explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical/Archive 2

explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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This is an archive of past discussions about explain xkcd:Community portal/Technical and is kept for historical purposes. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current discussion page.
 
 

Captcha

Captcha not appearing at all. Can't edit pages without turning off security settings (which were set to default). Chrome and "Edge" on Windows 10. Both yell at me about some components of the page being insecure. 15:48, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

Same issue with other browsers. reCAPTCHA won't load from an "insecure" resource when the wiki is accessed over HTTPS. TisTheAlmondTavern 15:07, 6 December 2016 (UTC)
Oooh, I see. Alright, I'll get to fixing it now I know what the problem is. Davidy²²[talk] 01:00, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Slight bug in the editing panel, when asked what webcomic we're talking about, it cannot be in all caps, it must be strict lowercase, despite appearances on xkcd.com. Could someone take a look at it? 108.162.249.158 00:54, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

It took me several months to figure out that "this wiki" is named "explain xkcd" and not "explainxkcd". I spent those months answering two questions every time the "what's this wiki's name" question appeared (when I missed the answer, a different question appeared).--Jojonete (talk) 09:06, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
I was sure both answers were correct, but never attempted to type explainxkcd, just in case. 108.162.221.17 12:44, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

wiki server clock has drifted - about 13 minutes fast

As I type this, it is exactly 07:42:45 UTC. Pesthouse (talk) 07:55, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

And thus timestamps here are 12 or 13 minutes off. Pesthouse (talk) 07:59, 14 April 2015 (UTC)

I see the same thing: 15:41:00 UTC now.... Nealmcb (talk) 15:54, 23 April 2015 (UTC)
Huh. I'll look into it, when I get back home. Davidy²²[talk] 23:19, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Currently it's 20 minutes fast. It's 21:00 UTC and it shows 21:20 (UTC). Xhfz (talk) 21:20, 14 July 2015 (UTC)

Sorry bout the delay, was busy for a long bit, should be fixed now. Davidy²²[talk] 21:44, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Currently it's 8 minutes fast. It's 20:56:00 UTC and it shows 21:03 UTC. 108.162.221.17 21:03, 5 November 2015 (UTC)

do we not have ntp on the server or something, gonna reset the clock again when i get back home. Davidy²²[talk] 00:33, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Happening again: it's 11:33 UTC and the server has 11:48 UTC. 141.101.75.161 11:49, 11 March 2016 (UTC)

Fixed again, and I'm gonna have to check our NTP installation. 06:37, 18 March 2016 (UTC)
Alright, changed some things, this shouldn't happen anymore. Davidy²²[talk] 06:38, 18 March 2016 (UTC)

The clock is about 13-14 minutes off again. It's currently 13:49 UTC. –TisTheAlmondTavern, 13:36, 17 January 2017 (UTC)

Discussion template resources apparently missing

As co-header (right-margin hugging text) to the Discussion section on all pages (or at least as many as I've just visited - and on multiple browsers, just in case...) I'm getting the following, with the <>-tags being my own descriptive additions: 

<redlink>File:comment.png</redlink> <validlink>add a comment!</validlink> ⋅ <redlink>File:Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif</redlink> <validlink>refresh comments!Discussion</validlink>

Looks like the PNG and GIF files concerned have been removed, or the links in the Discussion template broken/incorrectly redirected.

(Sidenote: The character between the "add a comment!" and the "File: Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif" that I've copied here verbatim (so doubtless appears correctly for everyone else who reads this) is an 'I don't have this character on my machine' character, for me, which is obviously entirely my fault for not downloading additional fonts that I'd need. From cursory investigation, it appears to be essentially the same as "·", Alt-0183, or HTML code '&middot;', which would render on my machine and yet (if changed) shouldn't break on those where it currently works. For your consideration, but not as vital.) 141.101.106.161 06:30, 7 November 2015 (UTC)

ETA - Delving around further, Category:Pages with broken file links seems to indicate it is a widespread problem at server-side, and not somehow solely my own (except for the Sidenote issue!). And suggests a simple way to check that the issue is fixed (when suddenly the category is nowhere near as 'full'), and then discover any related ones that might need fixing (like the special Star Trek Into Darkness alternate version of the Discussion template). 141.101.106.161 06:57, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
Huh. I have a feeling I know what caused this, I'll get right on it. Davidy²²[talk] 16:23, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
I've seen some more of these cases, e.g. on explain xkcd:Community portal. I think these images are from Wikimedia Commons, maybe that integration broke somehow? --SlashMe (talk) 16:33, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
i don't know what is even happening, the images seem to be fine now but they still show up as broken file links Davidy²²[talk] 02:04, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Update captcha text?

The text above the posting captcha says “type the two words” but reCaptcha often doesn't use two, and they're often not words. Example: http://i.imgur.com/TdM5n5O.png

Maybe we could change it to something like “type the text”?

P1h3r1e3d13 (talk) 23:44, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

So, the reCAPTCHA captchas are entirely provided by Google. If there's an error in it, it's likely Google's fault and a bug report should be sent in that direction instead. Davidy²²[talk] 00:23, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
I noticed that before. It's not a bug in recaptcha, but rather in ConfirmEdit, file ReCaptcha/i18n/en.json to be exact. --162.158.90.217
Oh huh, hadn't thought of that. I'll fix that up then. Davidy²²[talk] 19:45, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Stylesheets not working?

It doesn't look like any of the site's CSS is loading for me. I have tried purging, adding useskins to the URL, and clearing my browser's cache, and webpage content remains in Times New Roman with no special styling. Headers and bold spans of text are bold, list items are bulleted, buttons are button-y, templates and my signature display with HTML-style-attribute-level CSS, and so on, but that's the extent of it. Is this a belated April Fools' joke, or has something gone horribly wrong between the servers and my eyes? ~AgentMuffin

I made a similar post earlier -- it seems to have vanished down a black hole. I linked these screenshots: [1] [2]
Note that there are no ads either! This could get to problem-level very fast. KangaroOS 01:28, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
There are actually still ads, they're just shoved right at the bottom of the page. mysqld is clocking in at 40% cpu load, and mediawiki seems to be going into fallback mode and skipping stylesheets which is about what I'd expect from an april fools comic. Davidy²²[talk] 01:31, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Ah, figured it was some sort of server overslow. For a while there I was getting a 503 error. KangaroOS 01:36, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Well, perhaps you don't need another note about this, but I noted the 'stylesheetless' appearance myself, just now. Except that it is styled, partially. (When I choose to view by Style "No style", it's even more not-Styled!) Could be because a subset of styles aren't being loaded (so that the ones that are still loaded can only be identified from their enforced absence), but looks like you have this as much in hand as can be expected, so just FYI... 141.101.98.137 04:13, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Have you tried switching the server off and back on ? ;-) Jokes apart, are there really so many users continuously polling ? It could be just a case of stale open connections. Really, a reboot might not hurt (although it may kill-off few sessions and you may get some angry posts, but at this point, it might be worth the try) Edit: Sorry, I was messing up the formatting while replying. I'm trying to fix it. But at this point, does it really matter? :P 162.158.255.56 04:21, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Alright guys, still having trouble with the load, but I've put a quick temporary hack in place to get the css working again for now. Fonts are a little off, I'll deal with that soon. Davidy²²[talk] 08:09, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
Did a little more work on things, styles should be working again but it's not great on the back end. I'm going to do some rooting around to see what went wrong. Davidy²²[talk] 00:07, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
Cool.. This is pretty good. We're almost there.. The only things I can notice that are off are - (1) Category list at the end of the page (2) Contents block at the beginning of the page and (3) Edit buttons for individual sections. By the way, I'm curious, what exactly was broken ? I didn't expect you'd have to fix things here. I expected that since the issue was caused by excess server load, it would return back to normalcy automatically once things settle down a bit in couple of days after the offending comic was more or less explained. 162.158.255.56 03:32, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
A script responsible for picking user preferences and integrating css from pages like Mediawiki:common.css was failing to complete because of server load, so I gave it a helping hand and just had it insert a static stylesheet instead. I almost certainly missed a few spots though, because the wiki does not look right. Davidy²²[talk] 04:43, 6 April 2016 (UTC)

(resetting indent) Yes, things are still off. The text "Jump to: navigation, search" is at the top of every page, but it's useless because it links to stuff already at the top of the page. Edit summaries aren't italicized, the edit boxes don't use the whole window width, links are underlined, section edit links are too big, etc. I put the Wayback Machine to good use, and found the below set of archived pages, all using the proper style. Compare them with the current appearances of the pages, and you should see most, if not all, of the issues I've seen.
Main Page | My contributions | The "edit" page for comic 1486 --NealCruco (talk) 21:50, 7 April 2016 (UTC)

Is here nothing to be done about the missing styles? The tables still look horrible and there is not help when editing, for instance for signature etc. Colapsing of tables etc. also won't work which is a mess for some of the long explanations and tables Kynde (talk) 11:56, 18 April 2016 (UTC)

HotCat also seems to be not working for adding categories. Forrest (talk)13:18, 25 April 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, load.php is failing so all gadgets and user scripts are unavailable. :-( Mark Hurd (talk) 14:42, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
Alright, figured it out. It was a deal with file permissions, not sure how those got changed on April 1st. Davidy²²[talk] 18:59, 17 May 2016 (UTC)

Comic navigation buttons

You know, the buttons that look like the ones on the xkcd site. Shouldn't they also highlight like the xkcd site? I thought maybe it was due to the above CSS issue, but the links to archive.org make it seem like it's just never worked.

It just seems to me that, if we're going to go that far in mimicking the actual buttons, we should probably also mimic their a:hover settings. Shut off the box shadow, change the background to white, and the link color to #6E7B91.

