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Maniphest T100250

After session has been lost, process the edit without asking the user to retry
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Description

On Wikipedia, the editor edits a page, with the good old wikicode form.
After some time, the editor clicks "Save page".

Quite often, a bug occurs:
The site fails to save the edit. Instead, the site gives a red insult message ;-) telling the editor:
Some information related to the session has been lost. Retry.

The bug occurs when the edit takes a bit of time: 1 day gives the bug, 1 hour gives the bug, sometimes even 1/4 hour gives the bug.

 --> The editor retries and the edit works. This is simple and works systematically. So why shoud the editor do this? The site could do this automatically. Or the site could avoid losing "the info" altogether. Anyway, this is a computer glitch that is currently exposed to the editor as meaningless computer jargon. The editor does not want to know about this. The edit is expected to just work.

It would be nice to correct this glitch. :-)

Thank you.

Nnemo

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Event Timeline

Nnemo created this task.May 25 2015, 3:32 AM
Nnemo raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Nnemo updated the task description. (Show Details)
Nnemo added a project: MediaWiki-General.
Nnemo subscribed.
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald TranscriptMay 25 2015, 3:32 AM
Nnemo awarded a token.May 25 2015, 3:32 AM
Aklapper added a comment.May 25 2015, 1:31 PM

The site could do this automatically.

How could the site do this, instead of your browser?

Aklapper renamed this task from Process the edit without asking the user to retry to After session has been lost, process the edit without asking the user to retry.May 25 2015, 1:32 PM
Aklapper set Security to None.
Nnemo added a comment.Jun 1 2015, 12:27 PM
In T100250#1310004, @Aklapper wrote:

The site could do this automatically.

How could the site do this, instead of your browser?

Well...

 1. I first click on the button "Save page".
 What happens now?
 2. The site gives me a page, with a form, some data and some buttons.
 3. I don't change anything, I don't add anything. I just click one of the buttons of the page.
 4. And the site processes the edit successfully.

We see that, before the step 2., the site already has everything that will be sent to him at the step 3. The site manages to process the step 3. successfully. So, instead of the step 2., the site can process the data successfully; I don't see what would block the site from doing so.

Nemo_bis subscribed.Jun 16 2015, 8:05 AM

I don't think this can be solved for the action=edit form: the point is that MediaWiki needs another request from the browser to check the cookie. Submitting the entire form again might be unsecure, I don't know.

Anyway, I think the actual bug here is that this error became abnormally frequent: filed as T102588. There are then multiple bugs for session recovery in tools (usually JavaScript) which use the API, for instance T56467 and T72122.

Aklapper added a comment.Jun 18 2015, 9:59 AM

T102928 offers a feasible solution so I'm marking this as a dup

Aklapper closed this task as a duplicate of T102928: when saving after editing for a long time, try to get a token automatically instead of showing session_fail_preview.Jun 18 2015, 9:59 AM
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