Talk:About IFWiki

This is a talk page relating to the Community portal content page. Older discussions can be read at IFWiki talk:Community portal/Archive 2005 to 2019.

Proposed upgrade of MediaWiki software in 2021-22

David Cornelson suggested I add a page about my suggestion that the software behind this site be upgraded, so here it is: IFWiki:Proposed upgrade of MediaWiki software in 2021-22. Perhaps we could discuss it there. Thanks. Jonathan (talk) 11:34, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Job queue problem

The various choice-based games were added to Category:CYOA by Template:CYOA, i.e. {{CYOA}} was added to all the games' pages.

We changed Template:CYOA so that it would add pages using it to Category:Choice-based instead.

The expected behaviour is that, once the CYOA template was changed, a job would be added to MediaWiki's job queue for all 145 pages that call that template, and that the pages would be automatically recategorised. It's described in the MediaWiki job queue manual page: "When a template changes, MediaWiki adds a job to the job queue for each article transcluding that template. Each job is a command to read an article, expand any templates, and update the link table accordingly. Previously, the host articles would remain outdated until either their parser cache expires or until a user edits the article."

A couple of days later none of the pages have automatically been recategorised. Five of them were recategorised by me doing a null edit on them (i.e. opening the page for editing and saving having made no change).

Some problems/solutions that come to mind:

1. It is possible to run the whole job queue at the command line - but we don't have shell access.
2. Something might be causing a problem in the queue. We might see an error at the command line when running the job queue, or might see something useful in the job table - but we don't have access to the database.
3. The job queue might be running too slowly. It would be good to check the value for $wgJobRunRate in the config file, LocalSettings.php - but we don't have access to the files.
4. I didn't notice the size of the job queue increase when I edited the template (though to be fair it's higher today) so maybe the jobs weren't created. I can't think why this would be though.
5. There is a script that can be run at the command line that would rebuild everything including categories.
6. Without access to the server:
   1. We could just wait until the job queue runs down to 0.
   2. We could manually null edit the 140 remaining pages. Though that doesn't address the underlying problem.

What do we think? Jonathan (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2021 (UTC)