RationalWiki:Technical support/Planned changes

Planned technical changes for RationalWiki. This is just a list-shaped noticeboard and for compiling to-do items. These are currently planned things, but there's no guarantee as to when they're done.

Actual discussion of this stuff is at the main RationalWiki:Technical support page.

Mobile browsing support

• Skin:Minerva Neue is already installed, so people can manually change to a more mobile browsing-friendly interface by switching skin in Preferences. Note that you need to manually toggle between it and a more desktop-oriented skin.
• Extension:MobileFrontend is not yet installed, but should be. Installing it does a bit more and removes the need for manual toggling.

Anti-spam measures

• Remove the CAPTCHA. It's become less useful over the years, and now it does more harm than good. Discussed here.
• Add Extension:StopForumSpam. Mentioned here. It's a spam IP blocklist which seems trustworthy and effective in other wikis, and could save some effort banning spambots.

Anti-spoof measures

• Reject registration of accounts that utilize previously existing users that have been renamed to prevent impersonation.

Performance and scaling

• DDoS mitigation is already in place, but is suboptimal and there may be more to do to improve it.
• Installing wikidiff2 may help somewhat by improving page diff performance.

User group permissions

• Someone earlier mentioned that there was a potential safety issue with how user group permissions currently work, but didn't want to discuss details on the wiki. If that someone reads this, you can send an email to Cosmikdebris.
• Give bots the right to edit sysop-locked pages so that there's no need to give them sysop rights, which can present a security issue.
• Give techs and mods the right to unblock themselves.

Page rendering and features

Math rendering

• Run our own Mathoid instance and/or otherwise configure it so it scales, rather than pages breaking when they have too many <math> tags in them. Discussed here.

MediaWiki version upgrade

To be done, but no specifics of the next upgrade have been discussed yet, such as version number etc. It seems better to plan specifics closer to when it can be done in practice, as MediaWiki development goes on. Meanwhile, there's lower-hanging fruit listed above.