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1. To help us answer your questions, please indicate which versions you are using, as found on your wiki's Special:Version page:
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2. Please include the web address (URL) to your wiki if possible. It's often easier for us to identify the source of the problem if we can see the error directly.
3. To start a new thread, click "Start a new topic".

I had an offense 3 months ago. I have been banned. The time is over, and I am asking the ban to be lifted.

The agreement was 3monts banning and today is 3 months.

Please consider.

Herzakov

this is not the right place to make this request. You need to make this request at the wiki you were banned on. You should probably include your username.

I have a MediaWiki 1.36.1 website with Skin:Timeless and about 2,000 webpages, most of them (about 51% at least) are about marketing.

The website is all core, no external extensions or skins are installed.

This is my robots.txt syntax pattern:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: https://example.com/sitemap/sitemap.xml
disallow: /index.php?
disallow: /index.php/*:
allow: /index.php/Category:
allow: /index.php/קטגוריה:

The website's performance is very good with Google Page Speed Insights grades of 100/100 (both in mobile and desktop).

But,

The website's SEO is bad with average position of 43.8.

The average position becomes worse every passing day.

The website has only articles and categories --- As far as I know, I have removed anything else from PHP and there are no links to machine pages anywhere.

What may cause bad SEO to that website?

The website's SEO is bad with average position of 43.8.

In Google Search Console

I believe that the bad SEO is a legacy from the days that machine pages were indeed linked from various places (such as the sidebar), before I've removed link to these machine pages from PHP.

But if so, what do I do now?

How do I install the Sanitized CSS content model? --197.207.150.111 17:26, 14 May 2022 (UTC)

Install extension:TemplateStyles

I am trying to find (even payed, professional) help in order to fix a Wiki that I had set up a couple of years ago. Nobody seems to even have the time to look at it. So: Here I try again! Is there somebody out there who would take a look at my MediaWiki? The Database seems to be fine, the softwareversion is outdated but I am so ignorant that I am not able to get the Wiki software and the Database to speak to each other. If you can't help, but have an idea who might, refer me, please. Thank you!

See Professional development and consulting linked from the front page.

I want to download a new version but I can't uninstall the previous one

Just download it to a different directory.

It was a quick fix. I had overlooked a needed extension and a line in LocalSettings.php.

I'm trying to create a "Module:Documentation/styles.css" page (similar to en:Module:Documentation/styles.css) on a new installation of MW 1.37.2 (with Lua 5.1.5), but when I try to save the page I get an error message saying the formatting of the page has unexpected characters. I even tried copying exactly what was in the en:Module:Documentation/styles.css page, but I still get the error. It seems to be treating the CSS as if it's Lua code rather than CSS. Is there an additional extension I need to install to make it treat the CSS as CSS instead of Lua? Or am I missing something else?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

First off, just to confirm, you have extension:TemplateStyles installed?

Try creating the page via Special:changeContentModel which allows creating template style pages in other namespaces.

Probably the reason is you need $wgTemplateStylesNamespaces[NS_MODULE] = true; by default its template only.

I did not have that extension installed, but it is now. I also implemented $wgTemplateStylesNamespaces to allow it. Thanks!

I manually fixed the top-level subdirectory permissions to match those of a fresh install, but is there a script somewhere that can re-establish the expected permissions of the subdirectories recursively for the sub-sub directories and elements? FWIW, I am on MediaWiki 1.35.5. Thanks!

The -R option to chmod. See https://linux.die.net/man/1/chmod

Yes I am quite aware of that flag, but not all of the permissions for each file are supposed to be the same, I could see from the new install. So that won't work...!

There is no one right answer for permissions and ownership of mediawiki files - it depends on how your system is setup.

but generally speaking, images subdirectory needs to be readable and writable by the webserver, LocalSettings.php should be readable by webserver but not other users (contains db pass) and should not be writable by webserver, everything else should be readable by webserver but not writable by webserver.

$wgCacheDirectoty, if set, must be readable and writable by webserver, generally it should be outside of web root. For best security ensure php is disabled in images directory.

