On Fri, Dec 16, 2005 at 10:01:34AM -0600, Scot Wilcoxon wrote:
... Getting a page to check if we're logged in on wikipedia:en NOTE: You have unread messages on wikipedia:en Getting page to get a token. Getting page [[Non-existing page]] WARNING: No text area found on en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-existing%20page&action=edit. Maybe the server is down. Retrying in 1 minutes...
It then keeps retrying.
I have figured out in part what is happening here.
As you may know, a change was made recently (at least on en.wikipedia.org) to prevent unregistered users from creating new pages.
The "WARNING: No text area found on en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Non-existing%20page&action=edit" message occurs when the bot (for reasons I don't yet understand) is not recognized by the wiki as a logged-in user, so it is served a page (attached to this message) that is shown to non-registered users telling them to register if they want to create a new article. That's why you don't get this same error if you retrieve an existing page, because the restriction on unregistered users only applies to creating new pages.
What I don't understand is why the wiki doesn't recognize the bot user when trying to get a token, even though the bot has already logged in (as the transcript from SEWilco copied above shows clearly) and is able to retrieve and edit other pages.
Perhaps someone who is more familiar with the cookie mechanism can take it from here and diagnose the problem further.
RussBlau