Looks good Erel.

I tried to add a few “yes” entries, but when I tried to publish I got:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
/*id=20110824201536*/ (SQL query hidden)
from within function “BatchTask::createTask”. Database returned error “1290: The MySQL server is running with the—read-only option so it cannot execute this statement (10.8.32.26)”.

Is it Read-only for testing purposes?

If you are demonstrating something like a “transformer”, you should include how to set up the software to run it on another site.

Hi Merlin, thanks for the feedback!

This error message was caused by the wikia server. I wrote their technical support about it. In any case, I saw you managed to publish the page after all.

You are right about the software. It is still under development. When it is more ripe, I will also publish setup instructions.

Robert Mitchell - Aug 24, 2011:

Dave Morton - Jun 13, 2011:

Erwin Van Lun - Jun 13, 2011:

@Erel: thanks for your offering! I’ll contact you when the time is ripe (can you say that in English???)

The phrase has slipped out of common usage, but it’s still considered a valid aphorism.

I think the word you’re looking for is “idiom” Wikipedia says:

An aphorism (literally “distinction” or “definition”, from the Greek: ἀφορισμός, aphorismós, from ἀπό + ὁρίζειν, apo + horizein, “from/to bound”) is an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form.’

Thanks Robert/Dave!!! The best way to learn English is to observe the conversations between natives about their own language .

Is security a nightmare for something like this - I mean user editable code run from the website ?

It is… I did my best to make it secure, but I am sure a hacker will be able to hack it down.

I hope in the future, when it becomes more useful, there will be more security experts that are willing to help, than evil hackers trying to break it.

Unfortunately I am not really a security expert I only know the basic tricks.  Trying to determine what might be bad code is going to be difficult. If it wasn’t for this I would have offered to host it, but I have too many sites that could be compromised because of it.

You may find if you do run into this problem that even a free service may refuse to host it. If it were me I think the best bet would be to have a dedicated server so you don’t risk server wide access by the bad boys. Then you would have a mirrored backup too somewhere. Alas that will cost you dollars though. Good luck with it all the same

Running untrusted code is a recurring problem. A haskell bot (lambdabot, in freenode #haskell) does it though. One of the bot’s authors once said it was possible because of Haskell’s type system. Just found this link with more information: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Safely_running_untrusted_Haskell_code

“Since 2004, lambdabot has executed arbitrary strings of Haskell provided by user’s [sic] of various IRC channels, in particular, the Haskell channel. In order to do this, a particular security policy is required. The policy, and its implementation, is described here.”

You could start with a similar approach for other languages, though it might be harder since it seems Haskell labels certain IO etc. “unsafe”; for other languages you might have to do that manually.

Eventually I think the bot itself should learn what is dangerous (i.e. will harm it or others). You can teach it at first, but eventually (as with other problems of intelligence) it needs to start thinking for itself…

If it runs on a dedicated server, and keeps backups, and runs some harmful code, it should recognize that and restore itself and add an exclusion for the code that caused it harm…