User talk:Sean Colombo/Archive/2009 January

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Archive

Current 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2008 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 Apr 27 - 2008 Jul 10 2008 Feb 24 - 2008 Apr 26 2008 Jan 27 - 2008 Feb 23 2007 Oct 6 - 2008 Jan 26 2007 Sept 14 - Oct 6 2007 May 12 - Sep 14 2007 Mar 13 - May 12 2007 Jan 10 - 2007 Mar 13 2006 Nov 10 - 2007 Jan 10 2006 Sept 14 - 2006 Nov 10 2006 May 2 - 2006 Sept 13

Contents 1 Sean 2 Guess what? 3 A Question Regarding Online Status 4 Categories 5 Umabot 6 Spam protection prevents spam report 7 Lost in LW 8 Extensions 9 Viewing pages other than songs/artists/etc. in the API 10 DISPLAYTITLE 11 Question regarding Semantic MediaWiki 12 Questions about the SOAP Failures page 13 Mass Immigration 14 Wikifyer 15 When you got a minute... 16 API error- "Zero Sized Reply" 17 Thanks.. 18 Watchlist 19 MediaWiki API 19.1 $wgEnableWriteAPI 19.2 WSDL 20 Site Slowdown

Sean

Happy Christmas and all the very best to you in 2009!

 ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 05:27, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! :D (replied on Red's talk page)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:54, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Guess what?

Redxx presented me the Gold Record Award for maintaso well on the Song Of The Day pages. It was amazing. Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

-Andrew Horne (talk|contribs) 14:52, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

Very cool, congratulations! :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:54, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

A Question Regarding Online Status

Hi Sean, I met you in the chatroom once quite a while back. I wanted to run something by you and find out if is even possible. Is there a way to alter or upgrade MediaWiki in such a way as to allow us to know when somebody we need/want to contact is on the server? Now, if I want to see if a particular admin might be online is to check out the Recent Changes page. Thanks for your time, RainbowDragon 20:46, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Hiya,

I looked around a little bit and couldn't find an extension that does this (just found one that tells the total number of guests and registered users online, which doesn't really help with your problem). If you run into one or decide to write one, let me know. We might need to put some settings to let users opt-out of that if they don't want to plaster their presence on the site.

Cool idea though,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:31, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Are you able to create a MySQL (or similar) table with "username" and "online" (containing an expiry time), as columns and insert some PHP in the <div class="portlet" id="p-personal"&rt; (Personal tools) that updates the "online" column to a time 5 minutes from the current server time (only if that setting is enabled of course). The all you need is a method for including some PHP to check that expiry time for a given user and spit out "Online" of "Offline". ♫Humbug^{(Talk ♪ Ctrb)} 00:27, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

That sounds doable but would take a bit of time to make an extension to do that. Maybe someone will be willing to do that? I saw that this got moved to the Admin Portal though (which seems like a good place for it), so I'll just archive this convo and let that one go on. Hopefully if other ppl think it's interesting too, someone will jump on it and write it as an extension.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:54, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Categories

It seems to me that our categories are lagging behind a bit. I've saved and resaved pages in categories and the category pages themselves, but they continue to show pages which are not in them or even have been deleted. Could we perhaps run rebuildCategories.php or something? (For examples, see Category:Black Songs or Category:Review Me). --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ ¶ 15:52, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

Aqua, you mean there are more black stars out there? I've gotten Category:Black Songs down to 500 at this writing. Are there more just waiting to be put in the queue? *groans* RainbowDragon 15:34, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Aqua with regards to Black Songs please see this post. Thanks  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 16:48, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

The slave database isn't behind (which is a good thing :)) so that can't be the cause. Oddly, I can't find a file called rebuildCategories.php or anything similar ... maybe it doesn't exist in the current version anymore?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:54, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

