PmWiki

Protip: Link this article anywhere on TV Tropes if you want to troll their moderation team, especially Fast Eddie

PmWiki is a type of Wiki software, only unlike MediaWiki, it lacks quick revert options, making it easier to vandalize.

Pros

• Easier to vandalize than MediaWiki, and harder to undo said vandalism.
• Has support for MediaWiki formatting and syntax, so if you ever wanted to make a PmWiki mirror of ED, it would be easy to provide a PmWiki mirror of the lulziest site on the tubes.

Cons

• Unlike MediaWiki, which has extensions so easy a brain damaged script kiddie could set it up, PmWiki has cookbook files, which require lots of typing to set up, so fatassed faggots who hate using their keyboards to do anything except type in search results for porn will it find hard to set up.

TV Tropes

TV Tropes used to run entirely in PmWiki in its early days, but it allegedly uses its own code now, only keeping the PmWiki URL tags for legacy support.

In fact, here's the TVT forum thread where the moderators lie on that subject.

However, this is a total lie. Both PmWiki and TV Tropes share a lot moar than just formatting, and since both are coded in PHP, both wikis still use the same interface. The only difference between the two is that Eddie has slapped far more extensions into his shitty wiki.

It should also be noted that unlike MediaWiki, TV Tropes source code is not freely distributed unlike MediaWiki, even though it is based on PmWiki, which is also freely distributed.

Then again, it's shitty and full of fail, so why would anyone want it?

Some fun facts about their ghetto customization of PmWiki include:

