User talk:Skizzerz/LQT Archive 1

Please put new messages at the bottom by clicking either the + tab on top or [ click here]. If you leave a message here, I will respond here (unless you state that I should answer on your talk page).

OMG!!! RightFunctions!
I realize my section heading is AOL-speak, but in this case I think it's justified (I almost never use IM langauge). Imagine my surprise when, just when I was trying (and failing) to write my own extension to return the current protection level of a page, I discovered yours (RightFunctions) in a search for "getrestrictions"! What joy! And you just added it a few days ago. Congratulations on the extension, by the way; it's doing exactly what I need it to do so far. Thanks for making it and saving me from hours of writing and debugging! — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 19:32, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
 * You're welcome, and glad you enjoy it ^_^. I'm planning on making getrestrictions and ifprotected much more powerful in 1.4, so that'll come by in a few days (hopefully). And if you have any suggestions, feel free to let me know :) --Skizzerz talk 00:40, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, I just came here after cascade-protecting something and noticing that it didn't get tagged as protected. Is cascade-protection detection (I know, ouch) planned? I see you're using  in the code; perhaps that's a problem with MediaWiki's function that should be put in Bugzilla (if it's not there already)? That's the only bug missing feature I've seen so far (with the extension; my ParserFunctions chops have also needed work :P). I'll be watching the extension page for updates; cheers! — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 02:25, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Ok, should work now. --Skizzerz talk 04:12, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, I haven't tested the cascade detection yet, but it no longer works on pages I've explicitly protected. Every protected page I put the template on now displays my "not protected" icon (if you want my template source, just ask). I've gone back to 1.3. It's probably just a code flow issue. I'll look at the extension's code in a bit, after breakfast. Glad to see you're working on development, though. :) — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 13:57, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * So, I've been messing with it, and it's returning the value of what I put after the colon (e.g. for, "edit"; for  , "move"), and if I leave it blank, it returns an empty. But only in version 1.4; 1.3 returns "sysop", "bureaucrat", or "", depending on if the page is protected (sysop level or bureaucrat level) or not. — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 15:22, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I've been experiencing that too in my tests, and I wasn't sure what was going on with that. I'll do some major debugging of that now. --Skizzerz talk 15:24, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It's kind of frustrating that it's doing that, not because it doesn't work, but because I don't see what's changed that should be causing that. I tried changing the array value you have for  to a string, but that just broke it more. I'm not sure I understand the point of  ming stuff, though. But then again, I'm not super familiar with MediaWiki's API... I've been trying to help, though. I'll have to delve into some of the docs later today. — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 15:32, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

I've fixed it, try it now (I didn't realize that getRestrictions sometimes returned an array, so I had to check for that and extract the value of it if it did, which is why it was breaking). --Skizzerz talk 15:56, 27 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Looks good so far! Man, that cascade detection is cool, but boy does it make template programming complicated. :P I'm going to have to think about how to update my template for that...


 * Actually, how hard would it be for you to implement another function to return just the level? This business of adding parenthetical clauses gets really complicated, really fast, and the template won't switch properly if the switch cases have spaces in them. I'm just speaking from the point of view of a template developer, here. Also, perhaps at some point you'll I18n the extension?


 * I know, I'm just piling it on. :D Sorry if you feel overwhelmed. :) — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 16:37, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I'll add in a toggle for how the thing should be returned... check back in about half an hour or so for that. As for internationalisation... that's on hold for 2.0 when things REALLY turn complicated (plus, I'll need someone to help translate, I can do de i18n, but that's about it). --Skizzerz talk 16:49, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Done, it now returns the highest-level restriction among all sources (local and cascading) by default, but you can toggle it back to the list of all restrictions by setting the third parameter. --Skizzerz talk 17:25, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Deary me, I was gone for the day and I come back to find all this! Thanks! Will it still return whether the page is cascade or local? Ideally, I'd like to display different messages depending on whether the protection is local or via cascade. Perhaps that should be its own function, though.


