All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIII

[robkelk]

As for the other guy, their butthurt we care about our legal liability matters less to me than my last bowel movement. If one more edit of theirs turns out to be plagiarized I will personally boot this guy out because I'm not going to court over letting their theft run rampant.

Language like that from somebody who needs every contribution cleaned up after... not worth it. Have another two weeks of tempban for violation of Article 1 of All The Tropes:Terms of Service and All The Tropes:There is No One True Way.

[GethN7]

I don't know whether to approve this one - is it sufficiently different from TV Tropes' version to be original?

Also, this version of the same edit but in the wrong namespace, with more content than the one in the Trope Workshop.

EDIT: Noting this comment on the troper's talk page, I'm going to let Geth take care of these two.

Rejected both, they were poorly laundered (and grammatically terrible) TVT plagiarism. Left an official warning.

[robkelk]

Thanks.

[Umbire]

I just did an edit pass on it -- WDStudios clearly has never read either our Style Guidelines, the instructions within the Trope template, or, indeed, any trope page on the wiki, given their rather idiosyncratic markup choices and all.  While it may be wasted effort if we decide it's another case of "the same only a little different" (and we need to start debating that in the talk page), the page now at least looks right.

Yeah, I loved the basic idea of the workshop page, but the creator formatted it abysmally. If they do it again, I say we give them a talking to.

They responded and oh boy, looks like we have one of those "everyone is biased but me" types. This should be fun and productive to deal with.

[GethN7]

On a technical note, while our Flow double post/database timeout issues are getting better, we do have some lingering issues with that. I expect this will continue to improve with time as the database caches the improved changes to that on the backend, but be advised it's not entirely gone away yet.

[Umbire]

On a technical note, while our Flow double post/database timeout issues are getting better, we do have some lingering issues with that. I expect this will continue to improve with time as the database caches the improved changes to that on the backend, but be advised it's not entirely gone away yet.

Yeah, was thinking of bringing that up actually.

In other news, WDS seems open to actual discussion, and I'm currently happy to be wrong about that much at least.

[robkelk]

Good news! DPL3 works again!

I've reactivated it.

[robkelk]

Bad news! Flow breaks magic words.

Why are we using this obviously-not-fit-for-purpose extension, anyway? The drawbacks appear to outweigh the benefits.

[GethN7]

Bad news! Flow breaks magic words.

Why are we using this obviously-not-fit-for-purpose extension, anyway? The drawbacks appear to outweigh the benefits.

Flow was meant for conversations and to avoid the issue of how manual talk pages required a lot of markup to keep long conversations readable. It's also used for our Reviews namespace for those who wish to write a review in a format similar to how TV Tropes has their reviews space.

It was never meant to allow certain types of markup by design.

Our problems are not with Flow, anyway. Our problems are with how the backend has not completely addressed the changes brought about by the new update, which is out of our hands.

If there is a majority vote to disable Flow for talk pages, that is doable, but it may make referencing them difficult later. One thing I recommend, purely for technical reasons, is to belay any serious attempt to disable Flow until they are able to set up an Elastic Search cluster to offload our current search system on. Stock MediaWiki search is intensely taxing on the database and can cause slowdown in other things, and if they can offload that to its own server cluster, our Flow performance issues should drastically improve.

[robkelk]

Anything along the lines of "That's the way TV Tropes does it" has always been shot down everywhere else on the wiki. Why should it suddenly be a concern in the Reviews namespace?

When the backend is updated, will Flow stop breaking magic words?

[GethN7]

Anything along the lines of "That's the way TV Tropes does it" has always been shot down everywhere else on the wiki. Why should it suddenly be a concern in the Reviews namespace?

When the backend is updated, will Flow stop breaking magic words?

Rob, I remind you it provides a FEATURE on par with something they provide, which, is why ATT exists, to provide an alternative community with all the features (barring technical and practical limitations) of TV Tropes in order to allow others to make the jump easier, hence why we forked. It does NOT mean we are cloning what they do exactly, merely providing our own version of the same service tailored for OUR needs.

