843360 - wiki.mozilla.org dev and stage sites can not update user preferences

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations Graveyard :: WebOps: Other, task)

Description

[Jason Crowe [:jd]]

Both dev and stage have this issue. It might be related to:

https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42592

But I can find no errors in the logs. I will postpone the production upgrade until this issue is resolved.

https://wiki-dev.allizom.org/Special:Preferences
https://wiki.allizom.org/Special:Preferences

Comment 1

[Mark A. Hershberger (hexmode)]

It is not (directly) related to https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42592 -- the patch that fixed that bug doesn't apply to 1.19 because 1.19 doesn't have the writesOrCallbacksPending method.

Comment 2

[Mark A. Hershberger (hexmode)]

I can't link to the answer because of a bug in MediaWiki's LiquidThreads extension, but Ciencia Al Poder provides this answer:

  Your wiki has Short URLs wrongly configured, or there's something wrong with server
  alias or rewrite rules.

  When saving Special:Preferences it does a HTTP POST to /index.php/Special:Preferences,
  but the server is responding with a HTTP 302 Redirect to /Special:Preferences, which
  causes the browser to do a GET request instead of a POST one and the POST data is lost
  on the redirect.

From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Project:Support_desk/User_preferences_won%27t_save_%28no_error%29

Comment 3

[Mark A. Hershberger (hexmode)]

My bad.  NoScript was mangling the URL to keep me "safe".  Here it is: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Project:Support_desk/User_preferences_won%27t_save_%28no_error%29/reply_%2816%29

Comment 4

[Jake Maul [:jakem]]

Wow, that is an awesomely helpful response from them. I'm so happy I asked, I was afraid nobody would be able to help. :)

I see this in our Apache config for prod (wiki-dev looks similar):

  # The following rules are only for backwards compatibility 
  # (so that old links to your site keep working). You should leave them out in a new install.
  # Redirect old /wiki/ urls
  RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*)$ https://wiki.mozilla.org/$1 [R,L]
  RewriteRule ^/wiki$ https://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php [R,L]
  RewriteRule ^/index.php\?title=(.*)$ https://wiki.mozilla.org/$1 [R,L]
  RewriteRule ^/index.php/(.*)$ https://wiki.mozilla.org/$1 [R,L]
  # end backward compatibility rules, the following ones are important

So... I guess we could make a RewriteCond for that last one (for Special:Preferences), but honestly I'm kinda thinking maybe we can just kill it altogether.

Or we could redo our ShortURL stuff entirely. That's cleaner, but I suspect we'll need to do something about making at least the current sort of links work... we can perhaps abandon the previous generation(s) of links, if there are problems supporting them.

Comment 5

[Jason Crowe [:jd]]

I removed the last two rewrites on dev and stage which seems to have solved the problem. I refreshed dev and stage with a copy of the data from prod and we are once again ready for testing.