Fwd: Re: [pmwiki-users] Is there a way to tell if anyone is editing a wiki page?

[Radu]

oops, missed the 'reply all' :)

At 01:27 PM 4/15/2005, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
>What you don't see is whether the user has aborted the edit session.
>One scenario is when the user presses the Back button and the browser 
>decides to display the page from its cache - the server isn't notified of 
>that even.
>The other is when the user simply closes the browser window. Again, there 
>is no feedback to the server, so PmWiki doesn't even have a chance to find out.

Yes, however, when the wiki authors are conscientious(sp?) designers, this 
kind of behavior is much less likely to happen. And adding a timeout for 
the 'notelock' I was suggesting would help with that too. Anyway, a project 
member that notices a page has been note-locked for too long could 
call/email the member who 'locked' it and ask what's taking so long.

>So if you want to find out whether a page is open for editing: not possible.
>However, this isn't a serious problem. If two people edit the same page 
>and save, the second one to save will be notified of the conflict and get 
>a chance to integrate his changes with those of his competitor.

Many times in the little while I ran this wiki, I noticed people saving 
pages without noticing [all of] the merge brackets. It gets ugly, lemme 
tell ya.

>  (This strategy is generally called "optimistic locking" in the code 
> management literature.

Cool. but wiki users are not machines. They can [better] solve different 
sets of problems than a cvs or rds system can.


Cheers,
Radu
(www.monicsoft.net)