RationalWiki:Technical support

From RationalWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Archives for this page

Shortcuts:
Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!


Herein goeth anything regarding the technicalities of the wiki

  • Problems with accessing/editing the wiki.
  • Problems with MediaWiki/HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc.
  • Questions about RW's configuration/extensions/servers/etc. See gathered planned changes to-do items.
  • In short, anything tech-y goes here.

External links

Users

If your IP is blocked from editing as an open proxy

  • You need to go to your provider about it. The lists we use are xbl.spamhaus.org, dnsbl.tornevall.org, all.s5h.net. If your IP is on one of these lists, then your provider has a serious problem they need to resolve. We cannot get your ISP out of the blacklist.

Spamfilter warning[edit]

Other than the fact that I'm a new account making a big edit, I don't understand why I got this warning:

Warning: This action has been automatically identified as harmful.
Your action matched the edit filter: Edit caught by spamfilter.

What do I need to do to avoid this, or at least make edits that other people can review and update/reverse? There isn't any more info for me to understand what I'm doing wrong.-ADavidJohnson (talk) 09:52, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

@Duncan from Teflpedia gave your account autopatrolled status, so you should be able to edit the page now. Bongolian (talk) 17:38, 30 December 2024 (UTC)

Hello, I am another new user attempting to make a big edit and am receiving the same error. Is there a way I could get assistance with this? Billybaxet2 (talk) 21:35, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

You are attempting a massive whitewash of an article, which is something our filters are meant to prevent. Please bring your proposed changes to the article's talkpage. Plutocow (talk) 22:00, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
How does one know this? Is this one of them mod powers I don't know how to use? KarmaPolice (talk) 22:08, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
It's a tech right. Plutocow (talk) 22:39, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Rename request for Wikipedia impersonations on RationalWiki[edit]

If someone with tech rights has a spare moment, please rename the following accounts if possible:

All of the above are impersonations of ChopinAficionado who has cited them at Wikipedia. This is likely being done by Mikemikev as he was spamming his usual bald comments onto articles. Psychologist Guy (talk) 18:59, 10 January 2025 (UTC)

But why? All of these accounts are infinitely blocked. If they're renamed, some asshole can re-create them at some point in the future. —cosmikdebris talk stalk 19:13, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
I thought it might help bring some of the drama/trolling to an end. But if the accounts can be re-created then it probably isn't worth doing. Psychologist Guy (talk) 19:31, 10 January 2025 (UTC)
FWIW, if you do rename an impersonation account like this, it is possible to re-create the account immediately afterward to avoid the impersonation. Go to "Special Pages => create account" and create the account yourself. It'll link that account's creation to the user who created it (i.e: the tech user who renamed it), and it allows you to leave a comment as to why you did (i.e: to prevent impersonation). Just some food for thought, as I used to do that when I was a tech and there were such issues. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (talk) 15:03, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Cite web template[edit]

There seems to be an issue with Template:Cite web. When I use it, the "website" perameter does not appear. For example,

{{cite web | last=Lee | first=Matthew | last2=Madhani | first2=Aamer | last3=Long | first3=Colleen | last4=Miller | first4=Zeke | title=Biden moves to lift state sponsor of terrorism designation for Cuba, part of deal to free prisoners | website=AP News | date=2025-01-14 | url=https://apnews.com/article/biden-cuba-terrorism-designation-a0e2f003ce7100e6a845ef7ed6e96a1b | access-date=2025-01-14}}

produces,

Lee, Matthew; Madhani, Aamer; Long, Colleen; Miller, Zeke (2025-01-14). "Biden moves to lift state sponsor of terrorism designation for Cuba, part of deal to free prisoners". AP News. Retrieved 2025-01-14.

The website does not appear for some reason. I looked at the template code, and I don't see a parameter for "website" in it; I think this is the issue but I don't want to break something by trying to solve it. I've also tried switching "website" to "publisher", but that doesn't seem to work and I don't want to do that for like 500 citations.

This is a problem for me because I've moved to using the Citer tool to quickly produce citations from links, and it's greatly streamlined my editing and improves the quality of the citation while reducing busywork (especially once the "website" problem is hopefully ironed out). Could a tech help with this please? Pizza SLICE.gifDuceMoosoliniYour friendly RW dictator moderator 21:29, 14 January 2025 (UTC)

We need to update that template to use Scribunto, give me a bit. -- Techpriest (talk) 21:47, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
Thanks, Techpriest, you’re the best! Pizza SLICE.gifDuceMoosoliniYour friendly RW dictator moderator 21:53, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
DONE! -- Techpriest (talk) 22:01, 14 January 2025 (UTC)
I noticed the problem too, but it doesn't seem fixed yet. See, for example, the 3 usages on Nuwaubianism. Bongolian (talk) 22:28, 25 January 2025 (UTC) @Techpriest Bongolian (talk) 03:21, 29 January 2025 (UTC)
The uses of "cite web" on that page don't assign "website=". Now that can be done, that's the change, but on various pages it never was. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 16:20, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