• Lacks a quick revert button, just like the original PmWiki software, meaning page move vandals and people using the time sinks strategies on the Vandal/How-to page will be able to start lots of drama and gets tons of lulz in the process.
  • Recent builds of PmWiki DO have a restore button to restore certain changes back into a page, but it's still slightly half assed because it is only specific to one page and doesn't apply globally (you can't check the recent changes and see if someone moved text from page to another and get a good idea if someone is a text switch vandal), and Eddie's wiki lacks the ability to not only restore changes like recent builds of PmWiki, and it also cannot detect delta changes (the amount of bytes added/subtracted by an edit) like can be done in MediaWiki. This feature can be enabled using certain Cookbook scripts, but Eddie's wiki lacks these features.
• Extremely exploitable log in system. Like Wikipedia, you just put in a username and a password and you can start being a productive editor. They do have a feature to bounce you from their IP, but this is easily avoided using proxies.
  • The log in system now requires email confirmation, so just use a throwaway email service along with your proxy IP when creating an account.
• Unlike Wikipedia, which tracks by IP address, they rely on a cookie based tracking system. They can check out IPs, but their CheckUser equivalent is shitty and a stealthy troll can avoid the ban-hammer for a long time if they are clever.
• One thing is different about TV Tropes is that, aside from CamelCased words, some of the markup is customized, so it's not much like it is in Wikipedia or PmWiki. However, one user once got banned for finding interesting ways to fuck with the syntax code which caused the whole code base to go batshit in hilarious ways, so a clever troll with some programming know how should be able to find even more lulzy ways to mess with the code base.
• It's admin, Fast Eddie, is the only one who actually knows how to code his ghetto wiki, and so far has never released any source code for his customized version of PmWiki, which means any exploits must be patched by him alone, and most of the time his patches suck. In fact, he once made a macro to prevent certain trope pages from being viewed, and all people had to do to sidestep the macro was type the page names in lowercase. Also, even after he fixed this exploit, the page source could still be accessed if you knew the page name and could add the source action string to end of the page name.
• Not only is Fast Eddie a total asshole, he is also a horrible programmer who leaves behind a shitload of security holes for other people to use. Here are just a few:
  • There was once a time when Fast Eddie left open a giant security hole where you could impersonate other users by changing the name on your cookie, and this glitch could even be used to allow you to log in as Fast Eddie himself. His response, as usual, was to insult the person who first informed him of the glitch, ban them, and not bother fixing it until the new site staff cleaned it up in 2015.
  • In his infinite wisdom, Fast Eddie didn't bother with user input validation (because fuck security when there's money to be had), and it wasn't until users were able to post in locked forum threads and totally fuck up the markup with their forum posts that he dragged his ass out and fixed the security holes.
  • In yet another situation (that is lulzily common among Fast Eddie's stupidity), he accidentally ended up leaving a security hole that gave admin powers to anyone who logged out. Unfortunately, this glitch was patched out quickly, but the few heroes who took advantage of it left a giant burning pile of butthurt and BAWWWfaggotry behind them.
  • In a fourth situation, a Troper managed to use the view-source option (a.k.a. something that is available on every single person's computers) to make a custom thread ID, which confirms that Eddie never gave a shit about input validation, which breaks every fucking web security rule in existence.
  • The mod forum, which is supposed to be private, can actually be viewed through the search function. The new admin's solution was to make a macro to rip that feature out entirely, but it still works if you sidestep the macro and enter it directly into the URL.
• TV Tropes has no ability to detect Tor usage like Wikia, and their ability to detect proxies is shit, so any troll with a long list of proxies can vandalize for a long time without being detected.
• Unlike MediaWiki, PmWiki has no ability to preemptively "protect" pages from being created with certain words and phrases until after they are created, so any troll could cause a lot of butthurt by finding the name of a user or admin, then creating a bunch of pages mocking the fuck out of the user/admin. It is possible to create a page that is blocked from editing preemptively, but since it does not block whatever word or phrase the admin is trying to prevent from being used as a trolling tool from being added to the page title, this protection is fucking worthless. Also, if the words in question are someone's name or a really common phrase, any attempt to use the spam word filter to stop a troll would fuck over any further legit use of the words or phrases used by the troll so making variations of "AdminX touches children" pages is piss easy on the trolling side in PmWiki, and really fucking hard for the admins to do anything effective to stop.
  • As of February 2016, this tactic is slightly ineffective on TV Tropes because trying to create a new page in the Main/ namespace redirects you to You Know That Thing Where. It still works in other namespaces except for the Tropers/ namespace, so you know what to do.
  • And, for those who want a cheap laugh, it seems Eddie is such a thin skinned pussy because someone called him a "faggot" that he actually went to the trouble to create a redirection macro that will redirect to a special page if you type in a page URL with the word "Faggot" in it: (see here for an example).
• Eddie is lying out his ass when he says his code uses less than 5% of the original PmWiki code. In fact, here's a list of shit from stock PmWiki he is still using (or has used):
  • Eddie's wiki used PmWiki 0.6.0, one of the very first versions of PmWiki. This explains the security holes and the shitty hacks he had to make, as he was running 10-year old software on modern-day hardware. Even in 2021, more than eighteen years after PmWiki 0.6.0's release, the new admins are still using PmWiki 0.6.0 for the site.
  • The color code markup is identical. This was once disabled (it isn't anymore) but it is easily confirmed by going back in time on the Wayback Machine and examining the page source for any page with colored text.
  • Most of the same WikiWord behavior and CSS rules works like stock PmWiki, just with some minor spacing and other tweaks such as making "{{" "}}" brackets part of the markup, and a PmWiki provided custom markup cookbook file exists to allow this.