Understood. I am only referring to the permissions for the standard install directories and their subcontents, which are standard for a given release, such as docs, includes, languages, maintenance, resources, skins, vendor, etc. There are canonical permissions for those that are defined at install time. Other systems I have worked with have permissions-fixings scripts to fix things like this, and I am hoping something similar exists, or that there is at least a document from mediawiki that details the default install permissions for those directories and their contents. Thanks again!

If you are looking for a specific number, you probably want 644 on files 755 on directories. There is no mediawiki specific script

Hey it seems the rsync is alarm if active at https://grafana.wikimedia.org/alerting/list and we are not getting success in all of our requests, who can we reach out to about fixing this?

What is your actual concern?

That page is not really meant for public consumption.

We are starting to see a large increase in the number of our requests to Wikipedia API timing out starting as of yesterday

It seems to align with when the two rsync alarms began to go into alarm state

Are you following API:Etiquette?

Also, what's your user agent used for your requests?

It is very unlikely that the rsync alarm has anything to do with that.

Is there any other change were going online yesterday that might possibly causing issue? like overall service connection issue?

Impossible to say without answers to all the currently unanswered questions in this thread.

We are still checking our user agent and check the API Etiquette. But our code base has been out for a few years and the http request is falling suddenly since May 03. Anything possible might be causing the issue?

Yes, see above: Ignoring the rate limits, for example.

Could you please add more information for the "Ignoring the rate limit"?

Btw after some investigation for the API Etiquette, here are some result:

1. We usually just query 2 articles for the in the loop and the title is not piped, one of the title could be some transformation with removal the spaces.
2. We do not continue send request for the result we get from another request, thus we do not have the generator thing in our use case.
3. We still investigating around the gzip. Is there anything happened recently with gzip request? Like that become mandatory?

And we are only seeing the issue partially, not every request we make is having issue.

Gzip is not mandatory.

Which wiki are the requests being made to? What type of api requests (do you have an example)? What is the timestamp in utc when you started noticing the issue? Are you logged in (if so what username makes request? If not, what IP?) What precisely do you mean by "timeout" (are you getting an http response that is an error,if so what error, is your connection just not connecting? Do you not just not recieve an http response after some time (how long), something else?

There was database maintenance around this time. While it wasn't supposed to affect anything, there was some reports that it was causing temporary slowness. It may be related to your issue.

Which wiki are the requests being made to?

What type of api requests (do you have an example)?

It is a Get request send to en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php

What is the timestamp in utc when you started noticing the issue?

Between 05/03/2022 9am to 10am UTC

Are you logged in (if so what username makes request? If not, what IP?)

No login with username, trying to get the ip.

What precisely do you mean by "timeout" (are you getting an http response that is an error,if so what error, is your connection just not connecting?

Sometimes for some queries the http request is not succeeded, no wiki response returned, with request aborted exception. Continue checking the specific http code.

Do you not just not recieve an http response after some time (how long), something else?

No response  for 3s in US

Btw is the database maintenance still going on? We still seeing the issue on our side.

No.

Also, no response for 3 seconds sounds more like you should just increase your timeouts. A problem on wmf end would look more like getting a 503 error. Most api endpoints in normal times should respond within 3 seconds but that is not true of all of them.

Actually we have a retry. The first call is 3s whlle the second call is 5s.

For the user agent we found mostly they are "Java/1.8.0_211-ea", and several of them are "Java/phoneme_advanced-Core-1.3-b16 sjmc-b111".

And with the 5 s retry we are still seeing failure.

> For the user agent we found mostly they are "Java/1.8.0_211-ea", and several of them are "Java/phoneme_advanced-Core-1.3-b16 sjmc-b111".

Per WMF's user agent policy, this user agent isn't allowed and could potentially be blocked (you are probably not blocked, as you wouldget an error message). Your user agent must have a contact email adress in it and should have a descriptive name of your tool.

Anyways, i would suggest a timeout of 60 seconds.

Yes we didn't see it completely blocked. Is this block up recently? Could you provide the WMF policy link to it or any related doc to it if it is possible? Could you also provide some example for the user agent that is expected?

Meanwhile we will look into the timeout change.

