Current events

See the Forum. Current events are summarized and digested on what's up here?

New entries go right below this line:

2007-02-04 - Stricter Anti-Spam Regex
In the last weeks spam got annoying again. (Re-)enforced a stricter Anti-Spam Regex and will add more in reaction to spam. Please avoid false positives (if the spam filter ever keeps you from editing).

2007-01-24 - CategoryTree / Mediawiki 1.9.1
Today i installed CategoryTree extension. There is the new special page Special:CategoryTree which shows tree view of a given category and its subcategories. Also on each normal Category: page you can now click on little arrows next to subcategories to "expand" them. (as long as you have javascript enabled, cause this is using AJaX.)

Also upgraded Mediawiki from 1.9alpha (SVN) to 1.9.1 (stable).

2006-11-19 - GoogleMaps, Book links
reactivated new version of GoogleMaps extension, including Editor's Map,a graphical way to create map syntax. Unlike before you dont need to write the map code manually anymore. Click edit and find the new make map link on any page. Then create your map in preview, optionally add labels and just copy/paste the wiki code. Examples: Pyramid, Venedig, Berlin. (Syntax) ISBN links like f.e. on Books, now lead to new amazon.com and .de links including cover thumbnail pictures. f.e. 65753543557278919777522

2006-11-07 - fixed Flickr, updated phpFlickr
Fixed the Flickr Extension, updated phpFlickr to v2.0, installed php5-pear packages on Debian stable (via dotdeb).

2006-11-05 - Version 1.9 alpha
SVN upgrade to MediaWiki: 1.9alpha.

2006-11-04 - No more index.php page titles
By patching Title.php we now define page titles that end in 'index.php' as bad page titles to prevent some spam pages being created. It seems very unlikely that real users need those titles. We just had to give up w/index.php, but seems a very small sacrifice.

Title.php ~ line 1437 ,inside function secureAndSplit ...

if ( strstr ($t, 'index.php' ) ) { # Ends in index.php, spam protection, mutante 06/11/04 , thanks TimStarling return false; }

2006-10-21 - No more dead links
Finally we have non-existing pages displaying links to search engines and other wikis again, like we had it way back then in UseMod-times. So that means S23:whatever page name you type as URL or link to, you never end up at a dead-end. The links on a non-existing page can be edited in MediaWiki:Noarticletext and Interwiki prefixes to search engines can be added on Special:Interwiki. Current task is to make the "iw_url" field in interwiki table larger which is currently set to "char(127)". A Metager link that i wanted to add here and would have been really useful, has 657(!) chars and doesnt fit in there currently. mutante 11:51, 21 October 2006 (CEST)

2006-10-08 - PHP5 / Mediawiki SVN
Finally upgraded to PHP5 which allowed us to also upgrade Mediawiki to SVN version.


 * 1)  MediaWiki: 1.8alpha
 * 2) PHP: 5.1.6-0.dotdeb.2 (apache2handler)
 * 3) MySQL: 4.1.11-Debian_4sarge5-log
 * 4) Extensions: ... Special:Version

Mediawiki Roadmap 1.8, Del.icio.us-style Tags for MediaWiki

2006-08-12 - still fixing, but faster again
Still fixing a lot of small glitches, but positive is that the wiki is finally not so slow anymore and should generally run more reliable now with less downtimes. mutante 19:09, 12 August 2006 (CEST)

Testing the IRC bot.

2006-08-06 - back online after wiped hd
back online after fresh server image because of damaged filesystem

2006-07-25 page title search
Page title search is not case-sensitive anymore and should return all pages ,like if you search "fnord" it returns "Fnord" "fnord" and also "FnOrd" etc because we only compare the LOWER case versions in MySQL. (at least this applies to the "all" mode which is default) e.g. fnord. I also linked the page into the navigation bar, so i hope this makes it easier to find already existing pages reliably.

2006-07-05 Yes, we are too slow
The main reason we are currently so slow is low memory and MySQL suffering from it. Some quotes i just want to dump for now:

"Keep in mind that Linux, like most modern operating systems, considers caching disk I/O an optional feature. It doesn't reserve any memory for it. So when free memory is low, MySQL can really suffer because MyISAM tables expect the OS to do some read caching.