No I didn't think database was behind. That is why I posted. I think the explanation for what Aqua is seeing as a discrepancy is that it looks to me that people are working against each other. Some are working hard on putting song pages into black category, whilst others are working equally hard alongside them taking them out. OK I may not have described that entirely right but it ain't far off. This is why documentation needs to be updated. So everyone is clear on this.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 17:07, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Ah, I see. I'll jump over to that post.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:09, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Umabot

I just happened to notice that this bot isn't included in the live bot list. It's run by Umat  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 13:19, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Ah, cool. I've asked him if he's ready for a Bot flag.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 20:38, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Sean and sorry because I wasn't quite sure how it all worked but bot came up on my watchlist and I noticed it wasn't listed on Bot Portal template because it's not linked in live bot list.

Btw I know you're always very busy so don't worry about responding here if you feel it's something I might have on my watchlist. I had already seen you're post to Umat and in my book actions speak louder than words :-) If I don't happen to see what you've done, you can bet I'll come knocking ;)  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 21:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Spam protection prevents spam report

Recently, User:RainbowDragon tried to post a message on your spam report page – but couldn't save it, because one of the headers triggered the spam filter (probably "Pharmacy-for(dot)us"). While I admit that the irony of this is highly amusing ;-) could you maybe either edit the offending header(s) or archive the older messages? Thanks! — 6x9 (Talk) 00:47, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I deleted a bunch of unneeded sections from the page, hopefully that did the trick.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:40, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Lost in LW

If you take a peek at Los Rancheros, (it's empty even though what links here shows otherwise) and a peek at Orphaned pages, (none of their songs are in there).... Yep that's the problem... they are not orphaned because there is a redirect pointing to them. Thousands of song pages are in the twilight zone like this.

There are 2 solutions that I can think of, One is to delete all redirects (over 100,000). The other is to change the definition of Orphaned Page: so that a page that has a link only to a redirect is considered orphaned, as well as a page with no link whatsoever. This needs attention. TIA cheers ∃cho⚡ierr∀ ( ☏ • ⎋ • ⌫) 14:04, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Indeed it does need attention Echo. Most redirects do end up on a song page that is listed on the artist page of course, so they certainly shouldn't be deleted. (We probably wouldn't be able to function very well as a lyric site without them). But the example you have provided shows that not all do. If there was a list of these songs only linked indirectly via a redirect they would get rectified. It's somewhat amazing that this problem appears to have gone unnoticed for so long. Good call!  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 14:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry to play my same tune over again, but this will all not be an issue when and if we go Semantic. Artist and album pages will be auto-compiled and (as long as the album and artist pages exist) songs will be automatically added to them. --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ ¶ 14:54, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

It seems that these kind of problems just keep cropping up, even after 2 years. I'm surprised that the energy of continual maintenance doesn't appear greater than the work involved in adding an extension. There's the whole new vocabulary to learn, and a quite a few bot passes to make, but even if only for the sake of finding problem areas, it seems like a good trade. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 02:22, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

It's definitely yet another strong reason to move toward SMW. We should start a page somewhere with info on how that's coming because I feel like I've told different pieces to different ppl. The very short version is this: as I try to tread out of the other tasks as they crop up, I've been investigating this with a ton of help from a lot of you, especially Åqüã†ìкí. Even the guys who invented and maintain SMW have been very helpful. The main problem is going to be getting our 6 servers to be able to handle our traffic once we're Semantic. At least this is my assumption, none of us know for sure.

I think you make a great point team a, that the time we keep devoting to tasks like this may be better spent just biting the bullet for a while and spending a month (or however long it takes) letting that stuff go unresolved for a while. This is certainly an option, and is probably the best course if we can't eventually get all of the other stuff out of the way first.

Unfortunately, I'm the bottleneck in this process since server-stuff all has to filter through me. Some of the scheduled tasks (like open-sourcing the code) would make even the server-stuff a lot more open to the community and not bogged down by the availability of one person.

