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MediaWiki needs more easter eggs
Open, LowestPublicFeature

Description

Easter eggs are a common piece of software (see: [[Easter egg (media)]]). To my knowledge, MediaWiki doesn't contain many Easter eggs currently, aside from parser irregularities and crude code comments.

I suppose naming the "Bad image list" as Tim did is sort of an Easter egg (see: T16281#192741), but that's a bit too obscure for my tastes.

A neat trick or hidden feature of the software would be nice. Apparently additional languages are a no-go due to ISO rigidness (see: r55092).


Version: 1.22.0
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz20281

Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Lowest.Nov 21 2014, 10:52 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz20281.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

Mainly just want myself on CC for this in case anyone tries to commit some completely batshit idea for this bug.

That would be good, but we have to do more important things before.

ayg wrote:

This is silly. Suggest INVALID. If someone with commit access wants to do this, and it's harmless, then fine, but we don't need a bug for it.

Is r79712 enough? How many do we need?

(In reply to comment #5)

Is r79712 enough? How many do we need?

42.

r79712 needs something interesting

Reopening since the easter egg from r79712 has now been removed.

It was fun, but had a few problems:

  • It segfaulted on one dev's server due to its unusual /e modifier recursion.
  • The MW interface was obfuscated, so could not be maintained.
  • The data encoding used a lot of fonts, and so caused performance problems in editors and browsers.
  • The data encoding was vulnerable to corruption by text editors. This ultimately caused it to stop working.
  • It used /e to demonstrate the security problems of using /e. Since /e is now deprecated for security reasons, I suppose we can congratulate ourselves for raising awareness, but it also means that going forward, /e usage is unnecessary and a liability.

(And all that despite it being one of the most heavily-reviewed pieces of code in MediaWiki! Thanks to everyone who bothered to read it, and thanks for appreciating my jokes.)

In my spare time, I am working on a new easter egg which will address these issues. The concept is a VM which interprets obfuscated bytecode stored in an image file. The interface between the VM and the rest of MediaWiki will be in maintainable plaintext, but the output generated for a given input will be non-obvious.

It was cute.
Although I still think that hashar should have provided his own one.

Removed in 4c69569db71d149feff6c4b10ea7a493425d67fd / https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/54319

MC8 set Security to None.
MC8 subscribed.

Special:BlankPage (see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BlankPage) is not linked to from Special:Specialpages or any other logical place within vanilla MediaWiki and is also an amusing thing to come across. I believe it satisfies the requirements of this task.

This request is not closed. I do not agree with the closure T214555 while this request is open. This is visible to many. This is not a joke.

This request is not closed. I do not agree with the closure T214555 while this request is open. This is visible to many. This is not a joke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg_(media)

an Easter egg is an intentional inside joke

Wikipedia says it is a joke

This is visible to many.

The text you complained about on T214555 should never be seen by normal users unless they intentionally go looking for it. No one should end up at a plain load.php on purpose. That's where easter eggs are supposed to go, as they don't affect typical users.

This is visible to many.

The text you complained about on T214555 should never be seen by normal users unless they intentionally go looking for it. No one should end up at a plain load.php on purpose. That's where easter eggs are supposed to go, as they don't affect typical users.

Well, load.php is linked to in Special:Version... but I agree that it is a good place to hide one

This ticket is going to the moon now hat it got pumped in the meeting.

Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:02 AM