i just committed an updated version of antville into helma CVS:

• private weblogs will not appear anymore in the weblog-list on the frontpage (also not here). that means that private weblogs are now "really" private, but: there now is an auto-cleanup mechanism that checks how long they have been private. if for too long the creator will get a warning via mail. if the weblog is not set public within some days, it will be blocked - that means that nobody except sysadmins can access it anymore. plus, there is now a special kind of "trusted" weblog that can stay private for unlimited time. it's up to the sysadmins to decide which weblogs are "trusted".
• antville is now capable to dispose inactive weblogs: if they're idle for too long, they're deleted completely. both cleaning mechanisms, blocker and disposer, are fully configurable: if and when to run, how much days before sending warn-mails etc. to configure them one has to edit the file app.properties (both auto-cleaner are disabled by default).
• from now on users can be defined as "trusted", which for now has the only effect that those weblogs that they create are also "trusted". but i'm thinking about implementing something so that sysadmins can limit the creation of new weblogs just to trusted users.
• those accounts that are defined as sysadmins now have a tool to search for weblogs and users, to modify them (i.e. change status to trusted) or to delete weblogs.
• every maintenance-action done by sysadmins is stored in a log-table in database, and this log can be searched too. also the things the auto-cleanup-mechanism does are logged.
• and the smaller changes are: i switched to use helma's new md5Encoder instead of using a javascript-library, and removed the "Antville" from all weblog-related pagetitles, plus some minor bugfixes and code-cleanups.

so much for now, i'll see that i can do the update here on antville.org tonight.

i'd say here at antville.org we limit the time for private weblogs to 4 days (then they get the warning mail), plus three days - and afterwards the weblogs are blocked. or is this too short? inactive weblogs should be removed after 100 days (the mail in that case would be sent 1 week before removal). what ya say?

every maintenance-action done by sysadmins is stored in a log-table in database, and this log can be searched too. also the things the auto-cleanup-mechanism does are logged.

That's the best part, I think. Gives you a nice feeling of knowing what's going on. Maybe also record some other things like creation of new weblogs in the sys-log table?

and the smaller changes are: i switched to use helma's new md5Encoder instead of using a javascript-library, and removed the "Antville" from all weblog-related pagetitles, plus some minor bugfixes and code-cleanups.

I think that the Java class creates slightly different digests than the JavaScript code, so it's possible that permanent cookies stop working when we update. (Didn't confirm this for Antville, but I noticed it while messing around with the /manage application yesterday.)

Kudos!

that sounds like quite some work and very exciting!

i just got surprised by the cleaning woman: are inactive weblogs really completely deleted? uh-oh...

and how about a private trial time of 30 days (it's not unusual)?

i found a couple of setting in the properties file. but:

• where can i define who is admin?
• where can i change the user status to trusted?
• where can i limit the creation of new weblogs?

and an unrelated question: what is the antville-indexes.sql good for?