  • The reason why people who lose passwords have to beg for it in a forum thread is because that's how it works in stock PmWiki - since it has no email authentication, you have to make another account and beg for your old account's password, essentially forcing the user to have to make a sockpuppet by default. Well, that's how it used to work. The current system is slightly less full of fail, but if you forget your password, you have to manually request a password reset instead of (on browsers that support this) being able to check a list of saved passwords and/or have the browser auto-remember the password for that site.
    • TV Tropes has a really shitty SQL database, which is confirmed by this page and this screenshot of Fast Eddie's admin panel. But considering how often their site has been DDoS'ed and how the ability to use a MySQL backend in PmWiki is more of a hack than an actual, fully supported option, that may explain why when Fast Eddie changes features, shit breaks sitewide all the time due to his hacky code fucking his database in the ass.
  • Until 2013, it used the same emailess login authentication scheme as this cookbook script. The login script itself works like this cookbook script, or it used to for the longest time.
  • Pages are stored like "Main.HomePage" in PmWiki, and the forward slashes are an option enabled in PmWiki. Want proof? Try going to: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main.Main.HomePage
  • Want to know why TV Tropes' passwords are stored in a plain text file? Well, since PmWiki is coded entirely in PHP (with optional support for HTML/CSS) and the core design is set up as a collection of web editable text files (which includes the config files), that means anyone who manages to break into the admin computer and has a working knowledge of PHP would be able to have total control over the inner workings of the site if they edited the .php files on the site itself.
    • And it gets better. Anyone who can look at the source pages of a web page can see the code from practically everything on Eddie's shitty website (including his JavaScript), and his server security is so fucking poor any idiot could insert RAW PHP code into any page to fuck things up royally, which is only possible because Eddie LEFT THAT SHIT COMPLETELY EXPOSED due to his customization to his PmWiki build, something the PmWiki website itself warns is one of the most fucktarded things you could ever do.
  • The reason why there are Jewgle Ads on TV Tropes is because he added the script codes (cookbook files) of PmWiki that allow HTML/CSS code to be enabled on TV Tropes, so for you trolls reading this, that means TV Tropes is vulnerable to HTML exploits. In fact, PmWiki's own website even warns against enabling this sort of access due to the security problems it causes, but FE wanted his ad money so much that he apparently didn't give a shit.
  • Amusingly enough, TV Tropes actually has less markup available than stock PmWiki, with many types of markup either outright disabled for general use or restricted to the forums, like the strikethrough markup. In fact, if you have an account on TV Tropes, go read up on PmWiki's markup and try it all out. Most to all of it will function as was originally intended on stock PmWiki either on the forums or on the main wiki and has the same syntax.
  • Eddie's website gags when trying to load massive indexes (categories in MediaWiki) with lots of subpages because PmWiki lacks the built in throttling MediaWiki has to limit each category page from only loading a certain amount of content on it. It also lacks an actual distinction between category pages and main pages because such a distinction doesn't exist in PmWiki, so Eddie slapped together a crude solution where he added prefixes to pages to give the illusion of creating new namespaces (in truth, this is cosmetic at best), as opposed to MediaWiki, which actually has discrete namespaces like Main, Category, and MediaWiki namespaces. Also, the reason why some of the indexes including the "Index Index" redirect to a ".php" page is because Eddie realized PmWiki was a piece of shit that had no decent categorization feature like MediaWiki, so he redirected the main page of something like "Synopsis" or "Index Index" to the .php documents that control the entire subpage index as a workaround.
    • PmWiki DOES have support for Categories in a similar manner as MediaWiki, and there are even cookbook files that add further support for something way less fucktarded than Eddie's current setup, which is coded using one of the very first builds - a build in which the categories don't actually exist. So the shitty workaround he dreamed up concerning linking massive indexes of pages to the .php files is basically outdated in modern versions of PmWiki.
  • Eddie's image upload form comes from this cookbook file
  • Eddie's category schema is actually some retarded BS called "wiki trails". This is a PmWiki version of categorization that adds tags to pages that will "index" everything between the tags as being associated with the page, and every page that has the same tags (which are basically a half assed version of what MediaWiki calls parser hooks) will (in Eddie's version of shit) add a link in a massive category daisychain to every single page that has these index tags. Or, the tl;dr version is this: it isn't so much a category system as it's a massive chain binding all the pages together, and unlike actual categories, all someone would have to do to vandalize the shit out of something like this is to replace the items between the index tags with shit that doesn't belong, which would fuck up the whole wiki trail, provided all the items between the index tags are actual page links. Also, if Fast Eddie claims he's not using PmWiki anymore, he's lying out his ass, as what he's using now is a highly customized version of the shit explained on this page.
  • PmWiki has a really shitty page history option that tracks history by the page changes, but doesn't save a complete revision of the page, merely what lines were altered. This means that not only is keeping track of really long page histories really fucking hard, the page history is not transferred if moved to a new page. This sucks ass for Fast Eddie for two reasons: he and his minions are manually forced to root through pages to discover subtle vandalism, and in the event he tried a lolsuit if someone copied his pages to another site, he'd have to prove what was ripped off with his page histories, which he usually can't do because he has deleted most of the older ones and moved lots of pages around, leaving him with some horribly incomplete records and records that don't exist in the database. MediaWiki is much better by far, since it saves all the complete page revisions in chronological order, which makes for much less retarded record keeping. Also, this is one feature that is basically identical to a stock version of PmWiki minus his customizations, so he's bullshitting if he claims he made any substantial changes to this feature besides changing its name.
    • The page history "diff" display come from this cookbook script.
  • Their spoiler text code is complete and utter shit, with yellow text showing up prominently on blue background pages, partially because Eddie is a fucking moron that can't use web colors properly. The other reason is that PmWiki has it's own fucked up internal CSS rules that don't work worth a damn with modern web standards very well, which results in weird looking shit whenever he tries anything creative using customized color schemes.

