This thread from TV Tropes is proof positive no one there has a clue what the hell they are talking about concerning their own site software.
Apparently, they really need a script to migrate pages from one namespace to another, which basically means moving a bunch of pages from corner of the wiki to another, and according to Fighteer (who supposedly knows computer programming), this cannot be done at this point, and some other certified idiot says batch scripts can crap out the server.
As for Fighteer, thanks for proving you are incompetent I took you for, as Brent Laabs wrote a Perl script to do the dump of TV Tropes you had the gall to call a DDoS attack, and has written several more (in conjunction with the MediaWiki::Bot Perl script) to do things like namespace migration, and was doing most of this by hand even before he found that MediaWiki::Bot script for All The Tropes, so WOW, thanks for proving you know nothing about coding despite your supposed job.
Also, PmWiki is written in PHP, and you can write all sorts of scripts in PmWiki, including batch scripts with server limits to avoid timeouts or server crashes, so as for the other idiot in that thread, please stop, you're embarassing yourself with your coding fail. Yes, a fool can write a badly done or limitless script, but a halfway competent programmer can insert failsafes against that.
MediaWiki already has lots of scripts for similar purposes, and writing one in PHP for PmWiki should be trivial for Fast Eddie, or I would think, given what he has coded up to this point.
I'll be the first to admit I'm not a very good coder myself and would need a crib sheet to write my own code, but I do know the basics of how to write good code, so the sheer ignorance in the above link had me laughing uncontrollably, which I suppose is one possibly entertaining thing I've derived from TV Tropes of late.
I don't know the first thing about programming. Mind explaining the joke to me?
ReplyDeleteLet me clarify that: I do know the first (and second) thing about basic computer programming, but computer science, especially for websites, is one of those things that constantly goes above my head. I really don't have any kind of workable frame of reference to fully comprehend the magnitude of what you said.
ReplyDeleteShort version is that writing a script to do the same task for multiple files is incredibly easy to do in most coding languages, and adding limits to keep the script from using too much memory or processing power is easy to do and something any competent programmer would attempt to include, and the fact the parties mentioned in my post were going on about how hard that is to do is just laughable.
DeleteI know C++ well enough that any kind of loop could do something like the first thing, but I don't think that language has any kind of memory control (or at least, I wasn't taught it.) Is it the kind of thing that you habitually include at the top of every program, like the #IFNDEF/#DEFINE thing? Or does it have to be woven into the code proper?
DeleteIn PHP at least, the server limit is partially controlled by your PHP settings (many PHP scripts are forced to default to a hard coded fixed rate), though the script itself can be written to have it's own limits.
DeleteIn Perl, you can define limitations for your scripts to avoid causing a server to die due to bombarding it with too many requests (Brent fixed his page dump script to three second intervals when dumping TV Tropes, confident the site could handle HTTP requests made at those intervals without causing their server to die, and he was right)
As for C++, I don't know that language very well, but use AutoWikiBrowser, a program written in C++, and it also allows for manually set limits based on the MediaWiki API, and even has plugin DLLs that allow those limits to be circumvented if need be.
Again, I'm not a very good coder (I dabble in it somewhat), so I couldn't tell you the exact code to use, but I do know it is possible to define limits on a manual or semi-automatic basis in most coding languages.