[pmwiki-users] Re: David Spitzley's commentsmailed.php

[Tegan Dowling]

Now that PM has added PITS <http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PITS> /00563 (Don't
show ?action= links to web spiders/robots) to 2.1.beta8, this problem with
the commentsmailed recipe may go away.

I'm holding at version 2.012 on my wikis for now, so won't know for a while
- is there anybody who knows or can tell?

If the PITS 00563 fix is going to resolve the problem with commentsmailed,
is there by any chance a way that I can institute this restriction on robots
via somethink like added lines inside of my config.php, in the short term?

Thanks!

Tegan

On 11/12/05, Tegan Dowling <tmdowling at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi, all:
>
> We've been using the Comments recipe for ages - the three "public" actions
> that we usually have links to in our headers are "email this page"
> (MyWikiFriends recipe), "printable view of page" (?action=print), and
> "comment on this page" (Comments recipe).  The problem with having the
> Comments feature, though, is that it's very, very seldom used.  It's used so
> seldom that one typically never develops the habit (or else falls out of the
> habit) of checking for comments, which means that a visitor goes to the
> trouble of posting a comment and then never gets a response - not a good
> thing.
>
> So recently, when I noticed David Spitzley's commentsmailed.php variant of
> the comments recipe, I hoped that would resolve this issue.  Unfortunately,
> I've now stopped looking at the comments lines in the mailposts, just as I
> stopped checking
> AllRecentComments, because there are vastly more "false positives" than
> actual, legitimate reports of comments.
>
> First:  It appears that the ".Comment" version of a page is created the
> first time someone uses ?action=comment, even if he/she does not create and
> save a comment on the page, and also that a comment transaction is added to
> the mailpost whenever anyone uses ?action=comment.
>
> Second:  Based on the mailposts, which show a comment transaction on one
> page after another, I'm suspecting that a robot may be crawling the sites
> and somehow performing the ?action=comment.  When I look in wiki.d/, I see
> a ".Comments" version of every page, though none have any content, and
> "AllRecentComments" isn't registering any activity.  Does this make sense?
> I can't believe any person is methodically working his/her way through every
> page on these sites clicking "Comment" and then exiting without adding
> anything.
>
> I'd prefer that the ".Comment" page not be created unless an actual
> comment is added, and I'd very much prefer not to see the "false
> positives" in the mailposts.  Any thoughts on how this could be prevented?
>
> (Ultimately, I would wish to see comments integrated into
> (All)RecentChanges as well as into the mailposts)
>
> Thanks for giving it your consideration,
>
> Tegan
>
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