[pmwiki-users] Self registration

Henrik Bechmann henrik.bechmann at sympatico.ca
Thu Jan 22 15:57:37 CST 2009


If it is important to maintain 10,000 user profiles for a PmWiki 
website, it might be better to go for PHP5 and use the built-in SQLite 
support... not trivial though, in terms of finding or writing an 
interface, and integrating the result into PmWiki. No doubt a recipe 
candidate...

- Henrik

Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 08:50:54PM +0100, kirpi at kirpi.it wrote:
>   
>>> having all of the information on the SiteAdmin.AuthUser page can
>>> make it very cluttered for an admin to view/modify; putting
>>> info in profile page (with pagelist commands for displaying
>>> summary) keeps SiteAdmin.AuthUser itself clean
>>>       
>> Yes, but:
>> a) just like one can write a pagelist to extract data from different
>> Profile pages, couldn't one with about the same ease put together a
>> few lines of code to tidy extract (and, why not, handle) data
>> extracted from SiteAdmin.AuthUser?
>>     
>
> This misses the point I was aiming at.  At some point an administrator
> may need to manipulate SiteAdmin.AuthUser directly (e.g., to remove
> someone's account), and if there are hundreds of user records in
> the SiteAdmin.AuthUser page it's more difficult to do this.
> If it's in Profile.XYZ then it's easy to locate and manipulate
> directly.
>
> Also, SiteAdmin.AuthUser stores more information than just usernames
> and passwords, it also stores group memberships.  Keeping group
> memberships in individual profile pages would also be much simpler.
>
>   
>> b) Let's imagine we have 10000 users: would a (:pagelist:) work in
>> gathering data from Profiles? Or would it be easier to store 10000
>> lines in one file? I have no experience, but maybe the second is
>> safer?
>>     
>
> With 10,000 users, I would think that storing information separately
> would be far more important.  Granted, (:pagelist:) might be slow
> or impossible in that case, but getting a complete list of user 
> accounts is also rare.  And at least the (:pagelist:) version would
> give you the option of selecting records based on some criteria,
> while we'd need some very custom code to extract individual entries
> from AuthUser.
>
> Put another way:  Apache offers the ability to keep usernames and
> passwords in .htpasswd files, but those quickly degrade in performance
> as there get to be a larger number of entries.  In such cases Apache
> recommends moving to something that allows better random-access
> rather than sequentially scanning a large .htpasswd file (on every
> authentication request).
>
> As far as safety, I personally would feel much safer with such a
> large password database spread out over many files than in a single
> (essentially text) file.  
>
>   
>>> a small mistake in SiteAdmin.AuthUser can suddenly wipe out lots
>>> of accounts
>>>       
>> Same as it is right now, isn't it?
>> There is no way to setup some redundancy of any kind?
>>     
>
> My message was in response to the question of "why would storing
> user information in profile pages be better"; while a small mistake
> in SiteAdmin.AuthUser could wipe out the entire database -- a small
> mistake in a user's profile page would affect only that one user.
>
> Pm
>
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>
>
>   

-- 

Henrik Bechmann
bechmann.ca

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