Andreas Hörstemeier wrote:
Brion Vibber knows. He was one of those abusing me on Village Pump.
Maybe he was still tired from the server movement.
I'm sorry if I've somehow offended Rick; it is not my intention to abuse or ridicule him. For the public record, here's the exchange:
== Deletion is broken ==
At least, partially. A couple of article I have had no problems deleting, but I have tried at least ten times on both [[Danza Slap]] and [[Ben Wyrosdick]], and keep getting an ERROR message when I attempt it. [[User:RickK|Rick]][[User talk:RickK|K]] 22:54, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)
:They sure look deleted to me. --[[User:Brion VIBBER|Brion]] 00:16, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
At the time I posted, the linked pages had indeed been successfully deleted, indicating that the problem with that pages had apparently been resolved. There was no other detail given about the scope of the problem.
Cyrius was kind enough to supply useful follow-up information that this was a wider issue:
::This has been an ongoing problem for weeks. Deletions fail to go through with resulting error pages on a regular basis. One must try, try again. If you look at the deletion history, both pages were deleted later by other admins. -- [[User:Cyrius|Cyrius]]|[[User talk:Cyrius|✎]] 00:25, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Frustration is a natural reaction to computer problems, so I think we can cut Rick some slack for his response to someone trying to help him:
:::Gee, thanks. So you just keep trying, 50, 100, 250 times before it takes? OH, and duh, how stupid I must be, to think that red links aren't deleted. Wow, I mut really be a moron. Thanks for pointing that out, that was very useful. [[User:RickK|Rick]][[User talk:RickK|K]] 06:39, Jun 8, 2005 (UTC)
But as a very active speedy deletor that problem as been getting more and more annying recently, and today it has become virtually impossible to delete anything. Maybe after one hour of retrying the deletion it finally works, but that's unacceptable. But it already has a bug in bugzilla (2195) about it,
Bug 2195 was reported specifically as a browser-specific problem with Opera -- complete with a claim that there was *NO* problem with Firefox. When it was reported, I tried deleting pages with Opera and did not experience a problem, so asked for additional testing (such as other versions of Opera).
I'd like to thank Andreas and everyone else who's given additional information on that report (such as that Firefox is *NOT* immune), giving us the chance to seriously look into it as an en.wikipedia.org problem instead of dismissing it as an unreproduceble problem with an old version of Opera.
I haven't figured out the root problem yet, but I have localized it to one part of the deletion operation, and put in place a workaround which seems to have relieved the pressure. I'm doing some debug logging on deletions, and haven't seen any breaking halfway through in the hour-ish since I put it in place.
For a permanent fix it may be necessary to do some tweaks to the archive table, where deleted pages are stored for review and possible undeletion; some loads from it are also going rather slowly and there might be an indexing or lock contention problem.
it is mentioned in the Administrators Noticeboard and the Village Pump, that should be enough hint for the developers that the problem really exists.
Sysop hangouts on en.wikipedia.org and the wikien-l list probably should not be considered sufficient notice to the developers; not everybody's an active en.wikipedia.org sysop. I do try to skim the pumps there every couple of days, but it's only one of our many projects and the number of pump and pump-like pages has expanded dramatically in the last couple of years; don't even assume that we know of the existence of all these pages.
Many of us aren't on this mailing list or don't read it regularly because 50 messages a day of "X is a vandal!" "Y is an abusive sysop!" gets real boring real fast. :)
As a general rule I strongly recommend using our Bugzilla to report problems, and if you want to draw peoples' attention post to wikitech-l and/or try to get ahold of us live in #wikimedia-tech on irc.freenode.net.
When you report a problem, it's best to try providing as much information as possible about where the problem is, how reproduceable it is (always, often or intermittent? mostly at peak access hours or all day?), what alternatives you've tried (different browsers? other wikis? other pages on the same wiki?), etc.
It's not that we're jerks (well, not *just* that we're jerks ;) but we've got a lot of problem reports to deal with, and we're not necessarily experiencing the same set of things you're experiencing. Not everybody pounces on speedy deletes on en.wikipedia.org many times a day; a problem that's specific to one action on one site might not be getting noticed if the people who _are_ doing that aren't talking to us.
Some detail is *needed* to prioritize problem reports and to investigate and solve problems that we haven't personally come across.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)