For now, I'm going to try to see if I can just accelerate myself a bit so that I can make forward progress on all the forward-looking stuff we've planned. Here is a good way to track how well I'm doing at that: my backlog. If I do nothing, the line goes up, if I move at a decent pace, the line stays flat... but if I can get enough done, that line should be able to fall & then we can have all of this great, fun stuff like SMW and fix the whole internets! ;)

So... I agree with what's above. For this specific problem though, there should be a fix. I'll jump in the MW IRC channel while I do some of the other tasks and see what the opinion is on changing the definition of Orphaned Pages (ie: whether we should fix it in MW or write an extension of our own).

As always, thanks for the helpful feedback guys (and gal)!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 03:35, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

I think everyone here is grateful to have someone like you run LW. I'm hoping that Semantic will allow many of us to shoulder even more of the work, in addition to what Semantic itself will do. As far as having a bottleneck to the server-side work, is it possible to make some of the server-side stuff available via FTP so that users can suggest specific changes rather than posting "please fix this problem I found" on your talk page? I think I've seen this on Wikipedia. Or, maybe Uberbot can upload some files into the MediaWiki namespace every week or so, whatever works.

I myself have been thinking over the past week or so that we need some kind of action plan with specific details about how the upgrade will take place - I think LyricWiki:Semantics would be a good place to coordinate the effort. I don't know much about how Semantic will affect server use - it seems that the servers have lately been bogged down at times as things currently stand. This probably deserves further research, possibly into caching some Semantic functions or pages (I recall that many already are). When it comes time to upgrade to Semantic, I think templates will probably do most of the heavy lifting, so users can learn the new terms and functions at their own pace, and not actually need to know much while editing. These are among the things the proponents of Semantic should probably look into further, but if any of the recent template work on this site is any indication, I'm sure that the admins can shoulder a lot of this burden. Once again, Sean, thanks for putting your support behind us and letting us know about progress and obstacles. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 22:40, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Just wanted to say thanks for response Sean.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 20:37, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

 :) Thanks for the kind words guys. To make my talk-page a little shorter, I'm archiving this and I'll just leave a note about looking into getting redirected-to-only pages as Orphaned Pages again.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:43, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Extensions

There is an awesome extension called Replace Text that does a simple search-and-replace (no regex) across an entire wiki, putting all the changes into the job queue. I think it would be an awesome tool for this site and is made to be fore admins only. Installing is a cinch. How about it? --Aquatiki - T - E 02:14, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

You're right Aqua, that extension does indeed look awesome. Although it looks very simple to use, I would still suggest that if it was installed someone writes an Idiots Guide. Better safe than sorry!  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 12:16, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, cool. That might be a good way to fix Mischko's signature too. I spent some time yesterday trying to fix it and it looks like we're going to need an extension (probably one that will require different code than Mischko has in there right now). I'll set it up on the test server when I have a sec.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:10, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Installed. -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:05, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Viewing pages other than songs/artists/etc. in the API

I decided to make a small program to help me input languages for songs needing language identification, using the SOAP API to display each song and a simple manual review and button GUI to input language information. However, I found that the API is not capable of retrieving the listing page Category:Songs_Needing_Language_Identification (or I am missing something). I am aware that this page is automatically generated, so being able to edit the page is not desirable. However, viewing the list of songs would be very useful when creating some types of tools.

I am not aware of the proper procedure to request new functionality, so I added a note about this in future functions on LyricWiki:SOAP#Future_Tasks, and also this note here to call attention to it. (Spacejens 13:55, 14 October 2008 (CET))

You can use the MediaWiki API located at mw_api.php to do this sort of thing. ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ Something For Nothing 05:01, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

DISPLAYTITLE

Can anything be done to widen this, so that it isn't just the first letter of page name that is affected? An earlier discussion.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 04:23, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

It's not just the first letter. You can also display underscores instead of spaces. *ducks and runs* — 6x9 (Talk) 04:30, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

