On 12/19/06, Alphax (Wikipedia email) <alphasigmax(a)gmail.com> wrote:
You're wrong. Subtle vandalism isn't prevented
by a time delay.
Yeah, I didn't read closely enough. Although, come to think of it, the
issue is basically the same:
Page A indirectly transcludes page X. User U can't modify page A, but
can modify X. Modifying X instantly modifies the appearance of A: big
problem.
If there was a time delay between when the change was made to X and
when the change appeared on A, there would be time to react. One way
to do that might be to "freeze" all the templates that appear in A,
perhaps by cloning them (with subst) to protected copies of
themselves. Or perhaps by hacking the page caching code? Maybe give
some trusted user the ability to control when the rendered view of the
page is updated?
It seems pointless to me to attempt to somehow predict or track down
vandals who are obviously pretty cluey and determined. Much better to
focus our efforts on reducing the effectiveness of vandalism in
general.
Oh, one last thought: if the major is problem is certain bad images,
would there be any way of tagging those images so that they simply
could not be displayed on the main page (or other designated page)?
Regardless of how many layers of transclusion? This might have to be
right at the web server level...?
Steve