Talk:Phabricator/Help

Is it possible to set a criteria in Herald that says "look for X project, and all Milestones thereof"?

For instance, a team wants to have weekly Milestones on their backlog, and they use a separate board for their Kanban. In a process in which all Kanban tasks need to be reflected on the backlog (in case, say, someone added a brand new task to the Kanban, but skipped the backlog triage process) for one-source-of-truth, Herald can look for those stragglers. Example: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/H269

With Milestones, I'm under the impression that Phabricator treats each as its own project, so Herald has to be updated for each Milestone.

Example: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/H246

Updating Herald for weekly Milestones isn't hard, but it's a little tedious, and it adds weakness to the process (e.g. the changes have to be requested; or, each change to the Herald is a risk in and of itself should a mistake occur). It would be useful to be able to tell Herald to look for subprojects of a project, to automate this.

As far as I understand this is not possible currently: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T144041

Naturally, I have already commented on, subscribed to, and flagged that ticket! I suppose it's just tradition at this point to forget and ask on a talk page, too... :)

 :D

Unexpected thread bump: It seems to me that Milestones are inclusive now, when it was once necessary to add them explicitly to Heralds. For instance, in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/H260, I did not add the "Q4" Milestone until a week after it was created and used, but Herald caused no problems (I used to see tasks get bumped out of those quarterly boards by Herald). Wildcarding might not yet be a feature, but can anyone confirm that Milestones of projects are automatically captured by Herald in the query criteria?

It appears to be hit or miss.

This is an example of a task the Herald forced out (as it was told to, in a world in which Milestones are not inclusive): https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249259

This is a task in which Herald ignored it: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244804

@MBinder (WMF) T244804 had its last Herald activity two months ago, hence cannot look at its Herald transcript (already garbage collected). Do you have a more recent example?

Sorry I could have been clearer. Let me try that now:

The Herald has existed since October 2017. The most recent Kanban board is for 2019-20 Q4, and was created by me on 2020-03-31. I did not add it to the Herald until 2020-04-07, so presumably Herald should have removed tasks (such as T244804) that were added to the new board between 2020-03-31 and 2020-04-07, because the new board is a Milestone of the board that gets added by Herald, and those are mutually exclusive. In the case of T249259, that occurred on 2020-04-06 (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249259#6033118). In the case of T244804, nothing happened (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244804#6017043). Am I missing something?

@MBinder (WMF) Hmm, maybe I misunderstand, but as you edited H260 on 2020-04-07 to add "Project tags include none of: [...] Community-Tech (Kanban-2019-20-Q4)", Herald should not have magically removed tasks (such as T244804) that were added to the board before 2020-04-07 and which have not been touched since 2020-04-07. Herald rules are executed when an action is performed on tasks, but not automagically / retroactively when a Herald rule is changed.

Thanks for checking in on this.

The issue is not that something happened retroactively. The issue is that, for T244804, the Q4 Herald update did not yet exist when the task was moved/added to the new Q4 kanban board. This is fine, if Herald includes Milestones, but my understanding is that Milestones must be explicit, so this seems to be a bug.

In the case of the other ticket, T249259, this did happen (the ticket was removed from the board by Herald, which is why I later updated the Herald).

@MBinder (WMF): On 2020-04-07, in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249259#6033107 , "ARamirez_WMF edited projects, added Community-Tech (Kanban-2019-20-Q4); removed Community-Tech."

At that time H260 was "When all of these conditions are met: Project tags include any of Expiring-Watchlist-Items && Project tags include none of Community-Tech; Take these actions the first time this rule matches: Add projects: Community-Tech." As Community-Tech was removed in that edited by ARamirez_WMF, 2 minutes later in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249259#6033118, Herald "added Community-Tech; removed Community-Tech (Kanban-2019-20-Q4)" again which is exactly what the Herald rule was about.

Only 89 minutes later, in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/H260#1447, "Kanban-2019-20-Q4" was added to "Project tags include none of".

Hence I don't see a bug here (if I understand everything correctly).

Thanks for hanging with me on this!

