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Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Since the last edition

Since the last edition of the technology report, there have been a number of noteworthy changes to software and server configuration. Most significantly, the AntiSpoof extension (written by Neil Harris in Python and translated to PHP by Brion Vibber) has been enabled on all Wikimedia sites. It is now impossible to register usernames that are too similar to ones already registered on the wiki. Due to concerns that the restrictions were too harsh, they were relaxed less than a day before press time, and discussion is ongoing on the mailing list as to what changes exactly should be made to the code to strike the right balance between false positives and false negatives.

Nick Jenkins, Simetrical, Evan Prodromou, Andrew Garrett, and Jason Richey have become developers and now have general-purpose access to Subversion.

Additionally, various new features were added, including:

This week

The only significant software improvement made this week was retroactive autoblocking (bug 5149), added in r17486 by Andrew Garrett. When a user is blocked, the last IP address that they edited from will be immediately blocked. Previously, it was possible for a blocked user to log out without editing anything and then edit anonymously; this would only be stopped by an autoblock if the user attempted to edit a page before logging out. As an added bonus, CheckUser is now much faster, due to the indices that this modification required.

The Wikimedia Commons now allows users to specify that they should receive e-mail notification for changes to their talk page there, like Meta. (bug 7870, enabled by Brion Vibber)

A number of minor tweaks were made to the interface this week:

Some changes were made to non-English messages. Internationalization help is always appreciated! See m:Localization statistics for how complete the translations of languages you know are.


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Thanks for the detailed report! This is so much more useful than previous "list" reports full of unexplained technical jargon. Nice work! – Quadell (talk) (random) 18:56, 14 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]



       

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