 * Also, on a side note, I was having issues with category links (bug 12420), and I just got a response from Brion Vibber. He says, "Looks like your extension is using ... that's bad mojo, as I believe $wgTitle may belong to someone else during background updates. You should instead pull the current title from the parser, eg  ." I dunno if it'll solve the bug I've been having, but perhaps you could change the code to use the parser's title for the next release? I tweaked the one line after , but it didn't seem to work. Perhaps you'll have better luck. — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 01:43, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
 * You can use to check if it's cascading protected or not (returns true if it is, false if it isn't). As for the title bug, I'll fix that tomorrow. I gotta get some sleep now :) --Skizzerz talk 02:53, 28 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Ha ha! Developers, sleep? I don't. :P


 * Seriously, though, I'll have to look into that other function. I actually forgot that there were other protection-related functions in your extension. :D Really! Thanks for all the help, and the constant communication. Let me know how the title thing goes. 'Night! — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 03:06, 28 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Woo! My bug is gone in 1.7. Thanks for fixing that; I'll go mark it RESOLVED INVALID. Now the only question is, why didn't it work when I tried to fix it? Maybe I need to study a little more MediaWiki... — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 15:10, 28 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Did you change ALL instances of $wgTitle to $parser->getTitle? If not, then the else clause is probably what messed you up. --Skizzerz talk 15:12, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

(reset indent) I actually only changed the two instances I could find in. :P I was being lazy and trying to only test the function I was having problems with at first, before trying the others. — Tuvok[Talk/en.wp] 15:29, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

Very nicely done
I can't believe I missed you when I was spreading the news about the support team, but you are doing hell of a good job, keep it up! -PatPeter, MediaWiki Support Team  02:52, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * It's fine, I only officially joined recently anyway ^_^. --Skizzerz talk 03:02, 31 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The offfical sig addition for MediaWiki is at Project:Support_desk/Support_team. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  15:06, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Anon 82.42.23784 on support desk
Special:Contributions/82.42.237.84 is asking for your help again... looks like he's struggling.

--84.45.219.185 10:17, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

RE:
Wait wait what? You mean the edits I made to Template:Support desk notes? Because as you can see I have made a lot of edits to that template, no need to make a sandbox version of it. As for the speedy and all the rest I wouldn't have made the Support team if I wasn't an experienced editor, hell I've been a Wiki editor for about 2 years this April. -PatPeter,  MediaWiki Support Team  05:34, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
 * No need to get defensive or cranky... I'm just saying that if you do happen to break something, it's best to do it in a sandbox than on the real template page. --Skizzerz talk - contribs [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  15:29, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Did I sound like that? Sorry. It is a one-use template for only that page, so making a few test edits on that wouldn't do much harm, if I tried that on Wikipedia's Navbox, or any other high-use template I would sandbox first. -PatPeter, [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  15:05, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

EditUser imported into SVN
Hi Ryan. Thanks for writing EditUser. I have imported it into the MediaWiki svn repository and made a few changed to it. It uses wfLoadExtensionMessages now, which is the standard for supported extensions. I have also updated the version. The file containing the extension logic has been renamed to EditUser_body.php, which is a standard name.

I an looking into importing some more of the extensions you wrote. Cheers! Siebrand 17:50, 10 February 2008 (UTC)

Unblock
Hello Skizzerz, you know how large of a contributor I am here at this wiki. I was in my opinion unjustly blocked from Wikipedia. If you could put a word in at wikipedia:User talk:PatPeter, I would be grateful. -PatPeter,  MediaWiki Support Team  17:02, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
 * Please do not bug me about Wikipedia shit. I hate the bureaucracy there and that is why I refuse to edit there, or even attempt to understand what the hell goes on behind-the-scenes. Try asking at #wikipedia on IRC or something. --Skizzerz talk - contribs [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  19:24, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

PHP 6 moved to support desk
Greetings, I noticed you moved my PHP 6 question to support desk. However, I had checked that section before posting, and noticed that "Questions on this page are unlikely to be answered very quickly, and may not get answered at all.", so it kind of drove me off, and that's why I posted my question to the main page... I want a reply, and if possible fast!

