User blog:Lcawte/Update:BTS @ ShoutWiki

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So I thought I'd drop some of our behind the scenes work that we've been doing the last while into a quick update as it isn't always particularly visible.

As many of you may be aware, ShoutWiki took over the technical support of Brickimedia and Brickimedia now exists as a semi-autonomous network within the ShoutWiki farm. By this we mean that Brickimedia still retains control (by which we mean we'll grant the requests 99% of the time) over most of the settings here, as well as it's on wiki independence. I'm not sure I'll have everything included here, I've not sure we've written about anything we've done since Brickimedia merged in, so I'm drawing a lot on memory.

Over the last while, we've enabled VipsScaler to handle all bitmap thumbnailing on Brickimedia. Vips is a scaling library which uses a different algorithm to manipulate images and reduces memory load while tests show, produce a higher quality JPEG thumbnail than other previously used libraries. It also results in smaller thumbnail sizes which is great as Brickipedia has a large number of high quality images.

Behind the scenes, there's been various bits of work on keeping the servers up to date, running with decent performance, keeping MediaWiki up to date and secure, and general code quality of various extensions and skins.

More recently, and probably more importantly, HTTPS. We selected Brickipedia as our test candidate for HTTPS deployment as it's a large enough wiki that we have a number of test cases, but also because it's custom domain setup allows us to set it up mostly in isolation. Over the weekend, I rolled an initial setup for Brickipedia which now means that the site is accessible using the HTTPS entry point. This required a lot of poking around on the backend of our caching infrastructure to strip out the old setup that allowed us to run our backend/auxiliary services in HTTPS and migrate them to a unified solution. Brickipedia makes use of a wildcard LetsEncrypt SSL certificate for the entire of the Brickimedia.org domain, Nginx SSL termination before a frontend Varnish cache.

We've still got some work to do on our HTTPS setup, at Brickipedia our main challenge for a complete setup is getting global assets to load. While we were able to roll a certificate for our image setup, images.shoutwiki.com to reduce a large number of mixed content errors, we've still got a few global assets such as GlobalCSSJs to fix, as well as skin assets. A fix for the latter is more straightforward and likely to be here before the week is out. GlobalCSSJs is likely to take longer, as Hub requires a setup which will scale across our entire network, which is where we run into current domain structure issues that we are trying to find solutions for.

Jack Phoenix has been slaving away making ShoutWiki's code ready for an upcoming 1.32 deployment, details will be announced on our Facebook page closer to the time. Last night we believe we sorted a fix for the ArticleRating move issue (filed at Wikimedia Phabricator as T214212) which was caused by an upstream contributor merging in a post 1.33.0 compatibility change to the extension. We've rolled back the version to avoid this change, and page moves should now be possible again!

I am also working to try and get Bricki(p|m)edia's social presence back up to draw traffic and therefore potential editors back into the site. This has come further up my list of priorities, sparked by my Friday morning viewing of The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part which is brilliant on so many different levels. If you've not seen it, I'd very highly recommend it!

Edit: So apparently comments is slightly bugged as well, we're working on that. For now, talk page?

Edit 2: So Jack sort of fixed that...

Comments (4)

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NovaHawkLegendary Brickipedian

63 months ago

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Hey thanks for writing all this up Lcawte, nice to see everything that's been happening on ShoutWiki lately. I know you and Jack and Samantha are all busy doing stuff that will benefit us but it's good to see what exactly you've all been working on, really appreciate all that work that goes on which often doesn't get seen much by us editors :)

Great to see HTTPS is up and running, that's pretty awesome. Firefox for me is saying "Connection is Not Secure. Parts of this page are not secure (such as images)." - I'm guessing that's just to do with it not being completely set up yet?

Comments has been bugged for years, started happening back before we moved to ShoutWiki- basically as far as I know you can't create a page with {{comments}}, you have to create the page first then add the template in afterwards.

