Forum Talk:Technical Issues

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Help with server migration
Citizendium is migrating to a new server.

As of this writing, the most critical parts of the migration are nearly done. The new server should be the canonical one now, what you should be seeing now, and what the domain http://en.citizendium.org points to.

Those of you with existing Citizendium wiki accounts are invited to login on the new server and test it. Basically just try doing common things that you usually do, make sure you can visit pages or edit pages as usual. Also sanity check that no articles or content from the old server are missing on the new one (assuming they weren't added since the front page notice saying not to edit the wiki).

If you find any serious problems then please report them at http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Forum_Talk:Technical_Issues so they can be triaged and fixed at the earliest.

Keep in mind that no one should be doing normal edits that they expect to stick during this transition period, although its very likely they would stick.

These are some known differences or issues at this time:


 * The wiki is slower than usual right now. Some work likely needs to be done with its configuration e.g. related to caching or something but traffic may also be a factor.
 * Creating new wiki users is broken or disabled right now; that will likely be a post-migration fix.
 * It sounds like creating new articles is currently broken.
 * A number of MediaWiki extensions probably need updating or fixing in order to resolve certain problems. MediaWiki itself was updated to the latest version and some extensions have been updated too, others are pending.
 * There is an outstanding mystery to resolve regarding the report under title Tracking below.
 * The Citizendium custom skin isn't installed yet so things look more like vanilla MediaWiki.
 * The orange heading bar doesn't appear on all pages as it usually does.

Issues reported by others on this page may still exist.

Darren Duncan (talk) 04:53, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Pages not displaying when logged-in on other wikis
I have submitted a bug report over database error messages that appear when I try to view pages on CZ wikis other than this one (e.g. the test wiki). When logged-in, no pages are viewable. The 'Random Page' link also returns an error when not logged-in. It doesn't seem to be happening on this wiki (fingers crossed it won't). John Stephenson 15:17, 27 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Greg has fixed this - thanks. John Stephenson 22:26, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

'Recent changes' sidebar links
I have added a link to the left-hand sidebar which sends you to a version of the 'Recent Changes' page which lists only edits to mainspace pages, i.e. articles. I found that the standard page was being flooded with forum comments, making actual editing more difficult. (The original link is now 'All Recent Changes'.) Unfortunately, article Talk page comments cannot be included under the new page. I'll remove/change/leave it as directed. John Stephenson 12:30, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Move citizendium-L list to Google?
Presently, we have four mailing lists which are hosted by Purdue University: Citizendium-Tools, Citizendium-Editors, Citizendium-World and Citizendium-L. Of these, the first three are defunct and Citizendium-L is used for occasional announcements. At present, we only have control over Citizendium-L because the administrators of the other lists have not been active on the project for some time.

I suggest we move our announcement list to Google Groups, to protect ourselves against the possibility that Purdue might pull the plug (we have no communication with them at all as far as I know). We already have a Group for non-members and it would be easy to set up another one for anyone to subscribe to. The posts in all four existing lists can be downloaded by anyone as .zip files, so archiving is no problem. Additionally, Citizendium-L is archived on Gmane. Are there any objections or issues that you can think of for or against this? John Stephenson 17:09, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Request to delete some templates I tried to port
I tried to port the GeoBox/river template set from Wikipedia and gave up

Can a constable please delete these. , Thanks Pradyumna Singh 08:19, 19 November 2014 (UTC)

New server experience (comment, not issue)
My experience of using the new server is that so far, if anything it seems to be a faster and smoother experience than on the old servers. I'm not sure if use of the default Vector skin rather than CZ's own Pinkwich version has anything to do with this, or whether it's because we are now on MediaWiki 1.24, or some other reason. But all good so far. John Stephenson (talk) 11:53, 3 December 2014 (UTC)


 * No problem with an edit. The tools at the top of the editing area seem to have changed, but that may just be me.  --Martin Wyatt (talk) 21:22, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

Problem (metadata)
At the moment it is not possible to test starting a new article on the new website. --Martin Wyatt (talk) 21:08, 5 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I started a new article by using the quick start process and then doing the metadata. However, the metadata form did not materialise.  --Martin Wyatt (talk) 21:53, 8 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm having the same issue with a new test article Anny Kohli. Its Metadata form link is either incomplete or not working, instead I'm facing a wall of warning banners, which want me to create and code edit the No_metadata_template. A big no no IMHO. Pradyumna Singh (talk) 11:34, 9 December 2014 (UTC).


 * The Special:MetadataForm page definitely isn't working, but the templates on a metadata-less article work for me. I can hit 'show' and see a link to manually "Create the metadata template". John Stephenson (talk) 11:46, 9 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I created a metadata page without using the special metadata page, but then it did not appear. Now the article shows that it has a metadata page, but the link goes to a blank page.  This blank page needs to be deleted so that it can eventually be replaced(Uganda Railway).  --Martin Wyatt (talk) 19:34, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Speed Issues
yesterday the site was painfully slow, 3-5 minutes to load a page while the servers shuttled between the old and -dev sites. Today its a little better, 1 minute to load a page. Hopefully its a DNS problem which it will sort itself out with propagation. Pradyumna Singh (talk) 08:08, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

- While DNS affected things last night, the main outstanding issue is the server is getting heavy traffic such as search spiders or something, and some config to help speed is pending.


 * @DD, check out WIKIPEDIA robots.txt for ideas.If spiders don't behave block them with .htaccess. It took 2 minutes for this edit section to load for me. I'm off to test create an article from scratch to see how it ports. Pradyumna Singh (talk) 10:46, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Tracking
Calls are being made to "adnxs.com" and "scorecardresearch.com" while loading pages. Is this emanating from MW or from the "addthis" widget ? page load waterfall Pradyumna Singh (talk) 11:11, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

'Random Page' link
The random page link is back on the default, i.e. any page. We previously had it set to exclude /subpages, stubs (status 3) and external articles (4). John Stephenson (talk) 11:51, 9 December 2014 (UTC)