CielProfond 05:24, 28 February 2008 (UTC)
 * The support desk is for asking questions about the software. The main page talk page is only for discussion of the Main Page itself. I've replied to your question as well. --Skizzerz talk - contribs [[Image:Tournesol.png|20px]] MediaWiki Support Team  21:19, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

EditSubpages error
I am encountering an error with you extension EditSubpages, which I've detailed on the extension's talk page. Any ideas to try to help me are appreciated, as the extension seems very useful! Smaug 20:59, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

GPManager warning showing
Hi i've just installed your GMManager extension but it's throwing up the following warning in Special:Grouppermissions

Warning: Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated - argument passed by value; If you would like to pass it by reference, modify the declaration of sort. If you would like to enable call-time pass-by-reference, you can set allow_call_time_pass_reference to true in your INI file. However, future versions may not support this any longer. in /home/semanticgrid/semanticgrid.ecs.soton.ac.uk/devel/htdocs/extensions/GPManager/GPManager.page.php on line 46

Do you know what I need to comment out or chaage in GPManager.page.php to tfix the problem?

cheers

rebekah
 * Hmm... I'll fix that. I need to add in a few features and commit it to SVN anyway, so expect it later today or tomorrow, perhaps. I'm a bit restricted time-wise due to a huge test I have to study for. --Skizzerz talk - contribs 22:23, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

GPManager
Hiya... were you able to chase down that issue mentioned above? I am having a similar problem when I am trying to execute the extension using MediaWiki 1.12.0. Thanks, Maggi
 * I have just fixed it, needs a bit more standardization and stuff, but it should be fully usable again --Skizzerz talk - contribs 00:13, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to be a pest... have a new issue... : (

Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach in /extensions/GPManager/GPManager_body.php on line 242
 * I cannot reproduce that error on my local install. could you please paste your PHP version? --Skizzerz talk - contribs 03:23, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

Hi! Sure... here is the version info for PHP:

PHP 	5.2.3 (cgi-fcgi) (from the Special:Version page)

Bug in AuthorProtect ?
Hi Skizzerz ! Thank you for your extension AuthorProtect which is exactly what i was looking for... The only problem I see is that when a page has been protected, It seems impossible tu "unprotect" it. When I click on the "unprotect" tab, uncheck the restrictions and then click on the "protect" button (which would by more likely to become an "unprotect" button by the way), I've got the message "Protection Succesful" and the page is still protected.

Besides, when I go to the "unprotect" tab and change nothing, I've got the following notice : undefined variable cascade in AuthorProtect.php in line 170.

I tried rev 33130 and 33102 of the file but with the same results...

Am I the only one with this problem ?

Thanks for your help.
 * What version of MediaWiki are you using? --Skizzerz talk - contribs 21:59, 16 May 2008 (UTC)

I'm using mediawiki 1.12
 * Should be fixed now in version 1.1 of the extension. -- Skiz zerz  02:22, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

ForcePreview + LivePreview
I've left note at Extension_talk:ForcePreview. Please take a look.

--Aik099 09:28, 20 May 2008 (UTC)

Extension:VideoWiki
Thanks for doing the move of Extension:KalturaCollaborativeVideo to Extension:VideoWiki so promptly, I should have put a speedy delete template on it earlier :p --Zven 01:30, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
 * No problem :) I troll recentchanges anyway, so I'd catch pretty much anything. I just must have been afk the first time when you marked it -- Skiz zerz  02:15, 3 June 2008 (UTC)

Change name
I want to change my name into Azmi1995 to make it same like in Wikipedia Azmi 06:01, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
 * ✅, although next time please post on Project:Requests instead of here, thank you. -- Skiz zerz  13:24, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Extension Requests Archive
Would it be possible/appropriate to archive the older content on the page Extension requests? It is very large. Since this is an important page, I think that it would be better for a sysop to do it. You seem to be fairly active lately, so that is why I asked you. The page is very difficult to edit since it is so big. It may need more that one archive.--Mjr162006 03:45, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

reply to
This edit was based on a missing edit conflict. Please note the edit times (just 2 minutes difference). Such unintentional diffs occured a lot recently. So there's absolutely no need to assume silly deliberateness on my part. -- :bdk: 16:27, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
 * I usually don't check edit times when browsing through recentchanges, I only look at the diffs themselves... sorry. -- Skiz zerz  20:18, 20 July 2008 (UTC)
 * ok -- :bdk: 00:36, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

PD Help
Hi Skizzerz. Thanks for your work in sorting out the non-PD Help categorisation. I hope I'm not shitting in your milk with these comments... the foibles of Category:Help have only just been brought to my attention by your edits.

