You may have noticed that Tahini, which hosts the PCRE repositories,
mailing list and wiki, suffered some outage this week.
One of the causes of this was an apparent attack on the PCRE Wiki, which
was doing something strange to MoinMoin causing the web server to take
up excessive amounts of CPU.
We had transitioned the Exim wiki to github a while back because we were
unable to make it usable without having people spam it like mad. The
PCRE wiki has suffered less from that problem, but is tightly tied down
and had had no edits for 18 months.
So we moved the PCRE wiki to github on a pcre repository under the Exim
organisation, rewrote the pages to Markdown (there are only 5 or of
them) and put a redirect from tahini to github. This allowed us to
remove MoinMoin from tahini which has become a real problem to us.
So, what happens next...
We could leave things as they are - I can set the wiki to be editable to
anyone with a github user id.
We could create a PCRE project on github, thus allowing some other
people to take management of the whole thing - in this case we could
move the wiki across very easily and change tahini's redirects. It
would also be possible to reflect the svn repository into a github git
repository which is a step towards being able to change revision control
systems, but does give you access to some of github's tools.
Or something else could be done...
One question is whether a wiki is actually useful nowadays. It looks as
though they are less used by actual users, and more prone to spammers
than they used to be. So maybe junking it and replacing it with a set
of basic web pages is a better answer...
Nigel.
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[ Nigel Metheringham ------------------------------ nigel@??? ]
[ Ellipsis Intangible Technologies ]
