All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XV

[Bob Schroeck]

You'll note that I haven't undone the deletion. However...

It may be an absolute defense, but that doesn't stop a lawsuit from being started. 

This strikes me as being uncomfortably close to TVT's justification for their censorship and their mandatory happiness rules.

[robkelk]

It may be an absolute defense, ...

Good thing I said "may". Some checking indicates that it is not an absolute defense in Canada.

You'll note that I haven't undone the deletion.  However...

It may be an absolute defense, but that doesn't stop a lawsuit from being started. 

This strikes me as being uncomfortably close to TVT's justification for their censorship and their mandatory happiness rules.

It appears I may be reading something into point #2 of the Policy for Wiki Staff that wasn't intended to be there, then.

[robkelk]

So... Oscar time. I've updated the five navboxes that we have for various awards... and, as expected, four of the five links are red and the fifth links to an outdated page.

We really should do something about keeping creator pages up to date. I wish we had enough people willing to do that work. Anybody have any ideas for promoting the wiki?

[Bob Schroeck]

It looks like that despite multiple Admin contacts to suggest demand he use proper link and italic markup on work names in his contributions, TVGarbage is already backsliding. In the last couple days I've spotted this edit on "Jack the Ripper" and this edit on "Freudian Excuse/Video Games".

I'm getting a bit tired of being the Bad Cop so much recently, would someone else please take point on his recidivism? Thanks.

[GethN7]

It looks like that despite multiple Admin contacts to suggest demand he use proper link and italic markup on work names in his contributions, TVGarbage is already backsliding.  In the last couple days I've spotted this edit on "Jack the Ripper" and this edit on "Freudian Excuse/Video Games".

I'm getting a bit tired of being the Bad Cop so much recently, would someone else please take point on his recidivism?  Thanks.

I took a bullet for you. Given the amount of warnings they've gotten, I gave a last chance before the blocks drop even longer warning.

[Bob Schroeck]

Thanks.

[Bob Schroeck]

Oh, for the love of...

File uploads are failing, with messages like this one:

Action failed

Could not open lock file for "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/5/5c/Avina3_2856.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:M...age/Manual:$wgUploadDirectory for more information.

EDIT: And a minute later, the files I thought were missing are now displaying just fine and there's no need to upload them at all. The hell...?

[Labster]

Oh sorry, we were just feeding the chipmunks that power our file storage. They're easily distracted.

[Bob Schroeck]

503s every time I've checked for the last half hour or more.

Just sayin'.

EDIT: And it's not just us. It looks like all of Miraheze, including Phabricator, is hosed right now.

[Bob Schroeck]

Ah, found out what's happening:

Miraheze
@miraheze
Miraheze will be doing server maintenance from 19:00 UTC (Friday 14th 2020) to 02:00 UTC (Saturday 15th 2020). During this maintenance window some services may not work properly or operate in read-only mode. Please save your edits locally before submitting them!


Miraheze
@miraheze
ATTENTION: Due to unforeseen circumstances, it is not possible to perform this migration while keeping the wikis online, since that can cause database loss. Since it is very important to avoid data loss and errors, we are using another strategy for this upgrade.


Miraheze
@miraheze
However, as a result of this, all wikis may not be readable until 22:30 UTC.
The original maintenance window (until 02:00 UTC) is still in effect and we urge you to keep local copies of your edits.

(Lifted from the Twitter feed, which my work blocks so I couldn't see it an hour ago.)

EDIT: However, that 22:30 UTC? That's 5:30 Eastern Time, or about 25 minutes ago, and we're still seeing 503s. Expect to keep seeing them for a while, I'd say.

[robkelk]

Bob, you should know that IT projects never finish on time...

EDIT, another hour later: Looks like we're back.

[robkelk]

Bob, you should know that IT projects never finish on time...

EDIT, another hour later: Looks like we're back.

And it's gone again.

But there's still a quarter-hour left in the announced maintenance window (as of when I posted this).

[robkelk]

Well, it's 12 hours after the end of the posted maintenance window, and there's (still? again?) 503s everywhere including Meta.

No updates on the Twitter feed.

[robkelk]

Most of the wikis are back.

All The Tropes isn't.

[c13dfa241ce72ab2fdfa6fec] 2020-02-15 14:43:51: Fatal exception of type Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError

Phabricator isn't, either:

PhutilAggregateException
Encountered a processing exception, then another exception when trying to build a response for the first exception.
- AphrontSchemaQueryException: #1049: Unknown database 'phabricator_search'
- AphrontSchemaQueryException: #1049: Unknown database 'phabricator_cache'
AphrontSchemaQueryException
#1049: Unknown database 'phabricator_search'
AphrontSchemaQueryException
#1049: Unknown database 'phabricator_cache'

Since Phabricator is down, I posted to the Stewards' noticeboard. Look for the topic "Phabricator is down".