Past this, I don't know what to say. I hope the above is helpful, and I will cooperate to try and go with whatever solution the community wants, but there are downsides to regular talk pages and Flow as well as upsides, and we lose certain features and things that make out lives less stressful either way. Regardless, if this is important enough to you and you can get a consensus on changing core features to address what you consider to be a problem, and I will do everything in my power to help either way.

Update: To eliminate a possibility, I tried enabling slow parser functions very briefly to see if that fixes the issue, no dice. Instead, it confirmed that Flow returning the correct result. Rob, when I switch to view the source, this is what I saw:

<code>
And of course I can't preview the test.

First, the page name: {{PAGENAME}}
</code>

What the user sees is this:

<code>
And of course I can't preview the test.

First, the page name: Wn4fz55iuamwacnt
</code>

The magic word is NOT broken, it's working as intended, because this is the operative page value in the URL:

Topic:Wn4fz55iuamwacnt

Everything after "Topic:" is detected as the operative page value by the magic word by the parser and that's the result you get, same with stuff like BASEPAGENAME and similar magic words.

In short, Flow is not broken, nor are the magic words broken, because the talk pages are NOT in the same namespace as the page itself, which is by design, so the magic word returns the page value of the Flow Topic namespace, not the page name of the source page.

If you want to disable Flow and go back to stock talk pages, then what you want to do will work, but we lose the convenient autothreading and topic creation tools provided by Flow. Certain features that only worked with regular talk pages (as the regular ones will reference the base article page) will work again, but that means we will have to create new topics by hand, space out conversations by hand, and do a lot of other things Flow is nice enough to automate. As for performance, Flow should greatly improve once they offload the search to it's own cluster freeing up more server resources to avoid the timeout issues we saw. As for the other stuff, we could disable Flow for talk pages and simply keep it for other things, but we have a clear tradeoff which we will need to put to a vote on what the community prefers. Whatever is chosen I will of course happily go with.

[robkelk]

I don't know what you're looking at, but that isn't what I see on my computer. I've taken a screen shot and highlighted in yellow two strings that should match. They do not match. Thus, something is broken.

   

Although your reply reminds me of other issues:

• There is no way to preview edits before committing them in Flow.
  
• Other extensions do not work with Flow, including any extension that sends an automated "Welcome to the wiki" message to a new user. Thus, we have had no choice but to have a sitenotice at the top of every page for an entire year so that people are aware that their contributions in most of the wiki are subject to Moderation.
  
• Speaking of Moderation, does it work with Flow? Or are we letting talk pages go unmoderated as a back-door for spammers?
  

EDIT: If the reason for Flow is to allow automated threaded discussion (which I for one do not see a need for), might I suggest looking into replacing it with CommentStreams? That extension appears to "play well" with Social Profile.

[GethN7]

I don't know what you're looking at, but that isn't what I see on my computer. I've taken a screen shot and highlighted in yellow two strings that should match. They do not match. Thus, something is broken.



Although your reply reminds me of other issues:

• There is no way to preview edits before committing them in Flow.
  
• Other extensions do not work with Flow, including any extension that sends an automated "Welcome to the wiki" message to a new user. Thus, we have had no choice but to have a sitenotice at the top of every page for an entire year so that people are aware that their contributions in most of the wiki are subject to Moderation.
  
• Speaking of Moderation, does it work with Flow? Or are we letting talk pages go unmoderated as a back-door for spammers?
  

EDIT: If the reason for Flow is to allow automated threaded discussion (which I for one do not see a need for), might I suggest looking into replacing it with CommentStreams? That extension appears to "play well" with Social Profile.

Well, what I said is still operative because Flow ignores your userpage because the Topic namespace is transcluded OVER the regular namespace (Flow uses a different namespace and effectively ignores your stock talk page on a technical level), so it will report back via magic word the Topic page title, not your userpage title. (hence why I ignored the User talk:Robkelk part, I knew Flow ignored that on a technical level after reading the documentation, my apologies for not being clearer relaying that)

This stated, you have made a compelling argument for depreciation of Flow for the talk pages of users and articles (they can be archived if we do this and just retain it for the reviews or any other namespace we deem fit to preserve discussion history), and Comment Streams does look like a good idea given our concerns.

