Forum:RefreshSpecial forthcoming, comments/ideas?



The Wikia techs are working on a new administrator-only Special page (at my request) called Special:Refreshspecial. This will allow administrators to update the cached Special: pages more often, and with better control for fighting vandalism. It is similar to a tech running the updateSpecialPages.php script, but will allow finer control.

These are the options we've thought up so far
 * Choose which special pages you want to refresh (as seen in screenshot)
 * Rough time estimate or "expense" for each (Special:Wantedpages can take days on Wikimedia)
 * Rough time estimate for total execution.

Some other ones that might be useful:
 * Date of last refresh for each.
 * Anything else?

While it is in the development stage, we thought it might be good to get some feedback. So, feed us. --Splarka (talk) 08:47, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm guessing from the description that this page will be a "Refresh Now" request. So if, were I an admin, I wanted to refresh a page every three days, I would need to log in every three days and manually request the refresh, correct? If so, can you make sure there is a API for this to automate it via a bot.
 * Conversely, will there be some sort of limitation on the number of refresh requests (e.g. once per day for any given page) to prevent DOS attacks. Tjoneslo 13:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Hmm, I'd have to say that this will most likely not be bot-friendly, because this is (or will be, when working properly) already on a weekly or bi-weekly cron job, so there is not really a good reason to (and it will just put undue stress on the servers for it to refresh when it is not needed/requested). If the servers could handle the load of the whole list being updated daily or hourly, it would be. The main point of this is on-request. For example, if someone wants to check for someone page blankning with sockpuppets, they can update Special:Shortpages and see it almost live.
 * If it becomes a problem, the usage will probably be logged and the offending parties asked to slow down/stop, or the extension disabled for them. However, barring extreme overusage (such as hourly bot updates on Uncyclopedia or Wookieepedia), there is probably no need to log it. On the small wikis the server load is negligible, on the large ones the status of sysop is usually more trustworthy. --Splarka (talk) 02:25, 19 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Agreed, this would be usefull for me to refresh the Double Redirects so I can find any without searching, and refresh the uncategorized images list after I've fixed a number of pages. Technicaly it's not really needed for a bot to do it as the lists only need to be updated after a large bit of work has been done, or the pages could use some cleaning of old information. Dantman (Talk) 05:17, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Non-expensive special pages removed from list
The non-expensive special will not be listed now (can be back if necessary) - --BartL 09:07, 18 January 2007 (UTC)