I've tested the following CSS, and it appears to work: 

li.plainlinks:hover, .no-link-underline > li:hover {
 	background-color: #FFF !important;
	box-shadow: none !important;
	-moz-box-shadow: none !important;
	-webkit-box-shadow: none !important; 
}
li.plainlinks:hover > a > span, .no-link-underline > li:hover > a > span {
	color: #6E7B91 !important; 
}

Trlkly (talk) 09:14, 2 May 2016 (UTC)

Seems like a decent addition. Thanks! Davidy²²[talk] 18:52, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Captcha trouble

For about an hour, I wasn't able to edit a page or create an account when I was trying to, because the captcha was missing. I'm not sure if it was problem on this site or captcha but I thought I'd mention it. --Anqied (talk) 08:34, 11 June 2016 (UTC)

Recaptcha appears to work for me currently. Does it work now? It seems like they may have just gone down temporarily. Davidy²²[talk] 20:52, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm not certain this is the same issue, but I was just having a problem with the captcha for unregistered users trying to edit a page. I figured out that it's because you were trying to serve the captcha through HTTP even though the page was on HTTPS, so my browser was blocking the captcha. Changing to HTTP "fixed" the issue, but that shouldn't be the solution. 108.162.215.187 16:45, 18 July 2016 (UTC)

wrong IP

My edition was attributed to 141.101.104.60, whereas my real address is 88.156.226.213 according to [3]. Wikimedia sites (Wikipedias, Wiktionaries...) recognize my IP address properly. Someting strange is going on here. 141.101.104.71 22:40, 21 June 2016 (UTC)

Just a heads up that your website is incorrectly identifying the IP address of visitors as being from the CloudFlare server that is serving the page content to them. It would be best practice if you could explicitly look for the field "REMOTE_ADDR" rather than "X-FORWARDED-FOR" as the former is unaffected by the use of intermediate proxies. PS My IP address should begin with 131.111. IP addresses beginning with 141.101 belong to Cloudflare London. 141.101.98.5 21:08, 21 July 2016 (UTC)

  • FYI I just created this account and the "email address confirmation" email I received said the account was created by a Cloudflare IP (162.158.107.199), not my own. ExcarnateSojourner (talk) 15:09, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

Captcha does not appear

I am not a registered user (I just haven't bothered to make an account), so I have to complete a Captcha before saving any of my edits. However, I've found numerous times that the captcha does not show up when I hit [Save page]. The line of text introducing it ("To help protect against automated edit spam, please type the word you see in the box below:") shows up, but the no actual captcha and thus no saved edits. Is this a known issue with Chrome? I managed to circumvent it by using IE (I assure you, it was the only other browser available), but I would much prefer to be able to edit explain xkcd pages in Chrome, my usual browser. 108.162.220.17 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

What plugins do you have installed on chrome? Do you have Javascript enabled? I'll see what can be done if you have them off. Davidy²²[talk] 20:45, 20 July 2016 (UTC)
I just figured out the problem and successfully edited a page. I too tried IE after Chrome but still encountered the issue... to my consternation I noticed a new icon in the address-bar, 'Blocked content'. (Apparently recaptcha is treated similarly to a pop-up.) Interacting with this new button made the captcha appear. I am in Chrome adding this comment, and after finding the similarly-functioning/corresponding button here, all is well 108.162.237.247 18:39, 2 August 2016 (UTC)
Hmph, I am likely a completely different user from the foregoing, but our IP addresses are similar and both reported as from Cloudflare in TX. 108.162.237.247 18:42, 2 August 2016 (UTC)
I would like to address this and also point out this is the only site where I've run into this problem; other wiki-based sites can load captcha fine. According to Chrome it's blocked because it's an "unsafe script". 141.101.107.84 08:54, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

Wanted files

Special:WantedFiles: 41 file is linked but nonexistent.

Some on talk pages, user pages and project pages, but here is a list of those in main namespace:

  1. File:Apatosaurus scale mmartyniuk wiki.png
  2. File:Apidae - Eucera sp. (male).JPG
  3. File:Louisae.jpg
  4. File:Wet kookaburra 6674 Crop Edit.jpg
  5. File:MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft.jpg
  6. File:Bee orchids, Aller Brook Local Nature Reserve - geograph.org.uk - 833516.jpg
  7. File:Synhalonia nest 1.jpg
  8. File:Butterfly Voters View.jpg
  9. File:Fusca estacionado.jpg
  10. File:Ophrys apifera flower1.jpg
  11. File:Galilean moon Laplace resonance animation.gif
  12. File:PalmCellTower.jpg
  13. File:746 telephone in red.JPG
  14. File:Candidate Higgs Events in ATLAS and CMS.png
  15. File:Tommy Wiseau.jpg
  16. File:Google maps auto.jpg
  17. File:Velociraptor dinoguy2.jpg
  18. File:Acrocanthosaurus skeleton (1).jpg
  19. File:Vraptor-scale.png
  20. File:Alces alces elan trophee chateau Tanlay.jpg
  21. File:DBCooper.jpg
  22. File:Rick Astley - Pepsifest 2009.jpg
  23. File:Anonymous emblem.svg
  24. File:Eas new.svg
  25. File:John Cage and Michael Bach in Assissi 1992.jpg

I could not find why they were deleted and it's hard for me to argue for their presence in the articles. Being a newbie here, I would like to ask those who knows better to either undelete files, or upload them again, or delete file mentions from the explanations. Thanks --Ата (talk) 15:47, 8 August 2016 (UTC)

I tend to clean up after myself, don't recognise these file names. I believe these happen when files get moved, feel free to cut dead file links wherever you find them if you find them unnecessary.Davidy²²[talk] 02:38, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

827/1721: Business Idea

See 1721#Trivia. Randall has accidentally named both 1721 and 827 "Business Idea". He fixed it by renaming 827 to "My Business Idea". I tried to reproduce by renaming the file and wiki page for 827, but it now shows the old comic on both pages. Maybe CloudFlare caching? And idea (that's not a business idea) to fix this? --SlashMe (talk)

Cloudflare takes a little time to update changes to an image. For immediate results, you can create an image under a different name and use that while you wait for the old one to update. Otherwise, it should update within a few hours. Is it good for you now? Davidy²²[talk] 14:48, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
Yes, it was resolved after a few hours. --SlashMe (talk) 20:25, 18 August 2016 (UTC)

Mobile CSS

I've accessed this Wiki on my mobile device more often than previously and I couldn't find any discussion about this. Honestly, 50% of the reasons I'm adding this topic is about the discussion, the rest is about making it easier for people with narrower screens. I understand that I am a new member on this Wiki and that altering Mediawiki:Common.css has site-wide effects (and I'm sure that there are some templates that won't agree with some of the options we have, even some tables, such as the one on 893: 65 Years#Trivia, will break a very narrow design).

OK. Let me just ramble on about this, then. =) There are some obvious (but not necessarily easier) options for mobile devices. MediaWiki lists a few Skins and Extensions. Not having ever had access to a Wiki's server, I have no idea how nerve-racking that is (or if it even makes sense for this Wiki). Even more obvious to some - and even harder to implement - is a mobile app (that I wouldn't use anyway).

So, to bridge the time until maybe something more effective comes along, we could try to add some CSS ourselves. I'm no expert. But here are my thoughts.

  • This is about all devices with narrow screens, not just phones. Let's say anything under 600px width is considered narrow.
  • Most obviously, the font size should be affected. This has negative consequences for anything with fixed font size. And anything we forget. Basically, the sidebar, the search and anything else on top of each page can be massively smaller depending on the screen and fixing that won't be as easy.
  • Of course we could disregard the sidebar, or rather, push it to the bottom (which is easy, it's artificially placed on the left instead of the bottom). There are a number of reasons why a lot of people wouldn't want that. One of those reasons is that the ads would basically disappear for anyone who doesn't scroll down. We would have to figure out where else we can put it, on the top maybe. On the plus side, we could have the entire width of the screen just for the article.
  • Another thing that breaks the design regularly: comic images. We could make them fit. The navigation might be more challenging.
  • There's a whole lot of paddings and margins to get rid of.
  • Maybe make the search box a lot bigger?

A short snippet for the comic images and for the font: 

@media handheld,screen and (max-width: 600px),screen and (max-device-width: 600px){ /* because some mobile browsers like to work with a higher resolution than the resolution of the screen */

#bodyContent{
font-size:initial; /* resetting font to full size */
}

td > img{ /* maybe add a class for the table in Template:comic */
display:block;
margin:auto;
max-width:100%; /* make image fit into box */
height:auto;
}

}

I don't know... What do you think? Oh, also, Mediawiki says this can be added to Mediawiki:Mobile.css but I guess that is for extensions? We'd probably have to add that to Mediawiki:Common.css if we ever want to add it. Ret Samys (talk) 16:21, 15 September 2016 (UTC)

Getting on a plane soon, but I'll take a look at this when I get off and get moved in again. Davidy²²[talk] 14:07, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

HTTPS Links Back to XKCD Interfere with Random Button

(I've moved this from "Proposals" to here, now realising this is the proper location.)

The Links back to the comics that are present just above the comic itself on the wiki pages (and adjacent to the next and previous links) provides an HTTPS link back to XKCD. However, this interferes with users who want to click that link, and then click random - because c.xkcd.com does NOT support HTTPS, and thus clicking random after returning to xkcd from explainxkcd via the button on a comic's article does not work. These links should be switched back to HTTP.

--9000 volts (talk) 22:53, 24 December 2016 (UTC)

What makes you suspect c.xkcd.com does not support SSL? It features a perfectly valid wildcard certificate from GeoTrust (currently valid from Dec 14 00:00:00 2016 GMT, so it should already have affected you), although it's different from the multi-site certificate from Fastly used on the comic and what-if.xkcd.com and, yet again, different from the Let's Encrypt ones used on the blag and store.
On the other hand, there is a compelling argument for HTTP links: Most interactive comics break with HTTPS. –TisTheAlmondTavern, 14:19, 17 January 2017 (UTC)
I can't reproduce the issue with random comics, but the benefits of using SSL for links to a site that stores no user data probably don't outweigh the issues that some people seem to be having. Changed. Davidy²²[talk] 22:34, 10 February 2017 (UTC)

"Retry for a live version" and stuff not responding

Every now and then, I'd just be browsing around the site, then all of a sudden I'd run into an issue with it saying that there was an error with the explainxkcd.com host and that I would need to wait for the servers to restart. This is happening rather often for me, but goes away quickly. Sometimes, it happens on my own wiki pages too... weird. Other times, things would just freeze. Is it something on my end, or is it with the site? --JayRulesXKCD (talk) 14:05, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Support for timezones?

