Well, so far in 2023 I have managed to devote an hour a day to writing and editing Wongery articles. Unfortunately, this turns out to still be too slow a pace to get as much done as I'd like; writing a single article takes multiple hours. Still, it's a lot better than I've been doing the last few years, and if I keep up this pace at least I'll be getting something done—and of course the hope remains I can accelerate the pace and make more time to work on the Wongery, but at least I'm going to try to keep to at least an hour a day as a minimum.

Finally putting that time into the Wongery, I've managed to get one new article finished, as well as one very short old article significantly expanded. (I've started on other articles, but they're not quite ready to post yet.) When I went to post the new articles to the Wongery, though, I ran into an unexpected problem... I couldn't log in.

Okay, the next few paragraphs are going to get into some technical stuff about the MediaWiki backend, so if you have no interest in that feel free to skip them. (I mean, you can skip any of these posts anyway, obviously. You don't need my permission for that.)

It wasn't hard to figure out the reason for this. I wanted the Wongery site to have one unified login, for the Central Wongery, the fora, the Public Wongery, and any Master Wongeries that may eventually exist—rather than requiring users to create a separate login for each component of the site. To that end, I'd been using an extension called Phpbb Single Sign-On that allowed (and indeed forced) users to sign in to the wiki using their forum credentials. Unfortunately, with the update of MediaWiki to version 1.27 in 2016, that extension stopped working, and was no longer maintained. In the extension's talk page, a user had linked to a workaround they had done using another extension called Auth_remoteuser, so I went ahead and implemented that instead. Or maybe I didn't, because while I do see the extension in the extensions directory I don't see the requisite lines in my LocalSettings.php configuration file. Perhaps that extension too had broken with a recent update to either MediaWiki or phpBB—I do note from its github page that it hasn't been updated in almost four years, so that seems likely—and I had disabled it. Well, whatever the details, the upshot is that I now had no working extension installed that would let me log in through my forum account. And since I'd originally set things up for logins to the wiki to go through the forum account, there was no way for me to log in to the wiki directly. (I mean, presumably there was a way, if I knew what password to use, but I didn't. Or I guess I could have reset my password, but I didn't really want to enable logins directly through the wiki anyway.)

So that meant I'd have to figure out how to get the single sign in implemented again. And it turned out there was another extension, PHPBB_Auth, that did just that. So if I could get this extension up and working, I'd be good to go.

This turned out to be slightly more involved than I'd expected. First, the PHPBB_Auth extension relied on another extension, PluggableAuth, that I'd have to install first. And that extension wasn't available for the version of MediaWiki that the Wongery was currently running on, 1.37. (There was a link to download a version of the extension for MediaWiki 1.35, which presumably would have still worked with 1.37, except that when I tried to download that version I got a 404 error.) So I had to update the MediaWiki first. And before I did that I wanted to back up all my files and databases just in case, which took a while. Anyway, I got MediaWiki updated to the latest version; I got PluggableAuth and PHPBB_Auth installed; and then... I still couldn't log in. But after a bit of additional troubleshooting, which no doubt would have taken a lot less time if I had any idea what I was doing, I finally could.

(Yeah, to be clear, I don't have any idea what I'm doing. I'm not an expert programmer. I'm not great with computers. I'm trying to bumble my way through and get things working and so far I seem not to have irrevocably broken anything, but we'll see how long that holds up. I do have plans to write my own MediaWiki extensions to enable the extra features I eventually want the Wongery wikis to have, but I will probably be way over my head there and may very well fail disastrously. We'll see how it goes. If I had the money for it, I'd probably hire a programmer to do all this back end stuff for me, but I don't, so I haven't.)

So. Behold the newest article in the Wongery: Kaylit. And an older article that's been expanded to about nine times its former length: Tabulator batirine.

(I had for the last few years been trying to make a habit of making a Twitter post each time a new article was posted (or an old article significantly updated), but... given what's going on at Twitter right now, yeah, I think I'm staying away from that place. I guess there's really no point in staking out any sort of social media presence before the hard launch anyway; maybe by 2024 the dust will have settled and Twitter will either have returned to some semblance of sanity or will be basically dead. Either way, I guess when the time comes I'll probably want to make accounts on Mastodon and Tumblr; even if Twitter does manage to pull out of its current death spiral it wouldn't hurt to have a presence in more than one place.)

Oh... while it's unrelated to the rest of this post, there is one recent development that I suppose I should acknowledge, since it does seem likely to have some effect on the Wongery. Eh... you know what? Never mind. It's unrelated enough it should probably be the subject of a separate post, which I guess I'll make tomorrow. I'd worry about leaving you in suspense, but since the Wongery hasn't had its hard launch yet, nobody's reading this the day I'm writing this, and if anyone is reading this they're reading it much later after the next news article has already been posted.