Last modified: 2007-06-27 17:59:41 UTC
When a person reverts a page (without having admin rollback), they are editing an older version of the page. If you change the oldid in the address bar of your browser, you can effectively copy the contents of another page onto the page you are editing. (I'm not sure if this is good or bad) This, when combined with a bug in a vandal-fighting programme, caused a pretty odd revision to the main page: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page&oldid=61168673 It can easily be replicated in my sandbox, see below link: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:MichaelBillington/Sandbox&action=edit&oldid=61168415 My thinking is that it should only allow you to edit a page with an oldid from the same page, or maybe it should give you a different banner at the top of the page instead of the usual "You are editing a prior version of this page. If you save it, any changes made since this version will be removed." Any thoughts?
Created attachment 2255 [details] Possible fix Here is a fix, assuming that the new check doesn't break any valid cases. It raises another issue though: if a completely bogus oldid is entered when editing a page, the error message is displayed inside the edit form. The page can still be saved, replacing the article text with the error message. So the fix probably wouldn't do anything to stop a bot gone awry.
The fix is bad. It still allows them to be edited, except instead of giving an error message, it puts the error message IN the textbox. This is unacceptable.
Fixed this in r23483 (cf related issue bug 10377).