[Pmwiki-users] Recording of IP-Addresses

[Neil Herber]

At 2004-12-11  09:26 AM -0700, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
>...except there's definitely more than two "camps" here:
>
>  - admins who want the IP always visible
>  - admins who don't want the IP recorded at all
>  - admins who want the IP recorded but not visible by default
>
>and I can probably come up with still more.
>

...much musing snipped...

>Which all leads me to think that perhaps PmWiki's original default --
>displaying the IP address when no author name is given -- is the easiest
>starting point.  Admins who want to always display the IP address in
>the history output simply redefine $DiffStartFmt; admins who want to
>suppress recording of the IP address set $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']
>(and possibly redefine $DiffStartFmt); and admins who want the IP
>address recorded but not displayed when an author name is provided
>can leave things as is.

I think the 3 camps you describe are in fact all the camps. Admins want to 
either record the IP or not and they wish to display the IP or not. Clearly 
the not-record-but-display choice makes no sense, hence your 3 camps.

There are an infinite number of ways to display the information, but I see 
that as a styling issue that should be handled by local customization.

The current default (display IP when no author is present) satisfies none 
of the 3 camps, because it acts like record-but-don't-display sometimes and 
record-and-display other times.

I think the full display should be:

         December 11, 2004  10:06 AM  AuthorName 192.168.0.1

Having "at", "by", and "from" makes it read better, but this is a really a 
log entry that only shows up in history. It will not be any impediment to 
regular readers. Plus this format is already internationalized (assuming 
the date is correctly translated by the host).

Now if the author is not present it becomes:

         December 11, 2004  10:06 AM 192.168.0.1

If the IP is recorded but not displayed it becomes:

         December 11, 2004  10:06 AM  AuthorName

The full string even works if the IP is not recorded, as long as the 
suppression text is all blank as in " ". It then looks exactly like the 
line above.



Neil

Neil Herber
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