Howdypedia:Issues/Technical

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This is something of a log of technical changes made to the wiki (hosting, upgrades, extensions, etc.); regular issues are at Howdypedia:Issues.

This year, instead of organizing the logs into proper sections and responding in ever-indenting form, I'm just going to have a header for each month. Maybe this will help me post more frequently and less verbosely. —Emufarmers^(T|C) 02:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] March

1.12.0rc1 came out four and a half hours ago; I've upgraded the site to it, but I'm tired, so I'll hold off on talking about it (and technical issues in general) until tomorrow. —Emufarmers^(T|C) 02:55, 12 March 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, "tomorrow" tends to mean "in a couple weeks," doesn't it? We're running 1.12.0 now. 1.11 took four months (instead of three), and 1.12 took six months: The length of the release notes testifies to the delay. Having read through them all, here's a summary of the changes that caught my eye:

• "Behaviour of $wgAddGroups and $wgRemoveGroups changed." — New versatility in user rights management should eliminate the need for the Makebot extension
• "(bug 12668) Support for custom iPhone bookmark icon via $wgAppleTouchIcon" — We actually have had visits from an iPhone (though perhaps not Touch)
• "(bug 11897) Add alias Special:CreateAccount & Special:Userlogin/signup for Special:Userlogin?type=signup" — We can use internal links to the registration page (example)
• "Signatures for anonymous users link to Special:Contributions page rather than user page" — Woo!
• "(bug 11211) Pass, as a parameter to the protectedpagetext interface message, the level of protection." — I might be able to make our protection messages more context-sensitive with this
• "(bug 12815) Signature timestamps were always in UTC, even if the timezone code in parentheses after them claimed otherwise" — This always annoyed me!

The toolserver wasn't working for a little while; it kept getting assigned the wrong internal IP address. Everything should be spiffy now.

There has no doubt been other stuff I added or changed but forgot to note in the last 7 months (including the upgrade to 1.11.0, which was shortly after my last entry!); I'll try to keep better records in the future (for all the good they do). —Emufarmers^(T|C) 06:05, 24 March 2008 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that anchor links in redirects have been working since the upgrade. I never figured out why they stopped working before.

Also, I broke MWSearch on the toolserver while trying to get the RC bot to work. I'll try to fix that soon. On the plus side, the LuceneSearch extension will be deprecated in the next MediaWiki upgrade, to be replaced by the MWSearch extension (different from the MWSearch daemon I have right now, I think), which will use the Java-based Lucene-search daemon instead of the current C#-based MWSearch daemon. This will also help merge some search functionality back into the MediaWiki core. Or something. Hopefully I'll be able to set it up when the time comes.

Finally, I tried to upgrade PHP, and it didn't go well. As always, getting FastCGI to work proved nightmarish, and I ended up just restoring the old settings after much frustration (and breakage of the wiki). —Emufarmers^(T|C) 21:49, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] May

MWSearch and the RC bot are still broken; I don't really have a timeframe for a fix. Also, I enabled Tidy, which fixed some invalid output that was showing up on a few pages. I don't recall whether adding any extensions recently other than the nifty LookupUser. —Emufarmers^(T|C) 22:55, 9 May 2008 (UTC)

I just added the PJIRC extension. It uses the same applet on freenode, but it appears on a special page and will automatically set your IRC nickname to your wiki username. —Emufarmers^(T|C) 03:51, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

I've jiggered things into what seems to be working order. —Emufarmers^(T|C) 00:37, 19 May 2008 (UTC)