6x9, you mentioned something about v1.14. Is that the way to make DISPLAYTITLE work better as far as you know? 1.14 wasn't "stable" yet last time I checked. I think the official release is still 1.13. Given how many problems we had with a "stable" release, I'd want to wait for it to be official.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:52, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I got that info from here: "Since MediaWiki 1.14, it is possible to disable this restriction and thus allow any display title…" It would be neat, yes, but it's certainly not worth the hassle of another upgrade just for this feature. — 6x9 (Talk) 18:14, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Says who 6x9? (Rfl). Joking aside, no of course not. But it would be a great feature, certainly one that would be very much appreciated by our friends who get hot under the collar about our page naming policy re capitalisation.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 14:27, 20 January 2009 (UTC) P.S. Yes underscores too 6x9..but I ask you, what use are they? Ugly things!

Would it really be a big a deal to go from 1.13 to 1.14 as it was to go 1.7 to 1.13? --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ ¶ 17:02, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Our upgrades should be much easier now since we took out all the code that was a "hack" to the system and made everything into extensions (mad props to Krimpet from MediaWiki for the help). So eventually the upgrade to 1.14 should be easy. Last I heard though *runs to check* yup, 1.14 isn't released yet. Even when the new versions come out they tend to be a little buggy (I've had to make patches to our system because 1.13 had some issues). Once 1.14 is out, it'll probably take one night to upgrade (~3 hours?) if everything goes relatively smoothly. I'm pretty sure I'll get an email from MediaWiki or Wikimedia or whoever runs the MediaWiki list when 1.14 comes out, but I'm not positive. If you guys hear about it before me, let me know :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:49, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Question regarding Semantic MediaWiki

Hi Sean, I was curious when our wiki would change to the Semantic MediaWiki software? From everything I've read it is da bomb! Also, is it a matter of time, money or logistics that will determine how soon we get it? Sincerely,    RainbowDragon    talk    contribs   00:21, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Howdy,

Um. I don't have a single answer which maybe implies that I'm just being too lazy? A main concern is the performance (speed) of it. The creators were very responsive and recommended ways to test the performance ahead of time. If we get to a point where we have a test server again, it might only take a couple days of work to get it up and tested. An unfortunate problem is that we need to modify the database to test it and that requires downtime (a couple of hours... not great, but definitely manageable).

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 20:03, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Okay, fair enough. Thank you for replying :-) --   RainbowDragon    talk    contribs   21:10, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Questions about the SOAP Failures page

I've been exploring the site and trying to familiarize myself with as much as possible. Well, I came across the SOAP Failures page and I've actually managed to find a couple songs! My question is this: do you periodically go through and purge page requests that are utterly impossible to retrieve? By this I mean like requests for Sirius XM (satellite radio) or the Playboy Channel. There are also a couple that post phone numbers as well (nope, not 867-5309) *grin*

This is also an eye-opening experience. Although I've not found the lyrics for Beres Hammond:I Surrender, I happened to listen to it on YouTube. Awesome!    RainbowDragon    talk    contribs   15:13, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, that page is a lot of fun :)

As far as clearing out the list, it's cleared out once per week (I think on Monday mornings). I just cleared it out a minute ago to double-check that the command I was using actually works, so it should be alright.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 03:37, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Ugh. It's a good thing you brought that up though. It helped me find that I accidentally had a password still in the SVN repository which I intended to make public.

Actually, it turns out there were a lot of passwords left still (the way I searched for them before was wrong). Been working on this for a few hours and it will be a few more before it is done :/ ... anywho, that was a really good catch! Thanks!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 05:58, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Mass Immigration

I don't know what happened, but suddenly the unknown flag at Category Hometown/Unknown changed to the Australian Flag! no change in the page history.... Did you happen to do something serverside?! baffled, ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 15:27, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

It's just that the weather is really horrible everywhere else right now, so I figured it'd be nice to give ppl the benefit of the doubt and put them somewhere warm.

