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PBwiki Bugs

Page history last edited by On 15 years, 11 months ago

Attitude

In the PBwiki support forum, a gentleman named Guy Fawkes commented:

... Script tags are, indeed, stripped out of V2 wikis. Also, they made such massive changes to V2.0's DOM that most things in Widget don't work anymore ...

This is hard to believe, but our experience shows that Guy is right. Here's a quick list of PBwiki bugs we have ran into. Don't wate your time on those... most of them are known to PBwiki staff, and some are placed there intentionally just to make your life harder. Unbelievable? Read on!

Styelsheet

No way to get rid of table border: styleseet always override it to one
No background color on table cells.
No alignment on entire tables?
Indent on right-to-left segments goes in the wrong direction.
<img style="float: left"... and <img align="left"... never behave the same, not even close.
To quote Guy Fawkes again,

... they've gone to some effort to obscure the CSS used in V2 page layouts ...

The origianal idea behind CSS is openess from the top level, propagating (and being modified or replaced) down the DOM. Obfuscating the CSS defeats that intent . At the moment serves no purpise (some users rverse-engineer and hacked it already) othe than hiding the disgrace of poor technology.

Editor

Some table operations display as if extra columns were created.
Table operation do not work on multiple narked cells (operations take effect only on first cell).
The editor feels free to strip some tags sometimes. <a name="..."> is stripped every other time you edit a page; <script> and <form> seem to be stripped every time.

General

When you invite writers, there is no way to tell when they created a PBwiki login.
Unused, uploaded files sometimes dissapear silently (and sometimes reapear!)
HTML widget hangs for anything but most tirivial code.
No "legal" way to specify internal PBwili links (to create page, search and so on).

RTL, BiDi and Unicode

Templates with non-ascii names don't work.
Indent on right-to-left segments goes in the wrong direction.
No UI to change paragraph or page direction.

Conclusion

C'mon, PBwiki... we know you have malicious (and plain stupid) users. We also assume you're short on staff, money, hosting resources and whatever, and that you execute an unproven buisness model. Yet:

Dosen editions of Wikipedia run wikis on charity money. None is broken.
Zoho offers free wiki. When it breaks occasionaly they just fix it.
Google Sites works, and works pretty well.

When you do things just to make life harder for your customers (such as obfuscating your CSS), it's ironic to outsource your support forums from a company called "getsatisfaction.com". We appreciate the irony, but -- just like the Rolling Stonse -- can get none.