Last modified: 2011-04-06 16:28:38 UTC
In "Manual:Preventing access#Restrict viewing of all pages" <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access#Restrict_viewing_of_all_pages> it is said that : « In addition to the main page of such a private site, you could give access to the Recentchanges page (if you think that its content isn't private) for feed readers by adding "Special:Recentchanges" to $wgWhitelistRead. » But the problem is that since MediaWiki 1.12, as soon as "Disable reading by anonymous users" is set, the diffs aren't shown anymore in the feeds. Why ? Since it remains possible to choose whether or not to let the feeds be visible ? How diffs could be visible again in the RSS or Atom feeds even-though restricting viewing of pages has been set ?
> How diffs could be visible again in the RSS or Atom feeds even-though > restricting viewing of pages has been set ? It seems like you could do that by introducing the bug that was fixed in 1.12 back into the software. Otherwise, I don't think this is what most users would want since it provides a way around the access restriction. Why you want this sort of control (protect the wiki, but not the diffs)? It almost sounds like you want to be using a real CMS (as the warning on the "Preventing access" page says) instead of a Wiki.
Updating summary. Differences show content of the wiki. If read permission is restricted users without access may not view page content unless they are in $wgWhitelistRead [0]. Special:Recent_changes could be added to the whitelist, and then that page would be visible. However diffs are not visible on Special:Recent_changes so anything else that whitelisting Special:Recent_changes enables (like RSS feeds) should not show diffs either. Else people that have Recent_changes whitelisted will be surprised if suddenly random people can see snippets of their restricted wiki through the RSS feed. I think the situation Dieudonné wants (diffs in feeds of a read restricted wiki) should not be possible by whitelisting RecentChanges. -- Krinkle [0] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/$wgWhitelistRead
Looking desperately for a solution for my problem, I found I had already explained it here : https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15472 Maybe it was better explained there, because it is still marked as unresolved. And I confirm the problem remains for me : I have a wiki in 1.11.2 version, and I can't upgrade it because if I do the benefit of following it's changes via the feeds is lost :( And the configuration offered by 1.11.2 version is not a problem since people supposed not being able to access the wiki, can't access the feed either. To access the feed on a restricted wiki (with MW < 1.11.2), I use the Brief addon on Firefox. And it's fine. Recent changes become very easy to follow and to read within Brief.
