcome to help. And I’m still optimistic : ready to pay for integrated compatbile solutions. Agree with Alex that css designers will get paid. Because there is no alternative : private and public wikis will soon come to help all of us to drive our business ;) Cheers all.

2006-10-09

Vapour. Thanks for advices.

Vapour: Some people are attracted to wiki (wikipedia) as a hybrid of wordprocessor and knowledge database. Afterall, most works/projects at school, work or home are private. Given the popularity of wikipedia, I’m a bit suprised that closed wiki feature is not avialable for people who want to use it as personal notebook/portfolio. Maybe, google can do something about it given that they are going to host online wordprocessor, and they already offer gigabytes of storage. But as you said, closed wiki is a contradiction in terms.

AlexSchroeder: I think Mattis was giving you his personal opinion. Certainly not everybody shares it. Check out the Wiki Matrix for some choices available to you!

DavidCary: Dear vapour, “closed wiki” are available for the paranoid :-).

  • If you want a wiki that only you can edit, your simplest choice is to put TiddlyWiki or "Wiki on a Stick" on your own computer – perhaps on a USB stick. “Wiki on a Stick (WoaS) is a wiki that lives in one self-modifying XHTML file.” Since it’s all in one file, once you copy the starter file to your computer or your USB stick, that’s it – there’s no “installation”.
  • If you want a wiki that only you and a few others can edit (but you don’t mind other people reading it), the simplest choice is to start a new wiki on Wikia, becoming a "founder". Then “lock” every page on your wiki so only you and the people you designate as “administrators” for your wiki can edit those pages.
  • If you want to install a wiki on a web server, you really should check out the Wiki Matrix (start with the “Wiki Choice Wizard”). Once you’ve selected a few wiki, when you look at the “feature comparison”, many wiki have “Page Permissions” or “ACL” (access control list) that let the owner choose, for each page, exactly who (perhaps “everyone”) can read and/or edit that page.

If choose one of the latter options, please consider leaving a few pages such as “Sandbox” open for anyone to edit – you may be pleasantly surprised.

2006-10-03

Vapour: Thanks for responses. You say, “a text published in a wiki is basically open for everybody to look at.” Is there any way to alter the access right of each wikipages? My primarly aim is to utilise the format of wikipedia (or any online encyclopedia) rather than to utilise wiki per se. My study topic is quite specialised. If there would ever be a collaboration, only a handfull of people would be involved. Initially, all of my wiki pages will be my idea scrapbook pages. Therefore, I want only me to be able to read and edit these pages. Out of these scrapbook wikipages, I might eventually write more formal draft wikipages or even some collaborative draft wikipages, in which people with right passwords can read and edit (for example, to correct my English :-)). Does this site cater for people who want to utilise wiki for more private use? I don’t mind if my wikipage show ads if that pays for bandwidth.

AlexSchroeder: You’ll have to find somebody else to host the wiki for you, unfortunately.

MattisManzel: Vapour, you find links to kinda all working free wiki-hosting sites on the hive-wiki: wiki-node - but I fear they are all all open - which is definetely not a problem, think about it. Two years ago on the flashmob-wiki it occured that we were thinking about a partly closed section on a wiki - non public. MoinMoin?, I know, has such a feature but we never got into it any deeper, actually. It’s simply not the idea behind wiki to restrict read and write access.

2006-10-02

MattisManzel: Alex,

(13:10:53) mattis^: oddwikis banned content has an oversensibility, Every simple text causes: contains forbidden text, not permitted to edit because of the rule “^[A-Za-z].* .*\n$”. Someone can read that?

(13:11:24) mattis^: saving just “a” on the page works

(13:15:15) mattis^: it seems like the blancs are forbidden

(13:15:41) mattis^: space

(13:16:44) mattis^: that’s pretty annoying, only kensanata has access the banned content list, true?

(13:24:59) mattis^: it seems to occurr only on day-pages - I first noticed it yesterday on a day-page I couldn’t save, now it occurrs on http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/SandDiki/2006-10-02_11h00_FirstDikiPage

Thanks.