I live in the timezone PST, and because of that, the clock seems to be ahead of my time by about 7 hours and 40 minutes. Can someone add support for different timezones? For example, at my time of posting, it is 7:56 PM on March 8, 2017. The time the wiki thinks it is is shown on my signature: 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 03:40, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

You can actually set your own time zone. Go to Preferences->Date and Time, and there should be a time offset option for you to pick your time zone. Davidy²²[talk] 07:36, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
The thing is, I do have my time zone set to PST, but on the wiki it is still showing up as the wrong time. 625571b7-aa66-4f98-ac5c-92464cfb4ed8 (talk) 15:24, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
Oh, the timestamps recorded in signatures are in UTC for everyone. That doesn't change, because it makes it easier to follow the timeline of a conversation in a talk page. Davidy²²[talk] 17:24, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
Uhhh, the timestamp isn't UTC at all. My latest BOT upload was 06:02, 8 March 2017 CET or 05:02, 8 March 2017 UTC and it is recorded here as 04:45, 8 March 2017. So we still have an offset 17 minutes to the past. That's an old problem.--Dgbrt (talk) 18:33, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
It is UTC, server inaccuracy doesn't change the time zone, it just makes it inaccurate. Davidy²²[talk] 19:13, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
And even if you don't like me for this: The server time is currently UTC-00:17 and not UTC. This odd offset confuses users. But I know nobody can change this.--Dgbrt (talk) 19:36, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Mailserver-problem

Hello,
I tried to reset my password today, but there is a problem with your mail-server: The sender-adress of your password-reset-mail is [email protected], but the (sub-)domain vps.explainxkcd.com does not exists, and so the eMail is rejected by my mail-server (and most others too). Could that please be fixed? Thank you very much. --DaB.

When did InstantCommons get disabled?

I was just about to add some photos of the ISS transiting the sun to today's explanation, but saw that it's no longer possible to just enter the names of Wikimedia Commons photos and for them to render. I know of at least one explanation—1400—that previously had such images, but now just has redlinks. I presume that at some point someone must have disabled $wgUseInstantCommons in the config settings. May I ask what the reason for that was? And is there any chance that that could be reverted? Obviously there aren't a lot of articles where it makes sense to have Commons images up, but IMHO it's a useful feature to have for the rare occasion where it makes sense, like with today's comic. PinkAmpersand (talk) 21:20, 24 April 2017 (UTC)

Solved. You now can embed pictures from Commons like local files. The link [[File:DBCooper.jpg|thumb|Cooper]] shows the picture from Commons because it doesn't exist here. There is no need to use a template. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:57, 25 May 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia template stopped working

Some time ago the template used for links to Wikipedia stopped working correctly. If you see here link to Halloween on Wikipedia, it works again: Halloween. --JakubNarebski (talk) 22:21, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

Known issue, there's currently an anon doing boring vandalism. --108.162.241.172 22:37, 25 June 2017 (UTC)

CAPTCHA does not work for HTTPS visitors

I am a fervent believer in encrypting everything (I am the crypto nut in 1269: Privacy Opinions), and have configured the NoScript plugin to force the use of HTTPS instead of HTTP for all sites that aren't on a special list in my configs. Hence, I tend to visit sites on HTTPS that most people visit on unencrypted HTTP, discovering all the bugs in people's HTTPS implementations in the process...and this site is not exempt from the bugfinding.

In order to edit pages, you need to enter a CAPTCHA. However, the script that makes this captcha work is fetched from Google over unencrypted http (the src tag in the script specifies http: not https:). When I visit this site over HTTPS, the use of active content served over unencrypted HTTP onto an encrypted page causes Firefox to have a spasm and block the script. Since Google fully supports HTTPS, the script's src tag should just be changed to say https: instead of http:, and that SHOULD fix it. Better yet, omit the protocol at all, and do something like:

src="//www.google.com/recaptcha/(rest of url)"

Most modern browsers will interpret that as "fetch www.google.com/recaptcha/(rest of url) over the same protocol used to serve this page."

(Sadly, NoScript is not smart enough to fix this by itself and just change the script's src to https: client-side...)

162.158.79.89 11:12, 20 August 2017 (UTC)

The CAPTCHA also doesn't work for https while using Chrome. 01 September 2017

Deprecation of reCAPTCHA v1

The wiki currently uses reCAPTCHA v1 to validate users as human, which beginning in November will show public deprecation notices and stop working altogether on March 31, 2018.

Are there already plans to migrate to reCAPTCHA v2 or a different CAPTCHA algorithm? –TisTheAlmondTavern (talk) 20:05, 31 October 2017 (UTC) (wiki clock is several minutes late again, BTW)

I do intend to update the CAPTCHA, I got the email notice from Google. I've been away from the site for longer than I'd like, been busy but it looks like a bunch of stuff has piled up while I was gone. I'll try to fix what I can with the time I have. Davidy²²[talk] 03:38, 12 November 2017 (UTC)
Any update on this? It has <6 weeks of life left, and the user messaging has just got angrier. 162.158.155.26 09:22, 20 February 2018 (UTC)
10 days left. I wonder what happens then. Right now, it just says "V1 SHUTDOWN ON 2018-03-31" and expects me to type it as an answer. 172.68.110.46 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)
You can hit the refresh button and it will display an actual catch. 4 days before they shut it down. TheMageKing (talk) 12:22, 27 March 2018 (UTC)

Either the kludge of simply typing the message about shutdown still works, or the Captcha system is just not working: I'm not autoconfirmed here but I was able to edit today, 9 days after v1 presumably went "poof". Yngvadottir (talk) 18:12, 9 April 2018 (UTC)

The new reCAPTCHA v2 is now online. I apologize for the delay but many updates were required and I tried to keep the server downtime as short as possible. Dgbrt (talk) 12:53, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

RSS bot stopped?

The master RSS feed only goes up to 1912, although the wiki is already up to 1914. --141.101.105.18 11:20, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, been busy, the feed should be up and running again. Davidy²²[talk] 03:38, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

Captcha doesn't work on my browser

I can't make any edits to the comic pages because the captcha simply doesn't appear when I'm trying to edit the comic pages. -- WilliamBrennan (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Please check your add blockers and activate JavaScript. Dgbrt (talk) 12:53, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Hi & Thanks heaps! I finally created an account after years of pleasurable & enlightening explanations. It took me over 5 minutes to get past the Captcha, and I've seen a few in the last week registering for sites such as XDA-developers and the like. Not sure how it all works but it feels like it's set to "ultra-difficult" or some-such...and this is the place where things are *easy* for *stupid people* like me ;) Cheers & thanks again -- Munchywok (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The Captcha is from Google (Big Brother...) and based on an sophisticated software in which you sometimes even don't have to solve it at all when it is convinced that you are a human. But it depends on your browser installation, especially your add ons. My best experience is using Google Chrome without any extensions. Firefox with extensions is the hell. --Dgbrt (talk) 09:25, 15 August 2018 (UTC)

New High Resolution comics

I've noticed Randall has been making the comics higher resolution to look good on HiDPI/Retina displays. But the copies on ExplainXKCD are the old low resolution copies.

Perhaps we'll have to go through at some point and update these? 162.158.75.58 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

I am aware of this. Randall started to provide two different resolutions at standard comics more than a year ago, and he also provides the larger resolutions to older comics since than. Technically the image tag provides links to two pictures and the browser decides based on the screen resolution what is shown. Since this wiki is now at the latest version the use of $wgResponsiveImages may be possible. But this has to be tested first. Stay tuned... Dgbrt (talk) 12:53, 19 May 2018 (UTC)

Should the HTTP urls redirect to HTTPS?

Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but shouldn't the HTTP urls be redirecting to HTTPS? Right now, the HTTP and HTTPS endpoints seem to have different login states, which is possibly confusing. I was stumped for a long time on why I couldn't login to my account, because I kept getting the error message "There seems to be a problem with your login session; this action has been canceled as a precaution against session hijacking. Go back to the previous page, reload that page and then try again." And then I noticed the "Use secure connection" button, and when I clicked it, it took me to the HTTPS site where I was already logged in! But even now, if I go to an HTTP url, I'm still logged out there. Ahiijny (talk) 00:43, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

Of course HTTP and HTTPS are different endpoints. Login via HTTPS and your credentials are encrypted and this will be never converted into plain text for HTTP. And I just successfully tested both connections with Google Chrome. Maybe we should redirect always to HTTPS like xkcd does, right now it's just your choice. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:46, 21 August 2018 (UTC)
Ah, I see. If I log in from the HTTP site, I'm logged in on both the HTTP and HTTPS sites. But if I login from the HTTPS site, then I'm only logged in on the HTTPS site, and not on the HTTP site. Furthermore, if I'm logged into the HTTPS site and I try to login from the HTTP site, I get the error message that I quote from above. Fair enough.
I guess one contribution to my confusion was the fact that the HTTPS site doesn't have the green padlock in Chrome. That would have made the difference between the HTTPS and HTTP site a bit more obvious. (I rarely type in the entire URL directly; I usually just let the Chrome address bar autocomplete do its job... and unfortunately that autocomplete takes me to the HTTP site, and I keep forgetting about that.) Right now, on any HTTPS page here, Chrome still says that it's insecure: "Attackers might be able to see the images you're looking at on this site and trick you by modifying them." Firefox says something similar: "Parts of this page are not secure (such as images)." Perhaps someone should look into that? (I think it might be the ad image.) Ahiijny (talk) 03:09, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
Thanks for your remarks. I'm aware of this but the site isn't insecure, only a few local images and some from wikimedia are hard coded to a http link. It's not much so I'll fix it soon.
In general every http request should be redirected to https, but that's not trivial at our current environment. --Dgbrt (talk) 14:35, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
It took some time to find all the places of hard coded images via http (insecure) but now you should see the green secure remark in your browser when logging in via https. --Dgbrt (talk) 13:50, 24 August 2018 (UTC)
in my holy opinion at least the login page should only be served securely. people are notoriously bad at not-reusing-passwords. //gir.st/ (talk) 12:23, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Just noting that basically every major site out there redirects from HTTP to HTTPS (including http://en.wikipedia.com, http://xkcd.com, http://stackoverflow.com, and even other wiki communities like http://wiki.puella-magi.net, http://en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Touhou_Wiki, and http://wiki.documentfoundation.org). So it would really cool if we could get that redirect action happening on this site, too :) I was browsing the site today and I was just struck once again by how odd it was that I wasn't logged in, until I remembered that I was on the HTTP site, not the HTTPS site. A real user experience annoyance, if you ask me. Ahiijny (talk) 21:34, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Of course you're right. I still have other issues but this will be done soon. Stay tuned... --Dgbrt (talk) 19:08, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

