Open Rail Data Wiki - change of functionality

[Peter Hicks]

All,

Some of you may have noticed the wiki becoming quite slow at times.  I've been investigating over the weekend and it appears that AI web crawlers have been requesting the diffs and history for all changes.  These pages aren't static and incur a CPU and I/O hit when called.

I've updated to the latest MediaWiki and installed the CrawlerProtection extension.  This means you need to be logged in to see what has been changed on pages - a minor inconvenience but hopefully in everyone's best interests.

Best wishes,

Peter

[Mark Rawlinson]

On Monday, August 4, 2025 at 8:48:55 AM UTC+1 Peter Hicks wrote:

This means you need to be logged in to see what has been changed on pages - a minor inconvenience but hopefully in everyone's best interests.

No problem with having to log in, but I've just clicked on the [Request Account] option and it gives a fatal error:

https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Special:RequestAccount

 

[Peter Hicks]

On Monday, 4 August 2025 at 15:57, Mark Rawlinson <freightmas...@gmail.com> wrote:

No problem with having to log in, but I've just clicked on the [Request Account] option and it gives a fatal error:

https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Special:RequestAccount

Oh, software shakes fist​

It looks like the SimpleCaptcha plugin isn't loaded - leave it with me, I'll have it fixed and a new Docker image deployed in a couple of hours.

Peter

[Peter Hicks]

On Monday, 4 August 2025 at 15:59, 'Peter Hicks' via A gathering place for the Open Rail Data community <openrail...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

It looks like the SimpleCaptcha plugin isn't loaded - leave it with me, I'll have it fixed and a new Docker image deployed in a couple of hours.

Fixed.  The actual issue wasn't the SimpleCaptcha plugin, it was that the ConfirmAccount plugin had defaulted to using the SimpleCaptcha plugin, and after some head-scratching, I found you have to explicitly configure the CAPTCHA class as a class name, not a text string.

I've disabled the biography and CV fields on the signup form, because they're not at all necessary and nobody fills them in anyway :-)

Peter

[Christoper Stafford]

I'm getting as far as signing up and clicking on the email confirmation link, and it gives me the message "Invalid confirmation code. The code may have expired.". I'm clicking on it in well under a minute.

[Peter Hicks]

On Tuesday, 5 August 2025 at 22:00, 'Christoper Stafford' via A gathering place for the Open Rail Data community <openrail...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

I'm getting as far as signing up and clicking on the email confirmation link, and it gives me the message "Invalid confirmation code. The code may have expired.". I'm clicking on it in well under a minute.

I'm not sure if it's related, but you already have an account with which was created in August last year.  Try resetting your password?

Peter