Hi Mattis. Basically this pattern prevents people from creating pages containg exactly one line starting with a letter A-Z containing at least two words. We’ve had a vandal bot that kept replacing pages with such a one-liner. [1]AlexSchroeder

Vapour

Hi, I’m a beginner to all this so forgive my ignorance. I’m somewhat familiar with Wikipedia editing. I wanted to use the same format to organise my history course work. After a bit of searching I’ve found this site. I have already experimented by creating several entries. First question is how can I insert reference like <ref> in Wikipedia? Secondly, I don’t really need to or want to share my work. I just like the way online encycropedia organise the information. Am I using the right programme?

MattisManzel: Hi Vapour. http://url turns a link when saving a page. A text published in a wiki is basically open for everybody to look at. Wikipedia is the biggest site applying wiki-software, we’re another wiki here. Oddwikis on the oddwiki-hive (hive as you don’t have to ask for permission here, wiki) - you made one, I’ve read some of it, interesting topic, I think. Welcome.

AlexSchroeder: I don’t know the <ref> markup in Wikipedia. I guess that means no such markup is available. I’d just create a numbered list at bottom of a page and use that for bibliography, if that’s what the <ref> tag does. When you get your own Oddmuse installation, you might install other modules or write your own that implement such a text formatting rule, of course.

2006-09-24

I was also wondering: is there a page somewhere here that discusses how to create a wiki hive, similar to OddWiki? SocialSynergy:SamRose

Check the info at the end of Setup. If you need more info, ask questions here and we’ll fix the docs as we go along. – AlexSchroeder

2006-09-23

I am a newbie to all this, so please forgive my ignorance. I am interested in setting up Odd Wiki but I am hitting some brick walls regarding the install. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

First some details: I have my own web hosting already set up and running. I have Apache and Perl installed on my computer (Windows XP). Apache I know works; Perl I’m not sure (I get no welcome screen like Apache’s, only what looks like Perl source code.)

So, first question: What should I see if Perl works? The installation instructions don’t say what should happen. I have Perl installed in C:\Perl.

Thanks,

Sean

2006-09-17

Ok, I figured out what I was screwing up, so all set now. Thanks, Alex.

2006-09-16

I think that something must be messed up somewhere in general with NearLinks to MeatballWiki? and CommunityWiki. Because, if I can recall correctly, they were working in my last post to this forum, and now they are not working here n this forum either, apparently. Either that, Or I really screwed up something big time with SocialSynergy:NearMap -SocialSynergy:SamRose

2006-09-14

Forgive my ignorance. I am trying to learn how InterMap and NearMap work. I had it working on SocialSynergy:HomePage for a brief time it would automatically make NearLinks to both CommunityWiki and MeatballWiki? when I created a page name. But, then I experimented with trying to add wikis that are set up on MediaWiki?, and google queries, and del.icio.us tags, and I seem to have broken the “edit near links” and the automatic near linking and SisterSites (this same page on) functions.

Can someone check out SocialSynergy:NearMap and SocialSynergy:InterMap and maybe tell me what I am doing wrong here? Thanks!

SocialSynergy:SamRose

Hm. The two are basically the same. That’s not right. InterMap maps abbreviations to URL fragments. NearMap maps the same abbreviations to an URL that returns the list of all pages on that wiki in plaintext format.

Look at Main:InterMap and Main:NearMap for examples.

Main:AlexSchroeder

2006-09-11

On my personal bliki, obliged to revert some pages following some EveMoreau?’s edits ? I try to do my best following Eve’s instructions to describe it !

  1. while searching for WikiNode in the searchbox, Eve has seen two searchboxes appearing…
  2. In the right search box, she entered “NearMap
  3. After she went on the NearMap page, edited the page, and went back without saving
  4. odd → a lot of pages were altered with this message appearing in the summary-box :
 WikiNode -> NearMap 

Any idea ?

ChristopheDucamp

Looks like she was able to trigger search & replace somehow. Ordinarily, this operation is reserved to administrators. It seems extraordinary that she managed to guess the administrator password. What does Xtof:try?action=password say? Is she an ordinary user or an administrator?

If I try it, it says “Your password does not match any of the administrator or editor passwords.”

If she is an ordinary user but can recreate the problem (I cannot!) then please let me know. Looks like an interesting bug… :)

AlexSchroeder

Thanks Alex. You’re right, Eve did use my PC logged as administrator without any IdentityTheft? because she was logged with her RealName? ;-) Xtof:try?action=password told with her real name

  Vous êtes actuellement administrateur de ce site.

