Topic on Extension talk:Replace Text

I think ReplaceText put a bunch of <span class="error">Expansion depth limit exceeded</span> into some of my pages instead of the expected output. When I googled for solutions it appears that at least some other wikis have the same problem (e.g. https://wiki.gccollab.ca/index.php?title=Template:Cloud_Readings&mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop) It is possible that it wasn't ReplaceText that caused this, but since the actual markup on the wiki page was changed it seems the most likely candidate. I didn't catch this when it happened. Tenbergen (talk) 01:05, 12 September 2024 (UTC)

Its unlikely that ReplaceText itself had anything to do with this. It just reads/edits one page at a time without following/parsing included pages/code.

Its unclear here where those "<span class="error">Expansion depth limit exceeded</span>" lines turned up. If there not in the actual page-code itself ... there generated by mediawiki on page parsing. And as such are not related to ReplaceText itself. (Ie: its related to the applied edits/changes to those pages.)

Related information page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Avoiding_MediaWiki_expansion_depth_limit

Thanks for your reply. On our wiki, the actual mediawiki markup ended up changed. I read the link you sent, and looked at the example with the 51 templates. For it, the markup remains as expected, but the templates don't expand right. On my wiki, the actual markup changed to have the ... text replacing the previous template call. It is possible that it wasn't ReplaceText that did it, but I am not sure what else would have updated a bunch of places on the site to ...

I can't really be specific due to lack of useful data. The biggest problem in my view comes from the "I didn't catch this when it happened." ... which turns any additional data into potential assumptions which might be irrelevant to your current problem.

The only things that come to my mind at this point are:

- Revert the changes that you think let to the problem. So you can try to debug the changes and see where things go wrong. (provided the problem went away)

and/or

- Inspect the effected pages (includes used, +resent changes) to try to track down where/when things went wrong.

Those might be expensive solutions to a problem that might be simple. But that's the best I can come up with.