[OpenID] ok, so why pbwiki?

[Chris Messina]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 7:13 PM, William J. Coldwell
<cryo+openid at os10.org<cryo%2Bopenid at os10.org>
> wrote:

> I'm a little confused, but catching up on a lot of the openid list mail.
>  Why would
> you necessarily move from mediawiki which was functioning fine, but as far
> as
> I can tell, was degraded simply because pages were out-of-date... you what
> is
> to prevent the same thing from happening here?
>

The primary motivation that I had in initiating this move was due to the
inability to login to the wiki, consistently, with an OpenID. After almost
exactly a year of having problems with this [1], no one from the community
stepped up [2] to fix the MediaWiki OpenID plugin, and so a different
strategy needed to be taken.

That the content was out of date [3] was only one part of the problem. No
one seemed to be responsible for the wiki, and few were gardening it, and
one thing that prevented people from doing so, I think, was the inability to
consistently sign in to the site to make updates.

Personally I attempted to sign in to make changes to the wiki several times
only to be stopped dead in my tracks. If it happened for me, I'm sure other
people had similar experiences.

PBWiki is a provider I've used for BarCamp, Coworking, OAuth, Portable
Contacts, and DiSo Projects (as well as the Twitter Fan Wiki), so it's a
known entity for me, and I have good connections with folks there (though
other folks know David Weekly and others involved with PBWiki).

When it came down to selecting PBWiki, it came down to support for OpenID,
prior experience with the product, familiarity with the vendor, and the fact
that I was already running the wiki as the "OpenID Fan Wiki" (again, since I
couldn't contribute to the main wiki).

We flipped the switch on the CNAME this morning. There will be broken URLs
unfortunately, but we've both made an effort to move over still-useful
content, and have mothballed the previous wiki at wiki2008.openid.net.


Regardless of PBwiki's contribution to the cause, what happens to the
> data/SLA
>  if something terrible happens to the commercial PBwiki company,
> or for that matter, that it's not open-source.
>

I'm less concerned about the wiki software and more concerned about the
data, which, fortunately, is stored as HTML.

We have a couple options.

There is an option under the Admin Settings to export a ZIP file of all
content:

http://pbwikimanual.pbwiki.com/Admin-Settings#Backup

There is also a powerful API that we could use to automate backups:

http://pbwiki.com/api_v2/

Also that the logins are controlled
> by 'them' rather than what would be considered a secure openid.net server
> controlled by the openid foundation, blah blah blah.
>

As for security, you might check out this section of the PBWiki manual:

http://pbwikimanual.pbwiki.com/Safety+and+Security


> At least with the case of OpenID accounts, PBWiki is not storing passwords.



> I started the new thread because the other one was getting impossible to
> read
> because a lot of people are lazy on cutting out irrelevant parts of
> conversations
> and doing just post-top.
>

Hopefully I've answered some of your questions. Thanks for asking!

Chris

[1] http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2007-December/003860.html
[2] http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2007-November/003670.html[3]
http://openid.net/pipermail/general/2008-March/004484.html

-- 
Chris Messina
Citizen-Participant &
 Open Technology Advocate-at-Large

Vote in the OpenID Board Election!
http://tr.im/vote_oidf

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