''By adjusting how much memory MySQL uses, you can often realize significant performance improvements. To do that effectively, you first need to understand how MySQL uses memory. ''

< gleam_> decrease max connections, lower per connection buffers, lower query cache size, lower key_buffer/innodb_buffer_pool_size

''Tuning memory usage on MySQL servers can be a delicate balancing act. As explained earlier, MySQL has some global memory buffers in addition to a number of per-thread buffers. The trick is to balance the performance gains that come from having large global buffers against the need to service a particular number of concurrent users. ..''

min_memory_needed = global_buffers + (thread_buffers * max_connections)

2006-06-23 PHP syntax highlighting
You can now use   around pasted PHP source code to enable syntax highlighting. Syntax Highlighting Extension Beautifier.org

2006-06-22 ASCII Art extensions
Installed our ASCII Art Extensions 3-in-1 package for DrOwl. (Important! ;)

2006-06-19 figlet extyension version 0.2
we have installed wikiFiglet version 0.2 try &lt;figlet&gt;moo&lt;/figlet&gt;

2006-06-18 Mediawiki 1.6.7 / de translation
Upgraded to Mediawiki 1.6.7 Includes a Security fix and among others # (bug 6051) Improvement to German localisation (de)
 * 1) (bug 6017) Update bookstore list for German language (de)

Übersetzung
Ich habe die folgenden Übersetzungen zu ./languages/MessagesDe.php hinzugefügt, so das unsere selbst hinzugefügten Punkte in der Sidebar nun auch in deutsch angezeigt werden wenn ein User in seinen Preferences die Sprache auf Deutsch ändert. Falls noch was fehlt oder jemand andere Sprachen ausser Deutsch und English verwendet bitte sagen.
 * 1) S23Wiki own additions

'calendar' => 'Kalender', 'all-categories' => 'Alle Kategorien', 'top-categories' => 'Grösste Kategorien', 'uncat-pages' => 'Unkategorisierte Seiten', 'potdpage' => 'Seite des Tages', 'wantedpage' => 'Gewünschte Seiten', 'brokenlinks' => 'Kaputte Links', 'taskspage' => 'Aufgaben (ToDo)', 'popularpage' => 'Beliebte Seiten', 'sidebaredit' => 'Navigationsleiste ändern', 'statspage' => 'Statistiken', 'blacklistpage' => 'Blockierte Domänen', 'searchpage' => 'Suchseite'

2006-06-15 Blinken & Graph & Interwiki

 * 1) Installed Blinken Extension (BlinkenApplet) (by took)
 * 2) Finally updated & fixed Graph Extension (Graph-Easy) (by tels)
 * 3) Fixed and updated Special:Interwiki, a special page to manipulate the InterWiki table. (the "interwiki" flag is required to modify the interwiki table, this flag can be set in Special:Userrights by a bureaucrat.) The old Special:Interwiki created this error Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /var/www/w/includes/SkinTemplate.php on line 306 due to incompabilities with newer Mediawiki versions. Replaced the extension with this one which also works with 1.6.

2006-06-05 Statistics Graphs
I created some statistics graphs,using JpGraph. You can see them on

http://s23.org/wiki/Special:Statistics?action=graph

It should update automagically. Cronjob is reading the raw stats and the graph image is created from the saved data.

Fixed http://boinc23.org/graph.php

Upgrade to version 1.6.5
Upgraded Mediawiki to 1.6.5

2006-04-16 range blocks
Blocked a range of 255 hosts that was source of the lastest spam ("68.87.76.0/24") for testing range blocks.

2006-04-12 - "Jump to"-line CSS bug removed
Removed the annoying "Jump to: search navigation" line that was shown on top of each page due to a change in Monobook.php which made our custom skin incomtabile. I removed line 102 from MonoBook.php.

2006-04-12 - ManExtension
Installed the ManExtension, used on Gentoo Wiki. Works like a charm, see f.e ps and then look at its source, its simply ps, and it takes the input from manpages existing on our server and converts them to nice wiki pages. exactly what i was planning to do with man2html, but thrasher7 had it already done and released the source just today by request. Thanks for that. mutante 21:14, 12 April 2006 (CEST)

2006-04-09 - Update to 1.6.2
Updated Mediawiki to V.1.6.2.

