---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" <bjorsch@wikimedia.org>
Date: 30 Jan 2016 6:06 am
Subject: [Wikitech-l] *unclear-"now"-timestamp* (was Re: Bot operators: Please check your configuration)
To: "Wikimedia developers" <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, "MediaWiki API announcements & discussion" <mediawiki-api@lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc:

On Fri, Jan 29, 2016 at 1:41 PM, Bináris <wikiposta@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2016-01-29 18:56 GMT+01:00 Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch@wikimedia.org>:
>
> > by going to
> > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:ApiFeatureUsage, entering your
> > agent
> > (or any useful prefix of it), and looking for "https-expected".
> >
>
> What does *unclear-"now"-timestamp* mean here?
>

For various API timestamp-typed parameters, you can pass unusual values
such as the empty string or "0" and it will be interpreted as meaning
"now", which doesn't make very much sense except for the fact that it has
always done that. If you really mean "now", you should pass that as the
value instead.

action=edit even has to hack around this to avoid spurious edit conflicts
if you do it for the 'basetimestamp' parameter. Ideally we'd make empty
string and '0' be rejected as invalid timestamps, but first people have to
stop passing them in.


--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation
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