Jack Phoenix

Archived discussions

25 March 2007 - 1 January 2009
1 January 2009 - 20 September 2011
20 September 2011 - 22 September 2016
22 September 2016 - 4 September 2022

SocialProfile Update

Hello, thank you very much for your work for SocialProfile. Do you plan to update it — maybe from the new Fandom profiles?

Soronos (talk) 12:55, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by that. Though (largely) feature-complete, SocialProfile and the associated social tools family of extensions receive regular bug fixes and i18n updates (courtesy of translatewiki.net translators; if you speak a language other than English, please consider signing up and helping out in the translation effort! As the for the entire social tools family of extensions show, many languages need more and more active translators. I maintain the Finnish ones, so a completion rate of around ~90% or so results in a useful, usable user experience, and as of right now, besides Finnish and English, only a handful of languages are at that level of completion: French, Interlingua, Macedonian, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Turkish, Brazilian Portuguese, Telugu, Norwegian (Bokmål) and maybe potentially also Swedish and German.

As for the question of Fandom/Wikia, I've not visited their sites in years, so I'm not familiar with whatever changes may have taken place there, but either way, Fandom/Wikia hasn't truly been open source since their "Unified Community Platform" (UCP) project, and I generally speaking don't feel like reverse-engineering what they may have built. Should there be something that SocialProfile or other social tools should support, please file a feature request on Phabricator and tag it appropriately (#social-tools and the relevant individual extensions' tags) and it'll get looked into. Thank you for using SocialProfile! Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 20:32, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

File:SiteMetrics.png

Hi! You uploaded File:SiteMetrics.png many years ago. Can you please a proper license and move it to Commons? Amir E. Aharoni {{🌎🌍🌏}} 09:34, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi Amir, I'm not sure how come this slipped my mind, but apologies! I'm not sure what might be the proper license for that; though MW-generated, the chart is generated by a Google thing, though IMO it's simple enough to be basically as public domain as anything generated by MW can be. Please let me know (and feel free to ping me on IRC!) if this is of any help; basically I'm totally cool with choosing whatever license that is OK for Commons, anything from permissive copyleft to literally public domain is fine by me. --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 22:30, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

ShoutHow help

Hi. I don't know if you are still active but when I try and install certain extensions on shouthow, I get an error stating Class 'RobotPolicy' not found. I cannot figure out for the life of me what to do. Help requested. 82.36.146.164 12:29, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

I've been around since 2008, I'm not going anywhere, fear not.

Now, first things first: it's experimental, alpha-grade software meant for hardcore MediaWiki geeks. It's not suitable for anything world-facing and likely won't be anytime soon, if ever. (Hells, even the MediaWiki core version it's using is now somewhat outdated; but I haven't really had the time to even think about upgrading from 1.35 to 1.39...)

Secondly, I admit it's been years since I tested out the installation process, so it's entirely realistic that the documentation etc. might have gaps in it or just be outright wrong in certain parts. Additionally, it's annoying how (as of right now) only MySQL/MariaDB is supported, SQLite nor PostgreSQL aren't.

RobotPolicy is loaded in $IP/imports.php on line 229 (see source), so it truly should Just Work™ — as in it should get loaded the very least. A lot of things use it so if it's not available, the platform is basically inoperable, period.

That said, I'm wondering about your phrasing...you wrote that when you try to "install certain extension" — but again, most extensions are already loaded in $IP/imports.php, so might I ask for a clarification as to what you're trying to exactly do? The wikiHow-authored extensions basically do not work outside the wikiHow/ShoutHow platform, although over the years I've tried to make painstakingly slow progress in upstreaming hooks and other simple, harmless things that could be used to make some wikiHow-authored things work on a regular, vanilla MediaWiki (see gerrit for details if you're interested).

The MediaWiki engine used by the ShoutHow platform is currently 1.35.5 (and this is woefully outdated, the last 1.35.x series release was 1.35.14 (!), released on 21 December 2013, which also signified the end of life for the 1.35 branch, as per the announcement, and 1.39 is the currently supported Long-Term Support (LTS) release of MediaWiki...but upgrading a platform like ShoutHow from 1.35 to 1.39 is a massive undertaking for a single person, even if that person is me). If you know what you're doing and you're prepared to spend more than a bit of time debugging, you might be able to get some extensions to run on a more vanilla 1.35.x MediaWiki, but it's in no way, shape or form easy. These days MediaWiki "evolves" so rapidly that what used to work just fine a few releases ago might not work anymore in the latest supported release(s) of MediaWiki, so beware.

One day I hope to publish my notes on the extension interdependencies, but long story very short, the vast majority of extensions originally written by and for wikiHow simply depend on each other (and various external libraries, e.g. phpQuery) and you can't even disable them without potentially breaking a lot of things. :-/ As an extreme example, the Schema extension depends on the aforementioned phpQuery library (as do most things, really), but also on the following custom wikiHow extension: AlternateDomain, ArticleMetaInfo, AsyncHttp, Categories, CustomTitle, GoodRevision, Misc, RobotPolicy, SocialProof, Summary, Tags, WHVid, WikihowArticle, WikihowSkinHelper, WikihowStatsd. Quite a list, huh?

In any case, ShoutHow is a fun and interesting little experiment/tech demo, allowing you to at least try to answer questions like "what would it be to run a wikiHow-like site?" and "how well would this support my language?" as well as "what do I need to do to translate this feature into my language?". The original goal of the project was to be a drop-in replacement for the official wikiHow source code, but needless to say, achieving this is rather unrealistic, given that wikiHow employs dozens of tech staff and I just threw ShoutHow together on my spare time as a silly research project out of sheer curiosity.

With all that in mind, I wish you happy hacking and let me know how your adventure with the source code goes! You can also stop by the #ShoutHow IRC channel on Libera.Chat for (potentially) more real-time discussion, if I'm around. --Jack Phoenix _(Contact) 22:30, 8 April 2024 (UTC)