User talk:Bawolff

Extension: write-whitelist namespace
I just saw your Extension:Whitelist Namespaces, works great! Thank you :) Would it be difficult to change it to write-whitelist an entire namespace? on what line in the code do i need to look? Thanks Mauro Bieg 07:57, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Should be fairly easy, just change the

if ($action == 'read') { to if ($action == 'edit') { Should work (but I have not tested). Bawolff 18:56, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your quick reply! Unfortunately it doesn't work for me, even an  doesn't.. :S so apparently it isn't enough setting that $result to TRUE.. whatever exactly happens afterwards. Mauro Bieg

Google Summer of Code 2010
Thanks for expressing an interest in MediaWiki for Google Summer of Code 2010. Please note (if you haven't already done so) that you must apply and a submit proposal at http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student/apply/google/gsoc2010 by April 9 at the latest or a slot will not be reserved. Thanks! -- RobLa 19:38, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the message. I will do that. Bawolff 19:43, 1 April 2010 (UTC)

Extension:DynamicPageList_(third-party)
Hi, you add a warning to this extension. Can you please explain what the risk means for sites with this extension? I want to know if I shall uninstall it or that I can still use it. Thanks for your answer. 145.94.74.23 15:20, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Hi. Basically the warning means that someone with knowledge of the insides of that extension would be able to inject html (including javascript) into your page if you have the extension enabled. Someone could potentially exploit this to put a code in the wikipage to make anyone who views that wikipage make edits to some other page for example. Another example is someone could put code into a wikipage that causes everyone who views that page to be redirected to another website. The most recent version of the extension is slightly harder to exploit, but someone familiar with the internals of that extension could still exploit it. See also Cross-site_scripting and 24199. As a side note, if you're only using the basic features of the extension, you could try using extension:DynamicPageList (Wikimedia) which does not have the above mentioned security issues but has significantly less features. Bawolff 15:50, 17 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the explanation. One more question: Does someone need to log in and be able to edit pages on the site to use this exploit? Or is it something that can be used without any rights? 145.94.74.23 15:20, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, one would need to be able to edit. Basically the exploit is that someone can use the dpl extension to make part of the page behave as if manual:$wgRawHtml was set to true. Thus, all the warnings that apply to that setting also apply to that extension. If its a private wiki and you trust everyone who has access, you should be fine. Bawolff 21:16, 18 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah, great. That's good to know. Thank you very much for answering the questions. Would it be useful to copy this discussion to the talk page of the mod, or at least link to it? 145.94.74.23 18:24, 20 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Feel free to if you want. Bawolff 20:14, 20 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I've just sent an email to two of the maintainers of this extension, so they are aware of this. --Ciencia Al Poder 17:32, 23 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Cool. Although as a sidenote i think Algorithmix is the only semi-active maintainer of the extension. Bawolff 20:52, 23 July 2010 (UTC)

Maybe you know... would 'RunFromProtectedPagesOnly' setting (from here) be enough to make DPL usage safe? Wassily Steik 07:38, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Assuming that its implemented correctly, I believe it should (at least for the issue I found. I have not read the entire source code so there could potentially be other things wrong with it, etc so no guarantees, etc) Bawolff 07:49, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Well, at least it makes DPL usable... Of course, I'll check this twice before enabling it. E.g. currently this option allowed DPL on semiprotected pages (I've already fixed this on my copy - in DPLMain.php under 'Initialization' comment). Wassily Steik 08:10, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * I should mention, this of course assumes you trust all your admins :P. Bawolff 08:12, 12 August 2010 (UTC)
 * Well, I understand this :) Fortunately, on my small project that's not a problem. Wassily Steik 08:25, 12 August 2010 (UTC)

DPL issues?
Hello Bawolff, I saw that you are concerned about DPL regarding security (HTML injection). I plan to work on a major new DPL releasse in January 2011. Currently DPL switches silently to allow HTML for internal purpose and switches back once it has finished. A user knowing this might inject HTML code or even Javascript as cou clearly explained. I plan to restructure the code and to avoid such risks (at least in a default configuration setting). Would you be willing to review or maybe give some advice when I start working on the changes? Algorithmix 07:04, 29 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I am by no means an expert on such issues, but I would of course be willing to review/give advice on any changes. I'm excited to see that you're planning to work on it again, as its quite a popular extension. Bawolff 11:22, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

