Tag Archives: mediawiki

Setting expiry time to infinite by default in Mediawiki

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If you follow a mediawiki powered wiki and have to block users who spam the wiki, this trick might save you precious seconds. When you go to http://www.example.com/wiki/Special:Blockip/xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx you get a form in which the expiry field is set to “other” by default, then you have to change into “infinite” (if this is what you like) and then to click “Block this user”.
It would save seconds to have the expiry field already set by default to “infinite”, but how we do it? The way I found is the following. Edit the file includes/SpecialBlockip.php and around line 101 insert $this->BlockExpiry = "infinite";. There could be a variable you can set in the config but I haven’t found it.
If you didn’t understand what I was writing, this is good! This means you don’t have to unspam a wiki! ;-)

TrentoWiki.it, a wiki for the city of Trento

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UPDATE: now also with videos of Trento and bloggers of Trento.
TrentoWiki logoSome time ago I started TrentoWiki.it. I opened TrentoWiki because I needed a place to store information about the places, the events, the many opportunities that this small charming city and its surroundings offer. Up to now it didn’t attract thousands of contributors but it is anyway a useful service at least for myself.

So, who can be interested in a Wiki about Trento?
(1) People who are going to come to Trento (because of a conference, such as the upcoming conference about Free Software (May 16, 2008), or BlogFest in Riva del Garda, or for working in a research centre or just for tourism) and might be able to find information in the wiki, and in fact one of the most accessed pages in “Cercare casa a Trento” (find house in Trento) and Photos of Trento), and
(2) people who lives in Trento and possibly don’t know about all the interesting stuff happening and available in the city.
So please share your local knowledge and insights and, please, be bold in editing TrentoWiki!

TrentoWiki is Mediawiki powered, just like Wikipedia.
The license is Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 which means that the knowledge created on the wiki can be reused legally elsewhere as long as attribution is given and the license remains the same; this means that even if I decide to close the wiki or anything else, all the content can be moved by anyone elsewhere.
TrentoWiki is opened to anonymous editing but you are certainly welcome to create an identity on the wiki.
For me running a wiki is also a very useful experiment, for example for experimenting with the challenge to be multilingual (there is a Category:English) which will be an issue also for the project of getting a wiki internal to my research institute adopted. And it is also an experiment because I’m curious to see if a wiki targeted to a small community can work even by reaching a critical mass of few users. We’ll see, and in the meantime, please do join TrentoWiki.it