Hi,
I have a wiki at
http://bibliowiki.com.pt that has been experiencing for
the past week severe (and increasing) parsing problems. It started out
last saturday as an occasional and apparently random glitch that seemed
to turn off the handling of template syntax, wereas tables instead of
showing the values turned up full of {{}} thingies with the variable
names inside.
This wiki had been transferred in mid September from my previous host
(which didn't have PHP5) to my current one (which has), and therefore
its version was pretty outdated: 1.6.X. It was working fine till last
saturday, though, so as I have been pretty pressed with time, I kept
postponing the update. When the trouble started, though, I was told a
few times (in #mediawiki, for instance) that the version of mediawiki
might be the culprit, so I finally updated a couple of days ago. The
update went fine, and, apart from the issue, the wiki is working now
properly in version 1.11.0 (PHP is 5.2.2 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard-log,
by the way).
The issue, however, remains, and seems to me to be getting worse. When
it struck only sometimes a few days ago, now it seems to be striking
almost constantly, and any sequence of clicks in "Página aleatória"
(portuguese version of "Random article") will almost certainly be
showing broken tables. Also, other variables, such as the {{SITENAME}}
one that exists in the login page, also started to show up instead of
their values from time to time. As an example, the stats page I have
opened right now, reads exactly as follows:
>>Há actualmente um total de {{PLURAL:11 251|*11
251* página|*11 251*
páginas}} na base de dados. Isto inclui páginas de
"discussão", páginas
sobre o projecto ({{SITENAME}}), páginas de rascunho, redireccionamentos
e outras que provavelmente não são qualificadas como páginas de
conteúdo. Excluindo estas, há {{PLURAL:8 62[[:Predefinição:*8
622*]]icheiro foi carregado|ficheiros foram carregados}}.<<<
Sometimes, adding "?action=purge" to the end of the page's URL helps,
but that's perhaps only 40% of the times.
The thing gets stranger still. My content is mostly within tables (it's
a database; I chose the wiki approach because of its greater openness to
unexpected details compared to the predefined and closed nature of
traditional databases... and my data does show a naughty tendency to
turn up surprises), and these tables are defined in simple templates,
only with the template name and their variables. One would expect that
if the software failed to recognize the variables, it *totally* failed
to recognize them, right? Wrong: typically, the first variable in the
template is properly shown, sometimes the second one also gets shown,
and only the rest is garbled.
*And* it comes and goes. A few minutes ago, I had the result I'm quoting
above in the statistics page; just now, a sequence of random pages
showed them all perfectly fine. I'm totally lost as to what might be
causing this, and, which is worse, the guys at the host are too, and not
even the three or four devs I talked to in #mediawiki were able to come
up with an answer.
Please help...
Jorge Candeias
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http://ficcao.com.pt
http://lampadamagica.blogspot.com