Huh?
I'm not at all sure I understood your edit summary here. If you're saying what I think you're saying, I don't really see the difference between an empty table cell and a non-existent table cell, other than the non-existent one looks really ugly. RobinHood70 21:38, 4 November 2010 (UTC)
 * responded on your talk. Bawolff 22:51, 4 November 2010 (UTC)

"javascript for maxlength of the edit summary" in Opera
Hi, could you please revisit the 66913 "javascript for maxlength of the edit summary" (the code is now in mediawiki.action.edit.js) since it does not work correctly in Opera 11.01 (and Opera 10.6)? The problem is, delete and backspace are not recognized as special keys, so user gets stuck with an overfilled summary (only after reading the JS code I realized that cutting the text with a mouse is a possible way out). I could also file this in bugzilla if you want. —AlexSm 18:02, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes of course, I'll look at it right away. Bawolff
 * Thanks. Fixed in 83067. Bawolff 03:59, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Combating Spam
In the article Combating Spam (why does linking not work?) you reverted an edit i made. After testing it with my own wiki, the bannedips.php extension did not work untill i added the trailing ?>, hence i added it in the article. Code arguments aside, a ?> is not needed but adding it doesn't hurt either, hence i added it just to be safe. Besides, it's good code etiquette ;p
 * If you needed the trailing ?>s, you did something wrong. Closing tags are discouraged by our coding standards, please don't re-add. Max Semenik 13:54, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

pedanticism!
May have killed it. - Amgine 22:54, 8 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well you know - I enjoy pointing out flaws in wikinews techie articles, without actually fixing them my self. Bawolff 04:11, 9 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well played... - Amgine 14:41, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Help:Formatting -> why we wouldn't want to use those templates
Thanks for giving me a note on that.

I was trying to contribute to the goals of Project:PD help. To allow the help to be used on a fresh wiki installation, it should not use extensions. Many of the templates however depend on extensions. In that particular case on Extension:ParserFunctions. This heavily limits the usefulness when copied to a fresh installation. --Nzara 11:48, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Hmm, you have a point, but it seems like a lot of effort to not use such templates. Bawolff 19:52, 11 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, let's cut the effort in pieces and let's start, subst is a great help. However, I'm not clear how to handle Template:PD Help Page and Template:Languages. Here a plain subst appears misleading. --Nzara 10:40, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
 * If we started including parserfuncs with the default tarball (which seems quite possible), this becomes much less of an issue (To be honest, has anyone ever actually imported the pd-help stuff to their wiki? I don't know of anyone who ever has). I don't just mean its effort to convert the pages to not use the template, its also effort if anyone ever wants to change what those templates look like, or more generally makes the wiki-source more complex to edit. Bawolff 20:44, 13 June 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, at least I tried to import the pd-help stuff (that created the idea to improve it). Confronting my target users (definitly digtal non-natives) with a naked wiki created some confusion and a usage barrier. --- I agree, not using templates makes it harder to apply a common style. On the other side, with templates and especially with parser functions the source resembles some sort of programming, creating an barrier to non-programmers. These folks perfere WYSIWYG and cut-and-paste.--Nzara 17:10, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

About Arabic XML tags.

 * Hi Bawolff.

Do you remember this ?! I made an extension to help to do that. would you mind to check it out. because I am very beginner !

Thank you very much --أحمد ش الشيخ 20:17, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Hi. Interesting. Ideally I think MediaWiki should support i18n aliases for tag hooks in core, that way it could more cleanly hook into how the parser works. The extension probably wouldn't be enabled on Wikimedia (due to not quite being inline with manual:Coding conventions, and if its decided to support translating tag names, we'd want to put it in the part that deals with tags, instead of running a new regex over the page contents). However, for a non-Wikimedia Wiki, the extension would probably be good. Cheers. Bawolff 21:01, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you !.--أحمد ش الشيخ 19:33, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

"Current Date" Parameter
You said here that it is now possible to add a current date function. Yet I have tried it here and I was not successful. Could you assist me with this troublesome problem? -- Phoenix (talk) 09:13, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * The basic idea of how to do this is . You pretty much just have to replace with }} and any instances of | with |. You might also have to escape {'s and }'s in your timeline source. Bawolff 18:28, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * WOW! Fascinating. Is there a way for 27 to be shown in a 2 day format? The code breaks down there. -- Phoenix (talk) 08:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure what you mean? like have the day be 02 instead of just 2 (that can be done with ). For more complicated date stuff you can do almost anything with  but the syntax is complicated. [note, I should mention, all this stuff is cached, so the current day won't be updated until next time the page is re-rendered. Normally it probably won't be more than a day off]. Bawolff 23:18, 2 July 2011 (UTC)
 * YES thanks it had to be in mm/dd/yyyy format and the previous version gave it a mm/d/yyyy result causing it to crash. AMAZING. Thanks. PLEASE can you update the article to reflect this AMAZING addition? -- Phoenix (talk) 08:31, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear that solved it. Which page did you want me to update? Bawolff 14:39, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
 * Extension:EasyTimeline/syntax Should be updated to include this coding idea :) -- Phoenix (talk) 11:19, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

Manual:Update.php
Hi Bawolff, the contents of the page is not exactly outdated but it was incomplete and still is. The problem is that I cannot offer insights into this and had hoped that an expert may do it somehow "on the fly". Please do not take offence for having inserted the label. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; 09:21, 9 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Hi Bawolff, I just answered on my talk page. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; 16:49, 9 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Oops, there was some kind of edit conflict. I guess I am ready editing the page. Please have a look at it. Thank you and cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; 17:13, 9 December 2011 (UTC)

Extension:Score
Hi, I received your fixes through User:MarkAHershberger, thank you!--GrafZahl (talk) 13:50, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Moving pages
At the support desk, you noted that 'movestable' is required to move pages with stable revisions, however, that right appears to belong to all autoconfirmed users, so I'm confused as to why User:Igottheconch wasn't able to move the page. This is probably just a brain cramp on my end but if you could clarify this for me I'd appreciate it - is a bugzilla needed. I agree with you that this shouldn't be so hard for people to move.

Additionally, do you understand why the links provided by the e-mail notifications of changes to pages don't work for this? The e-mail notice gave me this link: http://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Support_desk&offset=20111229074439&lqt_mustshow=10213#moving_pages_10213 which doesn't even show the required thread. Is this a problem with LQT or with the e-mail notification system? Does this need a bugzilla? Thanks for your help.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 14:59, 29 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Whoops, it looks like I totally misread the page listing all the rights. Thanks for catching that. As for email notification, that does look like a bugzilla type bug. Bawolff 00:40, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

$wgTitle
Thanks for fixing the code in Manual:$wgTitle. I saw a glimmer of hope in the Title.php file, but it turned out to be false.. thanks again. --Gbruin 05:20, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Friendly reminder: 1/13 @ 19:00 UTC - MediaWiki Workshop: Preparing extensions for MW 1.19 in #wikimedia-dev
Thank you for your interest in the MediaWiki Workshop, Preparing extensions for MediaWiki 1.19!

As a friendly reminder, the workshop is being held being held in about 12 hours - 13 January, 2012 at 19:00 UTC - in IRC (#wikimedia-dev).

This workshop will be an opportunity to share information about changes in MediaWiki 1.19 that may require revisions to extensions or skins. Also an opportunity for developers to ask questions regarding extension development.

Look forward to seeing you in IRC. :) --Varnent 06:18, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for your documentation on Manual:$wgArticle
Thank you for documenting how to move away from $wgArticle. I have it working now on my wiki! -- Tbleher 09:59, 12 February 2012 (UTC)

Acquiring reviewer permissions
As you can see from my contribs to this wiki, I have a lot of changes that are still pending. However, my first request was declined a while back.Jasper Deng 05:08, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * File a new request at Project:Requests and request the Editor right again, The only reason the last one got closed (by myself) is that a question left unanswered for over a month. Peachey88 06:18, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Hhm, how would I handle the fact that I already made a request? I need help.Jasper Deng 06:33, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * A new subpage, eg: Project:Requests/User_rights/Jasper_Deng (2). Peachey88 06:46, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * Done; you think my rationale is sufficient?Jasper Deng 06:51, 14 February 2012 (UTC)
 * that seems as good a reason for review rights as any. Bawolff 16:16, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

You are correct / my bad
I was going to revert my change this morning. Thanks for fixing it. My problem was using the help from mysql which reads: -p, --password[=name] Password to use when connecting to server. If password is                     not given it's asked from the tty.

