[e-lang] Wiki problems? (was:: Some minor bugs (switch and traceln))

[James Graves]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 02:16:12PM +0000, Thomas Leonard wrote:

> I'm editing "Editing Walnut/Ordinary Programming/Emakers", logged in as
> "ThomasLeonard". When I click "Save page" I get asked to solve a
> CAPTCHA. Either pressing Return in the box or clicking Submit leads to a
> "Could not open socket" message.

Short version:

I've added Thomas to the 'bots' group, which should skip the recaptcha
prompt, for him at least.

More generally, however, the recaptcha mechanism is suddenly broken, and
I don't know why.

Anyone being prompted: please send me your username in private email
and you'll be added to the bots group.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Long version:

Well, this is quite a puzzle.

The 'Could not open socket' is from the Recaptcha plugin.  So I go and
dig into that a little.

So we've got an on-going problem with DNS lookups... but I won't get
into that now.  The recaptcha servers weren't resolving, but that is
fixed (temporarily).  I can now ping them from the wiki host, and I
can also run a wget on them to retrieve a web page.  OK, fine.

The recaptcha is still not working at this poing.  I add some
debugging information, to have it print out the host, socket, request,
etc.  That all looks fine.

I can use netcat to submit a request to the verify server, and it
returns a webpage indicating that the request is invalid.  Maybe I
didn't copy and paste it correctly, whatever.  It does not, however,
give me an error that it could not open the socket (on port 80) to the
verify server.

So running on the command line, I can get a response from the verify
server, but running it from inside the mediawiki, it doesn't work.

We currently have v1.7 of the plugin installed.  This is the latest
release for MediaWiki... and I haven't seen anything yet to indicate
that there is some kind of protocol error.  

Digging around the recaptcha mailing list hasn't uncovered anything
real useful yet.

So members of 'bots', sysops (like Kevin, MarkM, etc.) will not be
asked to fill in the captcha.  However, everyone else (including
anonymous users of course) will be prompted... and the verification
will fail.

So I'll be working on it this week.  

BR,

James