@Aklapper Do you happen to know someone who might at least assess the issue which in short is: $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault is respected for logged in users but not for anonymous users.

@Kghbln: There might be some hints on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Developers/Maintainers but no, not really.

@Aklapper Thanks to the info about this page. Did not know that existed. In this case I am not absolutely sure who to ask either. I guess Discovery appears the most appropriate.

@Smalyshev You appear to be driving the Discovery efforts at WMF code wise. Could you have a peep at this and/or point to somebody who may be even more appropriate to ask. Thanks a lot!

We thought this had been addressed, we'll look into it.

Thanks a lot for triaging and your short feedback. Sounds like this issue is not unfamiliar to you. Yeah, a fix will be much appreciated.

I can confirm that the issue is still happening with the latest release, i.e.

• MediaWiki 1.30.0 (d0c8f49) 19:49, 5 January 2018
• PHP 5.6.33-0+deb8u1 (apache2handler)
• MariaDB 10.0.33-MariaDB-1~jessie

I do not know how things are in master (1.31 to be).

Will this be a bigger issue? I guess it will be cool to get a fix at least into the upcoming 1.31 LTS

Any hopes for this. It is a rather troubling issue. Thanks for your time.

Hi @Kghbln, we have been actively working on search profiles in the context of refactoring our query parser (T191876), but I'm not sure if this specific issue has been addressed in the 1.31 release.

@dcausse, is there any insight you can share on this?

@EBjune Thanks a lot for managing this issue and @dcausse Thanks a lot for digging into this issue.

Indeed the following setting helps the cause. It is a bit embarrassing since it was probably sitting in front of my face all the time

$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault = [
        NS_MAIN => true,
        SMW_NS_PROPERTY => false,
        SMW_NS_CONCEPT => false
];

What probably got me off track is that setting

$wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault = [
        NS_MAIN => true
];

works for logged in users but not for anonymous users, which was what this issue was intended to address. I still think it is a bit strange to get this behaviour but it is not a big deal since there is a way out. However this is why I figured that adding this configuration parameter overrides all existing default settings to it.

Thanks to both of you for dealing with this and your assistance. Indeed very much appreciated!

One thing to consider that can be confusing with logged user vs anonymous is that logged-in users can save their namespaces preferences in Special:Search, so even after switching the $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault to another set of values if some user had saved their namespace preferences the change you make to the config may not be visible for such user. It's perhaps what happened to you and caused even more confusion (just guessing).

Thanks a lot for the pointer. I think to have considered this and used a freshly created account when trying to work on this issue report. However I am not 100% sure about this any longer. Indeed, users can override - which is good. :)