Topic on Talk:MediaWiki 1.31/Flow

The installation script of 1.31 LTS has a major bug in it. Do not install MediaWiki 1.31. Hold off until this major issue is fixed. The account that is created during installation does not have sysop privileges. Actually, the data in the data database seems to be fine. The account is assigned to the group ("sysop"). Therefore the problem is most likely in the code somewhere. Maybe it has something to do with sometimes the sysop account being called "administrator" and sometimes the sysop account being called "administrators". At the end of the day, the installation does not work to a level where a regular user will not be able to fix the problem.

I already wasted a whole day and half trying to install this. Don't waste your time and energy. At the end of the day, you will just be frustrated and angry.

Can you please explain what exactly isn't working? What did you install, what did you expect to work, and what didn't work?

I've installed MediaWiki 1.31 quite a few times while testing the release and afterwards and didn't run into any issues.

Also, the installation script should allow a user to setup a "regular user" account / autoconfirmed account / administrator account. It is bad practice to user a sysop account for regular day to day stuff. Or it should be setup like Ubuntu is setup where when a person needs to do something, they have to specifically put themselves into sysop mode.

A sysop account in MediaWiki cannot do very many destructive things compared to root in Linux. Almost every action a sysop account can do is easily reversible (exception being merging page histories together, which is still reversible but is a gigantic pain to reverse).

If you feel strongly about not being an administrator for your regular account, you can create a normal user account after the wiki is set up and use that one instead.

Also, links to the minor releases of Mediawiki should be provided on the installation page for a specific version. 1.31.0, 1.31.1, etc. That way if something just did an "oops", a person can easily go back a minor release version and got on with their work instead of having to wait for somebody to read this, complain I did not put it into the bug report system, assign it to somebody, somebody actually looking at it, and then fixing it. Which means that it maybe 6 months, this might actually get fixed.

Version 1.31.0 does work. 1.31.1 has a new installation developer where 1.31.1 was his first installation release.