[Nms-cgi-devel] Re: [Nms-cgi-support] Admin remove does not remove followup links

[Jonathan S. <jn...@ge...>]

On Wed, 2006-02-08 at 05:11, Joey wrote:
> I'm using the nms wwwboard program.  When using the admin mode and
> followups are deleted, none of the follow up links are deleted from
> the other messages.  This effectively allows the trolls or spammers to
> keep their links and names on my site despite the fact that I've
> removed the actual message.   
>  
> When a message is deleted, all links associated with that message
> should be automatically removed as well. 

Yes you are probably right, to be honest wwwadmin could do with a
complete rewrite anyway it has had the least attention of the NMS
programs - this is largely because wwwboard is basically a really
horrible program that should have been abandoned years ago but it
refuses to die and all the developers seem to largely ignore in the hope
that it will go away.

There are a number of problems with retrofitting this to the existing
wwwadmin/wwwboard, firstly any given message does not contain the
information that it is a followup to another message and what that
message might be (except in the "In Reply to" link but not is not
completely useful for our purposes) so it is likely that we would have
to build up the tree structure from the main page in order to find the
predecessor and descendant of the page being removed (bearing in mind
that if we do this we really should remove the "In Reply To" from any
subsequent follow up), we also are going to need to potentially traverse
a whole tree of replies to rewrite all of the files above the removed
one to recreate the tree of responses on all of them.  So this is not
just a quick hack - it will require some thought.

To some extent we are constrained by the requirement to remain backwards
compatible with the files created by the MSA wwwboard however horrible
the design might have been, I think that we would probably end up with a
compromise whereby if we were to fix this behaviour we would have the
existing messages treated the same as they currently are and only fix up
the references for messages and threads created with the changed
wwwboard.

>  If provided a little direction, I would be glad to help with this
> problem.   

A patch in "diff -Bub" format would be fabulous :-)

Looking at wwwadmin.pl it really does need a very very big makeover, it
currently handles files in some very unsafe ways and really should at
the very least use File::Transaction like wwwboard itself does  - it
does use the .lock file like wwwboard so it should prevent file
corruption but I need to check that more carefully.

I have copied in the devel list in case there is anyone still reading
that who might feel like a bit of exercise, otherwise it'll have to wait
until I get around to doing it.

>  
> I think that my configuration currently runs in emulate Matt's mode. 

It appears this has no effect in the wwwadmin
>  

/J\
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