I've just now enable the feature flag on the Beta Cluster[1] that allows
MediaWiki to store comments longer than 255 bytes.
The web UI has not been updated to allow longer comments in places where it
enforces a limit, such as the edit summary box. But if you use the API to
edit, or perform page moves or do other things where long comments could be
entered and were truncated, you should now find that they're truncated at
1000 Unicode characters rather than 255 bytes.
Please test it out! If you find errors, or places in core features (not
comments in extensions such as SecurePoll, AbuseFilter, CheckUser, or Flow)
where *new* comments are still being truncated to 255 bytes, or places
where comments aren't showing up at all, please let me know. You can reply
to this message or post a task in Phabricator and add me as a subscriber.
If things go well, we'll look at rolling this out to production wikis once
the schema changes to the production databases are complete. See
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T174569 to follow progress there.
If anyone is interested in submitting patches for the web UI to reflect the
changed length limits, please do. I'll try to review them if you add me as
a reviewer.
[1]:
https://deployment.wikimedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation