GuildWiki:Wikia staff noticeboard/Resolved2

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The deletion log
Is borked? See this. Note that the offset number in that URL is approximately one decillion, and it's showing edits from august 2007.  &not; Wizårdbõÿ777  ( talk ) 02:07, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
 * It went back beyond the beginning of time and wrapped around, obviously d-: -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 02:11, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Yay everyone's back and I've still got all my teeth! --Xasxas256 02:39, 7 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Also, just fyi, it shows those entries for any offset number of 10000 or higher.  &not; Wizårdbõÿ777  ( talk ) 17:26, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Considering the "correct" behavior is probably "ERROR! Invalid offset! Go delete more pages!", I doubt this is high on the priority list to fix... -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 18:07, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually, that's not what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps using an offset of one decillion wasn't the best example. Look at the deletion log with an offset of 10000 and with an offset of 10500. They show the exact same entries. But go to the bottom of the page and look at the date of the last entry - July 9th, 2007. The builds wipe was in May of 2007, so there should be entries in the log after that, but you can click "next 500" forever and it will never get to them, it'll just keep showing the same 500. Those entries are still in the log - if you search for a specific user you can see them, and you can probably see them if you search for a specific page, but you can't see them without specifying a user or an article.  &not; Wizårdbõÿ777  ( talk ) 21:17, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the clarification. -User:PanSola (talk to the [[Image:follower of Lyssa.png]]) 21:53, 8 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the heads-up. I reported this issue to our tech team so they can take a look at it. --KyleH (talk) 17:25, 14 May 2008 (UTC)
 * Heya ... just a quick follow-up on this. This behavior is intentional in MediaWiki 1.12 for performance reasons.  The MediaWiki developers have changed that behavior in 1.13, so it should be fixed in the next MediaWiki upgrade. --KyleH (talk) 22:00, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Bot posts triggering new messages notice
We have found that if a bot posts on a user's talk page, it does not seem to trigger the new messages notice. I have found no information indicating that this is normal behavior. The only special feature of a bot is that its edits do not show up in recent changes by default because of their flag. We would like to use bots to leave important notices on user's talk pages and if the bot doesn't trigger the new messages notice, they won't know about it. Is this a bug or some setting that can be changed? We are discussing it primarily in relation to Bot tasks/License reminder but I bet we will have other reasons to perform similar tasks in the future. &mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 18:28, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Heya! The reason that the bot is not triggering notification messages is because it is marking the changes as minor changes.  By default, users to not receive notification of bot edits marked as minor edits.  Try leaving the messages as non-minor edits and see if notification works properly.  You can find more details here  --KyleH (talk) 18:41, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Not something I would've guessed, but that's exactly what it was. I got a notification for my bot editing my talk page as a non-minor edit.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 18:50, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Kyle. Good to know. Could have sworn I read that exact page yesterday when I was looking for my answer though... must have missed it. I can easily change it so the bot's edits are not minor. &mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥  18:54, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
 * No problem. Trudging through the MediaWiki documentation is an arduous task ... I just got lucky and found that page pretty quickly.  It wouldn't surprise me if you found a page almost exactly like that one somewhere else without that tidbit of information. ;) --KyleH (talk) 21:55, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

Spam filter stuff
I don't know if this is discussed somewhere else, but I never encountered anything blocking me cause of spam filtering but what do I do about it? lol. I couldn't edit the following page: User:Vespa Lynch. I say that sysops shouldn't have spam filter issues... ♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 23:57, 6 June 2008 (UTC)


 * It would be best if wikia could just pop up a warning that allowed to user to [Cancel this link] [Continue to destination website] - else people are just going to start circumventing the block, and I already found two different ways to do so without really tring hard. ;-) Just rewrite the link whenever it is saved, e.g. http://badspammer.com to http://spam.wikia.com/?spamurl=badspammer.com . --mendel 10:40, 7 June 2008 (UTC)#
 * Tinyurl has a preview feature - I agree with wikia doing it - perhaps a user preferences opt out... Random Time 10:44, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Since I obviously worded my idea badly, I clarify: I want wikia to pop up a warning (similar to the tinyurl warning) for all URLs it classifies as spam, instead of blocking them. Although this probably defeats the purpose of preventing spammers posting in the first place. :-( --mendel 11:12, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I'll pass the feedback along to our product guys. I suspect that we don't do that because that really doesn't prevent the spam from appearing ... spammers and their bots interpret the post as a success and keep chugging along.  By the way, you can use MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist to allow the posting of URLs that would otherwise be blacklisted. --KyleH (talk) 06:04, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmm, so you have the same suspicions I do. ;-) Well, we can probably make another template for users to request an admin to unblock a URL (much like page deletes or bans are requested). We'll see how that works out. --mendel 13:10, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * In case you want to customize it to send users to a certain page to request that the URL be whitelisted, the text for the message that the user receives when a page is blocked by the spam filter is stored at MediaWiki:spamprotectiontitle (for the page title), MediaWiki:spamprotectiontext (for the first line), and MediaWiki:spamprotectionmatch (for the second line). --KyleH (talk) 16:44, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

edit count
Sometime recently the format of Special:Editcount was changed to be a new table. Out of curiousity, I wonder when that occurred. Out of concern, the font is very small and hard to read. Should we fix that within our own css or is that a wikia wide thing that should be adjusted? &mdash;♥ Jedi ♥ Rogue ♥ 01:40, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * It looks like this went in to production on Tuesday, June 3rd. I'll pass along the comments regarding the font size of the text in the table, but for the time being, it's probably best that you just fix it yourself in your MediaWiki:common.css.  Adding ...

.ecmaintable { font-size: 10pt !important; }
 * ... should do the trick. --KyleH (talk) 06:00, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Looks like that'll work, thanks! &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 21:23, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Image:Gwevilcoolnl6.jpg
The image was deleted back in April, yet you can see it if you follow a link, it shows up in Special:Unusedimages, internal links to it don't show up as broken, and you can display it normally. Oh, and the headline preview shows it as a redlink o_O  &not; Wizårdbõÿ777  ( talk ) 18:10, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * hmmm, that's a pretty odd bug, but re-uploading then deleting (rather than just undeleting then deleting) seems to have fixed it). --KyleH (talk) 18:15, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
 * Most of the time undel/del worked when I came across images like that during my huge delete spree about a month ago. I'll remember this trick for the future, though.  &mdash;Dr Ishmael [[Image:Diablo_the_chicken.gif]] 21:32, 12 June 2008 (UTC)