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T249259 behaved as I would expect (as you confirmed above). https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244804 did not.

I honestly take a moment to context-switch back into this thread, and at this rate there's a good chance I'm just making things more confusing, so I might schedule a quick 1:1 to chat about this. :)

@MBinder (WMF) No worries. :) I think/hope that I got it now (finally, sorry).

On 2020-03-31, in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244804#6017026 you moved/added "2019-20 Q4".

At that time the Herald rule was: "Project tags include any of [...] Expiring-Watchlist-Items && Project tags include none of Community-Tech, Community-Tech (Kanban-Q2-2019-20), Community-Tech (Kanban-Q3-2019-20)".

If you expected Herald at that time to add Community-Tech (because the Herald rule matches) and as a side effect remove "2019-20 Q4" (because that's a subproject of Community-Tech, hence a task cannot have both Community-Tech and "2019-20 Q4" as tags), then this did not happen because the Herald rule says "Take these actions the first time this rule matches" but not "Take these actions every time this rule matches": Herald was already triggered before in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T244804#5874805.

If I still don't get it then maybe a 1:1 is indeed a good idea. :D

Aha! I totally missed that, thank you for catching it. A simple answer, to a simple question, with many vectors to complicate the context. :-D

As I see it via your link to ifried's comment, the Herald removed the team Q3 Kanban because it wasn't yet excepted. Because the Herald only fires once, it did not do the same thing for the Q4 Kanban, while on other tasks it did simply because it would have been the first time the Herald touched the task.

This is an edge-case, because it only affects work that carries over from quarter to quarter, and only in circumstances in which the team forgot to update the Herald twice in a row for the same task. It can be really confusing, though, as evidenced by this thread!

Thanks again for helping me investigate and understand. It will be easier to explain this to newcomers to the team, etc. In the meantime, I've got more use-cases for promoting Milestones-captured-in-Herald-rules.

Hello all,

I recently removed some disabled accounts from the Trusted-Contributors group.

Should we do this more often or by a bot?

I also noticed that CommTechBot is disabled, does anyone from Community Tech kmow if it still needs access or will be used again? @IFried (WMF)

I don't think this needs a bot as I don't know which problem is solved by removing disabled accounts. :)

It’s not really a problem as such but it just keeps everything tidy and under control so we don’t have projects full of accounts that can’t log in.

Hello,

I have created https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tool:Phabsearchemail.

I can confirm it worked perfectly fine this week and wondered if it should be added to documentation so people know it exists. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Thanks! I'd add it as a section in Phabricator/Help#Advanced features describing which 'problem' it solves (I myself would not use the word "alert" here as this is about a list regularly provided via email).

@AKlapper (WMF) Thanks, I will do this later!

@AKlapper (WMF):  Done with Special:Diff/3876738

Hello,

I have tried to use the Conduit API to collect some details about Legalpad (L37), its list of signatures, more specifically particular. After trying most of the endpoints described in the documentation, I can’t seem to find the one that would help me retrieve the signatures list.

When using the browser, I can generally access the signatures list through one of these ways:

• by visiting /legalpad/signatures/<legalPadNumber>/
• or checking a saved query /legalpad/signatures/query/<savedQueryNumber>/

Thanks in advance for your help,

Cheers

@Samuel (WMF) Looking at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/conduit/ I do not see any API for Legalpad. Looking upstream via https://secure.phabricator.com/maniphest/query/advanced/ for tasks filed under Conduit which mention Legalpad or vice versa there are also no tickets.

I'd say that you'll have to go https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/legalpad/signatures/ and copy the list (if complete)...

Much thanks for your quick response @AKlapper (WMF). I had suspected that it wasn't covered by the Conduit API. Thank you for confirming it. I'll look into ways to collect the list available at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/legalpad/signatures/.

Cheers

I have recently attempted logging into Phabricator without success; I no longer have access to the Authy App that holds my 2FA method.