I am still trying to get that extension to work... Schalice (talk) 17:00, 3 March 2012 (UTC)
 * No worries, the mysql help on that is quite confusing. Cheers. Bawolff (talk) 19:21, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Sysop?
I'm not a developer, but I'm pretty active on this wiki.Jasper Deng (talk) 04:28, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
 * Project:Requests is where you are looking for. Peachey88 (talk) 05:36, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I mean, do I stand a chance of passing that?Jasper Deng (talk) 05:45, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You have the same as every one else, But I should also point out, we are trying to limit giving out sysop these days to people that can show why they want/need it compared to "I want sysop". Peachey88 (talk) 05:54, 21 March 2012 (UTC)
 * OK, my situation is that uncontroversial things like those speedy deletions I just did are made much easier, not to mention the creation of talk page archives. The ability to edit some certain protected pages with minor corrections is also something I'd like to be able to do.Jasper Deng (talk) 05:56, 21 March 2012 (UTC)

Support desk
You helped me with a hint to check other skins. However, nobody could help to solve the problem of the watchlist error yet. Could you have a look at this again or forward the question to someone who could help? Thanks a lot in advance, --ThT (talk) 15:19, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

XExternalEditor Java program does not show preview
XExternalEditor Java program does not show preview suddenly and stops working to upload. It was working fine few days back. Please help --Yjenith (talk) 16:45, 26 March 2012 (UTC)
 * You'll have to ask the maintainers of that piece of software. I know a little bit of MediaWiki's external editor support, but

XExternalEditor is a third party program I've never used and am not familiar with. Bawolff (talk) 13:18, 27 March 2012 (UTC)

OK. I have asked support in Sourceforge's project page. --Yjenith (talk) 02:25, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

Workaround for MW image EXIF privacy issue
Bug 20326 deals with removing EXIF data from images. My duplicate bug detailed why that is important. Some use cases require compulsory removal of all EXIF data, as a matter of safety for the uploaders. The quantity of images I need to deal with is not huge, and even when it is huge, the rate of incoming new data should be low enough to accommodate a simple workaround, at least until a better solution is available.

My proposed workaround is to manually remove EXIF data from all images locally, and then update MediaWiki image data using /maintenance/rebuildImages.php. That file dates back to 2009 - Before I break something, can you tell me if I can expect rebuildImages.php to work as promised, after I've stripped EXIF data?

Badon (talk) 23:10, 28 March 2012 (UTC)
 * I'd recommend using . I'm not 100% sure off the top of my head, but I think rebuildImages.php will only rebuild images that look broken in the MediaWiki db, so it won't catch your metadata changes (and then the sha1 would get out of sync, and that'd be bad as well).   will definitely refresh the metadata of all the images (and update the sha1) [I suppose it probably wouldn't update the archivedfiles and oldimages table. Note that info, including metadata can be gotten from both those tables from the api. archivedfiles is not so much of an issue as you need to be an admin, but info from oldimages can be read by anybody who knows the rather obscure api command needed] Bawolff (talk) 00:05, 29 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Manual:Oldimage table says it only exists as a consequence of overwriting files. I've disabled file overwrites, so that should circumvent that data leak. Manual:deleteArchivedFiles.php seems to be the way to get rid of the problem altogether, if needed. Manual:$wgHashedUploadDirectory is something I'm concerned about, when set to true. If removing EXIF data changes the hash, does MediaWiki move the file? The docs say MD5 is use, but you mentioned SHA1 - are the docs outdated for that? Badon (talk) 01:36, 29 March 2012 (UTC)
 * There's 2 different hashes mediawiki uses. The md5 one is the hash of the file name (not the contents). It won't change unless you re-name the file (It is used for the hashed directory thing). The sha1 hash is stored in the db, and is a hash of the actual file (used for finding duplicate files and some other stuff). It will change when you modify the file. However, its only stored in the db, and the maintenance script should update it when it updates the img_metadata field (?action=purge also updates the sha1 hash too).

