Reading Simterical's comments, I asked myself, what are the advantages and disadvantages of having Edit Counter as an extension, and not a Toolserver project?
Being part of MediaWiki's (extensions) code allows faster internationlization of messages. Also, there will be no replication lag to take into account. On the other hand, *perhaps* it may make creation of graphs a little harder, but I'm not sure (since I regularly create several graphs using PHP and GD with my Toolserver account).
What do you think?
On 11/23/07, Huji huji.odp@gmail.com wrote:
Reading Simterical's comments, I asked myself, what are the advantages and disadvantages of having Edit Counter as an extension, and not a Toolserver project?
The more important question is whether the sysadmins will approve having such a basically pointless and arguably harmful thing using the main servers' resources. To do it properly, at any rate, the current way is completely unacceptable: you need to create summary tables (possibly multiple and quite complicated) that are updated on every edit, and then can be referred to immediately.
But as for general advantages vs. disadvantages of the toolserver versus the main server, the basic advantage is better integration and better access to resources, the basic disadvantages are tighter constraints on security and efficiency and less flexibility for things like database changes. Typically I would say the former outweigh the latter for anything important. For edit counts, it would probably do people good to have the counter break periodically and be outdated half the time. ;)
toolserver-l@lists.wikimedia.org