Update problems

I've got the following major issues:

• In LiquidThreads, when I type a reply the spinning loading icon never goes away, and the shortcuts at the top never load.
• When I try to edit the RoboRumble/Participants page it tells me that the server did not receive some of the message and that I should confirm the edits, but it shows me an empty box instead of all the participants data.

These behaviours are seen on both Firefox 21 b6 and Chrome 26.0. I've cleared cache and done a hard reload in both.

Is anybody seeing these?

Yeah, LiquidThreads spinners all over the place for me. I haven't tried editing the participants list but that seems pretty high priority. Hrm..

I'm definitely noticing the first problem. I haven't yet tried editing the participants page.

We seem to be getting a lot of user registrations, did the update break some of the blockers?

Yeah, Rednaxela had some custom things in that got broken. He's working on it now.

Yeah, the update removed the Math extension which used to be part of the core of MediaWiki, but got moved into an extension. This broke some pages, and also broke the extra math question I added in added to the reCaptcha check. (Besides the extra math question, my modifications also included a "same IP address as received the captcha must solve it" check, which based on server logs was very effective)

Due to the error that was happening on the new user creation page, Voidious reverted back to the traditional reCaptcha extension temporarily, which let that flood of bots register.

Gladly, the custom extension I added which disallows accounts less than 24 hours old inserting external links was still intact after the upgrade, and appears to have foiled those spambots.

Also, I've now reinstalled the Math extension, both fixing some wiki pages and making my modified captcha checker work again, so all should be well now :)

Good to know. On that point though, I still think KittenAuth/Asirra would be a good auth system (and has nothing to do with me liking kittens, honest).

Asirra was mentioned in some emails that went around. I don't think Asirra is fundamentally any better than reCaptcha for the main problem. I suspect there's a high probability that rather than pure computer-based bots, the reCaptcha system was being broken by a Mechanical Turk style system that farmed the captcha breaking task out to humans. From what I understand that is common these days. Asirra is equally vulnerable to that technique. Assuming that is the case, the reason my modifications help, would be that rather than preventing the captcha-breaking itself, they make it incompatible with some automation systems used to farm out captcha breaking. I have nothing against using Asirra if people want to switch it to that instead of reCaptcha, but at least in theory I doubt Asirra vs reCaptcha makes much of a difference.

A quick update regarding the RoboRumble/Participants issue: I've confirmed it's definitely related to the total size of the page. I see the error if I click preview there normally, but I don't see the error if I delete half the content of the text box before hitting preview. I don't know why it only started happening after the update though, or what a good fix would be.

Participants issue is fixed, but the spinners persist!