RationalWiki:Requests for user rights

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Welcome to your mother's basement! Here you can ask for autopatrolled, sysop rights, ninja rights, or tech rights.

Please include your reason for requesting the rights. For example, if requesting sysop rights, one could say: "I've been here for bloody ages and you fuckers forgot to give me sysop".

Please also {{ping|user's name}} a mod or tech — otherwise, nobody will respond.

Tech: ApooftGnegiol[edit]

I've been torn on getting more involved with RW for a year or so, and technical things are what I have the most ideas for (and I've been doing some little things from time to time not requiring actually being a tech through much of my time here, including testing before the upgrade which was done). The main thing techs do here which stands out / requires the role seems to be to maintain edit filters, and I could take part in that (as I do on Illogicopedia).

I've also been thinking about wiki software configuration (and mentioned ideas for fixing and improving it, and maybe eventually another upgrade, on the current board campaigning). Low-hanging fruit if I get the role of actually tweaking the wiki installation, which I guess techs generally don't have here, could include:

  1. One small annoyance is, hovering over references and notes only shows tooltips on mainspace pages, not in e.g. funspace and essays; this can be changed with a small config tweak.
  2. The Google CAPTCHA for anonymous and new users has been noted by others to suck and I'd test disabling it and keeping it gone if spam doesn't increase.
  3. Trying to fix math rendering so it doesn't break on some pages, @Christopher already suggested a fix on the tech support page.

Roughly a decade ago I worked on a wiki which no longer exists, and if any tech emails me, I'll reply and point to my presence on MediaWiki.org (from where you'll be able to verify I've done some small-scale MediaWiki software development, which I did during that project back then). I won't link that directly on RW now, though, because I don't yet feel like linking my name here. Other than that, I've not done web development recently (other than maintaining my simple static websites), and I mainly write other things in C. I use Linux and sometimes one or another BSD, and have toyed with a local MediaWiki installation too a decade ago, but I've never had any kind of real server admin role (i.e. rather than just limited access to files for a wiki).

@Cosmikdebris --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 17:14, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

You're right, unfortunately this stuff is out of scope for techs, of the 17 techs (soon to be 16 since one of them is about to reach the 2-years-inactive mark), only 2 are sysadmins. It's not really all that clear what Techs do, but I've come to see it as a combination of Wikipedia's bureaucrats, since we add and remove moderator and staff during elections, and Oversighters, since we, along with the mods, can suppress/oversight stuff, and edit filter editors, but we don't have any community authority. If you're interested on those 3 things you mentioned, it would be better to put pressure to appoint new sysadmins as a board member, though no promises. If you're instead interested in joining the tech cabal, though, I can consider it. Rabbitseatcarrots (talk) 17:40, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
@ApooftGnegiol I have no problem with granting you tech permissions, but I'd like to see some of the other mods and techs chime in first. Your experience with the wiki software and software engineering is very close to mine (I professionally wrote C/C++ on a project 35 years ago but have since moved on to all kinds of other projects).
This page describes what additional permissions are granted to Techs here. This is not the same as server-side access. Once the new board gets in place the issue of server maintenance is at the top of my list of issues to discuss when we convene. —cosmikdebris talk stalk 18:04, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
@Rabbitseatcarrots, yeah, it seems like two very different levels of technical involvement. I may be able to help out a little with edit filters, etc., though I don't see any great need for more people to do that (others seem to handle spam quite well, though I've been wondering why there's the situation of lots of spambots registering without getting any edits through and then usually Plutocow having to pick off the accounts manually, instead of them being blocked automatically as IPs before registering). I can join in, though I don't really expect to make much of a difference that way (unless there's a simple fix for what I mentioned).
On top of that, I also thought that if I'm pitching more, as with the board, then if I'm going to personally be involved in doing any of it later (though it's also fine with me if others do it), then being trusted to be Tech seemed like a prerequisite. --ApooftGnegiol (talk) 18:23, 27 July 2023 (UTC)
All the supports are pretty good, but one of the techs or a mod needs to be a voucher to satisfy da rulez. Without the vouch, tech is not granted regardless of the vote. The 2 weeks period that this vote is supposed to last is set to end on Thursday 10. Rabbitseatcarrots (talk) 18:16, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
Bongolian is a mod and Cosmik is a tech. Pizza SLICE.gifChef Moosolini’s Ristorante ItalianoMake a Reservation 18:56, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Endorsements[edit]