+
+----
+
+I have a test ikiwiki setup somewhere to investigate adopting the comments
+plugin. It is setup with no auth enabled and I got hammered with a spam attack
+over the last weekend (predictably). What surprised me was the scale of the
+attack: ikiwiki eventually triggered OOM and brought the box down. When I got
+it back up, I checked out a copy of the underlying git repository, and it
+measured 280M in size after being packed. Of that, about 300K was data prior
+to the spam attack, so the rest was entirely spam text, compressed via git's
+efficient delta compression.
+
+I had two thoughts about possible improvements to the comments plugin in the
+wake of this:
+
+ * comment pagination - there is a hard-to-define upper limit on the number
+ of comments that can be appended to a wiki page whilst the page remains
+ legible. It would be useful if comments could be paginated into sub-pages.
+
+ * crude flood control - asides from spam attacks (and I am aware of
+ [[plugins/blogspam]]), people can crap flood or just aggressively flame
+ repeatedly. An interesting prevention measure might be to not let an IP
+ post more than 3 sequential comments to a page, or to the site, without
+ at least one other comment being interleaved. I say 3 rather than 2 since
+ correction follow-ups are common.
+
+-- [[Jon]]