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

On 05/04/2013 04:05 PM, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 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.

true - the question is "are the MW people aware?" or maybe "is it
something that in a newer version is fixed?"

[...]
> 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 not
>     allowed to update your external account.

hmm thanks for the report - that seems to be a (fairly) recently
introduced buglet in our custom authentication backend, it should
however not have resulted in any lost functionality just the above error
message. Should be fixed now anyway.

> 
> 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?

I do ;)

> 
> 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

the "notfiy watchlist" feature is off by default in MW.


> 
>>> 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>
>   <li class="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.

it is broken for me as well - I have no idea why though...

[..]

>> 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.

hmm not sure I get that - if you restart your browser daily how are the
session cookies even get preserved, or do you use one of these "restore
session" features?



Stefan