Thread:Extension talk:CanonURL/Patch: Escape output/reply (3)

It looks like characters are being now URL escaped where they should not be, such as the colon (namespace separator) and slash (subpage separator).

For example, http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Kaizer_the_Bjorn/Caffeine is mirrored at http://mirror.uncyc.org/wiki/User:Kaizer_the_Bjorn/Caffeine and the mirror is flagged with extension:CanonURL to direct search bots to the main site.

The result is  which is a big fat 404 depending on how the target site's Apache rewrites short URLs.

Mediawiki seems to tolerate the %3A namespace separator. It's the / as %2F which is breaking and it seems to depend on Apache rewriting URLs and not on MW: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AKaizer_the_Bjorn%2FCaffeine would work if the subpage existed while http://wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AKaizer_the_Bjorn%2FCaffeine goes 404 and http://wikipedia.org/wiki/User%3AKaizer_the_Bjorn/Caffeine would be valid.

Admittedly, the page doesn't exist on Wikipedia, but a 404 at the Apache level indicates MediaWiki didn't even see these; perhaps the %2F isn't a / to mod_rewrite on all MW sites?