Captcha too picky

I just had to solve the "select all street signs" Captcha at least 10 times in a row. I never know when/whether to include slivers, backs of signs, sign posts, walk/wait lights. Captcha already doesn't follow my definition of street sign (I only call the sign that has the street name a "street sign", but I realize what I call "road signs," Captcha also calls "street signs" and I can adjust for that. But I haven't figured out the other issue yet, and I suspect Captcha is dinging me on choosing slivers. But that's only a guess, since it never tells you what you got wrong, it just gives you another Captcha. -- Thisisnotatest (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

My advice is installing Google Chrome and it works fine. Since that Captcha software is also from Google (Big Brother...) I believe that's on purpose. Firefox is the hell as you described; I'm not sure how it works at MS IE/Edge. In general you have to select not less than three and not more than four squares. But on Firefox, even when it seems definitely to be correct, the chance of getting an error message is more than 80%. You probably use FF. Nonetheless right now there are no other adequate Captcha tools supported by Mediawiki, the software this Wiki runs on. --Dgbrt (talk) 12:57, 27 August 2018 (UTC)
I second this. Big Brother's Captchas on Firefox are nearly unsolvable (granted, I'm browsing with JS off and blocking 3rd party cookies). And recaptcha requires 1) JavaScript and 2) a connection to google. //gir.st/ (talk) 12:23, 10 September 2018 (UTC)

Cannot create a user page

i have tried to make a user page for myself and cannot seem to do it, i'm sorry if this has been addressed already, but i couldn't find it. User: Nintendo Mc (talk) 13:07, 28 September 2018 (UTC)

New user don't have the rights. Do some more edits and wait a few days until you can create new pages. Your user page is created by me for now. --Dgbrt (talk) 15:00, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
Good Question! is there some place that everyone [who is cool] can find, that explains how many edits one has to do (and/or, how long one has to wait) in order to cause the

[...] but you do not have permission to create this page.

[error] message to ... "no longer" appear, when some limitation or rule is no longer blocking or "preventing" allowing creation -- by that user -- of his own "User:" page? (OR ... of her own "User talk:" page?)
I have done very few edits here, but ... a couple of them were almost 3 years ago.
For what it's worth (FWIW), I did not plan to say much on my "User:" page here. Probably something like:
This user is not a frequent flyer here on this Wiki (at "explainxkcd"); ...but he has done a 4-digit number of edits on other Wikis ...mainly English Wikipedia ("See also" his "User:" page there.)
Any comments? Thanks for listening. --Mike Schwartz (talk) 07:43, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
According to here and explain xkcd:Autoconfirmed users, you need to accumulate 10 edits (as well as your account being active for at least 3? or 7? days), then you become an "autoconfirmed user" and gain the right to create pages. – Yfmcpxpj (talk) 02:09, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
Do you know if only edits count, or if talk contributions count too? PDesbeginner (talk) 14:26, 19 June 2024 (UTC)
Wait. On explain xkcd:Autoconfirmed users it says 50 edits, not 10. PDesbeginner (talk) 14:51, 26 June 2024 (UTC)

Accessibility issues

[First post - hello, everyone!]

I have 15 years of experience of using MediaWiki, and have been heavily involved in some of the accessibility work on Wikipedia.

When we use colons (:), semicolons (;), and asterisks (*) to indent dialogue, discussions, etc we actually cause MediaWiki to generate HTML lists.

If we leave a bank line between indented lines/ paragraphs, we cause the start of a new HTML list.

Since the start of each list is read out by the kind of software used by (for example) people with severe visual impairments, this generates barrier to their use of the site.

The solution is to not leave blank lines; to always indent replies by just one step; and to maintain consistency in the type of character used.

You can see examples and more explanation at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Lists

Please consider adopting Wikipedia's recommended best practice for such lists, on this site. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:20, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for your input and welcome here. At first you should know that this Wiki doesn't follow every Wikipedia standard, but there is a --relatively new-- FAQ and we should talk at that discussion page about any enhancements. And please consider to keep it short, a typical editor here isn't a Wikipedean and doesn't read tons of manuals.
There are many ugly layouts here, most written before the FAQ did exist, but when I and others see them the explanation or transcript gets an incomplete tag for that reason. And the biggest problem in the past was the use of overwhelming tables.
BTW: Using a new-newline for each sentence isn't also a nice layout. Never mind... --Dgbrt (talk) 20:54, 5 November 2018 (UTC)

suggest adding info to pages

I see "Title text" here on explainxkcd, but not on the comic itself.

Eg. https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1313:_Regex_Golf shows "Title text: /bu|[rn]t|[coy]e|[mtg]a|j|iso|n[hl]|[ae]d|lev|sh|[lnd]i|[po]o|ls/ matches the last names of elected US presidents but not their opponents."

I don't see that anywhere on https://xkcd.com/1313/ Why not? 172.68.174.106 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

First of all: Please sign your comments
Second: I am not sure this is the right place for such a question, so please do not wonder if someone removes it.
And finally: the "title text" can be seen by hovering the mouse over the image on the "regular" xkcd page. Here it is made more visible by mentioning beneath the picture additionally. More details can be found at the page about the title text :) https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/title_text Lupo (talk) 15:09, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

@Lupo, no honest comment will be removed here, even if it should be posted at the Miscellaneous section. @IP, the proper internal link is here: title text, and I see that this wiki needs a simple page to explain all the terms and characters used in a general short way. --Dgbrt (talk) 19:43, 12 November 2018 (UTC)

Mediawiki exception on some pages

I get the following MedaiWiki exception on some of the pages: 

MediaWiki internal error.

Original exception: [0beebcc3efaec7ded86aea14] 2018-12-05 23:25:16: Fatal exception of type "MWException"

Exception caught inside exception handler.

Set $wgShowExceptionDetails = true; at the bottom of LocalSettings.php to show detailed debugging information.

See for example sites https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2034:_Equations or https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/User:Dgbrt

Sztupy (talk) 23:29, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Also having this. Seems to happen when “math” in Preferences-Appearance is set to “MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools)” DrMeepster (talk) 08:01, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
New error: If that math option is set to “Latex source” than an error relating to the page-ruining setting replaces any latex code: Failed to parse (MathML with SVG or PNG fallback (recommended for modern browsers and accessibility tools): Invalid response ("Math extension can not find Restbase URL. Please specify $wgMathFullRestbaseURL.") from server "invalid":): <LATEX CODE HERE> DrMeepster (talk) 07:50, 11 December 2018 (UTC)
Sorry for my late reply. I will check and solve this issue soon, right now only the plain PNG image setting does work. --Dgbrt (talk) 18:15, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
The problem appears to not be solved. In addition to the above pages (which are still broken), I've noticed it on the following: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2292 and https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2311. The workaround of configuring my account to render math as PNG works, but someone with the knowledge and access to fix this needs to do so. Shamino (talk) 13:43, 3 June 2020 (UTC)

“All 2126 Comics have an Explanation”

There are 2127 comics, and the main page seems to update automagically, so I’m not sure what the issue is. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 15:58, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

I think you posted this before the "new robot" comic came up? keep in mind that the number 404 is not linked to any comic. (There is an explain page for 404, but no comic 404. Therefore it is actually 1 comic less than you might think based on the number. On the other hand there are I think 2 or 3 additional special comics (not numbered), such as the latest entry to the 5 minute comic series, or the one about open source, etc. Lupo (talk)
I posted after it came up. I know about the unnumbered comics, so assumed they didn’t count, but I always forget about 404. Accounting for the non-comic, all seems right in the world. Thanks Lupo. “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 14:01, 26 March 2019 (UTC)
Just checked and they just subtract 1 in the source code??????? “That Guy from the Netherlands” (talk) 16:58, 12 April 2019 (UTC)

API

Hi, I'm working on a project focused on docs, and wondered if there's some API or database I can access to pinch some of the tagging info from this site? Even something like Randall's /json.html data from each page would work. User:Toonarmycaptain (User talk:Toonarmycaptain forgot to sign this edit at 03:50, 14 May 2019 (UTC)

Unwanted Link

In 1467: Email, there are two links in the title text that should be normal text. It has happened several times in other pages, and it's annoying. How do I change links like that into regular text? Herobrine (talk) 07:41, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean. Maybe it is a browser issue on your end? on my computer neither chrome nor internet explorer or edge interpret anything inside of "My New Year's resolution for 2014-54-12/30/14 Dec:12:1420001642 is to learn these stupid time formatting strings." as a link... Lupo (talk) 08:00, 11 July 2019 (UTC)
Just checked. iPad misinterpreting part of them as phone numbers, appeared as link. Herobrine (talk) 09:29, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

Captcha not working?

I've been experiencing some problems when trying to solve captcha when posting comments and topics. It's gotten much harder than before, I fail a lot more often, and occasionally, when I finish it, it reloads the page with an "Incorrect or Missing Captcha" error, and forces me to retry. Has anybody else experienced this problem? Am I the only one with Captcha issues? Has it been working properly in recent times?108.162.241.244 18:40, 8 November 2019 (UTC)

DgbrtBOT

The bot seems to have been down since December 13, 2019, and Dgbrt hasn't made a single edit since March, 2019. He hasn't responded to the comments in DgbrtBOT's talk page, either. Is there any way for an someone to contact him? Herobrine (talk) 13:12, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

The bot has resumed its extremely helpful work again this week, but no word yet on why it was MIA for a solid month. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 14:06, 10 January 2020 (UTC)

Google seems to have changed something in AdSense again, and the ads have been appearing in random positions again since December, 2019. This page might have a solution? Herobrine (talk) 13:20, 1 January 2020 (UTC)

Links to xkcd pages sould be withoult "www." part

There is an issue with loading resources on pages, that are opened with "www." part in URL. For example commic 1975. If viewed from https://www.xkcd.com/1975/, comic is not interactive. On the other hand, https://xkcd.com/1975/ works like a charm.