DPL: Help me?
Allowcachedresults=yes+warn is not working, no message is display, I've created a topic here, could you please help me?? - 186.218.184.219 22:17, 18 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm not the maintainer of that extension, but if I know anything about your issue I'll post it to that page. Bawolff (talk) 12:00, 19 June 2012 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

 * Thanks for the barnstar. Bawolff (talk) 12:03, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Math extension error
Did you read my reply?--Luca Ghio (talk) 15:20, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Wikimania
Are you at Wikimania? —Emufarmers(T 06:51, 14 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Alas no. Maybe some other year. Bawolff (talk) 12:15, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Manual:$wgExtensionAliasesFiles
Responded to your comment on my talk page.

Re: Sumanah's edit
She's just tried to deprecate 1.0 in favour of 2.0, which is fair enough. The template doesn't quite read properly, but it does the trick. Jarry1250 (talk) 15:47, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Yeah, it should be the canonical page, but it isn't yet :) Jarry1250 (talk) 16:48, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

PAGEID
doesn't work in mw1.19, is there a simple way (maybe custom .js) to retrieve this piece of information in wikitext? I'm using MW API to gather info and use the wiki somehow as a database, we'll be introducing a way to people to pass this page id as a parameter for a custom IPB forum bbcode to generate some information. The point is, the only way to know a page is to have its name, but I'd prefer just a number, could you lend a help? 186.218.184.139 18:35, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
 * OMG, it worked! What??? O.o 186.218.184.139 18:36, 21 August 2012 (UTC)
 * This wiki is using a beta version of 1.20. There's not really a way before that to retrieve the pageid (js can get it from ). You can get the revision id from wikitext, but that changes with every edit. Bawolff (talk) 19:30, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Categorytree-member-num system message
Hi,

A few months ago, you edited Extension:CategoryTree by modifying the documentation of $5 in categorytree-member-num system message. However, in all wikis I use where MediaWiki:categorytree-member-num is left to default, which is, the output is not the one you described but the one described before your edits (a single number whose value depends on category tree mode).

As a consequence, I am unsure if this is a feature added in the most recent versions (to which some wikis wouldn't be upgraded yet), or if you mixed it up with the value that most wikis assign to it. (For example, in this wiki, MediaWiki:categorytree-member-num has been modified to give the output you described, but it's not the default value, and its value doesn't contain any $5 reference.)

Please, could you throw some light on it? If it's a feature, it would be sensible to add a note with when or what version this was changed, and what was the prior meaning of $5.

-- Fomtg (talk) 13:02, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
 * The change happened on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:35:57. . Which would put it in the 1.19 version of the extension. Its somewhat hard to put versions in extensions, since they do not totally correspond with MW versions, but i'll add a note to that page. Thanks. Bawolff (talk) 17:55, 4 October 2012 (UTC)
 * Ok. Thanks for your feedback. -- Fomtg (talk) 23:02, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

mobile fronted extension
Could u help me in installing this extension. i will provide u my ftp password or upload localsettings.php file but make it work. the problem is i make a subdomain for mobile url but when i click on mobile view. its appears that page doesnot exists
 * sorry I don't currently do that sort of thing. I do occasional provide help for free, but more to point people in the right direction to fix it themselves. However there are many people who will do that for you but they generally charge money. Bawolff (talk) 02:22, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

CategorySortHeaders
Thanks for creating the CategorySortHeaders extension. I was trying to figure out how to build something similar until I found CategorySortHeaders, it works perfectly (on 1.18) so you saved me a lot of time! 213.154.239.2 02:15, 30 March 2013 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear. It is always nice to hear when something I make is helpful to others. Bawolff (talk) 02:22, 30 March 2013 (UTC)

GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands this week
Hi, you are invited to the GSoC / OPW IRC AllHands meeting on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 at 15:00 UTC (8:30pm IST, 8am PDT) at #wikimedia-office. We have done our best finding a time that works decently in as many timezones as possibles. Please confirm at qgil@undefinedwikimedia.org so I can add you to the calendar invitation and I have your preferred email for other occasions. If you can't make it's fine, but let me know as well. We have left a notice to all students, but your help is welcome making sure yours is aware about it. Thank you!--Qgil (talk) 20:35, 24 June 2013 (UTC)

gerrit-stats / crstats
Hello, it seems that your gerrit-stats is stuck? You may be interested in this: [//www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Gerrit%2FNavigation&diff=726041&oldid=726025]. Cheers, Nemo 12:46, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Sort key
Hi,

I think I need your help to understand something: with this sort : http://collation-charts.org/icu442/icu442-fr.html, what's ordered in first, émis or ermite ?