More changes than usual. Switched to the new 1.6 branch.

2006-04-08 - Fixed UserStats
Fixed UserStats to also check in the new table ("revision"),and not only in the outdated ("cur").

2006-04-08 - Fixed RSS feed
Fixed the RSSfeed. But we still dont really want "diffs" in there. mutante 04:56, 8 April 2006 (CEST)

2006-04-02 - Update to 1.5.8
Updated Mediawiki to V.1.5.8 (security reasons once again)

2006-03-24 - Upper / lowercase page names
I activated the option:

$wgCapitalLinks = false;

which allows to create pages starting with lowercase letters now. The wiki will NOT automatically convert page names anymore. This allows pages like df to have their correct names, but it also means now, for example Template:Manpage and Template:manpage are not the same anymore. You have more freedom to pick page titles but you also have to watch out when creating your links. I also think this caused a few broken links around the wiki that would need fixing, tell me if you want this option to stay on or not. mutante 08:32, 24 March 2006 (CET)

2006-02-28 - Ads
Forgive me for adding a few google ads. Need some way to finance currently. Any earnings will help paying the wiki server or getting a better one. I hope they dont interfere with your use of the wiki in any way and if you find an ad interesting cause they are targeted to the content you might even click. mutante 03:52, 1 March 2006 (CET)

2006-02-26 - InputBox extension
Installed Inputbox extension. In use on the Main Page. Tried to also use it on Forum, but it always adds to the bottom of a page.

2006-02-24 - -support
Enabled TeX, you can now use tags to create nice looking formulas. See Talk:MatheGruppen.

fyxxaona http://pacyaoie.com pmnktzfx pbqmzopb [URL=http://msshcmws.com]muohemkw[/URL]  nhdivboj

Upgraded to mediawiki 1.5.6
fix infinite loop bug in malformed edit comments

January 19, 2006

MediaWiki 1.5.6 is a security and bugfix maintenance release.

A bug in edit comment formatting could send PHP into an infinite loop if certain malformed links were included. In most installations, this would cause the script to fail after PHP's 30-second failsafe timeout.

backup format - mysqldump
Because of recent reports from Hundfred about problems importing a mysql dump file of the wikidb, and reading this warning

..using MySQL 4.1: changes in the new charset options may result in mysqldump outputting bogus data into backups which can't be restored without data loss.continued here,

i made 2 seperate dump files this time, one with the default options and one with --default-character-set=latin1 option. I ran a diff on them and they are different. So now we have both, and you could try either one. mutante 17:42, 5 February 2006 (CET)

2006-01-21 - google maps
You can now insert maps on wiki pages.

2006-01-17 - spam updates
update, 01/21, spam filter effectively blocks now

spam hiding with div overflow
cant we do something about the style overflow hiding trick?  mutante: yep, all wiki got that in last hours

delete page but still protect ?
hmm, i would like to delete a page and at the same time protect it :p to keep the spammer from recreating it < Sasa^Stefanovic> mutante: make a redirect to some page and than protect it < Sasa^Stefanovic> lets say Project:Protected from vandalism and lock that page too ah,sounds good...

SpamBlacklist broken ?
Apparently the SpamBlacklists still lets me post mp3.com. Still unreliable in general or caused by recent upgrade, or by using multiple blacklists (local and wikipedia)?

2006-01-16 - Mediawiki 1.5.5 upgrade
Upgraded mediawiki to 1.5.5 due to security risks (Windows Metafile vulnerability). Thanks for another advice to Mangala.

2005-12-25
"The result of the debate was No consensus. --Titoxd 07:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC") from . The discussion was moved from our Wikipedia:Talk:S23_Wiki. Thanks Savior for the "heads up". I am really glad we weren't deleted. -Kunda 12:21, 25 December 2005 (CET)

2005-12-23
S23 Wiki article on wikipedia subject to deletion


 * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/S23_Wiki

2005-12-07
Updated to Mediawiki (1.5.3) to fix a bug that allowed injecting php code. (thanks for the hint) mutante 16:42, 7 December 2005 (CET)

2005-12-01
Had a server problem. Rebooted via remote-interface. Back online before midnight. mutante 23:17, 1 December 2005 (CET)

2005-11-28
Installed the new Task Extension and Graph Extension.