Page failes to load resorces from https://xkcd.com/1975/alto/root with error caused by CORS policy:

  • Access to fetch at 'https://xkcd.com/1975/alto/root' from origin 'https://www.xkcd.com' has been blocked by CORS policy: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.

All links to commics in headers (button Comic #1975 (April 1, 2018)) include "www." part, for example this explanation: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1975:_Right_Click

IMO links in headers (buttons Comic #xxx (date)) should be updated to exclude "www." part.

Can't create my userpage

I just registered, and can't seem to edit/create my own userpage. I've been editing MediaWiki wikis for a very long time and it's currently part of my career, so I'm pretty sure I'm doing everything right. Is there a prerequisite number of edits or something before I can create my userpage? Equazcion (talk) 22:18, 6 April 2020 (UTC)

I do not know the answer to that, but ... if one of us finds out "sooner" than the other, then, let's "share" the answer. Yours might appear here, and mine ... might appear about eleven "sections" up, in this same "Technical" portal ... at the URL in the section "Cannot create a user page." (see the DIFF listing...)
Maybe I should have "seconded the motion" here, instead of adding my own question, -- which is very similar! -- to a different section, up there? Pardon me ... --Mike Schwartz (talk) 08:15, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
explain_xkcd:Community_portal/Admin_requests#Permission_request might help. AlChemist (talk) 11:06, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
Yes, according to that page, your account must be at least one week old, AND you must have made at least 10 edits. There's a new page, explain xkcd:Autoconfirmed users, which says it's three days (rather than one week) and 10 edits – after that, you become an "autoconfirmed user", and gain the right to create pages (among other things). – Yfmcpxpj (talk) 02:01, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

List of all comics incomplete/overflowing

The List of all comics and the full list are incomplete, stopping with 2289. Taking a look at List of all comics (full) nets that it belongs to the category 'Pages where template include size is exceeded', so I'm assuming it just hit the limit. I'm sadly not well versed in MediaWiki, so I have no idea what a workaround would look like

2138 page issues

This first came up when following a link from on of the other Code Quality pages.

when you go to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2138:_Wanna_See_the_Code%3F you get a blank pag that says "No input file specified."

however when you go to https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/2138 you get the actual page via redirect but when you reload the page it goes back to "No input file specified."

not sure what causes this but i tested in chrome (incognito mode to avoid extensions), old edge (not chromium) and chrome iOS via mobile data. all test had the same result.

sorry if this is the wrong place for this but not sure where else to put it. TomW1605 (talk) 14:44, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

This problem seems to be common to all comics ending with a question mark: 2236, 2138, 2065, 1841, 1205. My best guess is that the url is being interpreted as a query, but since there is nothing after the question mark this results in an error. Whether this is a new error or just hasn't been noticed before I don't know. Renaming the pages without the question mark could work, but would require every reference to these comics on the wiki to be updated. AlChemist (talk) 10:07, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
i think it is new, i recently (not sure when but after 2138 was released) went through the Code Quality series using the links and it worked fine then. i don't think it is being interpreted as a query because the question mark is encoded. i would amazed if it would still interpret this as a query because that would completely defeat the point of encoding the url in the first place. TomW1605 (talk) 09:35, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
here is a full list of broken pages: 58, 111, 259, 1205, 1705, 1841, 1913, 2065, 2138, 2236. i wrote a quick javascript to extract a full list of urls from List of all comics (full) (then added the recent ones manually, see above). then ran a python script to get the content of each page and check if it is broken (with a 2 sec delay to minimise server load) and saved the list if broken ones. TomW1605 (talk) 13:34, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
Note that you can view the comic by changing the URL from index.php/... to index.php?title=... (example). —Galaktos (talk) 13:03, 14 May 2021 (UTC)

"All comics" from left sidebar is not updating

https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/List_of_all_comics

image

Attention needed to some List pages

I just (mis)clicked on "All Comics", and thought it looked odd. DGBRTBot needs a prod, or something, given the current months-old state and commented prediction in https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=List_of_all_comics&action=history

(Oh, and the List of all comics (full), which I then checked has a redlinked Category of "Pages where template include size is exceeded" and seems to have been previously given a badly-included "...and everything before #501". Not sure if the first problem is easily solvable, but as I'm here I thought I'd mention it, and you could properly add 1-500 and 501-1000 to sort the Include Size issue, maybe?)

I could be way off-piste, but as it looks like nobody has noticed anything yet I thought I'd at least raise the issue, and then leave the fixing to someone with a bit more Wiki-Fu..? 162.158.155.120 20:48, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

For List of all comics, looks like DgbrtBOT is working again, and User:Btx40 already went back and added the missing entries, so that should be all good now.
For List of all comics (full), not sure if I correctly understand what you mean by "you could properly add 1-500 and 501-1000 to sort the Include Size issue"? But I think the "badly-included '...and everything before #501' " you mentioned wasn't so much badly-inluded – its code looked correct to me – rather, the inclusion makes the page so big that it causes the page to exceed the "template include-size" limit. See the following Wikipedia articles for more about how this "template include-size" limit works in MediaWiki:
So as a result of exceeding the limit, the parser excludes the template that caused the limit to be exceeded (i.e. it excludes the 1-500 list at the bottom of the page), so as to keep the page under the size limit; and instead of the actual content, the parser just inserts a link to the content. And it so happens that in this case, the content includes the control-characters for constructing the table rows – so because those control characters are excluded along with the content, then the link shows up in the last existing cell of the table, and appears to be badly-included.
I'm not sure how to fix it, but some options could be:
  • Somehow reduce the content of the page so that the full list of #1-to-#current doesn't exceed the limit.
    • Each "row" of the table produces about 700 characters in the resulting HTML; around 200 of that is the hidden "create" link (from Template:comicsrow) that I think would appear if the comic's page didn't exist yet. I would say that at this point, since all the comics already have pages, then that "create" link is only useful for the most recent comic, and could probably be omitted to significantly reduce the size of the page.
      • (Actually, it looks like DgbrtBOT might automatically create the page for each new comic, so the "create" link might not be needed at all anymore.)
    • There are some other elements that could be removed from each table row to save space, such as the title attributes of the links, etc.
    • Not sure if all of that would create enough headroom for the 1-500 list though?
  • Increase $wgMaxArticleSize on the server? (See here.)
    • Not sure of the risks of that; and in any case, it's only that one page that currently exceeds the limit, so may not be worth it.
For now, I've added a note to the page explaining that 1-500 are missing and why, and I've tweaked the bottom of the table to make the link to 1-500 a bit more presentable in the meantime.
– Yfmcpxpj (talk) 06:41, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

Strange error—maybe edit conflict?

I happened to be looking at my edit history, and I noticed that something insane happened back in June: I made an edit to 2319: Large Number Formats, and it somehow combined my edit with someone else's. The entirety of my edit (as I crafted it) was confined to the article's categories; I added one and put the set in alphabetical order. But the edit, as it was logged, is a massive alteration, with all sorts of questionable changes. It was (rightly, I think) undone by Jkrstrt a couple days later. Did I somehow overlook an edit-conflict error and accept some (now anonymous) users edit? I can see myself making some kind of oversight at that time of night, but it seems antithetical to the wiki process to have an edit misattributed in this way. (I certainly don't like having that change connected with my name, but I also wonder how this intersects with important issues of public ownership integral to wiki communities.) I'd appreciate any insight fellow editors could provide. jameslucas (" " / +) 22:24, 3 August 2020 (UTC)

As I'm passing through, I shall note that I'm the IP that added the "(The 1971 transition[...]" paragraph you see 'added' there. It was actually part of a larger edite that was later (than my edit, earlier than yours) understandably removed for being irrelevent. During this 5-day-earlier revision. But I had absolutely nothing to do with pretty much every other change in your above-logged diff, SFAICS from a quick skim, so honestly don't know why it features there. But hope this info is useful. 162.158.159.66 23:05, 3 August 2020 (UTC)
That's actually quite helpful because it caused me to go look at older versions of the article. It looks like my edit a very early version as a starting point (thereby reverting all changes made later). My best guess is that I had gone back to an old version because Randall changed this comic after it was published and was trying to convince myself that I wasn't crazy. No, not crazy, but spacey. Wikipedia puts a big red warning across the page when you're ending an old version, and this wiki uses only a bit of bold text—that apparently wasn't enough to draw my attention. Thanks! jameslucas (" " / +) 01:33, 4 August 2020 (UTC)

Unable to view "what if?" page

The link to the page for the what if? blog displays an error: "No input file specified." JBYoshi (talk) 03:38, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

This also happens to me on 1205: Is It Worth the Time? Must be something with the ?s in the titles. 172.69.22.66 15:46, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
I've noticed that as well. I made a page in my userspace that redirects to the what if page, and for some reason that seems to work. (here is the link to the page) Blue screen of life (talk) 20:09, 31 August 2020 (UTC)
I have also noticed this but it is not just on pages with questions marks. Both 259 and 1705 show the same thing. A full list (as of 22 June 2020) of the ones i found is in the last reply to my report found here #2138_page_issues TomW1605 (talk) 12:20, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
Both 259 and 1705 have an (e-with-accute-accent, Unicode U+00E9) in the URL, so for those pages, I wonder if that has anything to do with it?
For the "what if?" page, I had recently added a redirect from what if (blog) to get to it, and the What If disambiguation page has been updated with it, so at least we can get to it that way; and for the comic explanations, at least we can get to them by linking to their number-redirects (as 58 instead of 58: Why Do You Love Me?); but not sure how to fix it overall. At the following page, it suggests tweaking an Apache rewrite directive in .htaccess (or a CGI setting in PHP if it's running on IIS):
So maybe something about that has changed recently? Documentation:
Summarizing a few points from this related discussion:
  • Only one of the site's 10 administrators has made recent edits (SlashMe).
  • Neither of the site's 2 bureaucrats (Jeff and Lcarsos) have made any edits recently.
  • For admin access to the server itself, my limited understanding is that Jeff might actually own the server, but may have also given admin access to Dgbrt; however, neither of them have made edits recently.
But "most recent edit" might not be a good indicator, so I wonder of some of these folks are still involved in the project?
– Yfmcpxpj (talk) 05:10, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
Looks like it happens for any page that has a percent-encoding in the title. PoolloverNathan[stalk the blue seas] 16:32, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Known broken pages

(Redirects work, whereas links to the actual page are broken.)

