Re: How to Select Administrators (use of database query)

On Sun, 2003-03-09 at 13:15, Tomos at Wikipedia wrote:
> But I am not sure how it should apply to the use of database query. It is 
> perhaps not very powerful tool, but anyway a privilage. Is there any use of 
> database query that is considered (serious) abuse? Say, some admins use the 
> query to spot edits or his/her personal enemies? Well, I guess anyone can do 
> it with "user contribution" and "recent changes." So maybe there isn't any 
> significant danger of abuse?

I wouldn't expect that there's much potential for abuse there, except
for general denial-of-service. A particularly slow query can take a long
time to run, and slows down the server a bit. That's the reason that
query access is limited to sysops; it'd be too easy to put something
like "SELECT * FROM cur ORDER BY cur_comment LIMIT 100000" and run it a
hundred times in a row, and bring the whole server to a grinding halt.

The content of the wiki and who edits what is a matter of public record,
so if you want to check for edits by particular users or whatever, no
problem.


Some user settings are readable by sysops through a database query
(options & watchlist, but _not_ e-mail address or password hash). I
don't know if anyone would consider that a problem; measures of how many
pages are in watchlists, or how many people have what option set, could
be interesting information, and it can help in diagnosing problems to
check what options someone has set.

If there's worry about watchlists being private information, though, we
could shut off access to that table or limit it to seeing what pages are
watched, but not by whom.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

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