I have no objection to switching over to it myself, but I suggest we put this to a public vote and we'll go from there. For the record, I will vote in favor, but I'd still rather let the community know the pros and cons of this before we make this change, which will require some work to archive Flow pages and make sure no issues occur during transition.

[Bob Schroeck]

Meanwhile, is anyone else getting 502s and 503s when trying to view pages (but not for any other function, like recent changes and searches)? The wiki has been slow for me all afternoon, but at some point in the last 45 minutes it appears to have just given up on displaying actual content.

EDIT: I can also upload files/images and look at categories. I just can't see actual content pages.

[robkelk]

I just did a test view and edit of a random page, with no issues.

[Bob Schroeck]

Yeah, I was just coming back to say i could see your edit. And I realized that I could see the main page for that work... but I still couldn't load "Ask a Stupid Question". In fact, it seems to be only that page, as I have since seeing your edit hopped around through random pages, then went to what links to "Ask a Stupid Question", picked a page at random and followed its link to "AASQ", and bang! 502 Bad Gateway.

So revised question: Is anyone else getting 502s and 503s on "Ask a Stupid Question", and only on that page?

EDIT: And since I wanted to create a subpage and can see any other page, I just went directly to the nonexistent page and created it that way, so I don't need to see the parent page now. But the problem is disturbingly specific and bugs the hell out of me.

[robkelk]

It took a bit longer than I expected, but the page loaded for me. Then I tried a test edit (adding crosslinks to the section headers), and I'm getting 502s when I try to see the result.

EDIT: Going back in the browser history to the first load of the page and reloading from there worked - showing that the edit had not been saved.

RE-EDIT: And then purging the page resulted in another 502. Yeah, that particular page appears to be borked.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, so it's not just me. Thanks, Rob.

If it's still doing this in a couple hours, I think I might lob a ticket into Phabricator.

[robkelk]

While cleaning up a redirect, I found three pages that timeout on trying to save the edit: "Double Entendre", "Long List", and "Dissimile". These were three pages out of sixteen; the other thirteen had no issues with saving their edits.

Is anyone else having this sort of trouble? Is this the same issue that Bob's having?

It might be time to open a Phabricator ticket...

[Bob Schroeck]

I got past the issue I was having last night, but I'm still seeing very slow saves on page edits.

[GethN7]

Said it before, but in lieu of our issues, I'd be in favor of archiving all Flow pages (save for the reviews space, that gets little enough traffic we can leave it be), switching over to Comment Streams as a more lightweight alternative, and otherwise reducing our extension overhead of things that work poorly to make our issues better until the backend stuff improves.

If no one objects, I was going to put up a notice linking to a technical blog post where I outline the issues, why we need to switch, and adding voting so we can get the pulse of the community before the switchover.

We may need to get some help from our Miraheze overlords, but I already know what they'll need to do to implement it if we go ahead, so I can send in the support ticket then.

[robkelk]

No issues here. (I was going to wait until Bob's and my current issues with saving edits was resolved, but we can address both things at the same time.)

[GethN7]

No issues here. (I was going to wait until Bob's and my current issues with saving edits was resolved, but we can address both things at the same time.)

Done.

https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Blog:Tech_report_for_2022

Let me know if I need to add more or feel free to add more yourself if required.

[robkelk]

Speaking of current issues, there are slowdowns on the freebie wiki and the There's Nothing Better wiki this morning... so I'm, guessing they're Miraheze-wide.

[GethN7]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I did some last-minute tech lookup to make sure CommentStreams will not cause issues, there are only three issues, but all are surmountable.


1. Flow: CommentStreams is not directly compatible, but so long as we restrict Flow to the Reviews namespace, disable it everywhere else, and archive all existing Flow threads, this is surmountable with minimal hassles.

2. Comments: Used on BlogPage pages only. Simply restricting CommentStreams to talk pages (as is the default) will avoid issues.

3. Moderation: No issues with either working per se, but Moderation will not cover CommentStreams enabled pages (which is little different from how Flow threads are handled), so this is mostly a non-issue.