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

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2005 at 10:54:16PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> 
> >Yes, I can imagine.  Hey, here's another thought -- how about if
> >we only generate the "someone is editing the page" message if that
> >person's edit came with value set for Author (i.e., the edit is 
> >non-anonymous).  This would help to distinguish between edits coming
> >from humans versus robots.
> 
> When would you detect whether the edit is anonymous? If it's the first 
> post of that person, or the person has switched off cookies, PmWiki 
> won't know it's a non-anonymous edit until the user hits the Save 
> button. That's a bit late.

Yeah, but only for their first post, and the notice is purely
advisory anyway.

> Now detecting it at the start of the edit session runs into time-out 
> issues. Somebody might start to edit the page, abort after a minute, but 
> the page retains the warning until the time-out expires - lots of 
> spurious warnings then.

Well, I don't know about "lots".  We'd only get the spurious warnings
for those abandoned edits that came from people on browsers that
already have an Author cookie set.

But since this is going to be an optional recipe anyway, the
way to get some real data is to implement it and people can
install it if they like and report back on the results.  I'm
sure we'll hear about the cases where it's not working as
one would like.  :-)

Pm