I’ve been blabbing on about how I’m going to open up the AjaxPatterns wiki for as long as it’s been online (about a year), blah blah, talk is cheap. Anyway, it’s a few steps closer now. The main issue has been protection against spam - some entrepeneurial folks behind numerous proxies have discovered there’s a good niche market among Ajax developers for fake watches and cheap pharmaceuticals, and AjaxPatterns is just the thing for their cunning Long Tail marketing strategy. I wish these measures weren’t necessary, and they certainly won’t be foolproof, but hopefully they’ll let us grow a bunch of useful Ajax content without too much interruption. After The Ajax Experience, I realised how much more there is left to document and how much people want to hear and say.

So these are a few things you’ll see at AjaxPatterns.

  • Captcha - just implemented. Let me know if you have any problems. Unfortunately, it does go against accessibility, but contributors who have difficulty with it could always mail me contributions. Hopefully, mediawiki will incorporate captcha at some point, the kind of project where the resources for a more accessible solution would make sense. Mail me if you want more info on the implementation.
  • Links to book version Implemented, but not live. Each pattern page will link to the corresponding book version (well, a close-to-complete draft). Even if a spammer messes with the pattern description for a short time, there will be a permanent link to the corresponding description in the book.
  • Word/URL BlackList Based on Spam Blacklist. Sorry, no examples involving discount Rolexes.
  • Backup strategy Another measure is frequent snapshots of the whole thing (that’s always been there) .