[OpenGuides-Dev] Autocreation and web robots

Earle Martin openguides at downlode.org
Sun Aug 3 01:41:29 BST 2003


If you look at the RecentChanges for OG London, you'll see it's filled with
dozens of category and locale autocreations. Because I don't think anyone
would be bored enough to do such a thing, I reckon it's a web robot of some
kind that's followed lots of links to nonexistent categories and
consequently brought them into existence.

I think this exposes a vulnerability in the mechanism; numerous of the new
categories were erroneous.[0] I propose that autocreation be made a user
choice; namely, something like,

    The category you selected does not exist, but we can 
    create it for you if you would like.

    [Create Category]

with "Create Category" being a form submit button.



[0] Actually, it was quite useful as it exposed lots of pages that needed to
be tidied, but I'm not sure that would rate as a "feature"!


-- 
# Earle Martin                             http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EarleMartin
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