Title containing e-accute-accent:

Title ending with question mark:

Moved

I moved the what if? page to the what if (blog) page which I then changed to simply what if to fix this issue and because anyone new to this site would type that any way to see it. — The 𝗦𝗾𝗿𝘁-𝟭 talk stalk 06:47, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Still trying to wrap my head around it – so just to summarize, we currently have:
For completeness, we also have...
...and the disambiguation page...
...and these troubleshooting pages from User:Blue screen of life:
Given that the actual content of the "what if?" article now lives at what if, I've started updating pages (except for Talk pages) to link directly there instead of the other redirect pages. All that's left to do are pages that link to the what if? redirect-page (which is broken). Its "What links here" special page is broken too, so it's difficult to find what pages link there – but now that it redirects to the what if page, you can see them indirectly from that page's "What links here" special page. These are the pages that still link there. There are still a lot of them to go.
Also, should the following redirect-pages be simplified to have them redirect straight to the new what if page, instead of redirecting through the intermediate what if? page (which itself redirects there anyway)?
– Yfmcpxpj (talk) 17:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
Fixed the double redirects, don't ask me why we have so many pages for the same thing. PoolloverNathan[stalk the blue seas] 16:29, 16 March 2021 (UTC)

Discussion not displaying with comic

I am using FireFox on a Win10 machine. When I come to the site I can see the comic, explanation and transcript. But the discussion section is hidden. Even when logged in.

Any ideas?

You say "when I come to the site". If the address bar says you are on Main_Page and you see the heading "Latest comic", then it's simply working as designed. Above the comic, click on "Go to this comic explanation" and you will see the comic plus discussion.
Also, Steve, please sign your comments every time, with four tildes. That expands into your user name and a timestamp. Like this -- JohnB (talk) 10:10, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Random page sometimes takes me to an invalid address

Sometimes, when clicking on "Random page" in the left sidebar, the site will be blank apart from the text "No input file specified. ".

An example of such an URL is: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/111:_Firefox_and_Witchcraft_-_The_Connection%3F


I've noticed this happens for all URLs to comics that end in a question mark (or possibly any special character). Interestingly, this doesn't happen if you go to the comic from the search bar. Danish (talk) 23:04, 27 January 2021 (UTC)

Bug on the main page

Bug Enviroment(Might work on other enviroments): Ubuntu 20.04LTS Firefox85.0 2021.2.7

Bug: The front page reads: `Welcome, Main Page, to explain xkcd!` with `Main Page` formatted as a username,can someone fix this?

Xkcdjerry (talk) 09:48, 7 February 2021 (UTC)

The main page has a broken Div tag under "View comic discussion". I don't have the privileges to fix it. Nitpicking (talk) 00:40, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Occasional error via Cloudflare

Just a note that I'm getting Cloudflare errors of "origin not reachable" (sounds wrong to me, in my head it should be 'destination', but never mind) three times now in the last ten to fifteen minutes - of maybe a dozen general site-requests.

I've also been getting seemingly .CSSless formatted pages over the past few days, which I've been putting down to slightly dodgy wifi at my end (not unknown) but if I'm getting Cloudflare's error cleanly then perhaps it's been entirely upstream/downstream/however-you'd-describe-the-Explain-server. (Obviously CSS resource requests, as with images, are additional HTTP calls, but I still lump it into the single site-request per page in my 'dozen' estimate above. No obviously lost images, though, in incomplete pages - not that can't be explained by .CSS non-following, anyway.)

I had copy-buffered some of the exact info, but due to incompetence I recopied over it before coming here. If it happens again, I'll try to bring it over here. But (the way these things go) maybe it won't. FYI, though. 141.101.98.52 12:04, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

Not a Cloudfare error (looks like an error of the actual explainxkcd server) but every now and then (like just a few minutes ago) I get an error page that generally goes away if I immediately refresh. To whit:
Service Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.

Additionally, a 503 Service Unavailable error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
Not really a problem (occasionally happened while submitting an exit, and I have to confirm to the browser that I wish to repost the data, but this particular copied instance was through a more 'read-only' link-click, like most of the instances) but... in case someone finds this to be new and useful information... here you are! 141.101.98.192 03:45, 12 March 2021 (UTC)
OP, here, of the above 503 error report/casual mention. Obviously this is the same message that happened for an extended period of time over a number of days, but I've only just happened to find the site responding again and have not yet looked to see if it is explained as the same or different cause to the old intermittent issues (at root). I hope things are resolved from the major outage (server quota? bill payments? renewal/reconfiguration blips?) but wonder if I should report any future minor outages? I'm still smarting from the total loss of the fora.xkcd.com platform, a few years back, and while I'm not active enough here to consider a proper login (lurking as a freeloading anon-IP is good enough, usually, for my intellectual enjoyment, with all due apologies) I did have a slight pang of emptiness while it was out-of-order. 141.101.99.79 15:48, 16 June 2021 (UTC)

Add TemplateData

Add the TemplateData extension to allow setting data for templates. This will help editors because they will be able to see the data of templates.

MediaWiki 1.30.0?!

This wiki is currently on MediaWiki 1.30.0 (release notes), the first of three releases of a version of MW that reached end-of-life in June of 2019 (mw:Version lifecycle). It's thus missing multiple important security updates from 1.30.1 and 1.30.2, not to mention the two years' worth of security updates since 1.30.x reached end-of-life. Even 1.31.x will be reaching end-of-life in just over a month.

If the sysadmins here update to MediaWiki 1.35.2 (release notes), that version will be maintained till September of 2023, with only a few security updates in the meantime. I would strongly encourage y'all to update to 1.35.2; to promptly update if there's a .3, .4, etc.; and to make sure you switch to the next LTS release (which will presumably be 1.39) well in advance of September of '23. (Note that this will also require updating to PHP 7.3.19 or later.) PinkAmpersand (talk) 07:17, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Uptime

Did the website just go down? Beanie talk 13:06, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

It was definitely down this weekend! https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/nxrm65 ProphetZarquon (talk) 16:21, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Comic template lappend breaks for standalone comic links

For example, https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html is changed to https://xkcd.com/blue_eyes.html/ which isn't valid 172.69.90.15 15:51, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Template here, I think it needs to be changed to solve this https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Template:comic

exkcd page here https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Blue_Eyes

May not be your problem, but FYI.

My typcal setup: Android tablet, with Chrome for Android (latest update), but also Firefox for Android (ditto), using default Gboard (likewise) for input.

Occasionally (notably within the last few weeks/maybe a month or so), when going in to edit an explainxkcd page through Chrome (it's how I divide up my browsing), I'm getting the cursor in the textarea box which can be used to Cut/Copy/Paste (as applicable and useful), but the on-screen keyboard isn't popping up. Page is fully loaded (can be refreshed, doesn't have the "stop loading" alternative), can go back (page viewing) and try to go back to the page editor (often to same result). Sitting and waiting doesn't pop the keyboard up, either (sat there for minutes). Happens both on home wifi and mobile connection.

If I transfer my attentions to the page to Firefox (copy URL, to use there... but I don't use that by default for expxkcd stuff) there's no problem, but then if I come back to Chrome again it seems to start working again anyway so not sure if it's just avoiding/flushing a transient problem that would also initially crop up with Firefox if I used that more.

Because editing is a different (mobile-optimised) process on Wikipedia and I can't be sure about any the equivalence of any other wiki out there (and it doesn't happen with anything else I regularly key into on Chrome) it's not something I've reproduced outwith this site, and of course desktop page-editing doesn't require touch-screen keyboard because there's a physical one.

Not getting much feedback with Chrome (really can't get on with their bugrep processes, it's too huge a project to make headway, IME), not even tried to pester the Gboard team and I've not seen anything said on here about this being a site-issue (not sure how it could be, as it's outside the remit of the core web-page rendering process and more an Android or App level of incompetence), but I thought I'd make a note of it here for future reference. Make of it what you will. Annoying but not game-breaking. And I just wanted to vent a little. 172.70.162.147 16:54, 25 December 2021 (UTC)

special:interwiki

where'd it go? 172.69.68.200 05:07, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Please update MediaWiki + AbuseFilter

Seriously. Many scripts and such built for modern, supported versions of MW do not work here because it is so unbelievably undated. PinkAmpersand above basically covers the reason why. I also highly recommend adding the extension AbuseFilter (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:AbuseFilter) as it immensely makes removing vandalism easier (by straight up disallowing or blocking those that do, esp if it's like the current formulaic massive-replacement vandalism.) CRLF (talk) 00:48, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Ditto. I feel like the main problem is that the sole person who has access to the backend either doesn't have time to update, doesn't have interest, or doesn't have the technical knowledge necessary. But yes, I agree - updating and installing an extension to help control vandalism would help this wiki tremendously. Obwankenobi (talk) 20:09, 9 February 2024 (UTC)

↑ ?

Why do some pages have ↑ at the very start? They can all be spotted by searching ↑ Is it a technical thing, vandalism, some sort of glitch? Maybe I'm just uninformed or being an idiot.

Edit logs tell me that an IP user manually reverting vandalism somehow inserted one or more extra characters while manually reverting vandalism. Davidy²²[talk] 13:59, 22 May 2022 (UTC)
Should it be removed? It's not necessary and might be confusing for screenreaders... Mushrooms (talk) 09:00, 23 May 2022 (UTC)
Maybe not en-mass, I'd say. But I've dove in to delete a rogue leading <br /> tag left from a part of a prior vandalism (likewise, just before the {{comic}}-element) and I've promised myself that I'll remove any more that I spot (and now that arrow) in any future whole-page edit I make. Plus a small shopping-list of inessential but useful edits like making {{Citation needed}}s flow better when they're mispunctuated/etc.
But that's my solitary opinion. I'm sure hunting out and squishing this isn't a problem at all. I'm just balancing my own peculiar brand of OCD with what is somehow my also my own version of casual apathy towards other details. (Also, it probably looks better for a named account of recognised good standing to start editing potentially hundreds of pages in a session, rather than myself... potentially indistinguishable from the IP who seems to relish worn out memes in a general page-trashing.) 162.158.159.121 12:20, 23 May 2022 (UTC)

Is there anything else we can do to prevent vandalism?

