Blegs for help

by Henry Farrell on August 20, 2007

Two requests for help:

(1) Academic blogs wiki. I’ve grown tired of dealing with google spammers, and have upgraded to Mediawiki 1.68 which should allow me to use “ConfirmEdit”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit, a basic captcha tool. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work – when I try to implement it I get the following error message

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_BOOLEAN_AND, expecting ‘(‘ in /home/farrell/public_html/wiki/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEdit.php on line 363

It looks from the extension’s “talk page”:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension_talk:ConfirmEdit as though I am not the only person experiencing this problem (someone suggests a modification to the php file which doesn’t seem to work for me). Anyone have any idea of what the problem is? (fwiw my server uses php 4.4.6 – hence my inability to upgrade to a more recent version of MediaWiki). For the moment I have implemented a temporary kludge to deter spambots by protecting the relevant directory with a password easily visible to Real Humans, but this isn’t a happy or elegant long term solution. UPDATE – problem solved – a directory screw-up on my part.

(2) when messing around with my server a few months ago, I deleted the rtf and PDF files for the Yochai Benkler seminar that we ran here a while back, and can’t find any copies on my hard drive or on the Wayback Machine. Anyone who downloaded a copy and is willing to send me it will have my eternal gratitude …