[wicked] using the diffs to recreate a page

[Jason M. Felice]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2004 at 10:50:11AM +0200, Jan Schneider wrote:
> Zitat von Barsalou <barjunk at attglobal.net>:
> 
> >The issue is like Jason said.  If the page was deleted then all versions
> >are lost.  You may have a backup, but not for every page....this is
> >where the mail comes in.
> >
> >So let's say you back up the Wiki once a day...not unreasonable.
> >However, someone accidentally deletes a page during the day.  You would
> >be able to restore from yesterday, but would be missing any pieces that
> >happened today. This is where you would use the E-mails to possibly
> >rebuild the page that was deleted.
> >
> >Personally, I would like to see the pages "marked" as deleted, then run
> >a separate "admin only" process that would clean the database out.  This
> >would avoid the problems listed above.
> 
> From Jason's vague comment I guess he is questioning if pages should be
> deleted at all. And I think this is an interesting approach, we could mark
> a page as deleted as you suggested, and that's it.

That's pretty much what I was suggesting (sorry about being vague).

In Ward's wiki and UseMod, in RecentChanges you see when a page was
deleted.  You can't see that in ours, but I would like to be able to.
That was my original thought for changing how pages are deleted.

I would like to have the ability to keep the content, too,
because when using the wiki for public purposes, someone might go
through and kill lots of pages out of spite.  In UseMod, users cannot
delete history no matter what, and that's part of the theory of making
vandalism not so interesting.  One of the reasons from
Wiki:WhyNobodyDeletesWiki:

* What's the point when you know that someone else will just undo it
  immediately after you're gone?

> 
> Though there might be two issues: One might really want to delete a page
> permanently, for example because it contains spam or offense. And we need a
> way to handle the case when a new page with the same name gets created some
> time later.

I have no objection to the ability to clean out deleted pages
permanently, but I would never use it personally, neither on a public
nor a private site.

One question is how this would interact with my page_id TODO item.  It
looks like it can be done cleanly, but may require a little forethought.

> 
> Jan.
> 
-- 
 Jason M. Felice
 Cronosys, LLC <http://www.cronosys.com/>
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