I've just now enable the feature flag on the testing wikis[1][2][3] 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://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [2]: https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page [3]: https://test.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
Unfortunately, I had to revert it. We'll try again later when the schema change is compete.
On Mon, Dec 4, 2017 at 2:38 PM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've just now enable the feature flag on the testing wikis[1][2][3] 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.
-- Brad Jorsch (Anomie) Senior Software Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org