Topic on Project:Support desk

Product Version

MediaWiki 1.31.1

PHP 7.3.20 (cgi-fcgi)

MySQL 5.7.34-log

ICU 64.2

URL - its a government site so not posting the url on a public site.

We are having issue updating Media Wiki from version 1.31.1 to 1.35 or 1.36. We created an empty site; just installed the Media wiki files, created a new localsetting.php file using the default vector skin. The page does not come up. is has weird characters displaying - random letters, special characters, square boxes, black diamonds with question marks in them etc.. With the site not coming up even with the default skin, we cannot add our custom skin, which works great on version 1.31.1 since it is based on the vector skin. We reverted back to version 1.31.1

Try disabling Manual:$wgDisableOutputCompression or use a browser that is not Chrome. See also Topic:W04hg3l4k1ucernn and Topic:Vzxi8uroe2eo23gk.

Thanks Malyacko. In the other threads you mentioned disabling the compression didn't always work. One that seemed to work for most was modifying the includes/MediaWiki.php file and commenting out this line:

$response->header( 'Content-Encoding: identity' );

We will try this approach and let you know if this fixed our issues. They noted that this brought their sites up in all browsers except Firefox.