Nathan Schmidt's dashboard

Hi Scott,

Good question. We actually experimented with using Akismet behind-the-scenes for a while but that plugin relies on comparing new blog comments against existing comments which have been flagged as spam. Problem is, spammy wiki edits don't really look like blog comments and we didn't get the hit-to-miss ratio we needed.

On public wikis, we run a wiki spam filter system we developed in-house. It compares added urls to known spam sites, checks for known spammy phrases and words, and examines general wiki parameters.

The spam filter has two goals - first, identify wikis which are made by people attempting to use the whole wiki as a spam site, with links to their crummy pills websites and 'please update your paypal login info' phishing pages. The other goal is to protect legitimate public wikis. We've seen all sorts of approaches to posting links to spam websites on public wikis, and so far we think we do a pretty good job of guarding against wiki defacement.

This is much less of an issue on 2.0 wikis since they use a verified email round-trip for user identification. In the longer term, we're working on some great tools which will allow you to list, flag-as-spam, and even roll back changes made by particular users, so even if somebody slips through our filters their junk out with just a few clicks. Stay tuned!

Hi everyone,
I wanted to update here - via the support team PBwiki engineers have been in touch with Kimn, and we've isolated a couple of issues which have come up - the particular errors a couple of our users were seeing were isolated almost completely to one wiki which has (had) an unusual combination of settings and scale which made our system take way to long to compute the list of folders, pages and files which were visible to a particular user on this particular wiki. I'd been working on another subtle performance-related issue already today, and the coming patch to fix the first should resolve the other as well. Thanks for your patience helping us diagnose this problem, it was subtle and only happened for a few people, but clearly was causing a lot of frustration.

Hi Jesse,
We have a number of options for doing single-sign-on from a customer's own servers. Check out the documentation at:

http://pbwiki.com/api_v2/#Delegated_Auth

for more info. Basically we allow a company to authenticate users and automatically create accounts and sign them in to designated wikis.

There's an end-to-end demo here, including custom domains and delegated authentication:

http://wiki.demo.tdemo.net/

Yep, we had a server problem that didn't resolve itself automatically like it should have. About 15% of requests to the PBwiki application servers were getting empty replies, which clearly isn't right. Page view and edits may have been interrupted but stored wiki data was unaffected.

We haven't completely figured out the root cause of the issue but we've killed off the misbehaving server processes. All PBwiki services are functioning correctly at this point, and we'll keep a much closer eye on our system performance until we more completely understand the malfunction.

Hide-from-dock used to work for me but at some point it stopped behaving. Not sure when, since I very rarely restart this machine. FWIW, this fix worked for me and I don't have any other copies of Rescue Time.app on my machine. I also checked the file permissions for all of the path leading down to the Info.plist, and everything is read/writable by me. Weird.

Tim, just sent you an email, those are activated.

Hi Matt,
We've released PBwiki 2.0, which supports Safari nicely. It works great, and as promised, I'm using PBwiki with the point-and-click editor just fine. Newly-created wikis are 2.0 by default now, and we're working now on bringing our existing user's wikis from 1.0 to 2.0 mode, which includes Safari support.

As a follow-up here, last night we deployed the self-service API controls for 2.0 wikis, including the ability to deactivate the API and reset your access keys from the 'Settings' page. If you're logged in to your wiki as an administrator, click on 'Settings' and then 'API' for more info.

Hi Geoff,
Argh, both of your requests went to my spam folder (I think that's related to the name of your wiki, since some spam filters might think it's related to gambling or something...). I'm activating that now for you and am just now putting the finishing touches on a self-service activation mechanism for the PBwiki API. Sorry for the delay.

There aren't explicit permissions for files yet - we'll be adding that soon but for now the way to control on file access is to mark your wiki as 'public' or 'private' depending on your needs, and the files will take on that setting.

Leslie, I'm not really sure what you mean - you want to have the xml be rendered as if it were HTML or XHTML, or to be displayed in some syntax-colored or otherwise source-text-looking form? In the first case you can use the HTML plugin to place arbitrary blocks of HTML/XHTML snippets in a wiki page. In the latter case we don't have an explicit support for such a thing, though you could take a screenshot from some other source and upload that image -- that's not a great solution but might meet your needs depending on what you're trying to accomplish.

Two things come to mind:

1) You can use the Table of Contents plugin. Insert this at the top of your page with "Insert Plugin" --> "PBwiki Magic" --> Table of Contents. Now, anything that is formatted as any of the three Header types will be linked to in this table of contents.

2) You can manually create your own anchors by creating an HTML plugin ("Insert Plugin" --> "PBwiki Magic" --> "HTML") and typing:

<a name="myanchor">

Then, when you want to make a link to it, make a link like normal, but choose the "URL" method and for "Protocol", choose other. Then insert this as the link:

#myanchor

It will act just like any other link, but be linked inline to another part of the same page.

Yep, I fixed this bug last night at 11:57 PST. If you tried after that time, it should have worked for you.

At this time we don't have any plans to change the way the 3-tab sidebar works on the current PBwiki product. There's not a lot of room for more tabs and the way our software decides which tabs to draw and in what order wasn't designed with that use in mind.

Your best bet is to edit the pages which are there already - QuickStart, RecentActivity, and SideBar - to contain the content you want. We've heard this feature suggestion before but due to the factors I mentioned we've decided so far to not put more development resources on it in favor of all of the other great features and fixes we've got coming up.

Helen and Jshavitz,

Yep - we wish it were otherwise, but there are some things the technology we've got available to us on the platforms we're running on (choose pretty much any combination of browsers, operating systems, source data format, source data origin) can't do at the level you'd expect of a traditional shrink-wrapped software package.

A lot of the technology behind point-and-click text editing on the web just doesn't provide us the expressiveness necessary to make the magical 'do what i mean' moment happen every time. As Joel pointed out, clipboards don't do the expected thing, and there are a lot of security- and format-related issues which prevent proper pasting of anything but the simplest of text when it's coming from some other application. These problems have been largely solved in the desktop software world for the last 20 years but the web is behind. We feel your pain and we want to make this stuff work too.

We're focused on providing simple utility to the most people possible, and sometimes it just isn't going to meet everyone's expectations. That doesn't mean we're not actively trying to push the boundaries of what's possible, but we'll only get there through iteration - taking advantage of the power of a hosted Software-as-a-Service platform to provide useful tools today and more-useful tools tomorrow, without you having to do anything but continue to use the service as it evolves.

At the same time as we're filling in those gaps and polishing our service, there are so many things around sharing, remote-working, and versioning which we do much more effectively than a traditional software approach, that we think PBwiki is really good enough for every-day, all-day use, and we do hope you stay tuned for all of the new goodness that's in store.

You can use the 'Equation' plugin - it uses the latex syntax. I'm not too familiar with the language myself but there are good references here: http://www.latex-project.org/guides/