Don’t panic, she’s not a witch and cannot currently guess the password. So, I’ll look later HowTo :

  • log out as I leave this machine ?
  • play with this interesting and cool feature “search and replace” :-) ?

Thanks for all Alex.– ChristopheDucamp

Hehe. I’m glad you didn’t unveil a serious bug in Oddmuse! :) To log out, use the password action without a password.

– Alex

2006-09-07

The site was locked for some time. Sorry about that. I must have forgotten to remove a lock at one time or another…

2006-08-16

how do I delete an image? CoolHeadz:KennCattell

Two possibilities:

  1. View the page, then click on the link View other revisions and click on the link Mark this page for deletion below the Compare button.
  2. View the page, then click on the link Edit this page and click on the link Replace this file with text below the Save button, type “DeletedPage” into the textarea, and save.

Main:AlexSchroeder

2006-07-26

Why can’t I edit the css anymore? Jonty

Main:css is locked, the other css pages should not be locked. Which is the one you cannot edit?

By the way: You have created two sites with material I suspect you don’t have the right to copy and distribute: Sexi:HomePage and and SA:HomePage. Since I don’t want to get involved into any copyright litigation, I’d like you to remove the material. – Alex

It’s OK I can edit the css now, before it said “This page is read-only” where it usually says “Edit this page”. About the copyright, is it illegal to show an image that is still stored on its site by putting the URL? Well probably… that is why I am trying to sort out migration so you don’t have to worry about stuff like that… Jonty

Actually the css on The RedWiki has been messed up…there doesn’t seem to be a “Save” button any more when you edit a page. Jonty

I replaced whatever was on the RedWiki:css page with an empty page. At least you’re back in a usable state, now. I’m not sure what happened, though. You can always view old revisions of the css page and retrieve it piece by piece until you’ve identified the offending piece of CSS. – Alex

2006-06-22

(continued from 2006-06-20)

OK, when I use Firefox to download that link it’s .htm, but when I use IE it’s .txt. But I’m still getting the same thing even with .txt there. What file type should it be? Jonty

When you download the page, it should be a text file with “#!/usr/bin/perl -w” on the first line. The file extension doesn’t matter but traditionally it would be .pl. I see now that the browser suggests .htm as the file extension. Oh well. I guess it wouldn’t hurt, just as long as you know that the file contains a Perl script and not a web page. – AlexSchroeder
Saved as a pl file and its still saying the same thing… Jonty

I’m a bit lost. So, you have a directory called “My Documents”. In that directory you have a file called wikicopy.pl. If you edit this file, you see that starts with “#!/usr/bin/perl -w” on the first line.

Then you run cmd, cd My Documents, and run (all on one line):

perl wikicopy.pl http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest/raw/import http://www.communitywiki.org/odd http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest

What do you get?

– Alex

OK, I’m not sure if that worked but it did something different. This time it came up with some instructions for wikicopy (about SOURCE and TARGET). The instructions you give above are different from the one’s on the migration page. e.g. “wikicopy” vs “wikicopy.pl” and also the http addresses are in “quotation marks” on the migration page. Jonty.

Oh, and there is a “-i” and the addresses are slightly different…did you change them on purpose? Jonty

Hm, sorry about that. To answer your questions:

  • wikicopy vs. wikicopy.pl – that’s just the name of the script. Whatever name you saved it under, that’s the name you should provide. Nothing else matters.
  • Doublequotes protect you against weird characters which are part of URLs. In the case above none of the URLs contain such weird characters (brackets, braces, questionmarks, exclamation marks, semicolons, and so on), thus doublequotes are not necessary.
  • The missing -i was a typo. You need it! :)

Thus:

perl wikicopy.pl -i http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest/raw/import http://www.communitywiki.org/odd http://www.communitywiki.org/odd/MigrationTest

– Alex

Sorry for the delay but that seems to have worked for the Migration Test so thanks a lot. Now how do I go about migrating stuff onto my own webspace? Jonty

Instead of the Migration Test wiki, use the URL of your own wiki. – Alex

I don’t have my own wiki… how do I create one on my webspace? losethegame.com for example. Jonty

Try Oddmuse:Installation. – Alex

OK, what does this bit mean “make it executable: chmod +x wiki.pl”? Jonty

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod

Sorry to keep bothering you but I am using windows so this doesn’t make any sense to me… Jonty