[robkelk]

And they're gone again.

[Bob Schroeck]

It's up right now -- 11:15 AM EST -- but there's only one item in Recent Changes that's new to me, and it was made mid-afternoon yesterday. So I can't tell how long it's been up.

Trying to get to Meta, but it's very slow. (ten minutes later) Okay, its home page finally loaded. And the Steward's Board seems to be taking just as long...

[Bob Schroeck]

It looks like Flow is borked for the moment, now (or too).

EDIT: Aaaaand the 503s are back. So much for that.

EDIT 2: And the 503 page I got has this Tweet, timestamped 10 minutes ago, on it:

Miraheze
@miraheze
Due to technical issues, we're rolling back to the old cluster. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

So that's why.

[GethN7]

On the pages undeletable due to too many edits, yes, stewards should be able to fry those via the backend.

The issue stems from the fact MediaWiki is powered by a relational database with a hard frontend cap of 500 edits any one person is allowed to delete. This is done to prevent the server the crapping the bed due to the size of the deletion job and the power needed to delete the revisions from the database tables.

They can still be removed via the backend fine, but yes, any pages in excess of 500 edits are going to need steward intervention to kill off for any reason.

[robkelk]

Considering they're backing out of a major change at the moment, let's wait a few days before asking that they delete the pages.

Changing gears: What's the trope here? I'm sure that it is a trope, but I don't know which one.

[robkelk]

I was about to point TVGarbage at our Style Guide to show how we want works to be listed and linked to, but the Style Guide doesn't mention how we want works to be listed and linked to.

Whose turn is it to write documentation? I did the last one...

EDIT: No, wait - there is a description in the "Page Titles" section. It isn't obvious that this applies to internal links, though.

[robkelk]

Hmm, just noticed the ban on DocColress ends in ten days.  I'm sure everything will be fine.





I'm going to go stock up on food and guns now.

Maybe I'm being paranoid... Mark D. Gordon, whose User page says the name is a "pseudonyme" [sic], started editing again just as DocColress' tempban expired - and the edits are the types that Doc used to make. He reverted most of them to begin with, then left a big one unreverted, and the edit summary for that big one was "removing poor examples (already happened in TTT)".

Do we have a long-standing sockpuppet?

In the short term, I've reverted that change and left a note on the user's Talk page.

[GethN7]

Hmm, just noticed the ban on DocColress ends in ten days.  I'm sure everything will be fine.





I'm going to go stock up on food and guns now.

Maybe I'm being paranoid... Mark D. Gordon, whose User page says the name is a "pseudonyme" [sic], started editing again just as DocColress' tempban expired - and the edits are the types that Doc used to make. He reverted most of them to begin with, then left a big one unreverted, and the edit summary for that big one was "removing poor examples (already happened in TTT)".

Do we have a long-standing sockpuppet?

In the short term, I've reverted that change and left a note on the user's Talk page.

No, they are another user, relax.

Still, good call telling them that just because they removed examples on a fork with different rules does not necessarily fly on ours. Yeah, TTT refers to Doc's fork, which a few people actually do trope on.

[Bob Schroeck]

I was about to bring up Gordon's edit here, but I see I don't have to, except to note that I actually started wondering a couple of days ago if Magnificent Bastard is now going to be the new obsession of all these wonks who can't get their Complete Monster on... If so, what can we do to head them off at the pass?

[Bob Schroeck]

I was about to point TVGarbage at our Style Guide to show how we want works to be listed and linked to, but the Style Guide doesn't mention how we want works to be listed and linked to.

Whose turn is it to write documentation? I did the last one...

EDIT: No, wait - there is a description in the "Page Titles" section. It isn't obvious that this applies to internal links, though.

That's weird, I'm sure I put it somewhere (else) prominent when I did all the various guides and doc rewrites some months back.  No problem, I'll do it.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, making those changes, and we do say it explicitly, on All The Tropes:How to Write An Example, under "State the Source":

The name of the work the example comes from must be clearly stated, ideally near the beginning of the example. The name should be either italicized or put in quotes depending on the medium (if you're not sure which to use, see what someone else did for a work in the same medium), and be marked up as a link to the work's page.

I've added a bit about this (and a couple other things) to the Style Guide, though, and I'll probably make this a bit more prominent. I may also add something on Trope Workshop Guidelines if it's not there already.