Your not blocked (you would get an error message if you were). The WMF policy is just that that user agent can be blocked arbitrarily. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy

Ah ok, that makes sense. The strange thing about this issue is that we have not made any changes to our client code that is making these requests in several weeks and we have not seen any of these failures before and then all of a sudden on May 3, we see this immediate spike in timeout failures on up to 10% of our requests and it has continued at this rate since then.  

Hi, after more investigation, we got the http exception: Too many requests - for unthrottling, contact noc@wikimedia.org to discuss a less disruptive approach. And the status code is 429. And our current fix is to replace our user agent ("Java/1.8.0_211-ea", and  "Java/phoneme_advanced-Core-1.3-b16 sjmc-b111") with another one ("Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/533.3") then we stop receiving the throttle messages. And is happening only when POST request for parse the content.

Was there anything could happen on May 03 and caused the throttle on these user agents (or a specific set of user agents) suddenly? What could be a safe user agent we could use for future? Should we exactly follow the user agent policy you posted above? Is there any email list(noc@wikimedia.org) we could join or any metrics we could follow incase this happen again in the future?

Pretty much what we said already about API:Etiquette.

You are being blocked for not following the rules, follow the rules that were linked to you and you wont be blocked.

> "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/533.3") 

Using this user agent is not allowed, and makes it less likely for you to be unblocked as explained in the pages you were linked, because unlike the java user agent which looks like you were accidentally breaking the rules, the browser user agent makes it look intentional.

I'm a bit puzzled by questions like "Should we exactly follow the user agent policy you posted above?" No because you are also free to ignore the rules and get blocked instead? :)

We are from Kindle device and the request we send out that have issues are from Kindle device. While we doing some other investigation, is there a good/ safe user agent we could use?

And for the current one we are using,

> "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/533.3")

Do you know how much time we will have before this one get blocked?

Do we get any notification before we get blocked?

And is there anything happened on May 03 that could cause this issue? As we have been using this one for years and we never seen this issue before.

> is there a good/ safe user agent we could use?

Any specific one. See https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy

> Do you know how much time we will have before this one get blocked?

No, you should change it now to follow the rules.

> Do we get any notification before we get blocked?

No. At any time you can avoid getting blocked by following the rules.

> And is there anything happened on May 03 that could cause this issue?

Someone probably looked at logs and then took action.

I've got wikimedia 1.24 that I just use for personal use - I'm the only user. When I edit a page, at the bottom right above the save page button is a short disclaimer: "Please note that all contributions to...". Is there a way to get rid of this disclaimer?

Hi!

What you want basically is easy to achieve. :-)

View the editing page and then add to the URL ?uselang=qqx or &uselang=qqx, if there already are parameters. You will see the name of the system messages, which MediaWiki is using on the page. Now pick that message, which you want to change, let's say it would be called "copyrighttext" and then go to the wiki page MediaWiki:Copyrighttext. Being a wiki admin, you can edit this text to the text you want. You can edit languages by adding them to the URL, e.g. you can edit the German text by modifying MediaWiki:Copyrighttext/de.

That worked great. Thanks!

Go to "MediaWiki:Disclaimers" page and blanc it, to remove the link to the "Disclaimers" page.

Straightforward question:

If I use docker-compose up -d everything works fine and I get Mediawiki running on my localhost and my bash works fine.

If I use docker-compose up I get this: https://pastebin.com/FL8u9iHv and my bash freezes there. This got me curious. What am I lacking/doing wrong, if anything?

So -d means detach and put it in the background.

I am not that familar with docker-compose so this may be wrong, but what i think is happening: since you dont detach you see debug info which would normally be hidden. Your terminal is attached to the apache process. Since apache does not take input (since it normally runs in the background) it simply ignores anything you press on the keyboard. Thus it looks like things are frozen, where really its not frozen its just apache ignores input on stdin and doesn't normally output anything.

Thank you! That's what is happening because it literally ignores everything beside Ctrl+C to exit gracefully. Do I have anything to really debug though? I mean, for Apache.

Probably not. Generally if you wanted to access the container, you would want to start a new /bin/sh process and connect to that.

Okay then. Thank you one more time! :)