Editing Incubator escapee wiki:Help desk/Archive 4 (section)

==Template limit==
Why is each template used on a page limited to five occurrences?  --[[User:Eequor|Eequor]] 05:53, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

:Basically, to prevent a DOS attack. According to Tim Starling's comments in [http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/wikipedia/phase3/includes/Parser.php Parser.php], "Without countermeasures, it would be possible to attack the parser by saving a page filled with a large number of inclusions of large pages. The size of the generated page would be proportional to the square of the input size. Hence, we limit the number of inclusions of any given page, thus bringing any attack back to O(N)."

:[[User:Angela|Angela]][[user talk:Angela|.]] 10:16, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

::Limiting the number of a particular template is no solution.  It would be much more effective to limit the size of the generated page to 32k or twice the size of the unexpanded page, whichever is larger.  What is to stop an anonymous user from creating megabyte-sized templates for each letter of the alphabet?  --[[User:Eequor|Eequor]] 21:24, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

::It isn't even necessary to upload 26M of templates, given that templates follow redirects.  --[[User:Eequor|Eequor]] 21:28, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)

::You ought to be far more worried that somebody will do this:

<div align="center">
<nowiki>{{Z}}</nowiki>

|<br/>
v

<span class="error">Template loop detected: [[Template:Z]]</span>
</div>

::--[[User:Eequor|Eequor]] 21:50, 17 Jul 2004 (UTC)