E-mail is not working[edit]

So, @Oldman4 sent me an email. I did get a notification, but I didn't get the email. Checked by spam folder and it's not there. Tried to used another e-mail and it didn't work either (since it required me to verify it and I didn't get the verification e-mail, now I just lost the ability to receive e-mails from RW). Anyone having a similar problem? GeeJayKWhere all evil dwells Where every lie is true 00:29, 17 January 2025 (UTC)

I have had issues with email for a long time. For 2 months I attached my main outlook email to my RW account but the outlook email does not register to my RW account. No matter how many confirmation emails I would send, the email would not go through or verify to RW.
I created a quick protonmail recently which has now worked and confirmed on my account but for the most part when I send emails to people they do not go through. I sent an email to Bongolian but that is the only user who received an email from me. It seems to be hit and miss. For the most part it doesn't work. Is this because protomail is unreliable? I am surprised that outlook did not work either. I will probably register with a more reliable email provider.
The only other thing I can think of is that using a VPN on RW blocks emails. However this doesn't really add up either because when trying to attach outlook to RW, I have not used any VPN. I have used RW on mobile and in public library and it doesn't work either. I do not think this is an IP issue. Most users are on discord so this probably isn't a big issue, but I think there is a problem with registration and certain email providers. The solution may be to move to gmail. Oldman4 (talk) 11:10, 18 January 2025 (UTC)
I just tried it and received the email right away via Gmail. Could Outlook be the problem? Bongolian (talk) 22:24, 25 January 2025 (UTC)
This is definitely an Outlook problem. You can't attach an Outlook account to RationalWiki. I have dropped Spud an email. Outlook seems to be going to "Junk mail" at the moment as well. Oldman4 (talk) 16:22, 8 February 2025 (UTC)
Works on my Gmail account.Bob"Life is short and (insert adjective)" 16:33, 8 February 2025 (UTC)

Mobile View[edit]

Why do we only have a desktop view and not a mobile view? I think we need one, don’t we? —𝕶𝕾𝕳 🐅 17:13, 15 February 2025 (UTC)

  • Seconding the need for a mobile view. This site is hard to use on mobile cause it only uses desktop layout. Sympathy5010 (talk) 01:12, 4 March 2025 (UTC)
Extension:MobileFrontEnd is not installed. It probably should be. But the powers-that-be also need to upgrade MediaWiki from 1.35 to 1.43. Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 11:27, 20 April 2025 (UTC)
PS. I should add that this extension is not currently part of the standard package, and isn't going to be in 1.44, but has to be installed separately. Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 00:47, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
It can be toggled manually even without that extension (which is long planned to be added for the next upgrade). --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 16:26, 21 April 2025 (UTC)
Yes, the obvious way is to have two accounts, one for your phone and one for your desktop/laptop. If you don't edit, then you don't technically sockpuppet.Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 08:10, 22 April 2025 (UTC)

Kiwix backup[edit]

There's a problem with Kiwix storing backups of RationalWiki. Details were posted here.[9] This would be especially useful to fix given the current state of affairs. Bongolian (talk) 07:53, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

Not much to say other than "Kiwix is holding it wrong". They should just be able to use the Action API for their backups instead (which afaik would also support much older Mediawiki versions anyway since the Action API predates the REST API, although that'd be an overwhelmingly niche situation). That said, I'm not 100% sure what endpoints Kiwix needs. This seems to be something the devs of the underlying tool are aware of. -- Techpriest (talk) 22:17, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

IP vandalism[edit]

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/2A09:BAC3:382A:2696:0:0:3D8:1 is vandalizing various articles with pro-CCP propaganda and the like. MalAdeptus (talk) 00:59, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

It's been going on for a while - delete, block & ignoreScream!! (talk) 01:35, 24 March 2025 (UTC)
Please do not report random driveby vandals here (or anywhere else really), the sysops handle them easily and they're not worth giving attention, plus it's not even a tech issue in the first place. Plutocow (talk) 06:43, 24 March 2025 (UTC)

The front page is getting littered with flat earth articles[edit]

I recently split the Flat Earth article's debunk section, that was getting massive, into several subarticles. The problem is, the names are quite long, e.g., Empirical evidence for the spherical shape of Earth - The Earth, and they're now taking a lot of space on the RW front page, under the Portals and Articles section. Is there a syntax that can be used to avoid this?Nomoresecrets (talk) 16:38, 26 March 2025 (UTC)

