[pmwiki-users] documenting deleting pages and groups

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 06:49:15PM +0000, Hans wrote:
> There has not been any documentation about how to delete pages,
> because it may be misused, so I heard. But new users keep asking how
> they can delete a page they erroneously created. So I wrote a page:
> Cookbook.DeletePage  to document this. But I think this info should be
> really part of PmWiki.CreatingNewPages.

I agree that if it's documented, it belongs in the PmWiki group as
opposed to the cookbook.

> If there are any security reasons for withholding such information it
> may be better to disable the page delete via a keyword and let the
> admin decide if it should be enabled and with what keyword.

Well, until now I've generally withheld the information from public
view because I didn't want vandals to start writing scripts to do
mass deletions that had to be cleaned up by an admin.  While it could
be argued that vandals can clear lots of pages by simply erasing the
page contents entirely, the difference is that those pages can be
restored by anyone with edit privileges and not just the site admin.

Still, it hasn't ever come up as a serious problem, so perhaps we should
go ahead and document the delete functionality in PmWiki.CreatingNewPages
or somewhere like that, and if it becomes an issue we'll remove it
from the docs and change the default keyword.

> One question about deleting groups:
> groups are deleted by deleting all pages in the group.
> But how do you delete the page RecentChanges?
> Entering "delete" in this page is taken as a page change and
> RecentPages is recreated, or resurrected....
> how do you delete this page apart from doing it via server access?

You can only delete RecentChanges pages via server access.  There
are some operations which really should be performed only by an admin,
this prevents vandals from being able to completely cover their 
tracks in ways that aren't easily noticed.

Pm