And it's so nice to be able to move pages again haha :)

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Jack PhoenixBricktastic

63 months ago

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The non-secure elements you're seeing when using HTTPS currently are:

GlobalCssJs — user-specific styles and scripts (e.g. s:User:NovaHawk/global.js, s:User:NovaHawk/global.css)
GlobalCssJs — site-specific^[sic] styles and scripts (=s:MediaWiki:Global.css, s:MediaWiki:Global.js)
"Hosted by ShoutWiki" button in the footer (this is an easy fix, literally requires just tweaking the global configuration file for all ShoutWiki sites, we'll do this during the 1.32 upgrade)

Can you tell me more about the Comments bug? I'm curious as Comments is a social tool and I maintain the social tools family of extensions. :) Granted, Comments is super legacy in terms of age — the initial version was written around 2006 or so (!) and while it is maintained and actively used by many sites, it still doesn't get the same attention as some of the more popular extensions used on Wikimedia wikis do, for example. In any case, I was able to create a page with {{comments}}, so I wonder if the bug in question might've been fixed by my recent not-so-ideal bugfix referenced by Lcawte in this blog post.

As always, please ping me in case of bugs/things which seem like bugs/if you have something that needs developer attention! While I'm not editing every day (though I'd love to, but a day only has so many hours, alas), I'm definitely here and try to read messages left to me & respond to them in a timely manner; having an essential feature like page moving broken for many hours (let alone days!) is most certainly not ideal and it's definitely a prime example of an issue we want to address sooner than later.

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NovaHawkLegendary Brickipedian

63 months ago

Score 0

It looks like that's fixed it, just made a news post mainly to try it out and it seemed to work fine. That'll make things a lot easier in the future (I always forgot to remove the template before hitting save) :) I still have to purge the page to make the comments box show up instead of it just showing <comments/> right after the page is saved but that's no big deal at all.

And comment previews sounds like an awesome feature, I know I was always deleting comments and re-posting them again because of formatting errors (I'm guessing an "edit comment" button would be harder to code in than a preview option). Definitely looking forward to that if it ever does happen, but it sounds like a lot of work.

Didn't think those unsecure elements would be a big deal but good to know exactly what's triggering the message, and thanks will be sure to ping you if anything like the page move bug does happen again :)

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Jack PhoenixBricktastic

63 months ago

Score 1

Thanks for writing this blog post, Lcawte!

Indeed, a lot of the things we do behind the scenes don't show up in our contributions lists on-wiki — I for one wouldn't blame anyone for saying that I have been inactive on Brickipedia. (Which, sadly, is somewhat true as well; while I have been working on the software and continue to do so for the forseeable future, I really wish I could devote more of my time to actual editing! Plenty of articles could do with better pictures, which I hope to be able to take once I've restored the majority of my collection, but of course so many sets are missing one or two essential pieces...grumble grumble.)

HTTPS is way cool, I'm absolutely thrilled that we have it! Do note, though, that trying to access https://en.brickimedia.org will redirect to http://en.br...ki/Main_Page, but accessing that page (or any other page, e.g. Special:RecentChanges or this page, etc.) via the full URL — https://en.b...ki/Main_Page — will work as intended. That can be a bit surprising to figure out at first, or at least it was for me.

The master ticket for all things related to HTTPS is T131 on the ShoutWiki Phabricator and you are all more than welcome to provide your suggestions on how we should handle the issue. By no means it is an easy problem to solve, but I think there's consensus that this is most certainly a feature we want and need.

While writing this comment, I realized that one of the features I'd like to see is the ability to preview comments. This was partially implemented by myself and SamanthaNguyen in the Comments UI rewrite branch, but the work on that has stalled for it is a much bigger change than just the "mere" addition of a preview button. (I was thinking of breaking up that part into a separate patch, but the last time I tried out that it turned out to be unnecessarily complicated and it appeared that going forward with the OOUI rewrite is the only sensible way forward; but alas, I'm not overly familiar with OOUI and time and resource constraints are a reality.)

Together with Isarra, we've been working on trying to implement the Theme extension in MediaWiki core, which will hopefully increase the adoption of themes in general and inspire people to create even more awesome themes! Needless to say, this change won't really be that much user-facing for themes are and have been a thing on ShoutWiki for quite some time — after all, the extension was initially written for our needs back in 2010! Somewhat relatedly, we're also finally planning on sunsetting the long-obsolete, stand-alone DeepSea skin in favor of the Vector theme with the same name. This was announced back in July 2017 (!) but we haven't yet migrated the remaining users of the skin to use the Vector skin with the DeepSea theme. This, too, should essentially have no practical effect whatsoever; it will merely make the backend maintenance of the site somewhat easier and we have one thing less to worry about during future MediaWiki upgrades, but the feature will still be preserved, as ShoutWiki is very big on features and customizability.

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