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Marking a mentor as away without specifying a date silently fails
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

What happens?:

It appears to succeed but the mentor isn't actually marked away.

What should have happened instead?:

Either they remain marked Away indefinitely (unless they take explicit action to clear the away status) or the form fails saying the date field is required.

Software version (on Special:Version page; skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

Until T321509 is done, admins have to manually handle the case where a mentor suddenly stops editing and unanswered questions pile up, and I tried to mark some of them as away. I have no idea when they will return so can't specify a good date.

Event Timeline

Etonkovidova subscribed.

If an admin attempts to mark a mentor on Special:ManageMentors/edit-mentor/[mentor_userid] without specifying a time period, the message will be displayed: "Your edit was ignored because no change was made to the text"

Screen Shot 2024-08-21 at 5.22.48 PM.png (1,160×892 px, 114 KB)

That's actually a separate bug, as AFAIK the same message is shown if a time period is specified.

Urbanecm_WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.
Urbanecm_WMF subscribed.

Good catch @Pppery! Thanks a lot for the report! Fortunately, the fix is trivial here, that field should've been marked as required. Patch incoming!

Note I resigned my admin rights on enwiki (for reasons unrelated to anything here) so won't be able to test this once it's fixed.

Change #1066906 had a related patch set uploaded (by Urbanecm; author: Urbanecm):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] ManageMentorsEditMentor: Declare awayTimestamp as required

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1066906

Note I resigned my admin rights on enwiki (for reasons unrelated to anything here) so won't be able to test this once it's fixed.

I didn't know that, thanks for the info. Duly noted. If you'd be interested in continuing testing admin-specific Growth features, I think it'd be reasonable to grant +sysop at testwiki. The Growth team benefits from your insights frequently and if we can continue getting them in that way, we'd appreciate it. But of course, it is fully up to you.

Change #1066906 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] ManageMentorsEditMentor: Declare awayTimestamp as required

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1066906

Checked in beta - works as expected.
The date field is a required field; when a user attempts to save a blank date, the error message will be displayed:

Screen Shot 2024-08-27 at 4.38.50 PM.png (1,568×1,322 px, 158 KB)

Note: Checked for possible regression - no issues were found; setting the Away status for a mentor from Special:ManageMentors page works as expected.

Etonkovidova closed this task as Resolved.EditedSep 3 2024, 10:46 PM

Checked on testwiki wmf.21(along with checking T373143) - works as expected. The messages to user provide correct information for the cases in the table below:

Date is not selected/enteredNo changes to the form are made
Screen Shot 2025-03-24 at 2.03.42 PM.png (1,594×1,356 px, 160 KB)
Screen Shot 2025-03-24 at 2.04.01 PM.png (1,838×1,396 px, 226 KB)