These changes occurred over the span of this month and updates are still ongoing. The current changes have been compiled into this post.
Anti-spam tools
Starting since the start of December, we’ve effectively prevented all unwanted bots from the utilizing the site.
- Deleted over 3,000 dead spam accounts.
- Updated the captcha system used.
- Increased accuracy on the captcha for checks prone to accidentally catching humans.
- Increased the auto confirm edit count from 1 to 3, and auto confirm age from 600 to 1200.
- Title and spam block lists can now utilize Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia block lists, in addition to their local lists.
Lua modules
The main change with modules is that infoboxes will now be handled through Lua, rather than complex and repetitive variable array parser functions.
- Resolved issues with modules appearing as wikitext content modal rather than Scribunto.
- Updated various older modules.
- Navbox, Navbar, TableTools, Color contrast, Color contrast/colors, Arguments, Yesno, Check for unknown parameters, Italic title, Hatnote, Hatnote list, Labelled list hatnote List, Main, String, No globals, Navboxes, and Navbox with collapsible groups.
- Added new modules.
- Infobox and Exponential search.
- Removed the “Lua test” development test module.
Site design
End goal is to fully reimplement the site’s CSS theme, with various improvements and optimizations, and better readability in some locations. Currently, just enough has been reimplemented so that the site is readable.
- Started to reimplement and redo parts of the older CSS stylesheets for the updated site version. These changes largely apply to some relevant templates, and towards the main content bodies.
- Site Logo reimplemented…
- Background theming re-darkened…
- Text and headers re-brightened…
- Horizontal lists updated to latest snippet revision…
- Fixed a long-standing issue with the site logo and other CSS customizations not appearing on every page.
- Allowed user CSS and user JS pages.
- Adjusted default date format (still configurable as a user preference option).
- “Save page”/“Save changes” is now labeled as “Publish page”/“Publish changes”.
- User edit counts displayed in various prominent places.
- Disabled syndication feeds.
General extensions
There’s some other extensions which planned to be removed in the future as well (e.g., string functions) due to being replaceable by Lua modules, but the site still depends on these for various templates or other tasks.
- Granted sysops the interwiki right.
- ImageMagick thumbnail resizing now works properly.
- Removed the Tabber, Widgets, StopForumSpam, MassMessage, DiscordNotifications, Popups, EventLogging, GuidedTour, and DeletePagesForGood extensions.
- Now using bundled pygments package for SyntaxHighlight.
Miscellaneous
- Reduced the timespan for which email validation and temporary passwords remain valid.
- Adjusted the email sender to not be gibberish.
- Updated from Python 2.7.18 to python3
- Fixed an issue that led to only sometimes reporting php errors when they occurred.
- Removed various unnecessary or deprecated configuration settings.
- Updated security packages.