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Display better error message on submit failure for HTTP 503 or HTTP 504 errors
Open, LowPublicFeature

Description

Author: beland

Description:
When submitting edits, sometimes the post operation times out with an error
message that goes something like, "The Wikimedia web server did not respond to
your request".

This is more likely with changes that induce significant load, such as changing a
popular template. Personally, instead of repeating the operation, I wait a few
seconds, then check the history of the page to see if the submit worked despite
the error (which sometimes it does). Only if it hasn't worked do I try again.

It might be a good idea to provide the appropriate instructions and links to
help editors less familiar with the system to follow this procedure, if it's a
good idea.


Version: unspecified
Severity: normal

Details

Reference
bz2358

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bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Low.Nov 21 2014, 8:33 PM
bzimport set Reference to bz2358.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

gangleri wrote:

Hallo!

A "context sensitive" message would help a lot.

Just repeating the action "submit again" was in the past the reason for database
duplicats which could be deleted with a workaround (deleting the page and
restoring it again - suggested by André Engels).

Duplicate database entries seems to be fixed because of unique page names.
Nevertheless "submit again" in connection with "section=new" creates duplicate
sections. The separate bug 2360 relates to this.

Regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

gangleri wrote:

addition to comment 1

Duplicate database entries seems to be fixed because of unique page names.

see bug 1202: Clicking "Save page" on a new page multiple times creates the page
multiple times

gangleri wrote:

see also
bug 2388: "handling: add a "purge" link to [[MediaWiki:Noarticletext]]"

Noticed this as well when editing some widely used templates

Nowadays one would get a 503 Wikimedia error page, or a 504 error, for particularly heavy pages (usually when they have a lot of template calls).

Aklapper renamed this task from Better error message on submit failure? to Display better error message on submit failure for HTTP 503 or HTTP 504 errors.Feb 15 2022, 10:23 PM
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".
Aklapper removed a subscriber: wikibugs-l-list.