Help:Maintenance and Setup

Note: this is the public domain MediaWiki FAQ from 13 September 2006

Only,

Great site. Keep doing.,

Your Site Is Great,

Nise site,

Incredible site!,

I want to say thanks!,

Why...?

...is the Help namespace empty?

We don't currently have a clean, internationalised set of help pages under a free license. A few developers are hoping to make this possible; however, the Help namespace currently ships in a blank state. You are free to add your own help pages, or copy certain of the items from Meta, e.g. the user guide or MediaWiki Handbook, these two collections being free to use under the GNU Free Documentation License.

...are some of my images not showing up after an upgrade?

Several users have reported that, following an upgrade or a moving of their wiki, several images fail to be shown inline. The files exist, and the image description pages show a MIME type of unknown / unknown and, in some cases, a warning about potentially dangerous files.

The cure for this is to run the rebuildImages maintenance script from the command line. This sets the MIME types for all files in the database, and should restore things back to normal.

...are all PNG files not being turned into thumbnails?

After upgrading to a more recent version of PHP, it is possible a different MimeMagic.php function is being used to detect file MIME types, particularly the built-in PHP function mime_content_type, which fails to detect PNG files. Search the web for mime_content_type png for information on fixing this bug at the PHP level, possibly by editing your magic.mime file.

See here for more info.

...is a search for a short keyword giving no hits

The default settings for mysql demands that the minimum length of a word to be indexed for fulltext search is 4 characters. This can be a problem if you want to search for shorter words as substrings in pages. To change this, you need to reconfigure your mysql, as described in the MySQL documentation note that indexes must be rebuilt after resetting the mysql default settings.

...can't I download MediaWiki 1.8?

MediaWiki 1.8 is in a development state at present, and has not been packaged into a general release. The code can be downloaded from Subversion if desired.

...doesn't this work? It works on Wikipedia!

Wikimedia web sites run the current alpha code, MediaWiki 1.8. See above for caveats and information on obtaining this.

Also, they work with several extensions, such as "Makesysop" and "Renameuser" (the complete list exists in a version page of one of their projects.

...do I get a 403 Forbidden error after setting permissions on my Fedora system

Fedora Core enables SELinux by default. Instructions for setting SELinux permissions for MediaWiki are available.

Anti-spam

Where do I get the spam blacklist from and how do I install it?

The spam blacklist extension can be found in Subversion. For installation instructions, consult the README file.

How do I whitelist domains from the spam blacklist?

You can list the domains you wish to whitelist on your local [[Mediawiki:Spam-whitelist]]-page.

For the format you need to use take the whitelist of the English language Wikipedia as example; wikimedia:w:en:MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist

How do I use $wgSpamRegex to block more than one string?

$wgSpamRegex is a powerful filter for page content. Adding multiple items to the regex, however, can be awkward. Consider this snippet:

$wgSpamRegexLines[] = 'display\s*:\s*none';
$wgSpamRegexLines[] = 'overflow:\s*\s*auto';
[...]
$wgSpamRegex = '/(' . implode( '|', $wgSpamRegexLines ) . ')/i';

This example code allows convenient addition of additional items to the regex without fiddling about each time. It also demonstrates two popular filters, which block some of the most common spam attacks.

Where Now?

I've found a bug or have a feature request. Where do I post it?

Bugs and feature requests should be posted on MediaZilla, our implementation of Bugzilla. Please search the database prior to posting, to avoid creating duplicate entries.

I have a question not answered here. Where do I go next?

If you've exhausted the FAQ above, please try the following:

• Check the other sources of help on this site.
• Search the rest of this site
• Search our documentation archived on Meta
• Search the web
• Post a message at Project:Support desk
• Email the mediawiki-l mailing list
• Ask the developers in our IRC channel (Freenode network, channel #mediawiki).

Recommended reading

• Asking smart questions
• Effective bug reporting