The template used by the main page that is putting these articles' links on the main page is Template:MainPageRedesign. It selects articles randomly from within the gold, silver and bronze brainstar articles (RationalWiki:Article rating) in a given category. Part of the problem is that you have carried over the gold brainstar from the main flat earth article to the new split-off subarticles, thus getting them randomly included in the mainpage. Whereas bronze brainstar articles do not require a vote, silver and gold articles do require separate votes. So, these articles that you created have in appropriate brainstars. You could just get rid of the brainstars, or arguably you could say that they at least deserve a bronze star based on your view of their merits. Doing the latter, does not solve the mainpage problem though. Another option might be to make the subarticles instead be transcluded and/or collapsed in the main flat earth article instead of separate pages (Encyclopedia of American Loons is an example of a page that uses transclusion of subarticles). There might be a way to selectively exclude articles with brainstars from the mainpage, but I'm unaware of it. Bongolian (talk) 17:53, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
Yeah I was thinking about that. Only the one about Earth itself was something I felt would deserve a gold brainstar: it's doing most of the heavy lifting the original gold-tier article was, and I felt it was worthy to be featured on the front page. But I completely understand if it requires voting to retain silver/gold status, so I've demoted it to bronze. The rest of the articles do not have a brainstar, but they do have copy-pasted categorization which is the most likely culprit for the article to be present in the Portals and Articles section, so I'm pondering between 1) removing the categories, making the articles harder to find, but that reduces the spam on front page, and 2) renaming the articles into something shorter: Flat Earth Debunks - Earth etc. Thoughts? Nomoresecrets (talk) 19:57, 26 March 2025 (UTC)
Yes, name shortening would improve the mainpage appearance, and the brainstars need fixing. That's a reasonable minimal approach. Bongolian (talk) 02:01, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
I think the flat earth sub-articles should be promoted to no brainstars and treated as sub-pages of the main article. —cosmikdebris talk stalk 02:12, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
https://dpl3.wikitide.org/wiki/Criteria_for_page_selection#titleregexp could br uded to exclude titles over a certain length. Christopher (talk) 03:02, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Those sub-articles were explicitly split off from the main one because the main article was getting too long. Antares (talk) 03:03, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
Ok I've shortened the article series to Flat Earth debunks. I also demoted the Earth article from bronze to nothing. Bongolian: Do the articles still contain a tag or something that needs to be removed to fix the brainstars? Also, is there a standard banner like "This article is part of a series of Flat Earth articles", that could be used on top of the sub-articles? Nomoresecrets (talk) 15:57, 30 March 2025 (UTC)
I am unaware of such a banner. I don't think there are similar series of articles like this. You could create a template for such a purpose or just enter it manually and copy it to all the articles. I'll do some cleanup of the categories: not all of them apply to each article. Also the Notes and references templates had been commented out in at least one of these pages.
OK, I managed to create a very basic template for it. I'll leave the styling to someone who's more familiar with the wiki syntax.Nomoresecrets (talk) 23:00, 30 March 2025 (UTC)

How do I get past the spamfilter?[edit]

Post I wanted to post on the Saloon bar page:

"Have you guys seen this pundit? She claimed to be an undecided voter and even a liberal before the elections, but is now a full MAGA, always-loyal, Trump-always-good, Democrats-always-bad conservative, I don't think any intelligent person, and she's not dumb, can do that honestly, clearly she's a dishonest actor. No idea what her motives are (pro-Kremlin maybe?). Her main debate tactic is gish galloping and distracting you with how hateable she is. Even if I agreed with her I wouldn't want to listen to her speak, god damn.

Another subject: The Free Press, how I came to know about Batya in the first place. I followed their podcast feed because I didn't think The Witch Trials was THAT bad (maybe that was a poor judgement). Anyway, The Free Press is terrible, and I caught up with everyone else to that realization the first time they invited Batya Ungar-Sargon on one of their talk shows, somewhere in the summer of '24. How she just spewed the most insane bullshit about the Democrats and she wasn't challenged on it at all, it made me instantly remove the podcast from my feed.

I just wanna know more about Batya and about TFP. Who funds these people? How do they just rise up out of nowhere? Who consumes their media? Is it all bot farms? [sign off]"

Did I go wrong somewhere? I tried a completely different post but it also didn't get through the spam filter, so maybe a technical issue? RationalOgre (talk) 23:28, 3 April 2025 (UTC)

@RationalOgre I have made you autopatrolled, since you seem to be human.Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 04:47, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Bots and 503s and etc[edit]

So the server stopped serving, so you got 503s. Cosmikdebris laid out a pentagram, did slightly disturbing things with a goat and summoned me, so I had a look, logged in ok and saw 563 days' uptime lol. Update apt packages, rebooted. Now we're here.

