Re: Can we change auto-logout timing on wiki.postgresql.org?

On Sat, May  4, 2013 at 03:14:03PM +0200, Stefan Kaltenbrunner wrote:
> > Yes, really.  I am not saying I will stop using the wiki, but it
> > certainly would be nice if I didn't have to use the wiki because others
> > used it more.  And the more cumbersome with wiki is to use, the more I
> > would like to avoid using it --- that's just natural.  I would think we
> > would have a setup to encourage people to use the wiki more by making it
> > easier to use.
> 
> the huge success of MW as a basis for the likes of wikipedia does show
> that it seems to be at least somewhat usable...

It is certainly usable, but if it can be made more user-friendly, why
not?  The number of bugs I have reported isn't ideal, for sure.

> > I moved to the wiki so others could update the TODO list, but history
> > shows that I am still making the majority of the edits:
> > 
> >     https://wiki.postgresql.org/index.php?title=Todo&action=history
> > 
> > I do appreciate others making changes, but some of them are added
> > without discussion, so they need to be reviewed.  However, I don't
> > always get email when someone edits because of some logic that only
> > emails me the first time, unless I go to the site, though I have the
> > TODO list tab always open --- I never understood that.
> 
> well - the idea is that people do not get spammed if somebody does a
> large amount of edits, the fact that you "always have the page open in a
> tab" does not help there because that means you are not actually doing
> an http-request to the page so mw will never notice you are actually
> having it open (http is basically stateless).

Well, I start my browser daily probably, but that doesn't seem to help.

> The current behaviour makes a lot of sense for the general usecase
> because this would actually cause a mail storm if say a bot does a ton
> of edits (and we have spammers abusing our wiki going through the
> actually signing up for a community account and abusing our wiki for
> link-backtrack spam, so this is not a theoretical point).

I decided to look into this again and I see my preferences aren't set
for me to get emails for changes on my watch list:
E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed

I am not sure of the value of a watch list if you don't get email
notifications.  If I try to enable that and save, I get a failure:
There was either an authentication database error or you are notallowed to update your external account.

I am not sure when that setting was changed, but I certainly didn't do
it.  I bet that is why I don't get wiki change notifications.  Does
anyone else get notifications?

Also, it seems not getting email notifications is the default, because
if I press "Restore all default settings", it say it is saved and the
email is unclicked:
https://wiki.postgresql.org/index.php?title=Special:Preferences&success

> > There are other oddities, like many of the "Contents" links not working
> > (e.g. "Montoring"), and broken output when links contain '=', so I added
> > a cron job on my machine to check for them.
> 
> again this a MW thing - it would be useful for somebody doing the
> research if this is fixed in a different version or if there is another
> way around it.

I don't even understand why it isn't working.  Here is TOAST and Montoring:
 <li class="toclevel-1"><a href="#TOAST"><span class="tocnumber">23</span> <span class="toctext">TOAST</span></a></li>
<liclass="toclevel-1"><a href="#Monitoring"><span class="tocnumber">24</span> <span
class="toctext">Monitoring</span></a></li>

Here are the anchors:
 <a name="TOAST" id="TOAST"></a> <a name="Monitoring" id="Monitoring"></a>

TOAST link works, Monitoring does not.  Perhaps the HTML is mangled and
Firefox is buggy.

> > I asked about this timeout issue over a year ago, and was told no one
> > knew the cause.  Now that the cause was found, I am told that the
> > administrators want to set a timeout that is less than any other
> > non-commerce website I visit because of security.  To me that reflects a
> > distorted view of usability vs security, and all for a wiki site.
> 
> sure it is "only" a wiki - but given we do also maintain more or less
> official stuff there it needs to keep a certain reputation. your
> specific usecase of always having a particular page open is rather
> unique in the general sense and it is not and was never optimized from
> both a MW and also a infrastructure pov.
> Also - as far as I see we have never gotten feedback if the recent
> change to a larger timeout actually changed anything at all?

Yes, I can't tell as my usecase is unusual.

> > So if someone responsible wants to work on the TODO list, go ahead, it
> > is all there ready for you.  Odds are, I will never even see
> > notifications of your changes anyway.  :-(
> > 
> > Administrators say they increased the timeout 10x and need feedback if
> > it needs to be increased further?  Do you need me to notice that every
> > day I have to hit the 'edit' button, realize my session has timed out,
> > then hit the login button and try again.  It happened this morning ---
> > is that sufficient?  I have no idea.  Do these cookies control anything
> > but the wiki?  I assume not because 20 minutes was the MediaWiki default.
> 
> the ~20min is not a MW default, it is one from debian about cleaning up
> session data (again a protection machanism, http is stateless and you
> don't get a "user logged off" thingy in general so we need to remove
> session data in some interval to not end up with millions of session files).
> And yes as said above - we have speculated only so far on what exactly
> the session timeout mechanics are and if the settings we are currently
> dealing with actually control what people complain about - I'm still not
> sure if you are saying it does or not?

I have no idea.

> > So, in summary, there are all these things on the wiki that don't work,
> > but I am having to fight to get something we can fix to a reasonable
> > default, and at a certain point, you just give up and find a way to do
> > it yourself, like maybe an auto-login javascript widget for the wiki.
> 
> you do realise that the "Administrators" are mostly concerned about
> running the platform in a scalable, secure and reliable way?
> We are definitly not experts on every single piece of software from an
> application PoV.
> Most of the current complaints are either software issues (which we can
> only support so much) or stuff that comes from the very specific
> usecases that are different from what 95% of the people usually do (ie
> editing articles for hours and hours in one go instead of multiple
> smaller edits and keeping browers windows open for days on a specific
> article).
> Keep in mind that most of those defaults were choosen by people (package
> maintainers, upstream developers,..) that know this stuff likely better
> than any of us, so it is imho valid from a sysadmin pov to investigate
> on why we need something different.

Agreed.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +