Help:Wiki Update

On 2011-4-21 the Urban Dead Wiki was updated by Kevan to MediaWiki version 1.16.4. This article covers what has changed and serves to answer some frequently asked questions.

What Changed?

To answer the question on what's new (bolded items represent significant changes in functionality):

User rights

• Groups can be assigned the ability to change certain userrights (i.e. could give sysops the ability to give users the 'rollback permission'.
• There is a seperate 'undelete' permission
• A 'reason' field added to Special:Userrights
• Bureaucrats get a link to changing user rights on a user's contributions page

Administration

• Blocks can be modified without unblocking first
• 'Cascading protection' introduced - pages transcluded onto a protected page are automatically protected themselves
• Page protections can be given an expiry date.
• Nonexistant pages can be protected (i.e. to stop users recreating them)
• Users can be blocked from using Special:Emailuser
• Admins now have an option to watch the user/talk pages of users they block
• Autosummaries will be generated for deletion of pages longer than 500 characters
• Automatically fix redirects broken by a page move
• Show a diff of the revert on rollback notification page.
• A list of predefined reasons added to the protection/deletion/block forms.

Editing

• &minor= and &summary= as parameters in the url when editing, to automatically add a summary or a minor edit.
• __HIDDENCAT__ on a category page causes the category to be hidden on the article page
• There are now "undo" links in the page histories
• Relevant deletion log lines shown when uploading a previously deleted file.
• Allow bots to specify whether an edit should be marked as a bot edit, via the parameter 'bot'. (Default: '1')

User Interface

• RSS/Atom feeds of watchlists.
• Edit count is shown in user preferences
• AJAX based page watching/unwatching (doesn't appear to be enabled, though)
• Watchlist reflects logged actions like move, protection, undelete
• An excerpt of the Deletion log is now shown whenever a user vists a deleted page

Special Pages

• Special:SpecialPages is now nicely organised
• A list of active users is now available
• Special:ListUsers is sortable by account creation time
• Special:WantedTemplates added
• Allow hiding logged-in users, bots and patrolled pages on Special:Newpages.

Other

• A bunch of security/bug fixes
• A bunch of UI improvements that aren't worth listing here.

Implemented Changes

The following changes have been implemented by system administrators since the wiki software was updated.

User Interface

• Recent Changes
  • Atom and RSS feed links added to MediaWiki:Recentchangestext. Links to these feeds are now displayed at the top of Recent Changes.
  • A link to the User Creation Log was added to the top of Recent Changes. Logs are also visible as they occur in the list of recent changes (inherent behaviour).

• System Messages
  • The default message displayed while editing a cascade-protected page was changed to mimic regularly protected page.

• Style Classes
  • The CSS class townBox was redefined.
  • The CSS class stealthexternallink was redefined.
  • The CSS class for lighter than normal red links for visited red links was redefined.

Changes Effecting Sysops

• Reasons for action
  • A list of reasons for deleting a pages was defined with speedy deletion and scheduled deletion criteria.
  • A list of reasons for protecting a page was defined.
  • A list of reason for blocking a user was defined.

• Miscellaneous
  • "Ghost" images and pages which could not previously be deleted have been removed.
  • Some administrative templates have been updated to conform to the style previous to the update.

Technical Issues

Listed here are common technical issues which have been reported by users since the update.

1. Problem: My non-templated signature is broken when I sign.

   Explanation: The maximum number of characters allowed for non-templated signatures is 255. This is the default value set when the wiki software was installed.

   Solution: Use a templated signature. For help creating a templated signature, see Help:Templated_Signatures. Templated signatures can be substituted onto a page when you sign by adding the subst: tag in your user preferences (i.e. {{subst:User:Example User/MySig}}. Alternatively, shorten your signature, if you are having trouble with it experienced wikizens would be happy to help.

2. Problem: Image redirects no longer work. Clicking the image just brings me to the file page where i see the redirect has not changed and is set up properly.

   Explanation: Image redirection is unavailable in 1.16.

   Solution: A new feature is available which replaces image redirection. If you want an image to work as a link when clicked, use the link= attribute when adding the image to a page (example: [[Image:Example Image:jpg|link=Example Page]]) instead of loading the Image: page this will cause clicking on the image to send the user to the link. This also works for File: and Media: items.

3. Problem: What's with the gray boxes at the bottom of pages.

   Explanation: The default urbandead skin is showing the Category box on pages without categories.

   Solution (short term): Change your skin preferences from the Appearance tab of User Preferences. The skins urbandead2 and urbandead3 both have slightly different code that prevents this, there are also MonoBook and Vector, the old and current default wikipedia skins to choose from, neither have this issue. For help changing preferences, see Help:User Preferences.

   Solution (long term): Fixes to the urbandead skin are in the pipeline for various small issues like this.

4. Problem: Differences between revisions when viewing edit history no longer displays in color. Changes are just underlined instead of displaying in red.

   Explanation: This is another issue with the default urbandead skin.

   Solution (short term): Change your skin preferences from the Appearance tab of User Preferences.

   Solution (long term): Fixes to the urbandead skin are in the pipeline for various small issues like this.

5. Problem: External links using the CSS class "stealthexternallinks" are not displaying as they did prior to the update.

   Explanation: While the class ID stealthexternallink has been redefined on the wiki, problems with the default skin prevent links using it to display properly.

   Solution: Change skin in user preferences. It should also be noted that the class Plainlinks produces the same functionality and should be used rather than stealthexternallinks to prevent potential problems during future updates.

   Solution (long term): We will discuss the option of changing all instances of the stealthexternal id on this wiki to the plainlinks id.

6. Problem: Templates I use or have created are not working properly now or they break pages on which they are transcluded.

   Explanation: It appears that the software no longer automatically closes any unclosed HTML tags. The most common affected tags are <div> and <span>.

   Solution: Check these templates for any unclosed HTML tags, this may be what is causing the issues.