I'm glad to say that last week's rant has translated into action. Customized profile pages - a major spammer vulnerability in Wikidot.com - now don't appear except for Pro users. There is another new pro-only (not pro-lite) feature too, which is the ability to create per-site profiles for users. When you enable this, your site members get a page in the profiles: category, which they can edit.

Sheriff Phil Chett points out that profile pages are a huge source of spam. That is, spammers register and then use their profile pages to create links to various sites. This boosts the Page Rank of those sites, and lowers the Wikidot overall Page Rank. Every day he deletes about 150 spam profiles.

Just for fun this morning we reviewed Wikidot.com's uptime statistics over the last months. After fixing caching issues this summer, and before upgrading to the new super-fast database servers, we had about 99.7% uptime, and since then it's around 99.85%.

Today we published a new module that lets you put CSS styling onto any page. This is a very powerful tool, because it gives users control over the look and feel of their pages, which was previously an admin function. It also lets package creators mix CSS and CSI (cross site includes) so for example, pulling in a particular CSI package will automatically pull in the right styling.

Tuesday again, and today a small experiment. This rant thread has a specific topic, identities. Yesterday I was editing a site. It was part of a project, for which I'd created a new user account. It was/is very important to me that this project show that identity, not mine. A week of work later, I uploaded a new file and then saw with horror that I'd been logged in as pieterh, instead of using the new account. Result: site FUBAR.