Problems observed with the Main Wiki

The issues described here are probably never going to be "fixed." They're observations and characteristics of the way the Main Wiki and our web server are set up.

"Personal" sidebar

04-Feb-2008: With the upgrade to TWiki 4.2 (and a lot of work associated with the web security configuration), this is no longer an issue. Ignore this section... and feel free to edit your personal sidebar.

Obsolete

Despite the wording, there's no such thing as a personal sidebar in this Wiki. That is, you may be able to edit the sidebar, but your changes will affect everyone, not just your own account.

The technical reason for this is that the Wiki pages don't seem to correctly pick up the Apache variable REMOTE_USER. As a check, here is the value of the variable as you view this page: REMOTE_USER=not set. So the personal sidebar topic that you create becomes TWikiGuestLeftBar. If this name were unique to your user account, you'd get your own sidebar. Since it's not unique, everyone gets it.

I'm going to try to suppress the "Create Personal Sidebar" line everywhere I can to prevent problems in the future. But if you happen to see this line, please don't use this option.

-- WilliamSeligman - 29 Jul 2005