[pmwiki-users] "change summary" length

H. Fox haganfox at users.sourceforge.net
Thu Sep 8 15:33:37 CDT 2005


On 9/8/05, Neil Herber <nospam at eton.ca> wrote:
> At 2005-09-08  08:09 AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >Hagan Fox has pointed out that there's no length limit on the
> >"change summary" field that is attached to each edit, and this
> >can make for really long summary displays.
> >
> >Any thoughts from this group as to a reasonable maximum length
> >for change summaries...?
> 
> I never even thought of trying to put in more text than would fit in
> the box, and I doubt that anyone else would. (I cannot explain why
> Hagan tried it ;-)

Short explanation:
"I'm curious."  :-)

Long explanation:
When I saw that all of the summaries would be kept in the pages' files
now, I wondered how it would affect file size in the long term. 
Having noticed a few long summaries on pmwiki.org, I began wondering
what the size limit might be.  (The possibility of a DoS attack
crossed my mind...)  To test, I started pasting some Lorem Ipsum text
into the summary field on a test wiki.

Once I noticed that a ridiculously large size could be pasted in (the
following page has a summary with 142,647 characters of Lorem Ipsum
text), I sent a message to Pm off-list about it.

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/BigBigSummary?action=diff

Hagan




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