Seriously though, someone just uploaded a different picture over the Image:Flag_-_Unknown.png picture itself. Fixed now.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 15:38, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

LOL, I wrote the fellow a note too, it's -35 here :)) cheers ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 15:40, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Wikifyer

I think it's great that it now incorporates Musicbrainz, but I'm finding more and more that I can't use it for that site because it will only work and list tracks that have the PVID tag. Any chance you could amend script?  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 04:25, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a quick thing to fix. Can you link me to an example album that it doesn't work well for (so I can test it while I change it).

Thanks,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 11:33, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Sean - Grace Jones - Slave To The Rhythm Only lists 5 of the 8 tracks :( (and some people might not even notice). And I may be pushing my luck ;) but any chance of incorporating Discogs at some point? They sometimes have albums the others don't have.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 14:39, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Also, while you're at it — the auto-capitalisation doesn't work for (all) accented characters, i.e. "all" gets changed to "All", but "áll", "àll" or "äll" would stay lower-case. — 6x9 (Talk) 19:58, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

If you have a running PyWikipediaBot based bot environment, you can try the fetchdiscogs.py from my Google Code page, to create an album based on Discogs data (including album art). Also feel free to reuse the code for tighter integration into the page. Umat 19:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Any luck with this Sean?  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 06:20, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the reminder. Just so that I can go through them in order, I'm gonna make a checklist (please bear with the redundancy):

1. Fix the Musicbrainz bug
2. Fix capitalization of accented characters
3. Add discogs

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:36, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

When you got a minute...

Can you look at this post please Page Ranking/Talk pages. Thanks!  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 14:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

You can archive this post now Sean - thanks to 6x9!  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 16:48, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

API error- "Zero Sized Reply"

Hi, Sean; maybe you know already, - just wanted to inform you:

---

ERROR The requested URL could not be retrieved. While trying to retrieve the URL: http://lyricwiki.org/api.php? The following error was encountered:

   * Zero Sized Reply 

Squid did not receive any data for this request.

---

--Senvaikis ^(talk) 09:15, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Hmm... what do you think it should say? If you don't give it any parameters, it just quits early. Are you just saying that you think there should be an empty wrapper (like an HTML page w/nothing for the HTML format or an xml entity with no content for the xml format?) or am I missing the point?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 12:55, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Response given above corresponds to request with all required parameters. You may try any for testing, (this, for example) :). cheers,--Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:02, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

SOAP is dead from here too ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 13:05, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

It appears that maybe the getArtist() functionality is totally broken, but getSong() is fine. If that's not what you guys are seeing, please let me know.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:07, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

getsong() is alive ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 13:19, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

APC got confused (hate when that happens... because you can't really prevent it). Restarted Apache on the API server (which clears the APC cache) and it works again. Thanks for the report & the help debugging, guys :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 13:40, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Workin' now - thanks, --Senvaikis ^(talk) 13:49, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Thanks..

I'm glad you got round to checking the FAQ page (My post to you about it) I felt it important that you did.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 09:24, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

No prob... thanks for bringing it to my attention. I almost missed it :)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:01, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Watchlist

I know it shouldn't ever really be needed, but is there any way you can increase the number of days from 7 in user preferences? Sometimes I get a bit behind and I don't like not being able to review my watched pages.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 16:51, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Right next to "1 | 3 | 7 days" there is this little link that says "all". That says it all :-) (I haven't dared to click on it yet, because I don't know whether the result will be broken up or whether it'll be one huge list with several thousand items…) — 6x9 (Talk) 17:29, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

"All" doesn't make a difference, at least not in our configuration (try it out, it will be the same length as 7 days). My thought is that the watchlist information rolls off after 7 days and is permanently gone.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 03:30, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

As I see it a page is only listed once (maybe once per day actually, but I don't think so) with the newest dif only so clicking "All" will be, at max, the length of your watchlist. But I think you might be right. I get one more item from "All" then from "7". ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ Something For Nothing 09:30, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you KingNee. Did you honestly think 6x9, particularly since you know how curious I am and how much I love meddling, that I wouldn't have noticed or clicked on that option long, long before now...? Rflmao.. So back to Sean then..see if he change it, not in watchlists, but like I said in user preferences configuration.  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 11:02, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

So, it turns out that the limit of 7 is hardcoded into the Preferences special-page. So it doesn't look like you can make it the default, but since the duration of time actually gets passed as a URL parameter, you so you could (if this worked, but it won't... see below) make a link which will always use the parameter and store it wherever you keep helpful bookmarks - 30-day watchlist.