Tropes, Lies, and Faggotry

The above section chronicles the technical shit about how TV Tropes is running a really customized version of PmWiki, but if you ask the moderators, they will swear up and down, so help them Fast Eddie, that it only has mere remnants of PmWiki code and rest is completely customized.

For those not in the know, this is horseshit for a variety of reasons, most of which are covered above, but one additional thing Fast Eddie loves to claim is that his code is so customized that only he knows how to fix it, which is probably true, because it's such a clusterfuck of shitty coding married to a shaky MySQL backend that has been so mutated from how the stock PmWiki coding started out that in some ways, it is greatly altered from how stock PmWiki operates, but it still uses the same CSS rules, the same markup, has the same text limitations, still uses most the same login coding and upload/attachment code from stock PmWiki, and any asshole with a web browser that can view page source code can easily prove Eddie is a fucking liar, but while it's slightly sad that he would choose to lie about using a customized version of a freely distributable/customizable wiki engine, it's pathetic when the rest of his asshole tonguing sycophants keep repeating this shit, despite the fact they admit they are goddamn morons when it comes to the coding side of the wiki they moderate on.

Here's a list of links filled with their facepalm worthy bullshit and other lulz:

• This forum thread calls out Eddie for his shitty password security, and the upshot of his reaction is to tell his users he's too fucking lazy to encrypt their site passwords, even though PmWiki does provide security options to prevent this. The thread was left unresolved, and we learn from Fighteer that Eddie is a total cheapass.
• This discussion is where Fighteer (a fucking dumbass who allegedly is a computer programmer IRL who has whined like a baby about internet trolls on his blog) claims TV Tropes uses less than 5% of the original PmWiki code, and the URL is just an artifact of the original code left for stability reasons, which is horseshit because PmWiki provides several ways to have Short URLs any fucktard could set up in under two minutes by editing a single config file, which he could have implemented since day one.
• In this thread Fast Eddie reveals the location of the TV Tropes servers, and gives the world a good idea where to find him.
• In this discussion, Eddie lies about how they have great security against trolls and that they discovered trying to block proxies is a stupid idea, and what the thread doesn't say is that since they use a cookie based IP logger, any halfway decent proxy or Tor could make a mockery of his attempt to weed out trolls
• In this thread, we learn more about the shitty security of the login cookies used by TV Tropes, and what they mention here is true to this day: they use login cookies with no other features than storing the password and user name, which means they have no other security features whatsoever.

External Links

• PmWiki website
• The "pmwiki.php" file for PmWiki 0.6.0, the version of PmWiki that TV Tropes was built with.

PmWiki is part of a series on

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Leadership Fast Eddie • Fighteer Tropers Chagen46 • Colonel McBadass • Iconoclast • Starprincess801 • The Unknown Autobot Enemies Beyond The Lampshade • Nate Spidgewood Miscellaneous 5P • PmWiki • Tropes Drama • Horrible Fanfics Deleted articles Encyclopedia Dramatica • Troper Article • DoYouLikeHornyBunnies • FATAL • Hen • HogwartsExposed • KodomoNoJikan • LightningWarriorRaidy • MonsterGirlQuest • MonsterGirlQuestTropePage • NAUGHTY TENTACLES • Rance • SonoHanabiraNiKuchizukeWo • TheGirlWhoLived • TheSagaraFamily • Xchange • AkiSora • AmorousProfessorCherry • ChocoboNights • Conquering The Queen

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PmWiki is a part of a series on Wikis

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