Thread:Project:Support desk/Features mysteriously stop working

Hello, Helpful Persons!

My version numbers:
 * MediaWiki: 1.16.0
 * PHP: 5.3.0 (apache2handler)
 * MySQL, 5.1.36-community-log.

I can't link you to my wiki because it's just hosted on my desktop computer, for use only on that computer, as a giant sort of commonplace book.

Problem 1
 * In August 2011, I got my wiki to have popups like the ones at Wikipedia, the ones that give you a previous of the contents of another page if you hover the mouse pointer over a link to that page. For some reason, it took more steps and messing around than various webpages describing how to implement the feature had suggested; but, in the end, it worked.
 * Several weeks later, I made a fresh installation of Windows and migrated my wiki to the new Windows installation by installing the appropriate software and then simply pasting in the contents of the whole folder.
 * After that, a problem arose. I don't know whether it was immediately after the new installation, or whether there was an interval.  The problem was that the aforementioned popups stopped appearing.  They have never returned.  I've tried and tried to get them back, read webpage after webpage, all to no avail.

Problem 2
 * Much more recently, a new problem has arisen: all my Navbox templates no longer are automatically collapsed; instead, they're all expanded.  I tried forcing their collapse by changing the state from "autocollapse" to "collapsed"; this caused no change.  Also, the "hide" link in the upper right corner of the Navboxes is gone.  As far as I remember, this change was immediately preceded by my making no changes whatsoever to any of the pages and files that affect how the wiki looks or operates.

How can I solve these two problems?

I'm not thrilled at the prospect of returning everything to its default, for fear that I'd have to repeat a bunch of work customizing fonts and some other things. At the same time, there's clearly a growing number of problems that start seemingly without my doing anything to cause them; so maybe something of a fresh start is in order.

In fact, I like so much how things work at Wikipedia these days that I'd happily paste in a file or files that would make a whole bunch of things work at my wiki just the way they do at Wikipedia, including proper Navbox behavior, the popups, and the edit-page buttons for inserting special characters (such as IPA and math characters) and tags (such as those for strikethrough and for categories). (That last point is another problem, come to think of it: in my wiki, several of the buttons at the top of the edit box have ceased to be little iconic pictures and instead are just text describing what tags they would insert.  ...  Actually, now even some of the text descriptions are gone, replaced by blank space.)

I'm no fool at MediaWiki; but these problems are over my head, and my research off and on over many months has been tiresome and fruitless. So I'm ready for your best suggestions!

Thank you very much, Everyone. Preslethe (talk) 17:24, 9 September 2012 (UTC)