A Week of Work...
Posted: Fri Dec 31, 2021 4:53 am
Okay, so I said I was going to make a "news" post every week, and it's been a week, so I guess I should make a "news" post.
Actually, it's been a bit over a week, since it was... a week and two days ago that I made the last post. In fact, it was a week and two and a half days ago. Plus a few hours. Still, I said I'd make a post every week, not that I would never let a week pass between posts. Although I don't want to get in the habit of letting this much time pass between posts.
It's not like we don't have anything to post about. Actually, we got a lot done. Most notably, yes, we, well, got the site all working again. We updated the MediaWiki software for both the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery, as well as the phpBB software for the forum. Unfortunately, updating the MediaWiki code completely broke the rest of the site (except for the forum), and it took a while to get that fixed... it turned out the changes to the MediaWiki code meant that the code for parsing the wikitext on the main site didn't work anymore, and we had to figure out what had changed and how we had to change the code to fix it again. (These "news" posts are actually written in Wikitext that the PHP code then parses by calling MediaWiki functions, for... some reason.) Then it turned out the site was still kind of broken because the code for the random article feature didn't work anymore either, but that didn't take quite as long to fix, though we did have kind of an odd bug for a little while where the random article text was pulled from a different article than the title.
We also cleared out all the spammer accounts in the forums; in doing so we also accidentally deleted one account we'd let slide before that had only made a single post asking "What is this?", on the grounds that while it was probably spam, there was a slight possibility that it wasn't. Well, no great loss; they hadn't made any further posts, and honestly that was almost certainly a spammer testing the waters anyway. And we reimplemented most of the MediaWiki extensions we'd had before, including the MathJax extension (which hadn't been working anyway), the ParserFunctions extention (without which many of our templates didn't work), and the Interwiki extension. So... not an entirely unproductive week, I guess.
We also posted two new articles, both by Antefyn and both having been written some time ago and waiting in the backlog of articles I wanted to look through before posting. There are quite a few more articles in the backlog—and I'll get to the rest of them and get them all posted, but we're prioritizing getting the site working first. Oh... and I, uh, kind of remembered we have a twitter, and made a couple of tweets about the new articles and the last news post. At some point maybe I'll figure out how to automate the Twitter account to automatically make a tweet when we post a new article. Or maybe I won't. I don't know.
Speaking of getting the site working, though, there's still quite a bit left to do. We reimplemented most of the extensions we'd had before, but not all of them. There's a Collection extension that we haven't quite worked out how to reimplement yet, though I suppose that one's not really too important. A bit more urgent is a phpBB single-sign on extension that... well, let people use the site with a single sign-on, instead of having to use separate sign-ons for the forum and each wiki. Unfortunately, that extension apparently doesn't work at all with newer versions of MediaWiki, so we'll have to find some other way to do this. In the meantime, well, there's no way to create new accounts for the wiki, which means no one who doesn't already have an account—which means no one but the Grandmaster Wongers—can post there. That is, no one but the Grandmaster Wongers could post in the Central Wongery mainspace anyway, but other users are supposed to be able to post in the Central Wongery talkspace and in the Public Wongery, and for now they can't. Still, nobody's ever posted there anyway, so I guess maybe this isn't all that urgent, but it is one more thing we need to get done before the hard launch next year.
Also, we've got to implement a better captcha system in the forum. In the few days since we got them updated and got user registration working again, we've had, let's see... twenty-one new spammer accounts register. Which, again, is not as many as at the worst point when there were dozens of new accounts registered per day, but still more that we'd like to deal with if we could avoid it. Granted, none of them have actually made any posts yet, but given the usernames I think it's pretty safe to say these aren't legitimate accounts: Juligty, Julipbl, Julibkj, Romanoshen, Julibyo, poislerie, Julirea, Julinvy, Romanosgrd, Marinaiqh, Julitgu, Levvkd, Marinagfn, Marinaokh, Levccd, Levwix, Marinauzc, Levrzu, Levhiz, RobertErype, and Levgbg, you're not fooling anybody.
