The new Ubuntu wiki has launched

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Currently down, you can track the status here

https://status.canonical.com/

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Status reports

wiki.ubuntu.com                                                 ✅ Operational

however requests still consistently return 504 Gateway Timeout after the original incident was resolved.

Looking forward to seeing the new wiki once these launch challenges are resolved.

Update: the site loads, redirects to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Main_page and displays the home page. Responses are slow, but successful. Good job, supporters.

SAML login works, albeit more slowly than usual. Logging in resets dark mode to light.

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The wiki appears to be working, including displaying, editing and discussing pages.

One quibble: given how the Ubuntu SSO insists on usernames being all lower case, the wiki should stop automatically uppercasing the first letter, e.g. ajcxz0 to Ajcxz0.

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This is a quirk of MediaWiki.

Essentially: everything is a page. The first letter of any page is capitalized. Each user gets a user page. Their username links to that page, and the capitalization tracks between them.

There are almost certainly some hacky ways to get around this, but we haven’t found a particularly attractive option.

On the performance issues, we are aware of some intermittent issues and they are being investigated.

edit: “Logging in resets dark mode to light” — I assume this has something to do with cookies and/or user preferences, i.e., lightmode is the default for a first log-in and therafter the last mode you set is saved for future logged-in sessions. (edited twice for clarity)

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Thank you for the clear and sensible explanation of the case change.

As for the light and dark experience, this is not unusual. Except for folks who are especially sensitive who one hopes are using extensions and/or other methods to address to matter, it’s just another example of the challenge of avoiding being blasted by huge white spaces.

  1. :confounded_face: Visit https://wiki.ubuntu.com/
  2. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: Click :bright_button:
  3. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: Click Log in
  4. :confounded_face: Provide credentials
  5. :confounded_face: Flashed by redirect page with pure white background and a little text with way too little time to read even if not blinded
  6. :confounded_face: Return to the wiki
  7. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses: Click :bright_button: (unless you sensible navigate to Preferences > Appearance and hunt in vain for dark mode)

This is just a detailed description of the experience including the part to which I was referring with my terse comment about the mode reset, not a complaint or bug report. The wiki is almost certainly working as designed intended and the broader UI/UX issue is one I hope will eventually be addressed at the web standards level.

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Thanks for laying that out! I get it.

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We’ll fix that by starting to serve an Ubuntu branded pair of sunglasses with the first login :wink:

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When selecting Log out in the :bust_in_silhouette: Personal settings menu, I would prefer and expect to log out, not visit the Log out - Ubuntu Wiki page with header Log out which asks “Do you want to log out?”, despite having no interest in the variety of possible answers, before presenting a white-on-blue button - [Log out] - which actually does the thing I originally intended.

While not a Wiki issue, logging out redirects to the SSO site, which proclaims, “You are now logged out of the Ubuntu One website”. This may be true, but I logged out of the Wiki (which uses the SSO SAML service), which incidentally was trying to have me redirected to the page I was viewing using the returnto= parameter (even if that page isn’t viewable by an unauthenticated visitor).

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We’ll look into the log in/out experience as far as we can and report back on our findings.

I had to log out twice to confirm your observations. The first time, I seemed to have skipped both that confirm logout screen and the redirect.

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Is it a MediaWiki limitation, or Is there a technical reason or a perceived security issue with uploading text files with extensions such as “.netdev“ and “.network“ which are for systemd networkd. Also the same issue for “.conf“ for configuration files.
Scalable Vector Graphics “.svg“ are presently precluded.

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Thanks for your question.

There are a specific set of file extensions that are permitted for file uploads, and these can be configured by the maintainers of the wiki platform.

The ones that are currently enabled are primarily to support the most common use-cases — in particular, uploading images.

The upload of .svg files is currently not enabled because they have additional security considerations that we need to accomodate; however, we are looking into adding that support. In the meantime, it goes without saying, someone can convert an .svg to .jpg or .png before uploading.

As for the other file extensions that you mention, I guess the question is: why would we support uploading these files? We would need to consider it from a security perspective but also whether this is something users of the wiki (both editors and readers) would benefit from, in general.

For example, if an author of a page wanted to provide a configuration, could they not include it as a code block that someone could copy to create their own file, rather than providing it as a file to download? That’s just an example, but I’m not sure what precisely you are envisaging.

If there was a legitimate reason to extend support to other extensions, such as .svg being a very common image format with certain benefits, then we can — of course — investigate that. But I think we need to be careful about permitting the upload of arbitrary files.

I’m cc’ing @kkuo who may have a stronger technical perspective.