TULIPS/July 11th, 2024

Welcome to our third TULIPS (Thursday Updates & Logs Improving Platform Software)! You can read the previous one if you haven't yet.

These posts will be made whenever we have enough dev updates to make a post, usually on Thursdays.

Live now

New features

• We now have a global account blocking system for the big bad wolves vandals.
• As announced in the last TULIPS, editing semi-protected pages now requires a confirmed email address.

Performance updates

• We've applied several optimizations to MediaWiki to shave a few milliseconds off each time you have to connect to the server.
• Our job queue (background, server-side tasks) infrastructure has been expanded. This should affect:
  • Displays of appreciation from other users! ... and other notifications
  • Extension:Translate! (no, this does not mean we are recommending use of this extension on new wikis at this time)
  • Categories showing new members!
  • Pages showing up in navboxes doing DPL queries! (This does not mean we recommend more use of DPL)
  • Cargo tables building & rebuilding!

We will continue to monitor job queue performance, if your wiki has experienced problems with any of the above please notify us if it improves (or gets worse).

Fixes

• Mathematical formulas (the math extension) should stop showing errors. As a side effect of the patch we made to fix this, your wiki may require some CSS fixes. Please check the rendering of math in each of your themes and notify us if anything isn't working and you need help fixing it.
• You should no longer receive a 400 Bad Request error for visiting too many wikis back-to-back. This was due to a misconfiguration in Google Analytics.

Upcoming changes

• We're working on improving the reliability of cross-wiki (dev:) Lua modules.

Known issues

• Extension:InputBox doesn't permit empty fields when editing a page with real-time previews.
• Extension:RSS does not allow some safe HTML (e.g.  ).