Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2008-11-10/Technology report

This is a summary of recent (as in, since the last technology report was written) 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

 * Some duplicate element IDs on the diff view of Special:Undelete were changed to no longer be duplicates. (r42277, bug 16055)
 * Special:Lonelypages no longer lists pages which are transcluded but never linked to. (r42472, bug 12764)
 * API queries for backlinks now work under certain highly convoluted conditions in which they previously failed (Roan Kattouw describes the situation as this: assume B and C are redirects to A, D and E link to B and F links to C. Also, E's pageID is larger than D's, while F's is smaller than D's. If bllimit is set in such a way that the result is cut off after D (i.e. D is the last result), the continued query (with query-continue) will list E but not F, while F should be listed. (r42512, bug 16076)
 * The #time function now works on dates before 1970. (r42663, bug 11686)
 * The API no longer crashes when using generator=links when one of the links is to a Special: page. (r42732, bug 16158)
 * Inputboxes are again working properly. (r42662, bug 16108)
 * Title protections via the API now expire when requested, rather than on 1 January 1970. (r42964, bug 16207)
 * It no longer causes an internal error when an edit made via the API would hit the spam blacklist. (r43098, bug 16120)
 * The continue parameter on allpages API queries now works if a page of output happens to end with a pagename with a colon in it. (r43117, bug 16225)

New features

 * It's now possible to query the API for the number of active users. (r42335, bug 16047)
 * A new type of InputBox, "commenttitle", causes the text in the box to be used as the name of a new section. (r42703, bug 13262)
 * It's now possible for administrators to modify a block without unblocking first. (r42843, bug 10080)
 * When Special:BlockIP is visited with a user name already entered (e.g. via a "block" link), a notice is now shown if the user is already blocked (in addition to the block form). (r42843, bug 15820)
 * The "watch this" checkbox on the edit page can now be selected via the URL. (r42899, bug 13710)
 * Special:Newpages now has an option to show new redirects. (r43099, bug 16113)
 * There is a new preference to not show the diff of the rolled-back edit after doing a rollback. (r43103, bug 15761)

Breaking changes

 * Blocks via the API now prevent a user editing their own talk page by default (allowing the edit if the allowusertalk option is given); previously they allowed the user to edit their own talk page by default and crashed if there was an attempt to change this setting. (r42611, bug 16115)

Workarounds

 * The enhanced recent changes display no longer redirects users to pages with names like RCI0 when they click on the expand tabs after disabling JavaScript in Firefox using NoScript (see Deletion review/Log/2008 October 21 for more information); this was a bug in NoScript, but the code for that enhanced display has been changed to avoid triggering it. (r42576, bug 16073)

Interface changes

 * The Nostalgia skin now has a separate "Upload file" link, in addition to Upload being in the special pages dropdown. (r43100, bug 15903)

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.