2005-11-09
Heute ist 9. November.

2005-10-26
If there are outages tonite then this time its not our fault but the provider. Quote: '''we will run a emergency maintenance during night from 26th to 27th november between 02.00 and 05.00 CEST. You will see connection drop several times during this period. We apologise for any inconvenience.''

2005-10-25
Apache crashed. Minor outage tonite. Back online.

2005-10-22 CSS fixes, new way to edit sidebar, installed Spam extension

 * Rewrote main.css file to work properly with 1.5, added transparency, rounded corners and stuff
 * added minor graphics, for hr-tag, list bullets etc..
 * installed SpamBlacklist extension (works with interwiki spam blacklist)
 * discovered new way to edit sidebar via MediaWiki:Sidebar

...

mutante 21:03, 22 October 2005 (CEST)

2005-10-17 Finally upgraded to Mediawiki 1.5 stable
The database upgrade (major db scheme change) seems to have worked smoothly. Now we just need to hack the customizations back in place and learn about all the new features. Looking forward to content based spam control. Also we dont have to be scared of this one anymore:

Versions prior to 1.3.16 and 1.4.10 have a serious data corruption bug which is triggered by a spambot known to operate in the wild.

mutante 20:56, 17 October 2005 (CEST)

We have to fix the CSS once again, customization was not as easy to hack in again as expected due to CSS changes. Aware of the bugs in the navigation menu. Working on it as soon as time avail. mutante 01:57, 19 October 2005 (CEST)

2005-06-27 got rid of index.php
Weee! We finally have the short URLs without "index.php" working. And old long URLs are also still working ;) We didnt use mod_rewrite but just the "alias" method in apache config and had to move the wiki dir from "wiki" to "w" and then adjust wgScriptPath and $IP in LocalSettings.php. Then added aliases to httpd.conf as described here. After a little help from Duesentrieb it worked, joy :) mutante 01:05, 27 Jun 2005 (CEST)

and we even caused: (note to self: change default LocalSettings.php to $IP = dirname(__FILE__) ...)

,so there should be only one variable to adjust in the future instead of two.

2005-06-26
By request we have a brighter background for the article area and links are now bold. We can keep changing of course. Not 100% satisfied yet. mutante 13:17, 26 Jun 2005 (CEST)

''the german wikipedia is nominated for the Grimme Online Award and we go win with your help. vote here (last entry) it's very simple to vote: click on the circle left to Wikipedia - Die freie Enzyklopädie, then the button vote >>> and then Ja!. the rest isn't necessary, cause it's just a competition Schaengel89 @me 12:03, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)''

[] Vote for de.wikipedia

Webcam Integration / Mass file upload
actually i would like to let a few shell users (mass)-upload files via scp or ftp,because uploading one by one via webinterface is a lot more work, but then i would need to "emulate" the web upload function to make them still appear like normal wiki file uploads

making a command-line script like 'wikiupload.php ~/image.jpg' which makes the image appear in the Wiki exactly like if it was uploaded via the regular web upload ,sounds possible?

< brion_> mutante, sure if you like < brion_> see existing scripts in maintenance/ and the code run by SpecialUpload.php to log uploads

thanks,will do will try to upload with a cronjob then, integrating my webcam to my userpage..

2005-06-17
I made a fresh backup to my homeserver (wiki directory & sqldump). File sizes are getting bigger, means the wiki is growing quickly ;). Finn, if you want you can also download the backup from my homeserver later, to be even safer. greets, mutante 01:13, 18 Jun 2005 (CEST)

2005-05-05
I have installed small banner below the footer. Tell me if it bothers you a lot or if you think its ok to even click sometimes, because this would help finance the server an easy way and i hope its not to anoying down there. mutante 00:18, 6 May 2005 (CEST)

Changes in domain name settings and virtual hosts setup.

This Wiki is now reachable as http://s23.org/wiki/ OR http://is-root.de/wiki/.

IRC Recent Changes bot had trouble because of IP changes and is now back online.

mutante 11:16, 5 May 2005 (CEST)

2005-04-17
Added a Template:Fnord which randomly selects Fnord definitions from a newly added database table containing them all.

mutante 15:42, 17 Apr 2005 (CEST)

Here you can see how it works.