HOWEVER, the results on your Watchlist are grabbed from the RecentChanges, so the farthest it can go back is 7 days. This can be changed though pretty easily. The only drawback being that increasing that number can slow the system down. I just did "show the last 500 change not counting bots" and got 2,000 edits in the last 6 hours which would imply about 2,000 per day or 60,000 manual edits per month (plus whatever the bots are doing... which is probably a few million). Sooo... probably a bad idea to increase that :-/

Unless you guys really need it in which case we could bump it up to 14 to give it a whirl and see if it slows things down or not.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 00:25, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

No Sean not at expense of site. It was just for me really, because I get sooo distracted and before I know it stuff on my watchlist has disappeared and I can't recall what, nor can I get it back. Thanks for looking into it though. Appreciated. Now, if anyone should ever say "How come you didn't spot that?" I'll have a totally valid excuse ;)  ♫_♫Яєd_{xx ♪}♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 03:09, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki API

$wgEnableWriteAPI

Ok, I just discovered that writing is not enabled for the MW API. This is kinda crucial for what I'm planning on doing... Do you think you could allow it? (Set $wgEnableWriteAPI = true I think). That'd be handy. Thanks, ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ Something For Nothing 14:37, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Just checked it out. That's not available yet but it will probably be in 1.14 when it comes out (docs).

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:12, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Holy Mole-y. I didn't realise the edit function was new... I also didn't realise the big red box on the documentation page. Oh well, I might have to spoof a browser request. Thanks for your help. ♫ LYRIC-Humbug ^words♪_deeds ☘ Something For Nothing 06:00, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

WSDL

Is there a WSDL file for the MediaWiki API? Spacejens 16:24, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think so. I don't think it does SOAP. Here is some really good documentation though: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:18, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

OK, for my SOAP needs I guess I just have to wait for the functions I need to be implemented in the LyricWiki API then ;-)

Spacejens 08:21, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Site Slowdown

Some of the other admins and I have noticed that the site has been pretty slow lately (mentioned at LyricWiki_talk:Administrators_Portal#Ssslllooowww_Motion..., among other places). This doesn't seem to be due to bot activity or job queue length. If I remember correctly, we don't seem to be lacking in servers either. When you get the chance, do you think you could run some diagnostics to see where some of this activity is coming from? Appreciate it, ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 18:25, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I don't know exactly what wrong yet. I've looked into it a bit and it seems to be two problems. One related to the searchindex table being locked and the other was an upgrade problem related to postSong(). I've added the postSong() problem to the upgrade page and will use this convo as a reminder to look at the other problem when I have a chance.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:08, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! That's all I can ask for. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 22:15, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Actually, it also appears that now that the HTML for the right-hand-banner comes before the left column (to make the page render correctly in IE6), slow ad-loads cause the whole left menu not to load until it is done. That makes the whole page seem slow and the navigation be useless for several seconds. So in addition to the postSong() problem on the other page, this section is for:

1. Check into why the SearchIndex table can get backed up at times & figure out a fix.

   NOTE: The WP guys basically said that this just happens w/normal search... should switch to Lucene (MWSearch)

2. Figure out a way to make the right-hand banner not block the rest of the page from loading.
3. Figure out a way to make the Recentchanges RSS feed not crash the site even after a bunch of hardcore edits.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:27, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

NOTE: Moved the list of 'slow things' elsewhere (it's actually much longer). -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:05, 29 January 2009 (UTC)