On 15/01/12 06:33, MZMcBride wrote:
Hi.
Skimming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Action, it seems inevitable that some kind of banner (or "blackout" banner, which is apparently equivalent to an extra-large banner) will be implemented.
The question becomes: how will this be implemented? I assume some kind of CentralNotice banner with some CSS absolute positioning or something? Is that right? Or will it be part of a separate extension?
I am not aware of any such discussion. I suppose the underlying content could be hidden by just overlaying a blackout div with a high z-index, but that would cause the content to appear while the site is loading, to be removed later, and the scrollbars would be visible.
The admins of the Italian Wikipedia did overlay a div for their protest, but they additionally hid the content div and adjusted some overflows to avoid scrolling, using site CSS. This avoided flickering of the underlying content.
There's a number of other ways it could be done. For example the Squid configuration could be changed, either to display alternative HTML as a 403 error message, or to redirect the whole site to some specific page.
I think the SOPA discussion pages (including Jimmy's talk page) should be visible throughout the protest. With the Italian Wikipedia protest, it was fairly difficult for non-technical users to find out who was responsible for the protest and what level of support it enjoyed.
Whichever way it's done, $wgGroupPermissions should be changed to disallow editing, similar to what we do with closed wikis (closed.dblist). If we're going to tell all the editors to have a day off, it's important that the we don't leave any holes allowing vandalbots to edit.
Read-only mode ($wgReadOnly etc.) should not be set since it may cause unintended server issues, affecting wikis other that the English Wikipedia.
Primarily I'd like to know if "#siteNotice {display:none !important;}" will continue to work. If so, there's no further action that needs to be taken. If it's going to be put into a weird extension or something, I'd personally favor an edit count check or a "leave me alone" user preference. The regulars really don't need to be bothered by this obnoxiousness.
And, click-through banner or not, I think obscuring Special:UserLogin is a poor idea.
You should raise this on the wiki. I don't see any discussion there about whether logged-in users should be allowed to view the site.
-- Tim Starling