In my opinion (and I think it is an accident of history that this is not already the case) Category:Help should be a category for all help content, organised sensibly into sub-cats, of which PD Help should be one. It would be easy to add all PD help pages to a single category by editing Template:PD Help Page but I am aware that it would involve undoing a lot of your recent edits to put the other pages back into the category (or an appropriate sub-category). What do you reckon? --HappyDog 03:28, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I did see your objection before I started in Category talk:Help, but since that was from September '06 and it seems to have stayed that way since then, I assumed that it was the way we were going with this. Anyway, going along with what you said that Category:Help should be a category for all help content, isn't that what this entire wiki is anyway? The majority of the Manual: namespace contains help content, a lot of Project: namespace pages have help content, and quite a few others do as well. This encompasses over half of the wiki, so if you feel that you want to categorise that many pages... then feel free. Otherwise, I think that since the wiki was designed to have documentation and help, that the category isn't really all that necessary.
 * However, if you still think that the category is needed, I must say that "PD Help" is not an appropriate name for the ones containing the PD help pages. You may find this strange, but consider this: Help:Copying currently details how to copy the PD help pages to one's local wiki. However, once they are copied there, the people at that wiki have the option of re-licensing that material under whatever they want, so having a PD Help category contain cc-by-sa licensed pages (as an example) would be quite odd. At any rate, do whatever you want with the cats, I just wanted to say my 2 cents. Just make sure that if you are reverting me, that you use "undo" instead of "rollback" as I've made some back-to-back contributions to some of those pages. -- Skiz zerz  16:22, 2 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Hmmm... those are some valid points.
 * In terms of the categorisation of the PD help pages, really this should be included in the PD Help Page template, so that all PD help pages are automatically categorised. This also means that if you import the pages to a new wiki, you can simply modify this template to categorise them however you want (or not at all, if you choose).  It therefore doesn't matter from this point of view how we choose to categorise things here.
 * The original aim of Category:Help was as a second-level category for help content. It would not include any pages (except perhaps Help:Contents and Manual:Contents), just sub-categories that point to various other help categories: e.g. Category:Help for users, Category:Help for sysadmins, Category:Manual, Category:Public-domain help, etc.  Basically, the point was to allow the category tree to be usable as site navigation ("OK - I'm here for help, what help resources are there... OK there's the FAQ, there's help for sysadmins... oh no, wait - installation, that's what I'm after") rather than using it as a bunch of boxes to put things in.
 * Whether that's a sensible aim is still open for discussion, but I don't think it's quite so redundant as it appears on first glance --HappyDog 05:16, 4 August 2008 (UTC) ...and you made me think in order to give this reply - my first reaction was "that's all very true... I hadn't thought of that..." :-)
 * Having a second level category with nothing but more specific sub-categories is indeed quite sensible. It provides an extra means of navigation to specific pages that perhaps may not be easily found via search. I also agree with you that the category should be included in PD Help Page and not put onto every page, as it helps keep things synced. Perhaps this discussion could be opened up in a more publicly-known place for some other people to give their input before we go off and do drastic changes to the category structure of the site. -- Skiz zerz  16:09, 4 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed - moved to Project:Current issues. --HappyDog 21:54, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Ready To contribute throughly
Hi,

I'm truetech. I am a user of all the wikimedia sites and I currently own and operate my own wiki website. I have good + knowledge of the wiki software. I am also currently working on a new skin. Starting from yesterday I will be contributing around 5 hours a day of my time to all wikimedia projects. Now I am wondering if I can be promoted to either a Bureaucrat or a Sysop (Bureaucrat would be nice ;)) I am requesting this not only because I have ALOT of spare time, but because this site has alot of broken redirects, bad formated pages, fixing up support page, ect and more. So I want to contribute. Thanks and Cheers! --Truetech 07:15, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
 * No. If you're wondering why, try looking at my user page. -- Skiz zerz  15:49, 8 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh sorry. I didnt see that. Nevermind then. I guess ill post it there. Thanks though. --Truetech 16:10, 8 August 2008 (UTC)

Extension:Cropper
Why did you revert my changes to the Extension:Cropper article. I removed all that information from that article because it was inaccurate. In fact, there does not seem to be code for a Cropper extension and the code in the page is sample code and is entirely non-functional (this was noted on the page). The link provided was to a library that could be used for such a system, not to a working Mediawiki extension. I searched around for quite a long time, looked for code snippets, and such, before I removed the information from that page. Yes, my edits deleted information including version number, status, links, etc, but my edits deleted inaccurate and irrelevant information from the article and left it off in a better state.