Check my instructions on Oddmuse:Windows. – Alex

For some reason oddmuse.org doesn’t seem to be working right now. I’ll try again in a bit. Jonty

OK, I’ve installed Apache 2, and when I click http://localhost/ it says “It works!”. I should already have Perl installed. If I run cmd and type “perl --version” it says that it’s installed. But when I follow the http://localhost/cgi-bin/printenv.pl link it gives me an “Internal server error” message. It says to contact mail@losethegame.com so something must have worked… any ideas? Jonty

There’s this paragraph about editing printenv.pl and changing the Perl path on the first line…

By the way, I’m a bit confused. You got yourself some webspace. So somebody is hosting webspace for you? Or is your Windows machine going to be the webserver? Reading your text again, it seems like you got yourself webspace (ie. you rented time and space on a server on the Internet), but now you are installing Oddmuse on your own local machine that is not going to be on the Internet all the time.

Doesn’t this sound fishy to you? – Alex

Yeah, I am renting webspace, I don’t use my computer as a server. I don’t really know what I am doing which is why I keep asking for help… but at least if you can get it to work for me then anyone should be able to do it! If you don’t think I know enough about it and it’s a mistake to try then say so… it’s just the first thing it said is that migration is easy, so I beleived it… If I want it to run on my webspace, not on my local machine, is that possible? Jonty

To run it in your own webspace, you need to start with the following information:

  1. A copy of the current script from http://www.emacswiki.org/scripts/current.
  2. You need to know how to transfer files from your computer to your webspace.
  3. You need to know where to put CGI scripts in your webspace. Often this is a directory called “cgi-bin”.

Once you know all of this, copy the “current” file from your computer to the appropriate place in your webspace.

Next, try to view the “current” file in your webspace. If you get the content of the script, then it is not being executed. You probably need to make it executable. How to do this depends on the administration of your webspace. Perhaps there is some kind of file manager that does this for you. Or you can log into your account using ssh, in which case you will need some Unix knowhow. It would basically involve something like the Oddmuse:Manual Setup.

Your goal is to see an empty homepage.

Once you’re there, we can start adding things.

– Alex

Cheers, thanks for all your help. I’m having a look for the cgi directory now. Jonty

“Unfortunately CGI is not supported on our Windows shared hosting plans. For CGI support, you would need to change your hosting operating system and upgrade to a Deluxe Linux plan with CGI support.” I’m guessing this means I need to use Linux? Jonty

MattisManzel: Maybe. Ubuntu is cool.

How much are you paying, Jonty? You might want to check out Oddmuse:Free Hosting. Even Geocities offers something for $10/month. “Upgrading” to something “Deluxe” sure sounds more expensive than the $2 to $10 per month I’d expect you to pay. I’m sure they could set up Perl CGI scripts on Windows, too, since I’ve been doing that at our company. But if your current hosting plan doesn’t include that, then what can I say? It’s their service they are selling. They get to choose what to offer. You get to choose whether you want to pay. – AlexSchroeder

I’m paying $4 per month… I think the deluxe one is $7 per month. I don’t understand what it means by Linux hosting though, is that just what operating system you need to use to upload files? As I’m sure you have already worked out, I don’t really know very much about any of this… I tend to experiment a lot with things I don’t really understand… Jonty

Linux hosting probably means that they are using Linux to host your site. It has nothing to do with the system on your own personal computer. It’s all about the system they are using on their computer!

If you’re uploading your files to your webspace via FTP or SCP, Linux vs Windows hosting makes no difference. If you connect to your webspace via Telnet or SSH, you will note a difference: Instead of a Windows command interpreter (cmd), you’ll get a Unix shell (bash or similar). Linux hosting also means that you’ll have the Unix command-line tools at your disposal such as chmod and chown. The kind of stuff that we’re using. I prefer Linux hosting to Windows hosting.

If you know very little about these kinds of systems, then I assume that Windows vs. Linux hosting will make no difference to you, since you won’t be connecting to your webspace via Telnet or SSH anyway. I guess you’ll be using FTP or SCP to copy files, and that’s it.

All you care about is 1. you need to run a CGI script, and 2. where do you put it. – Alex

OK, yeah I am only using FTP. I will look into Linux hosting then, I’m pretty busy at the moment though so might not get it sorted for a while. Thanks for all the help. Jonty

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