Want to take part in these discussions? Sign in if you have an account, or apply for one below
Vanilla 1.1.10 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
For a while, we've been blanking spam pages and putting them in their own category; then people are supposed to use these when they create a new page. This effectively removes the spam page from circulation without having to invoke deletion. Then we found some other junk pages that weren't spam but either mistakes or whatever is going on with those weird slideshow pages. Then we put some of these in category: empty since they weren't spam. But we remarked that they really could all go there.
So now I've put them all there and regularised the names.
Please use these when you make a new page! Only a few people have to remember to do this and they will all go away. (Zoran remembers, but I usually forget.)
Another My First Slide! It became empty 36.
I have cleaned these up and regularized them. In particular, they all now have 3-digit numerals (most starting with 0). Hopefully we will never need 4 digits. The old numbering always redirects.
For the record (although I have said something like this before), if our recent spam attack is something that happens often enough that we do need 4 digits, then this would be a significant part of the Lab and it would be time to go in and delete some of it. This even though I generally am in favour of deleting nothing. Fortunately, that was caused a drop in spam protection that should not be repeated.
I have cleaned up two pages creating two more ’empty’ pages. (for the record 151 and 152)
Remember to add them to the empty category and remove redirects. If (after any name change) you replace everything in the content window with
category: empty
then that will all be good. Then you can go to http://ncatlab.org/nlab/list/empty and see what's already been done. (Right now, for example, #151 is available again.) And start new pages from there if you remember too (which I usually don't but did today).
I emptied a ‘slides’ page. It is now empty 152
(The page has been recreated but this time as a page about Selcan Aksoy, who is at Florida State University..)
empty 153 spam!
another bit of spam now empty 154.
And another empty 155.
And another empty 156..
And another empty 157. This time it was some attempt at slides from the same person!
Up to empty 158 and typos fixed. Try to use these pages when creating a new one.
empty 160 now exists! Please use.
I used up empty 000 but be warned it is very easy to forget to rename straight away (i.e. I did forget on empty 001) and so end up with two copies of the page you were creating. Heigh-ho!
empty 164 created getting rid of a string of digits. I do not think the number had any significance.
Try to use these pages when creating a new one.
I forget whether we talked about the idea of “re-using spam pages”, so please bear with me and allow me to make the following comment:
As you know, there is close to no physical resource which is actually being re-used here. On the contrary, due to the nature of the wiki, the main effect of “re-using” a spam page for a serious page is that the serious pages’s history will make the spam be preserved indefinitely!
Therefore I would, on the contrary, advise not to “re-use” any spam pages.
What do you think?
The way to delete a page in Instiki is to make it be “orphaned”, hence ensure that it receives no links. There is a command which we may run on the server that applies the usual file deletion to those files in the database that correspond to such orphaned pages.
As far as I am aware, we never ran this command (mainly because there is no urge, as we are not lacking disk space at the moment, and even if we were, deleting the few lines contained in spam pages would hardly solve the problem) but we could run it any moment (or maybe after a quick search reminding us what the command name is).
I like to reuse them to get them out of category: empty. The long-term goal is to make that category empty. Then nothing ever needs to be deleted.
(Not all history in empty pages is spam, incidentally. But it should all be worthless.)
Hi Toby,
thanks for your reply. I might still not know what your motivation is. Here would be my comments:
I like to reuse them to get them out of category: empty.
But why put them in that category in the first place? Possibly being in any category makes a page be non-orphaned.
Then nothing ever needs to be deleted.
What’s the problem with deleting a file that deserves to be deleted?
But it should all be worthless.
So then this is motivation to not re-use these pages, since all that accomplishes is to make this worthless content be saved indefinitely, in the page history. And not just saved, but saved in a potentially confusing way, since any serious page reusing this will now retain this random trash in its history.
For these reasons I still think what we should really do is make sure that all pages that are deemed worthless (or worse) receive no links and in particular no “category”-label.
Possibly being in any category makes a page be non-orphaned.
It doesn't; in fact, if you look at the category list, you can see that everything listed there is listed twice: once for just being in the category, and once for being an orphan in the category.
What’s the problem with deleting a file that deserves to be deleted?
I would prefer to never make that determination. Blanking a page, orphaning it, writing over it … these are all ways to demote the content of a page, declaring it worthless. But they're also all reversible in case of error. Even though in most (maybe all) of these cases, this conclusion is beyond doubt, I'm pleased that we've never done anything on the nLab that removes information about the history of edits to the wiki (beyond what is lost due to inherent features of Instiki). And as long as spam etc is only a tiny portion of that history, we'll never need to.
1 to 19 of 19