On Dec 28, 2014 2:07 AM, "Ricordisamoa" ricordisamoa@openmailbox.org wrote:

New users often need to purge the server cache,

{{Citation needed}} on "often".

A simple link is way more helpful than "visit the history page and

replace 'history' with 'purge'", etc.

Also, a server-side extension has much better i18n support and works

without JavaScript.

OTOH, this would also add further clutter to an already-cluttered UI.

I think your first step should be getting consensus on some wiki that they actually want this extension enabled there.

Ricordisamoa wrote:

It looks like the Purge extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Purge for MediaWiki could be very useful to replace many similar gadgets on Wikimedia sites. New users often need to purge the server cache, and don't know how to do it. A simple link is way more helpful than "visit the history page and replace 'history' with 'purge'", etc. Also, a server-side extension has much better i18n support and works without JavaScript. Is anyone interested in getting it in?

Hi.

Rather than trying find ways to institutionalize the purge action, I'd strongly prefer that we examine the purge action's current use-cases and find ways to obviate them.

Purging should be an internal implementation detail and any time a user feels that manually purging a page is required, MediaWiki has failed the user. In this way, the lack of user interface exposure for the purge action is basically intentional: we don't want to expose an action that most users shouldn't ever need to take.

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T56902 has some additional thoughts on deprecating the purge action in MediaWiki, as it's basically a hack. This is _not_ to say that the underlying challenges here are trivial; in fact, cache invalidation is regularly called one of the hardest problems in computer science. However, in my opinion, a manual purge action is an architectural blemish that we should seek to eliminate long-term.

MZMcBride