So why are things slow and flaky? well, I think it's AI bots. You remember last year how we had what looked like a DOS from Alicloud? I'm now thinking that was Ali training their Qwen LLM and the scraper being an ill-constrained piece of shit. Same for other scraper IPs.

The bots are so bad that even Wikipedia is suffering under the load. Nobody can work out quite what to do about this, except making the site harder to use.

I have no plans to put anything into place myself, cos then I'd be its maintainer forever and who the hell wants to administer systems I mean really. If anyone has suggestions, I am not interested unless you yourself personally have installed and administered the mechanism in question and can answer tricky questions about it. Assume I can google too.

Anyway everything sucks because life is suffering. Love you all! - David Gerard (talk) 22:22, 25 April 2025 (UTC)

No archiving[edit]

Inferno Bot hasn't run since Techpriest left. Is anyone willing to create a replacement? Christopher (talk) 18:28, 1 May 2025 (UTC)

Issues with gadgets[edit]

From Special:Gadgets:

inline

Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 11:39, 11 May 2025 (UTC)

This is all it took to get rid of the error message. None of the gadgets work, but I couldn't tell you whether that's related to this or if they've all broken for other reasons. The only one I already had enabled (resurrect button) never worked. Christopher (talk) 12:25, 11 May 2025 (UTC)
Thanks @Christopher. I couldn't fix as I don't have tech rights. Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 04:55, 12 May 2025 (UTC)
@Duncan from Teflpedia: for future reference, you ping by using {{ping|[Username]}}. I mean, you could just use "@," but it's not gonna do anything. I think they put it in the editing menu but don't feel like scrolling down to check.
– Regards, Avarice 23:10, 20 May 2025 (UTC)

Unable to Register[edit]

For some reason trying to sign up doesn't work and when I try to post on Saloon it only allows me to randomly do so. Is there anything I can do?47.5.66.54 (talk) 03:03, 13 May 2025 (UTC)

Unless a page is specifically protected, there are no restrictions on new editors. Page protections are almost always temporary. What is the page(s) that you wanted to edit? Bongolian (talk) 16:44, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
I guess it’s more the saloon bar. There is nothing at the top that lets me do it but I can do it here.Yokaiwatch (talk) 18:21, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
Yeah, the Saloon Bar's protected for another four days or so. Lots of vandalism.
– Regards, Avarice 19:06, 13 May 2025 (UTC)
I see. I got the message about being able to edit but I’m still unable to do so still. Guess I have to wait?Yokaiwatch (talk) 16:48, 14 May 2025 (UTC)
Either that or explain here why you think you deserve and can be trusted with sysop powers. Note that the bar is actually rather low. Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 10:48, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
But not that low. Yokaiwatch is a sock of a de-sysopped user (Machina) that hasn't edited in a week. Christopher (talk) 13:39, 31 May 2025 (UTC)
Makes you wonder. Why don't people try to improve content rather than just trolling each other? Duncan from Teflpedia (talk) 05:34, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

503, Redux?[edit]

Thank God my login still works at home. Because I cannot login either via work or my phone - just get 503 error messages. Also get them for BoN editing [so I couldn't send word to anyone]. Couldn't even join either - just get a 503 message.

On a personal level, this is crap because I'm a mod and cannot mod if unable to log in. In a more general point, I surely won't be the only hit by this and as such are driving away contributors etc. KarmaPolice (talk) 12:01, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

Error message when uploading an image[edit]

I got the following error message when I tried to upload an image:

“”Could not open lock file for "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/e/e9/Cracked_Magazine_(2006)_002_001.jpg". Make sure your upload directory is configured correctly and your web server has permission to write to that directory. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Manual:$wgUploadDirectory for more information.

Bongolian (talk) 19:10, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

It seems we're also unable to delete images, possibly related. Duce first encountered the error on the 30th of May trying to clean up some lawsuit stuff, see his contributions. If you visit the file pages he tried to delete now you get "Error creating thumbnail: File missing", so it looks like the deletion attempts did something despite not showing up in the logs. I've just tried to delete File:Carl Nielsen.jpg, as of writing the file still exists but I suspect it'll be gone soon. Last successful file deletion was on the 20th. Christopher (talk) 19:25, 6 June 2025 (UTC)
I've been having David Gerard manually delete images from the server disc, but it would be very useful for our techs to please resolve the image deletion issue. DuceMoosolini (talk) 21:33, 8 June 2025 (UTC)
Retrieved from "https://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=RationalWiki:Technical_support&oldid=2744138"