I described the situation in a rather long message on Extension_talk:Cropper before I made the edits. Please take a look there and respond before you revert in the future.

As a heads up, I built a working version of a module for editing images which replaces the need for a "Cropper" extension. I will probably turn Extension:Cropper into a redirect to this new extension page this evening but please do go look at the history and talk page. Thanks! —m a k o ๛  00:55, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Because it looked like vandalism when I was going through the diffs. I usually don't check discussion pages and really don't plan on starting to before reverting edits that look like vandalism. Try using edit summaries in the future when removing content. -- Skiz zerz  02:29, 12 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I apologize for not using an edit summary on the edits in question. I didn't in this case only because I'd explained myself in depth on the talk page already. I will try to be more diligent about referencing talk page messages from edit summaries in the future. You should also try to be more careful. With a more in-depth look, there were clues that the edits might not have been vandalism: done by a logged in user with legitimate edits, clearly improved wording in the diffs, removal of information selectively, etc. In these types of cases, it may in fact be worth checking talk pages or the user's contributions (where you would have seen the talk page edit) before reverting.


 * The vast majority of new editors will not come back to check and reinstate their edits and many won't use edit summaries properly. As a result, the onus needs to be on the people patrolling to ensure they don't revert legitimate edits that improve the quality of articles. I appreciate your hard work (and your extensions!). Let's see if we can both learn from this to ensure that we maximize good contributions to the wiki in the future. —m a k o ๛  05:16, 12 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Agreed. I will try to be more thorough before by getting the full story before taking actions like this in the future. -- Skiz zerz  17:06, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Did you post the info on atari assault? If so drop by arcadetreasure.com I have a few questions.

Deletion of How to Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu
The license for ubuntu.com is at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/License stating that it's CC-BY-SA 3.0, which is compatible with the GFDL. Instead of deleting the page, it would be sufficient to add an edit summary stating the origin of the media in the edit history. You may wish to consider restoring the page and adding an attribution edit instead. Thanks! Kylu 02:32, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Can you handle that? I'm not quite sure how/where to put the attribution. -- Skiz zerz  02:35, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
 * ✅ Kylu 04:00, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

At the risk of starting an impromptu AfD, the article is useless, and Manual:Running MediaWiki on Ubuntu already covers Ubuntu installation pretty nicely. Also, my understanding is that we don't directly support the installation of MediaWiki through package managers. —Emufarmers(T 00:47, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Let's take this discussion to Talk:How to Install MediaWiki on Ubuntu where more people can comment on it :) -- Skiz zerz  02:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Safe mode
Thank you for your answer. I tried to rethink the article and published a honest opinions from both sides and made a clear article structure. --Jehy 21:23, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks once again for correcting me. I completely forgot about so many formatting issues... And my English is too bad - right now, I can translate everything in Russian with a pretty good quality - but not vice versa :( --Jehy 00:28, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I made a mistake
And then I didn't realize what I had done until it was completed. Sorry about it, I promise it won't happen again. Drini 00:35, 22 October 2008 (UTC)


 * It doesn't seem like that bad of a mistake. I rebuilt it soon after and Skizzerz caught the oldid issue. By the way, at what point do you guys decide to clear out the history on the Sandbox? Just whenever, or after so many edits?Matt 00:47, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It's a matter of whenever a sysop feels like it. Generally I try to refresh it after it hits 500-1000 revisions, but sooner or later is fine, there really isn't a policy. @Drini: Don't feel bad, I made the same mistake my first time doing it (I kept clicking reset and it kept saying "No Old revision found" or something as the page text, making me very confused), and it was caught before anyone could've accidentally hit it anyway, so no harm done. Just something to keep in mind in the future :) -- Skiz zerz  01:59, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Eyecandy
Thanks very much. Your help is much appreciated. Anyway, where can I find the MediaWiki:Common.css page and will it work on MediaWiki 1.6.5 software (unfortunately the ultimate powers that be at wikicars have been dragging their feet at updating to the latest version)? I also have another question, is it possible to make images transparent via the wiki software or not?

