UESPWiki talk:Purge Requests

Clean Up?

This page is getting rather messy. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to keep this page orderly? I'm not sure the standard archival process is appropriate here. I would suggest that we just remove reports once they've been dealt with, but that may confuse some users who come back looking for a reply, or make people think that this page is rarely (if ever) used (potentially making them less likely to use it). --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 21:18, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I think we need an archive, just one say at Purge Request/Older or something similar, including 35kb worth of requests and responses. As well as the 35kb worth on the main page. Once the main page is up to 35kb just copy and paste it over to the archive and delete the previous contents? --Kiz 21:40, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't think the requests are worth archiving (there's still the page history). Just deleting all requests older than a week or so on a regular basis should do. That way people can look up their request and looking on the page would still show that it is used.--Alfwyn 21:57, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Agreed there's no point in archiving. I thought at first that a history would be helpful to Daveh in diagnosing the problem, but it isn't. Clear it out. rpeh •T•C•E• 22:03, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

I agree that old entries should simply be deleted. But I think it makes sense to leave the recent entries in place for maybe a week so that it's easier to tell that the request was actually taken care of, and to provide people with examples. --Nephele^Talk 14:40, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Status Update

After receiving this message from someone who presumably saw one of our problem IP talk pages, I decided to move the warnings for these three IPs to subpages. Basically, I doubt the original editors are going to read the warning at this point, so having it on the page is just confusing people who weren't supposed to have seen the message in the first place.

In addition, I went into the wiki database and manually removed the flags in the 'user_newtalk' table for these three IPs -- meaning that even if someone does visit the site using one of those IP addresses, they won't get a 'you have new messages' box. It's as if they had visited their talk page since the last edit was made. I'm hoping that will prevent new cached pages from being created with the dreaded box. (On a side note, if I'm understanding the user_newtalk table correctly, 112 edits have been made to 207.191.187.21's talk page without the IP ever visiting the page -- which goes back to about May 9th. Similarly, 74 edits have been made to 96.4.127.21, which means that IP never visited the talk page. But it's only been 2 edits for 96.4.127.20, so that means some time since July 3rd.)

Also, FWIW, I've tried a couple times over the last month or so to dig into the cause of this message. I've looked at the wiki software, and it's doing what I would expect it to do -- whenever a page is generated with a 'You have new messages' box on the page, the wiki explicitly says that the page should not be cached. Second, I've looked at the most obvious page cache -- namely the one that the wiki software creates on the content servers -- and confirmed that none of those pages contain the 'You have new messages' box. So I think squid1 has to be the place that's responsible for incorrectly caching these pages.

I'm hoping that my database change will prevent new cases from cropping up, so I'd rather not immediately dig any further into obscure details such as how squid1 is supposed to know which pages are cacheable. But if the requests don't start to dry up, I'll probably end up trying to look for a more permanent solution. --Nephele^Talk 23:39, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

You know what's going on far better than I, but I always assumed it was a squid issue rather than a strictly MW problem. It's been a real PITA problem, though, so anything you can do that might fix the problem will be greatly appreciated. Something tells me we might get one or two new IPs accessing the site in a couple of weeks... rpeh •T•C•E• 00:16, 29 October 2011 (UTC)

I just manually cleared out flags in 'user_newtalk' for IP addresses whose talk pages were last edited anytime before 1/1/2011, as well for a handful of 195.93.21.* IPs, such as our latest problem case. This added up to some 3000 flags -- probably more than 2000 different IP addresses. The only effect this change will have is preventing the 'you have new messages' box from appearing. My reasoning is that any IP visiting the page more than a year after the last message was posted isn't going to be the original editor, so displaying the messages box is far more likely to cause problems than do any useful.

It's still not a permanent fix, but I haven't been able to identify anything else that's likely to help. --Nephele^Talk 16:38, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

May or may not be related: If I visit the recent changes from another computer while not logged in, it is usually stuck a few days behind (right now it is at Nov 6th), a force reload of the page cures the problem. I mention it just because it seems to be another case of caching stuff that shouldn't be and it may be easier to track. --Alfwyn 16:45, 9 November 2011 (UTC)