People Editing Recent Changes

Why are people editing RecentChanges so much these days? And messing with my sense of reality.

Does it even make any sense to do so? Doesn't http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RecentChanges recompile the list based on the current state of the database?

No, it's static, just like other Wiki pages. It's only automated to the extent that changing pages causes lines to be appended to the end. (...and some tricks to put the right date in.) It's a manual process, done from time to time, to move old data to ChangesInWeek?<Number>.

OH! Oh my. I once went in, and thinking I'd be a GoodWikiCitizen lopped off a bunch of days from the top of RecentChanges. From what you're telling me here, that was not a good thing to do. Is this correct? -- JohnRepici

That's fine. If no one ever did that then the page would just continue to grow endlessly. You did the right thing.

<whew>, thanks for clearing that up. -jr

I'm afraid I started something unhealthy: I put JeffGrigg in place of multiple dial-in dynamically assigned IP names, to make it clear who was doing large scale changes of WikiMindWipeRepair.

Then someone got off on an experiment related to knowing or hiding who was making what changes to pages. (MeaningOfIdentity, ContentOfIdentity, IdentitySubversion) Now I'm wishing I hadn't started it.

I have noticed for a long time that some entries did not have a machine identifier afer a RecentChanges entry. For example, NewSubject? ....., where normally there would be NewSubject? ..... ObscureMachineName?. I always wondered how that happened. At first I thought it happened when Ward made a change, but now wonder if the person (making the recent change) manually edited the RecentChanges page. Does anyone know how this happens?

The reverse domain name look up failed. Probably because the IP has no publicly known domain name. For instance, this computer has no domain name so the RecentChanges entry shouldn't have a domain name. I lied, but the principle is correct.

In setting up this wiki on my site, I learned that servers who have this environment variable enabled actually do a reverse DNS for every single connection, not just cgi scripts. That's every graphic, small or large on the page, every frame content, etc. will cause the server to run a reverse DNS. I can understand why it is disabled on my hosting service. Right now I just put REMOTE_ADDR in place of it (which is even more unfriendly, but). Someday I'll learn how to do my own reverse lookup in perl. - jr

See also the question on UsingRecentChangesForComments