-Red marquis 07:04, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It's the page called MediaWiki:Common.css. And no, you need image editing software to add transparency to images. -- Skiz zerz  16:47, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * That's strange. We don't have that page. Thanks anyway. btw, I have another question: recently, we had a server crash and after having got it back up again our site came back with an anomaly. Whenever we post a picture on a page, especially when we encase it in a thumbnail or resize it to any pixel or insert it into a gallery, we either get a blank box or we get this text: "Error creating thumbnail: sh: /usr/sfw/bin/convert: No such file or directory ". The only pictures affected are the ones uploaded after the crash, the ones before that show up fine. They also upload fine however it's linking it to a page where it gets all whack. Do you know what problem we're having and how we may be able to fix it? Thanks.

-Red marquis 13:38, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Extensions and later MediaWiki versions
Sorry if I became a nuisance while trying to be helpful. The "+" does not mean that it works with all later versions, it only means that someone thought that it would work with all later versions. A future version may break backwards compatibility and if no one checks the extension again and updates the page then people who wish to use the extension may face errors. So, we need to re-check compatibility with all later versions from time to time and note our results in the page, perhaps not in the infobox, but surely somewhere, either in the extension page or somewhere else. NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis 02:44, 28 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Now whenever I check an extension for compatibility with a specific MediaWiki version I will note it in a Compatibility section in the extension page. If you think that's not good tell me now. NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis 02:48, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

AuthorProtect Problem
Hi Skizzerz, I'm trying to implement AuthorProtect and probably missed something very basic... when I check "Version" on my special pages, AuthorProtect shows up just fine as an extension, but when I go to my user rights management, the author and authorprotect rights do not appear. I am both a bureaucrat and sysop, so I should be seeing this... any suggestions? Thanx! Paul Z 128.107.248.220 00:13, 29 October 2008 (UTC)


 * No, you shouldn't be seeing it. They are rights, not groups. You don't assign people to the authors group, they gain the appropriate rights automatically when they are the author of a page. Since you are a sysop, the only place you will ever see it is when you click the "protect" tab and an "Authors only" option should appear. -- Skiz zerz  20:17, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

Ah, very illuminating... thank you!! -Paul Z.

Sorry... one more quick question... is the author the person who created the original page or who last edited the page? Or anyone who has edited it? Thanks! (Paul Z again)

128.107.248.220 23:37, 28 October 2008 (UTC)

extensions version compatibility
No it's not pointless because even though MediaWiki authors may focus on backwards compatibility, a bug could easily break it for a specific version or svn revision. Bugs can happen any time and are unpredictable. Verifying compatibility of each extension (and its versions) with each MediaWiki version and a few selected svn revisions could help with more adoption of MediaWiki and extensions by users that need such compatibility checks, for example enterprises. Of course you could say that there are probably other tasks that are of higher priority, which is another matter than pointlessness. So, checking compatibility could be of low usefulness, depending on your priorities, but not of no usefulness at all (it is, at least, useful to some potential users). NSK Nikolaos S. Karastathis 05:03, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Wiki bug
Recently, we had a server crash at Wikicars and after having got it back up again our site came back with an anomaly. Whenever we post a picture on a page, especially when we encase it in a thumbnail or resize it to any pixel or insert it into a gallery, we either get a blank box or we get this text: "Error creating thumbnail: sh: /usr/sfw/bin/convert: No such file or directory ". The only pictures affected are the ones uploaded after the crash, the ones before that show up fine. They also upload fine however it's linking it to a page where it gets all whack. Do you know what problem we're having and how we may be able to fix it? Thanks.

-Red marquis 15:43, 30 October 2008 (UTC)
 * No idea, but it sounds like you don't have the thumbnailing software installed. -- Skiz zerz  16:18, 30 October 2008 (UTC)