With this sentence : « It sorts on 3 levels - different letters, followed by different accents, followed by upper-case vs lower-case » of Thread:Project:Support desk/Sort order, I'm not sure to understand…

Regards, Automatik (talk) 09:45, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: you imagine maybe that the ideal for a multilingual dictionary would be to have a sort for every language, and that we add a magic word in the appropriate category to decide of the sort. But it seems obvious that you've ever heard this idea. Regards, Automatik (talk) 09:54, 17 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I believe émis would be ordered first (Didn't actually test). The first level of sorting, we discard accents. So we compare as if the words were emis and ermite. If we have a tie, than we throw accents back in (so it then becomes émis vs ermite. French does something special with accents though). If we have a tie again, we throw case in. (So if ermite was really Ermite, we would now compare the e vs E ). Does that make things clearer? Bawolff (talk) 17:03, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
 * That's what I told myself as for the order, thank you. But is there a possibility to display the words in finnish who begin with an "ä" at the end of the alphabet with this sort? I'm not sure. Automatik (talk) 17:14, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
 * In the uca-fi collation, 'ä' is considered a primary element (a letter), and not 'a' modified by an accent, so it does work. The issue is we have limited support for multiple collations on one site. Liangent is working on some code to allow more than 1 collation, but it still only allows a limitted number of collations on the site (Its aimed at people who want to be able to view the category in any collation on a list of allowed collations). Bawolff (talk) 17:40, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Ok, so I suppose it's not possible to have this sort with uca-fr at the moment. Is there a chart that solves this issue, like maybe uca-default? Thanks for all your help, it's not urgent. Automatik (talk) 18:09, 18 July 2013 (UTC)
 * uca-default is somewhat of a compromise. It sorts english and portugese correctly. Most other languages its sorts kind of right, with 1 or 2 letters being wrong (For example in Swedish, uca-default would sort ä beside a instead of after z). Bawolff (talk) 15:17, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much. I'll ask Liangent about multiple collations on one site for information. Thank you again. Automatik (talk) 13:19, 23 July 2013 (UTC)
 * I did an experiment once to use liangents code to sort files in a category by rating - http://tools.wmflabs.org/bawolff/whichisbetter/index.php?title=Category:Images . Liangents code would be something like that, but instead of having a drop down of 'alphabetical' or 'image rating' it would be different language sorting methods. Bawolff (talk) 18:04, 24 July 2013 (UTC)

Your wikis on Tool Labs
Hey there. I had to disable account creation on your wikis on Tool Labs (bawolff tool) because they were quickly found and infested by spambots. &mdash; MPelletier (WMF) (talk) 15:00, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * no worries. I had been monitoring them when I first created them and thought I was safe, guess not. Sorry for any inconviance I may have caused. Bawolff (talk) 15:26, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

re:https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Template_talk:Ticker
Hi there, hope you don't mind this posting here as the comments on the newswiki seem quite old,(or I looked in the wrong spot). Just wondered is there any trick to getting the ticker to update on page refresh I tried a force refresh but new added articles correctly categorized are not appearing on the ticker, however if I edit the page and save the ticker updates. I expect its my rather rudimentary understanding of mediawiki that has caused me to miss something (ie a needed hook). Other than the not updating it's ticking over fine (excuse pun), Any help much appreciated.
 * Hi. This sounds more like a DynamicPageList issue than a ticker issue. Ticker gets the list of pages via the DynamicPageList extension. In order to make things faster, DynamicPageList only checks if categories have changed once a day (or if you make an edit to a page), so it can be outdated for up to 24 hours (How often it checks is configurable per-wiki with the $wgDLPMaxCacheTime setting. 24 hours is the default). You can force DynamicPageList to recheck for category changes by purging the page (Adding either ?action=purge or &action=purge [depending on if the url already has a ? mark in it] to the end of the URL) Bawolff (talk) 16:41, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for the above, spot on purging a page caused a refresh. The 24 hourly update rate is fine for our use I was just worried I'd stuffed something up in the setup :) - Sirrob01