2005-04-15
The IRC Bot is back up in #wiki on EfNet. mutante 21:22, 15 Apr 2005 (CEST)

2005-04-09
mutante 11:58 (CEST)

Added "Top Categories" box to the left navigation area.

mutante 12:53 (CEST)

Recreated the Seti23 MySQL databases on this server (after hd crash,see below). Repairing step by step. The old s23 server will go down.

MattisManzel 14:13 (CEST)

I wonder it we shouldn't fold current events into forum, rename forum to wiki-forum (WikiForum) as ist leads to confusions on wikis having a an online forum attached and rename current events in the navigation bar into wiki-forum. Same with community portal and wiki-node. I'm testing leading signing here removing the date btw.

2005-04-05
mutante 00:08 (CEST)

The harddisk crashed on s23.org

Auf eris (s23.org) gibt es ein Problem mit der Festplatte. Email momentan nicht verwendbar. Wer dringend seine Mail braucht bitte schnell an mutante (mutante@s23.org geht wieder) den account und eine alternative mailadresse,dann kann ich weiterleitungen einrichten, da die domainverwaltung getrennt vom server läuft.

Added "Browse Categories" and "Wanted pages" links (/var/www/wiki/skins/MonoBook.php) mutante 23:34, 3 Apr 2005 (CEST)

Just upgraded to Mediawiki 1.4. Please report differences. mutante 23:20, 3 Apr 2005 (CEST)

Currently backing up to prepare Mediawiki 1.4 upgrade. Stay tuned. mutante 21:25, 30 Mar 2005 (CEST)

RSS-feed inclusion/syndication now works. Made a RssExtension using magpie. A PHP class to read rss-feeds. Check RecentChangesOfOurNeighbors for discussion and example. syntax is http://feedurl.com/feed.rss. mutante 21:22, 25 Mar 2005 (CET)

Access recent changes via http://rc.s23.org Thanks mutante -Kunda 21:32, 19 Mar 2005 (CET)

crypt wiki tag enabled by mutante 00:19, 19 Mar 2005 (CET)

Uploaded three desktop images i just made. mutante 00:22, 19 Mar 2005 (CET)

You can now use filename to insert MoonEdit files that have been saved with 'svsavetxt' on the 'is-root.de' MoonEdit server.

mutante 20:02, 12 Mar 2005 (CET)

New irc bot functions created in #wiki on efnet. mutante 00:29, 7 Mar 2005 (CET)

Image Thumbnails now work. Installed "imagemagick" on the server. Use wiki syntax like. mutante 01:56, 6 Mar 2005 (CET)

I have made a Custom Recent Changes mediawiki extension.You can now include something like Ting into any wikipage to include an RC page for all pages starting with "Ting" only. Example: Check the source of Debian/RecentChanges.

mutante 23:12, 1 Mar 2005 (CET)

Next task: Fix all Dead End Pages (pages that are not linked to anything in the wiki). Kunda 17:33, 27 Feb 2005 (CET)

Finished categorizing all pages! :) mutante 21:26, 26 Feb 2005 (CET)

Got the RC-IRC-Bot working! Now we have the bot in #wiki on Efnet. Join there, make a wiki update here and you will see. :) mutante 12:15, 26 Feb 2005 (CET)

You can help by putting uncategorized pages into categories. mutante 14:11, 20 Feb 2005 (CET)

Moved from Beta status to Release Canditate.

Currently the import from usemod is still fresh and you will see tons of editing that is fixing/transferring usemod wiki markup over here. You can help if you like. (pre-release phase)

Once we are done (not yet) we will "release" the wiki and redirect all the users from old usemod URLs.

'''Update: Traffic from old usemod wiki URLs is being redirected over here already. More than 1000 pages have been categorized. Still about 200 to go and many Umlaut fixes to do though.

Next steps:

- Finish categorizing. (Can endlessly be extended by inventing new categories.

- Fix all broken Umlauts. Find out if still so many that doing it by script on the database makes more sense

- Add content and internal links to pages that contain only external links (i.e. fix dead end pages.

- Hack own extensions (RecentChanges page for subwikis (ting,drogen) and tags. (good old and new stuff like )

mutante 19:47, 24 Feb 2005 (CET)

Update: A current event is you reading this page right where you are sitting now.