I would be very grateful for assistance to re-gain access to Phab so I can reset 2FA using Authy

Hi, basically see Phabricator/Help/Two-factor Authentication Resets - question is how to verify that you are the person who owns that account. :)

@AKlapper (WMF): Thank you. Unfortunately, I am unable to do so as it requires 2FA to be instigated; it's logging me in (because it's my Wikipedia account) but then locks me into the 2FA sign-in screen.

Well obviously own the account but yes, the issue is then verifying I am who I am.

I would be grateful for some further assistance

Hi, you really don't have any phab accessible access anymore (phone, second computer, second windows session...)?

Does anybody in Wikimedia movement knows you and your face, and can confirm your identity?

Do you have publicly shared your legal identity previously on wikimedia wikis/phab?

(Sorry for the delay in replying, I didn't get notified and I've been busy doing other things)

1. Correct - access is not possible as I am unable to log into the 'Authy' App that holds my Phabricator 2FA Key
2. Afraid not
3. I have previously confirmed my identity to the Wikimedia Foundation, in 2011 I believe, but I am currently unable to locate the Archived Page as I believe the Policy has since been updated (you used to be able to see a list of all 'identified users')

Re point 3, you're looking for m:Identification noticeboard/old

@Pppery: many thanks for confirming this

I'm having trouble finding a list of all the tasks I'm subscribed to. Does Phabricator have a page where I can do that?

Hi, @Sdkb! You can do this a number of ways. The most straightforward is https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/subscribed/. Another popular (if user-unfriendly to set up) is via Dashboards: Phabricator/Help/Dashboards

Hello, I would like my phabricator account to be deleted. Link to my account: My phabricator username and Wikimedia username don't match because I got renamed on Wikimedia. I created my phabricator account years ago and I won't use it ever again. I would prefere deletion of the phabricator account over renaming. According to Phabricator/Help#Troubleshooting "...we can delete your account..." account deletion is technically possible, but I can't find the option to delete my account in the phabricator gui so could you please delete it for me? Thanks!

Hi, that Phabricator account has had activity, so it is not possible to delete it. It could be renamed though.

Too bad. In that case, could you rename it to my Wikimedia username Œ̷͠²ð·¨´´̢́̕͘³͏¯̞̗ please? (just copy-paste the text)

Hi, I cannot because these characters are not supported; see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Phabricator/Help#With_your_global_wiki_account

Oh sry I didn't know that. Could you rename my account to "renamed_user" then please? My main request is for my old username to disappear, so if even that name is not possible you can just type in random letters or numbers. Sorry for the late reply (I was afk) and thank you for your patience.

Alright, done: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/people/manage/9332/

Why does every task I view "adds [myself] as a subscriber"? Can I disable this? Sometimes, I just feel it clutters ongoing discussion AND I'm currently concerned if I would be spammed because of this. Thanks.

Viewing does not add you as a subscriber. If you are logged in, the Preview below the comment field informs you that if you perform an action, you will get subscribed on that task.

Ah. Thanks for clearing that up, and sorry for the troubles.

Is there any hope that the Phabricator will be operated as a multilingual one? (I'm considering a Czech localization, but I'm not sure if that effort would make sense.)

Update: @Martin Urbanec (WMF) sent me a link (Thanks!) to this thread. That looks promising 🤔 How can I test it (i.e. switch to another language)?

@Nesnera It is possible since phab:T136071 and there is a translation setting at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/settings/panel/language/ however I don't know how things work and I've also seen tickets about translations not getting regularly updated.

Great! I overlooked this and played with the browser settings. Thank you very much. @AKlapper (WMF)

I'd like to export tickets in Excel or CSV format from a Phabricator board so that I can analyze the data in another tool. Is this possible? If yes, how?

@NNzali (WMF) Good catch that we had no docs about this! I've added a section at Phabricator/Help#Exporting task data. If you need more info / clarification please ask so I can improve it. I am also curious about the underlying use case - if it's more complex than using the Conduit API might also be an option.

@AKlapper (WMF), thank you for your response. I want to analyze work in progress, lead time, throughput, and blockers on the Clinic Duty workboard. I understand from conversations with my colleagues that I cannot create these metrics in Phabricator. That's why I'm exploring a third-party app. Have I answered your question?