So... that's the state of the Wongery for now. 51 weeks till the hard launch...
Actually, it's been a bit over a week, since it was... a week and two days ago that I made the last post. In fact, it was a week and two and a half days ago. Plus a few hours. Still, I said I'd make a post every week, not that I would never let a week pass between posts. Although I don't want to get in the habit of letting this much time pass between posts.
It's not like we don't have anything to post about. Actually, we got a lot done. Most notably, yes, we, well, got the site all working again. We updated the MediaWiki software for both the Central Wongery and the Public Wongery, as well as the phpBB software for the forum. Unfortunately, updating the MediaWiki code completely broke the rest of the site (except for the forum), and it took a while to get that fixed... it turned out the changes to the MediaWiki code meant that the code for parsing the wikitext on the main site didn't work anymore, and we had to figure out what had changed and how we had to change the code to fix it again. (These "news" posts are actually written in Wikitext that the PHP code then parses by calling MediaWiki functions, for... some reason.) Then it turned out the site was still kind of broken because the code for the random article feature didn't work anymore either, but that didn't take quite as long to fix, though we did have kind of an odd bug for a little while where the random article text was pulled from a different article than the title.
We also cleared out all the spammer accounts in the forums; in doing so we also accidentally deleted one account we'd let slide before that had only made a single post asking "What is this?", on the grounds that while it was probably spam, there was a slight possibility that it wasn't. Well, no great loss; they hadn't made any further posts, and honestly that was almost certainly a spammer testing the waters anyway. And we reimplemented most of the MediaWiki extensions we'd had before, including the MathJax extension (which hadn't been working anyway), the ParserFunctions extention (without which many of our templates didn't work), and the Interwiki extension. So... not an entirely unproductive week, I guess.
We also posted two new articles, both by Antefyn and both having been written some time ago and waiting in the backlog of articles I wanted to look through before posting. There are quite a few more articles in the backlog—and I'll get to the rest of them and get them all posted, but we're prioritizing getting the site working first. Oh... and I, uh, kind of remembered we have a twitter, and made a couple of tweets about the new articles and the last news post. At some point maybe I'll figure out how to automate the Twitter account to automatically make a tweet when we post a new article. Or maybe I won't. I don't know.
Speaking of getting the site working, though, there's still quite a bit left to do. We reimplemented most of the extensions we'd had before, but not all of them. There's a Collection extension that we haven't quite worked out how to reimplement yet, though I suppose that one's not really too important. A bit more urgent is a phpBB single-sign on extension that... well, let people use the site with a single sign-on, instead of having to use separate sign-ons for the forum and each wiki. Unfortunately, that extension apparently doesn't work at all with newer versions of MediaWiki, so we'll have to find some other way to do this. In the meantime, well, there's no way to create new accounts for the wiki, which means no one who doesn't already have an account—which means no one but the Grandmaster Wongers—can post there. That is, no one but the Grandmaster Wongers could post in the Central Wongery mainspace anyway, but other users are supposed to be able to post in the Central Wongery talkspace and in the Public Wongery, and for now they can't. Still, nobody's ever posted there anyway, so I guess maybe this isn't all that urgent, but it is one more thing we need to get done before the hard launch next year.
Also, we've got to implement a better captcha system in the forum. In the few days since we got them updated and got user registration working again, we've had, let's see... twenty-one new spammer accounts register. Which, again, is not as many as at the worst point when there were dozens of new accounts registered per day, but still more that we'd like to deal with if we could avoid it. Granted, none of them have actually made any posts yet, but given the usernames I think it's pretty safe to say these aren't legitimate accounts: Juligty, Julipbl, Julibkj, Romanoshen, Julibyo, poislerie, Julirea, Julinvy, Romanosgrd, Marinaiqh, Julitgu, Levvkd, Marinagfn, Marinaokh, Levccd, Levwix, Marinauzc, Levrzu, Levhiz, RobertErype, and Levgbg, you're not fooling anybody.
So... that's the state of the Wongery for now. 51 weeks till the hard launch...