TULIPS/July 4th, 2024

Welcome to our second ever 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. Since the last TULIP we have released a bunch more changes promised in the MediaWiki 1.41 update notes, along with a few previously unannounced changes. Most of those are listed below.

Happy Fourth of July to everyone in the world, regardless if this is a holiday to you or not!

Live now

New features

• Heads up! On July 10th we're going to start requiring users to confirm their e-mail address before they'll be eligible to edit semi-protected pages.
• Cross-wiki notifications are now properly supported on all live wikis!
• Users with a confirmed e-mail address will no longer be subjected to CAPTCHAs when logged in.

Performance updates

• Backported optimizations for Scribunto's mw.clone function. This reduces the cost of making an {{#invoke}} call.
• Last week we noticed an up-tick in connection errors to onboarding wikis. On the same day, a temporary fix was implemented to reduce those errors' frequency. We continue to monitor server performance and have long-term improvement plans.

Fixes

• Red links no longer leak into anonymous page views upon saving edits.
• Fixed an issue that would break tabbers if characters [ and ] were added to a tab name. This was a bug introduced in our 1.41 update.
• Email notifications are no longer sent for every edit to a watched page by default. You may turn them back on in your preferences.

Known issues

• Extension:InputBox doesn't permit empty fields when editing a page with real-time previews.
• We hope to address poor job queue performance in the upcoming weeks.