There's been quite a significant uptick in vandalism recently, and I don't feel we have any effective tools to combat it. I believe one of the biggest issues here is due to the way logged-out editing works on this wiki. Blocks are completely ineffective at slowing vandals, and IP editors can vandalize with basically nothing we can do to thwart them other than revert-warring. Is there a better way?

There's been some discussion of installing AbuseFilter, but I'm not sure anything became of it. We could disable logged-out editing, but that would likely be counterproductive as we get lots of legitimate contributions from logged-out users. If there's a way to switch to location-based IPs, we could rangeblock problematic users as well as proxies. Does anyone have any ideas? 162.158.78.145 16:11, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

I'm sort of making server side changes via telegraph so an extension is probably going to take a while to get installed. Takes a bunch of emails and followups to get single variables changed in the mediawiki settings file. There is an email verification option, and some edit frequency variables that could be set to make spam more time consuming. Don't love range blocks but wouldn't mind getting the CDN IPs dealt with so we can actually use the IP bans again. Davidy²²[talk] 17:16, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
I'm very grateful that you're working on changes under the hood. What do you think is the best way to deal with disruption in the meantime? Vandalbane (talk) 17:19, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
Could borrow a patrol bot like the ones people on main wikipedia have, could ask around. Davidy²²[talk] 18:53, 1 June 2022 (UTC)
There's not really a drop-in solution that you can use, especially since the server's MediaWiki version is not in sync with Wikipedia's (so a lot of the APIs etc have completely changed; when initially reverting vandalism I tried importing some scripts from enwiki but they failed as a result), but also because the bots have gotten pretty complex (using machine learning provided by the Wikimedia Foundation, for example). CRLF (talk) 03:56, 2 June 2022 (UTC)
Oh I do notice mediawiki hasn't been upgraded in a while. Looks like new version of mediawiki should be dropping extremely imminently, would be nice timing for an upgrade Davidy²²[talk] 04:45, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

Rollback

Does the rollback permission exist on this wiki? Vandalbane (talk) 17:00, 1 June 2022 (UTC)

The rollback permission of course exists but there's no group called "rollbacker" like you'd find on Wikipedia (limited to admins). You'd need the sysadmin to change the configuration to add one, which as established is not really an option right now. CRLF (talk) 03:58, 2 June 2022 (UTC)

What happened to custom JavaScript?

I put some code in User:Some user/common.js, but it is not alerting 'hi' every time I load a page. Why can't we execute JavaScript anymore? Is it in response to the crapping incident? Some user (talk) 21:16, 27 June 2022 (UTC)

Entirely because of that, yeah. Davidy²²[talk] 04:51, 28 June 2022 (UTC)

My IP

Why is my IP address a Cloudflare address in Norway? Is this a joke of some kind that I'm missing?

Other wikis like Wikipedia are showing me my actual IP when I go to Special:MyContributions, so I suspect this is a wiki misconfiguration. It changed again while I was typing this. 162.158.222.194 16:55, 19 November 2022 (UTC)

All IPs (as this one will be) are from Cloudflare gateway IPs, because that's the default IP that the Wiki understands as the source. Cloudflare mediates all the traffic, and perhaps to some advantage (not being privvy to the logs, I can only guess how much it insulates the true server from extreme problems, but I bet it does in some way).
There have been suggestions before to change some setting (in the MediaWiki implementation? ...can't recall exactly) to have it pick up and use the IP that the gateway reports (in its meta-request) was the origin, but that's not been enacted for Idunnowhat reason.
Because the black-box that is the Cloudflare traffic shapes in various ways, you will find that a single user will jump around 'apparent' IPs, and I've also been in the relatively embarassing situation of replying to another IP's info and finding that I've registered on the exact same IP so that it looks like I'm stooging myself, or something.
On the whole, though, it's a harmless quirk. And given the trivial nature of deliberately spoofing origins (even on top of assuming you get an effectively static NAT from your ISP in the first place) I don't personally see it as a problem to 'solve' this. But neither would I complain if the 'fix' were implemented if this query reminds someone that they were going to try and do the necessary tweak.
As a lay-answer, I hope that fills you in a little. If those who have more knowledge/control of the process want to add anything or correct me, I'm sure they'll do so as soon as they can, but here's a reply to keep you going for now... 172.70.85.24 01:19, 20 November 2022 (UTC)
fyi it is supported in MediaWiki through $wgCdnServers. See MediaWiki’s introduction. -- 物灵 (talk) 06:58, 6 April 2025 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Main page in categories

This discussion is marked as duplicate. See this discussion.

Main_Page was found wrongly appearing in some newly-created categories, such as Category:Cosmology. Could you fix it? --ColorfulGalaxy (talk) 17:49, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

Never noticed this myself, but I'll take it as read. Before checking myself, I'm wondering if this could be when the main page 'inherits' tags from the Current Comic that it features. And thus solve itself (whilst gaining others) upon a newer Current Comic. (Must surely inherit "Monday Comics"/etc, on schedule every week.)
If it is that, perhaps the solution lies in the details contained within https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Categories#Categories_and_templates_(transcluded_pages)
Or maybe I'm wrong about it. But I have no rights to edit (thus at least examine the 'code' of) the Main page, to check my snap theory, as with most people. 172.70.162.46 19:21, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

This happened again in Category:Airplane banner. I27.O.O.I (talk) 09:00, 28 February 2023 (UTC)

Yes, and it lasted as long as the latest comic was still one with particular categories. I don't intend to worry about it. If someone goes to a category that interests them and looks at the main page, as temporarily advertised, they're likely to find (as part of it) a comic which is indeed in that category. Doesn't sound like a big problem to me, except for determinin why some cats (e.g. Friday Comics) don't link to the Main page when they might be expected to...
(PS, I know for sure that I27.O.O.I isn't the same person as ColofulGalaxy (and various others, beyond even those with the bloomin' obvious "CG" initials or other recent spoofs on the RFC1918 addresses), and I don't think I mind too much, but faking disagreements between your various IDs isn't helping, anyone... smells too much of trying to establish alibis in advance of your next attempt to vandalise the site with stupid stuff. And doesn't impress me, so I doubt it impresses anyone else either. As long as you're just doing sane things, however, I'll accept your little idiosyncracies.) 162.158.74.32 19:37, 5 March 2023 (UTC)
(PPS: You left your fingerprint on this latter attempt to 'rescue' this page. - Spammer a few minutes before midnight, my IP reversion happened shortly after. A little later "Elisabeth" then re-spammed (modified), then another IP immediately jumps on it to restore it but with the modified undo-summary line clearly indicating that some sort of a game is being played. Please don't, it's not clever.) 172.70.90.34 02:22, 7 March 2023 (UTC)

This doesn't happen to date categories, but it happens in manually added categories such as Category:Statistics. ColorfulGalaxy (talk) 21:49, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Cannot create user page

It says: There is currently no text in this page. You can search for this page title in other pages, or search the related logs, but you do not have permission to create this page. 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 22:56, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

(Removed alternative text in the link involved, to not hide behind trickery.) I think you know that there's no problem with 2659: Unreliable Connection itself, except that it had become one of several pages targeted for spamming, the only one then locked down, then finding that the spammers just retargeted to its Talk page, etc.
I'm torn between "not assuming bad faith" and "don't feed the trolls", as competing principles, so I'm spelling out the situation. However much a tribute you might think it could be, I don't think there's a future in having a new username that's directly referencing a comic which has become so frequently seen in the recent history of this wiki's edits.
Obviously any genuine contributions are more than welcome. So prove me wrong, why don't you? 172.70.91.151 03:20, 27 March 2023 (UTC)
Could you help now? 2659: Unreliable Connection (talk) 09:13, 29 March 2023 (UTC)
I've created your talk page. I guess that what you intended is to have a backup or mirror page for comic 2659. Am I right? ColorfulGalaxy (talk) 20:16, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Fanmade comics

A fanmade comic appeared on xkcd. Could you edit the template? 172.69.23.100 07:21, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

You're going to have to say more about it, at least for me. Apart from the Sandbox attempt to make a page, I haven't seen the comic you're describing anywhere. Certainly not anywhere official. Link, for our benefit? 172.70.85.66 10:04, 28 April 2023 (UTC)

Why doesn't this code block work?

Does anybody know why the code block at the end of this page doesn't work? I've tried everything and it still looks like plain text

Can't add RSS feed because of pubDate value on 27 Nov 2015

When I try to add the RSS feed in Nextcloud News feed reader I get an error Impossible to convert date : Fri, 27 Nov 2015 17:24:34 Pacific Standard Time.

W3C Feed validation says that pubDate must be an RFC-822 date-time and points "Pacific Standard Time" portion as the cause of the error: <pubDate>Fri, 27 Nov 2015 17:24:34 Pacific Standard Time</pubDate>. Can you please fix the timestap for this?

Admin request posted here because of vandalism

I can not currently access the admin requests page because it has been vandalized... can someone please protect the latest comic page (2805). There is some pretty childish vandalism going on there right now. Thanks!

It's not the latest, seems like ALL. I went back to 2804, 2803, jumped back like 15 comics, all the same thing. To me the most offensive part is doing it with a nonsensical image. And why pipe it through Archive somehow? NiceGuy1 (talk) 02:33, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
UGH. the vandals are back at it again... we need to lock xkcd pages @NiceGuy 172.70.39.2 00:59, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Way to contact the site hosters?

