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was soll das?
Das ist nicht schwer: 23 ist 19 + 4
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
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.
I think I will install the Oddmuse:QuestionAsker_Extension. The spam is gettin on my nerves. – AlexSchroeder
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.
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.
[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.
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.
Hi. I need some help
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.
Thank you for your site. I have found here much useful information. Good site ! 
Hooray, it’s back! – SamRose
I agee! – HansWobbe
Yep, it seems the hosting service provider had a fatal disk crash. – AlexSchroeder
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
(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
(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:
But I had already built much of the wiki, so I did:
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:
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 $StyleSheetPage? Those two variables have precedence.
For more information on why Oddmuse uses redirects at all, see "Redirect After Post" by Michael Jouravlev 2004. That article seems to encourage flouting the RFCs in exactly the same way AlexSchroeder describes. Although it mentions “Status 303” is the “proper” code to use, it implies that “Status 302” is the “common de-facto behavior” that many people use.
(Continued from 2007-04-12)
Still trying to setup wiki on ISP-hosted web page, with only ftp and browser access: I renamed the DataDir “junk”, and created new DataDir containing config and empty admin files. First login attempt failed because DataDir/temp was not writeable by server; so chmod 777 DataDir/temp. Second login attempt failed because visitors.log was not writeable; so chmod 666 visitors.log. Third login displayed HomePage, but still with “This page is read-only”. Cookies are enabled on my browser. On password page, my passwords are recognized and admin functions allowed. But when I go to HomePage it’s still read-only. I sure would appreciate some tips. TIA, Bob Barry
I think the first thing to consider is that Oddmuse is telling you “This page is read-only” and this does not depened on write-permissions to the files. (In fact, this is a little bug: Oddmuse just assumes that it can write all the files and will run into an error when it tries to write the file.)
So the question is: Why does Oddmuse think the HomePage is read-only?
page/H/HomePage.lck and delete it, ornoedit in your data dir and delete it, or$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.
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
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)
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
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
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.
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
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.
Several questions:
– 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.
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. 
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?
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.
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.
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:
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 …
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
Hi. I am sort of new to this, so I have a couple of questions:
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.
More details on 2006-10-09. Should we make a FAQ ?
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 ?
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 ) …
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
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Vapour
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.
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
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
Ok, I figured out what I was screwing up, so all set now. Thanks, Alex.
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
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!
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.
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 !
WikiNode -> NearMap
Any idea ?
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… :)
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 :
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
The site was locked for some time. Sorry about that. I must have forgotten to remove a lock at one time or another…
how do I delete an image? CoolHeadz:KennCattell
Two possibilities:
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
(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
#!/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. – AlexSchroederI’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:
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:
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