Today I approved and merged a change [1] by Brad Jorsch that changes the way continue parameters are used in some API modules. These changes do not break backwards compatibility unless you were doing things you weren't supposed to, but I figured I should announce them anyway.

There were a few modules that were using continuations like <query-continue><allcategories acfrom="Foobar" /></query-continue> ; some of these were changed to use a dedicated accontinue parameter instead of reusing acfrom (keeping acfrom, it has a legitimate purpose). This shouldn't be a problem for clients that use values from query-continue verbatim and don't make any assumptions about which parameters will be used for continuations. The following modules are affected: * allcategories (acfrom -> accontinue) * allimages (aifrom -> aicontinue) * alllinks now consistently uses alcontinue instead of alfrom in all cases; previously, alfrom was used in some cases and alcontinue in others * allpages (apfrom -> apcontinue) * filearchive (fafrom -> facontinue)

Additionally, the values provided in query-continue will no longer be normalized for presentation, and the values read from the continue parameters will no longer be normalized for database usage. This won't be a problem if you're just passing query-continue values back in verbatim, but it might present problems if you were using continue parameters in hacky ways to jump to certain parts of the result. This change was needed to fix bug 36987[2] and bug 29290 [3]. The following modules and parameters are affected: * allcategories (accontinue) * allimages (aicontinue) * alllinks (alcontinue) * allpages (apcontinue) * categories (clcontinue) * deletedrevs (dlcontinue) * duplicatefiles (dfcontinue) * filearchive (facontinue) * iwbacklinks (iwblcontinue) * iwlinks (iwcontinue) * images (imcontinue) * langbacklinks (lblcontinue) * links (plcontinue) * templates (tlcontinue) * watchlistraw (wrcontinue)

This change will be deployed as part of the 1.20wmf8 deployment. This will be deployed to different wikis on different days over the course of the next two weeks, see the deployment schedule [4].

Roan

[1] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/8407/ [2] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=36987 [3] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29290 [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.20/Roadmap#Schedule_for_the_deplo...