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)