Example page_props extension
Thanks for that example page_props extension; it definitely made my life easier when I was writing Extension:BedellPenDragon. Leucosticte (talk) 22:54, 29 October 2013 (UTC)
 * You're welcome. I'm happy to hear it was useful. Bawolff (talk) 23:27, 29 October 2013 (UTC)

Suggestion for tweak in gallery packed mode
I love love love packed mode galleries on Commons for nature-related photos. Even at 120px, the thumbnails really "pop", with much more detail and less wasted whitespace. I'm not sure whether you are the main person behind the code, but if so, Thank You!.

I've been slowly converting some article/galleries on Commons to use "packed". I'm not doing it with a bot, just to proceed slowly and see if people notice, like, or dislike it. One user commented that tall pictures have poor layout of captions. I agree with that. A few weeks ago, I found the source to the galleries, and it seemed that it could use the width parameter (currently ignored), suitably multiplied by 1.5, to set the minimum spacing between images. Right now, it's too small, and text sometimes wraps in an ugly way. Do you think it's fixable? I want to use it for many different galleries! Hike395 (talk) 07:03, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Glad to hear you liked it. I assume you mean with whitespace between the images if the image isn't wide enough? I think 1.5*width parameter might be too much, but the current situation is way too little. (Currently I think it has a hard coded minimum of 40px). Maybe doing something like the narrowest aspect ratio allowed is 2:3 (Which is a film picture in potrait orientation), and if the image is narrower then that, pad with whitespace. Anyways, I'll try out some of those options, and show you what they look like. Bawolff (talk) 04:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Interested in mentoring CSS related proposal?
My GSoC proposal is the creation of a Frontend for Vector skin CSS customizations. It's based on an idea I work on since last summer. The need came from my wikis. I think it's high time wikis stop look all alike, or look like Wikipedia, or even look like wikis! I would appreciate your feedback. --Ioannis Protonotarios 02:15, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi. At the moment I'm not planning to participate in GSOC as a mentor (sorry). I will say however that I like your idea. Its high time that MediaWiki stopped requiring its users know CSS to make minor changes to the interface, like colour scheme. In terms of implementation, I would definitely recommend an extension. There's probably many implementation paths you could take. One of them could be having a special page, which stores various "properties" in its own DB table, and also implements a custom ResourceLoader module to output the custom CSS. I would recommend concentrating on making the GUI interface and finding things that can easily customizable, and not trying to parse existing CSS, as parsing CSS is probably going to be a hard problem, especially with edge cases, and is less interesting than the main part of the extension. You may want to make it so that your extension could be extensible by other extensions, so that people making skins could hook into your extension, and add new things to customize. Best of luck. Bawolff (talk) 03:06, 21 March 2014 (UTC)

Passwords
Just stopped by to say Thanx for your help in IRC today. Cheers,  Mlpearc  ( open channel ) 22:32, 29 July 2014 (UTC)

About bug 70672
Heiya Bawolff, thank you for your comment and your e-mail on the mailing list. I believe it will be best to create a bug for getting this extra configuration parameter if this has not been done so far? Thus we either get this extra or we at least know where we are standing. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 12:58, 7 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Actually there now is bug opened by Alexia to work on this. Thanks for your valuable thoughts in this matter. Cheers --&#91;&#91;kgh&#93;&#93; (talk) 08:17, 10 October 2014 (UTC)

derivativeFX not available
Hi Bawolff, I've tried to open Luxo's tool derivativeFX at the Wikimedia Toolserver but it appears only a message that the tool was moved to the Wikimedia Tool Labs. But if I visited the new page of this tool and clicked on Web interface the error message "No webservice. The URI you have requested, /derivative/, is not currently serviced." appears. How could I use derivativeFX in future? --Ak ccm (talk) 09:09, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi User:Ak ccm. There was a project created on tool labs, but it hasn't really been worked on. I unfortunately don't really have time to work on that now. I'm not sure if anyone else does. There's no way to use that tool anymore :(. Bawolff (talk) 23:45, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Heavy pages
Do you know MediaWiki pages heavier than this (700 MB)? --Nemo 22:24, 25 March 2015 (UTC)
 * no. That's insane (well someone could contrive an example by adding a gig of junk at the end of a low resolution image. Commons sometimes has to deal with people uploading pirated movies in a self-executing rar file with the executable part being a jpg which results in loading a 100mb file [pirates cant figure out chunked upload])Bawolff (talk) 00:22, 26 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Ok. :) Better so. Perhaps small thumbnails of animated GIFs should not be animated, or they shouldn't be in categories and search, or there should be a limit. It's not so nice when you search something and Special:Search takes ages to load because of the occasional 4 MB "thumb". --Nemo 06:32, 26 March 2015 (UTC)

Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org
(Hi Bawolff. I know that you already know, so I'm just adding this here for completism, and for any of your page-watchers. :)

Hello. I'm sending this to you, because you've been one of the top 50 users of LQT on mediawiki.org over the last 360 days, and I wanted to make sure that you'd seen the announcement at Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org. There are links in the topic-summary at the top, for other discussions (wikitech-l and Project:Current_issues), and a link to the planned process and timeline (scheduled to begin April 6, with smaller conversions at first). Please do test Flow out at Talk:Sandbox if you haven't tried it recently, and give any feedback/suggestions/requests at that main discussion location. Much thanks, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:14, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

Dervative
Hi! I was used to use derivative tool when I uploaded derivative files, like wikivoyage banners or maps, to commons. Last month I found out that the tool was online: even if it was impossible to upload directly the image, you could copy the code generated and paste it into commons (saving a lot of time). Now the tool is offline, could you check and try to put it online again (it's enough that it generate the code as one month ago did)? Thanks. --Lkcl it (talk) 10:02, 7 April 2015 (UTC)
 * hi. I know my name is listed by its description, but im not involved with the tool. Sorry. Bawolff (talk)

A barnstar for you!

 * Glad to help. Bawolff (talk) 12:52, 26 August 2015 (UTC)

PageInCat
Hello

I'm a contributor form the french wikipedia. We would like to add to fr.wiki only, the feature mw:Extension:PageInCat. Regarding to the extension talk page and all what you said there, we are wondering if this extension can be applied in a wikipedia in a good way, without troubles, bugs...

Can you tell us what's possible to do ?

Best regards from France (sorry for my engrish). --Archimëa (talk) 11:52, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Hi User:Archimëa: Getting new extensions deployed on Wikimedia wikis, even in the best of circumstances, can be a very involved and frustrating process. Ultimately, what gets deployed on site is User:Greg_(WMF)'s department. For this extension in particular:


 * The parsoid people (Infrastructure for Visual editor), don't want any new extensions that depend on other parts of the page. They are likely to object to this extension, since the extension does different stuff depending on the categories a page is in. If we set the  option, then previews will use the last saved version of the pages categories, which is much more likely to be ok
 * This extension parses pages twice to make previews look right. This is likely to get the performance people up in arms (Although perhaps this could be made better with newer support for stashing preview parses...). Anyways, again, if we use the  option, that would probably address their concerns
 * Due to a recent change in how MediaWiki processes category additions to a page, after you save a page, the #pageincat function might show the results based on the previous version of the page instead of the current. This may or may not be a problem.

So basically, if you're ok with the extension sometimes using the previous instead of current version of the page for calculating categories, then it is probably do-able. But like all extension deployment requests, it will probably require a lot of nagging. I hope that answers your question. Bawolff (talk) 00:02, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks for that answer, Bawolff.
 * Hi User:Archimëa. Take a look at Review queue for the steps needed to get an extension deployed on WMF production. Let me know if you have any quetsions. Greg (WMF) (talk) 01:22, 17 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Greg (WMF), Bawolff : We eventually decided to don't use PageinCat feature, as we discovered Lua can do it with better results.
 * PageinCat beeing really more simpler, i hope futures inproovments will make it works fine.
 * Best regards and thnak you all of two for your help. --Archimëa (talk) 21:32, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Patrolled edits in history
Hello, you were active in some nearby bugs so maybe you have insight on T31611. Fixing the bug for diffs shouldn't be too hard, we already do the check to show the button. As for history, it would be great to have some performance insight on whether it would really be an issue to "simply" join the recentchanges table. Nemo 09:50, 14 February 2016 (UTC)