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Mentorship interface throwing errors
Closed, ResolvedPublicBUG REPORT

Description

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

What happens?:

  • An error message comes up saying "Introduction message is too long (affected user ID: 49604360). Maximum length is 240."
  • The exact same error occurs (with a different user ID) whenever I try to edit the information of (screenshot below) or remove a mentor.

What should have happened instead?:

  • I should have been able to enroll as a mentor/edit a mentor/remove a mentor — the introduction messages are not over the limit, and regardless it should not affect the ability to remove a mentor.

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

  • I am using an English Wikipedia administrator account on Firefox 139.

Trying to enroll as a mentor:

image.png (314×836 px, 35 KB)

Trying to edit a mentor:

image.png (577×907 px, 60 KB)

This is my first bug report, so apologies if I have done something wrong.

Event Timeline

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Etonkovidova subscribed.

Can reproduce fwiw

Thank you, @ClydeFranklin for filing the issue! I can reproduce the when I'm trying to quit mentorship on Special:QuitMentorship on enwiki.wmf.8. But I cannot reproduce the issue not on testwiki wmf.9 and not in beta cluster. Will do more testing tomorrow.

The issue was reported before - T314691: [betalabs] Mentorship pages issues and [T31542}.
Moved to Needs Discussion on our team workboard.

Michael triaged this task as High priority.Jul 10 2025, 8:15 AM
Michael moved this task from Needs Discussion to Up Next (estimated tasks) on the Growth-Team board.
Michael added a subscriber: Pppery.

This message means that the mentor with ID 49604360 has a message that is longer than the allowed limit of 240 characters. Apparently this was introduced by @Pppery in
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MediaWiki%3AGrowthMentors.json&diff=1298155486&oldid=1298155352

However, saving a mentor message that is too long is supposed to be impossible in the first place! So there is clearly something not right here somewhere.

The quick fix would be to trim the intro-message of the mentor with id 49604360 on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json while we look into preventing this from happening again.

Change #1167826 had a related patch set uploaded (by Michael Große; author: Michael Große):

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] fix(Mentorship): Prevent too long mentor message

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1167826

Change #1167826 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/GrowthExperiments@master] fix(Mentorship): Prevent too long mentor message

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1167826

No worries. You had little chance of knowing that this would happen. Starting Thursday, this bug should no longer be possible on enwiki, and it should complain when editing the MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json file with a commit message that is too long.

Etonkovidova claimed this task.

No worries. You had little chance of knowing that this would happen. Starting Thursday, this bug should no longer be possible on enwiki, and it should complain when editing the MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json file with a commit message that is too long.

As far as I could see - the issue is fixed. My test mentor on enwiki wmf.9 was able to quit mentorship (not being able to quit was an impact of an over-limit intro message). Tested more for the impact of an over-limit intro message and filed as a separate task -

Tested for the introductory message length - the message of over-limit length can be added (by an admin) only directly to MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json. Filed as T399352: MediaWiki:GrowthMentors.json allows to save over-limit intro message .