Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-07-07/Technology report

This is a summary of recent technology and site configuration changes that affect the English Wikipedia. Note that not all changes described here are necessarily live as of press time; the English Wikipedia is currently running version, and changes to the software with a version number higher than that will not yet be active. Configuration changes and changes to interface messages, however, become active immediately.

Fixed bugs

 * The Cortado player (used to play .ogg files) now stops at the right moment rather than continuing for several minutes on low-performance computers. (bug 11445 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11445 )
 * The Cortado player's control bar no longer covers the bottom of a video it's playing. (r36977, bug 13795)
 * Several bugs were fixed in the CategoryTree extension (which shows hierarchical lists of subcategories on category pages):
 * Subcategories with no subsubcategories now no longer show a link to display their subsubcategories. (r36886, bug 11132)
 * Empty subcategories now have the message stating that they are empty with certain combinations of options that were buggy beforehand. (r36886, bug 12149)
 * The [+] link now links to the category it references when JavaScript is not enabled, rather than doing nothing. (r36773, bug 13680)
 * Subcategories are now shown in normal font rather than in bold. (r37054, bug 14730)
 * When a page is created and then immediately moved, its new title now appears in Special:Newpages. (r36938, bug 3481)
 * Unprotecting an unprotected page no longer creates a log entry. (r36967, bug 12716)
 * The length (in characters) of a block expiry time is now limited to 50 characters, to prevent it corrupting the display of the block log. (r36980, bug 14088)
 * Double-escaping was fixed in the RSS feed for log entries. (r37202, bug 14646)
 * The parsing of MediaWiki:Loginsuccess was fixed; previously many more complicated constructions failed to parse due to mistakes in the way it was parsed. (r37209, bug 14709)

New features

 * Special:SpecialPages now has a Table of Contents. (r36907, bug 13862)
 * The meta=siteinfo API query now returns a wiki's timezone and writing direction (UTC and left-to-right for enwiki). (r37034, bug 14723)
 * It is now possible to mark a gadget (Special:Gadgets) as enabled for all users by default (with [default] at the end of its line in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition), or as limited to certain groups of users (with [rights:]). (bugs 13742 and 12211, r37263) reverted in r37278

Configuration changes

 * Global accounts can now only be administered by stewards, not by Meta bureaucrats. (bug 14461 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14461 )
 * The new toolserver URL has been whitelisted so that linking to the toolserver does not trigger CAPTCHAs for anonymous users. (bug 14632 http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14632 )

Ongoing news

 * Internationalisation has been continuing as normal; help is always appreciated! See Localisation statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are, and post any updates to bugzilla or use Betawiki.