As many have pointed out the software this wiki runs on is horribly outdated. WikiEditor also isn't here for some reason. Quite a bit of messages here have seen no action. Is there some kind of contact form to reach the hosters? -- Aaron Liu (talk) 00:36, 10 October 2023 (UTC) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

There are various levels of admin who do intervene, as and when jecessary, but I understand that the (active) ones closest to the actual hosting level of intervention are not really ready to do the (increasingly greater) degree of uprooting necessary to get a "working" system to be "marginally better working", by way of that very dangerous middle-ground of potentially being ruined entirely.
I appreciate and anticipate the counter-arguments regarding letting it go totally unupdated, of course, just I've personally seen enough failures (participated in some, or been the actual invokee, myself) to be very sympathetic to the "if it aint (too) broke, don't fix it" tendency. But that inertia is not the only factor, of course, and the full motivations (or lack of them) of those involved is not for a lowly IP like me to explain, even if I think I know... 172.69.195.42 01:24, 10 October 2023 (UTC)
Have they posted some sort of statement? It also is most definitely not “marginally” better working, compare the source editor to that of Wikipedia and look at topic subscription etc features. Not to mention a lot of security fixes haven’t been added and this version has reached EOL long ago. Updating also would not ruin this entirely…Aaron Liu (talk) 17:22, 12 October 2023 (UTC)
Some have also said that quite a bit of assistive scripts for modern versions don’t work. Visual Editor, while horrible, is still easier for new people to get started with. Aaron Liu (talk) 17:23, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

I've found a new reason: This wiki doesn't even allow loading userscripts! Aaron Liu (talk) 01:34, 9 December 2023 (UTC)

That might actually have been a conscious decition, after a 'certain user' caused chaos here, not so long ago. 162.158.74.25 19:01, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
It was about a year and a half ago. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that. 172.68.174.143 06:41, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
Huh? What happened? Is there a place to request gadgets then? Aaron Liu (talk) 02:04, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
"What happened" involved automated vandalism (from someone who been doing it manually, then found the "better way") though I couldn't tell you the exact details, there were automated 'unvandalism's made in response, and theusafBOT/etc does some of that still, in response to non-automated(/off-site scripted) vandalism/errors that it can actually catch before ordinary users (or IPs like me) can. But certainly a certain brand of scripting was turned off to curtail the 'high intensity' vandalism phase.
You're more or less in the best place to request things, right here. Whether updates, (re)adding functionalitu or tweaking site settings. Can't tell if those who can do these things can't or won't do them... Or are actually absent, instead of just not replying. The cavalry has been known to come running in when necessary (e.g. when "what happened" happened) so it could be any manner of non-response (until you get one). Not necessarily the best state of affairs, but better than being confirmed absentees.
I ran a bot to mass-edit pages by replacing their content with the word "crap" repeatedly. I was 15 then, and I thought it was funny. It wasn't. 172.68.174.143 06:41, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
As an occasional but infrequent actual-Wikipedia editor, too, I must say that if the Visual Editor is what I currently have to use for that (at least as an anonIP when using a mobile device, which tends to be when I get the urge most) then I like the unaugmented editor here more. Straight up, honest, un'wizarded' interface, where you only have to get used to markup details and not a WYSIWYG editing environment (as well?). Not sure I'd be happy with an even more 'assistive' script imposed upon me, like I dislike modern generations of Windows (and 'user friendly' linux dists). So can I just ask that functional/visible changes of the kind you seem to be asking for, if made available, aren't overimposed/left as options rather than the default (or only) choice...? Ok, so I can (or would have to) adapt, but I'd rather not. Of course, I have no weight to pull in this matter, it's just an afterthought (even as I wish you good luck with raising an admin's eyebrow, in some useful manner). 141.101.98.135 05:14, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
I am not asking for VisualEditor, which no one likes on Wikipedia either. For some blasted reason they made it edit HTML instead of Wikitext and it’s clunky and loads for a very long time.
I’m asking about the WikiEditor, aka Wikipedia’s source editor. In VE, click on the pen next to the publish button and click on “source editing”. That editor makes this one look like freaking Stone Age, syntax highlighting is especially a game-changer. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:03, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
There’s also the annoying ReCaptcha v2 every single edit… it seems like it would be relatively easy to switch to v3 which only makes you do the challenge when you’ve visited a bit too much. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:32, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Unfortunately, that would make things easier for someone who wanted to do mass vandalism like I did. If it didn't do it every time, someone could still edit quite quickly. 172.68.174.192 18:32, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
Well, I can tell you that it doesn't always demand that I fulfil more than a tickbox (most trouble I have is when it fails to connect to give me the tickbox (or respond with anything useful when I do), for which I'm forced into one or more Previews until it will. When it does ask me to do something about it, I do often get forced through two or more request to identify traffic lights, motorbikes, stairways, bridges, hills, tractors, buses, etc, etc, etc... But I think that's more the Tesla-training Algorithm being nust greedy for my attention than the Robot-sentry having a less casual attitude to my attempt to edit. (I believe I'm on a usually untroublesome source IP/Cloudflare gateway, but it could also depend on how many others try to do things via (part of) the same route. Very, very rarely I get Google Search requesting something similar of me ((It: "You have made a lot of searches", me: "Of course I'll have play your little game, but this is my first lookup today...")), which I'm sure isn't Cloudflared, so it might reach back to my ISP's gateway and what fellow users are currently getting up to.)
As for the guy above (and you, Liu), can't speak for how well or badly others on your own 'choice' of gateways behave. Or yourselves. Luck of the draw? For the first part, at least. 172.69.195.174 20:31, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
MediaWiki 1.40 automatically tags all edits that remove over 90% of page text with "mw-replaced". You could block all edits in mainspace with that tag, either if MediaWiki has it or through the AbuseFilter extension. While I can complete the CAPTCHAs, it's very annoying to need to Captcha every edit on a place where the main focus is edits. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:06, 13 December 2023 (UTC)
Plus, v3 doesn't just do nothing. It tracks how your cursor moves to see if it's robotic, while v2 annoyingly gives you the challenge every time. Aaron Liu (talk) 20:01, 8 January 2024 (UTC)
Presumably for touchscreen control (like mine, right this moment), it does something else than track a nonexistent mouse-pointer's passage across the monitored elements of the display... ;) 172.70.90.190 12:26, 9 January 2024 (UTC)
There are a few MediaWiki plugins that help keep vandalism/spam under control without requiring users to solve a Captcha every time they make an edit. I use https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Moderation on the wiki I maintain, and it works very well. However, it does require that there be enough active moderators to approve edits, as it basically requires every single edit to be approved before it's posted. Thus, it also introduces some "lag" between when stuff is written and when it can be seen by others. I think it could work if the extension could be installed (I'm not even sure if it's supported on this version of MediaWiki) and if a good list of moderators could be put together. Obwankenobi (talk) 20:02, 9 February 2024 (UTC)
I disagree with requiring edits to be approved. Unless we have extremely high vandalism, just filtering out the above tags I mentioned and using ReCAPTCHA v3 would be enough. Aaron Liu (talk) 23:16, 16 February 2024 (UTC)
Ok, fair point. However, that wouldn't stop human vandalism, just vandalism from bots. I'm not sure how much human vandalism there is, though, so it might not even be a problem. Obwankenobi (talk) 12:35, 22 February 2024 (UTC)
It's hard (for us 'civvies') to know how much bot-vandalism is stopped but probably a lot, most of which we never see, with occasional ones we might see having be dealt with. (I'm guessing these things are rare (temporarily-)successful 'bots, because flesh-and-blood vandals wouldn't be occasionally doing essentially the same insta-reverted thing on a thematically-small set of pages, over several years without moving on. It has to be a lucky unattended script-based effort that just keeps trying the same things over and over with an easily revertible but tangible result happening only infrequently.)
More obvious human vandalism tends to rumble on, with occasionally a spate of it as someone gets short-term kicks for it. Though some of them seem may repeat themself after a break. Friendly humans and friendly 'bots both tend to provide the main anti-vandalism responses fairly quickly, though, depending upon what kind of a mess they caused. I've seen worse places, definitely, and it's by no means a losing battle against chaos, just regular skermishes.
Not wanting to tempt fate, of course. I guarantee that there'll be some fool that takes all this as a challenge, so I just have to trust to the Good Guys keeping on keeping on. 172.70.90.71 14:21, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

heyo, is there a way to add actual citations to explainxkcd instead of the template citation needed? couldn't find anything, but i'm pretty new here - thanks in advance. Nigga (talk) 21:47, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Not that I have much faith in your usernae lasting long (you're 'that guy', aren't you? ...in which case you know anyway), but for the sake of anyone else who needs to know:
  • If you mean "add an actual 'citation needed' tag", then it's {{Actual citation needed}} that you'll use.
  • If you mean "add an actual citation link to somewhere", then:
    • Link to URLs with [].
      • A link such as [<url>] will give you a superscript-number link, which isn't pretty, IMO.
      • A link such as [<url> <text>] (that's a space between the two) will link <text> to the URL, just work it into the sentence you're writing, fairly easy
    • Link to internal (or cross-wiki) pages with [[]].
      • [[<page title>]] will make a literal link to <page title>.
      • [[<page title>|<text>]] (with a pipe) is how you make the <text> your link.
    • You can use the last to link specifically to wikipedia's cross-site format, but for that it's best to use {{w}}
      • {{w|<page title>}} (w-pipe...) uses the page title
        • It will use the link as if the first character is uppercase, so you don't need to capitalise that. Other case-sensitivity is preserved.
        • {{w|<singular page title>}}s will link the obvious pluralisation of the page title, just to save you effort
      • {{w|<page title>|<text>}} (w-pipe and pipe) lets you use entirely alternate text.
    • There's also templates that shortcut (or make easier on the eye, or add appropriate warnings) for some other commonly referenced external sites, from xkcd's own what-if to TVTropes.
...hope that helps everyone that doesn't already know these few simple bits as relate to wikis in general or this wiki in particular. 172.71.242.218 22:24, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Confirmation Email Bug

Hi. I've been trying to get my email confirmed so that I can get pinged when pages are edited, but I just can't find it, even after trying multiple times. I use Gmail, and yes, I have checked my spam folder. Has anyone else had this issue? EDIT: I see that others have had this issue, but the admins haven't done any action to solve it, except for one sarcastic comment by Davidy22 back in 2014. 42.book.addict (talk) 00:43, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Lack of Userpage

Hey, I joined a few years ago, but I still do not have a Userpage. Can you make one for me? I do not have the permission to do so. GreyFox (talk) 22:47, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

This is actually your very first post, after joining a bit more than a year ago ("18:35, 14 November 2023 User account GreyFox (talk | contribs) was created"). I'm sure someone can oblige (not me, for obvious reasons), but you've not done much to contribute (at least under this account), which would have then eventually brought you to the point where you can just self-create your Userpages/etc. So your request is a bit out of the blue.
Just so long as we all know where we stand, though. 172.69.194.227 09:42, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
Oh, thanks! Do you know the exact number of edits I need to create it?
50 to be autoconfirmed. Also, please sign your comments. 42.book.addict (talk) 15:23, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

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