The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed an upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

It includes a few changes:

• Autocomplete proposals in tasks: List involved users first
• User Profiles:
  • Projects box: Always show "View All" button and number of projects
  • History: Expose previous names of renamed users to admins only
• User settings:
  • Personal API Token field: Auto-select token on click
  • Never show annoying timezone offset notification when user set UTC
• Tasks: Restore "subtask created" entry creation in parent task timeline
• Conduit API:
  • Fix HTTP 200 error setting non-string task points
  • Add many missing parameter descriptions to the docs
  • Convert numerous "Frozen" methods to Deprecated methods
  • Convert nearly all Unstable methods to Stable
  • (admins only) Allow filtering call logs by caller type (e.g. bots)
• Search:
  • Fix using Typeahead Custom Fields (e.g. "Other Assignee")
  • Project search: Make results adhere to project status dropdown value
• UI: Replace ambiguous "owner" strings with "assignee" or "author"
• Flags UI: Replace PNG flag images with SVG versions
• File Transforms: Hide "Available Transforms" when none are supported
• Dashboards: Chart Panels: Add proper chart key validation at least
• (admins only) Projects: Expose users' MFA status in Project Members list
• (admins only) Config: Display each setting's config source on All Settings page
• Misc bug fixes, code cleanup, CSS cleanup, etc.

Downstream dependency tree of tasks: T404375: Update to Phorge upstream / Arcanist upstream to 2025-11-12 code

Upstream changelogs:

• https://we.phorge.it/source/phorge/history/master/
• https://we.phorge.it/source/arcanist/history/master/

We also recently deployed some changes to reduce the load created by aggressive web crawlers: Browsing code repositories in Diffusion asks for login, and viewing project workboards requires login. This creates some inconvenience for users but helps us to keep services available.

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed a major upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

It includes numerous changes:

• Performance improvements:
  • Global fulltext Search ignores data of uninstalled Phab applications
  • Embedded full size image files are lazy loaded
  • Using DNS preconnect for https://phab.wmfusercontent.org
  • Faster rendering of Project Burndown tabular reports
• Search user interface:
  • "Advanced Search" renamed to Global Search and application search
  • Global Search Scope dropdown: "Current Application" replaced by the actual application name, no more such option when the application does not support global fulltext searching
  • Global Search Scope dropdown: Support searching in the current application in more Phab applications
  • Maniphest Search does not propose uninstalled Owners or Packages as Subscribers
  • Ctrl+Return in text boxes opens search results in a new tab
• User Profile pages:
  • New "Authored Tasks" one-click menu item in sidebar
  • Less ambiguous menu item names in sidebar
  • Support for images in WebP format as avatars
  • (admins only): One-click menu item to view Activity Log of user
  • (admins only): User's Two-Factor Auth status shown on profile page
• Project Workboards:
  • Strike-through rendering of archived projects in navigation crumbs
  • Tooltips for those numbers in workboard column headers
  • Automated Column Triggers: Allow setting the user who performs the move as task assignee
  • Thinner scrollbars in Firefox on Windows
  • Importing columns: No crash when typeahead querying projects and search string is not a project name prefix
  • "Move Tasks" now requires "Can Bulk Edit Tasks" rights
• Herald automated actions:
  • New condition "Acting user's projects" available
  • No more "Unknown Object (????)" for custom field values in editor
• Text input:
  • No more text suddenly disappearing when writing {{#something:}}
  • Stripped surrounding whitespace when entering project or task titles
  • Support for "size=thumb" parameter when embedding video files
• Conduit API:
  • Support search select fields as constraints, e.g. "Group By" in maniphest.search, project status in project.search, status and hosted in diffusion.repository.search
  • Improved documentation of types in transaction.search
• User Preferences:
  • Email: Hide "Audits" section (we uninstalled the Audits application)
  • External Accounts: Shows tooltips for buttons
  • Multi-Factor Auth: Explains consequences of adding a second factor
• Projects:
  • Profile images: Show maximum picture dimensions at uploading
  • No more "set this color to Red" editing archived projects
  • No more 404 error on URLs which include an alternative hashtag of a milestone
• Project Report Charts:
  • Rotated x-axis labels for better readability
  • Improved line colors
• Files:
  • Support rendering images in WebP format
  • List of uploads includes the timestamp, not only the date
• Mobile: Support zooming on pages (useful when looking at image files)
• Mobile: Better detection of Firefox on Android to adjust content width
• Tokens: Allow filtering given tokens by token types
• Wikibugs IRC bot: Report the color of milestones correctly
• (admins only) Allow changing email address of bot and mailing list accounts
• Numerous crasher fixes
• Accessibility improvements (ARIA labels, titles, etc)
• Cleaner CSS (less noise in your browser's Developer Tools' console)

Downstream dependency tree of tasks: T386558: Update to Phorge upstream 2025.18 release and T393840: Update to Phorge upstream rPca176821 / Arcanist upstream rARCd2d2afd0 (2025-09-08)

Upstream changelog: https://we.phorge.it/w/changelog/2024.35/

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

The Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation just deployed a major upgrade of Wikimedia Phabricator.

You can now enjoy

• collapsing project workboard columns by clicking on their header (allows faster scrolling to the next column on mobile)
• a preview of tasks when pasting a task URI in a web application which supports the Open Graph Protocol
• seeing your personal flags set on tasks in Maniphest search results
• copying the path of a file shown in Diffusion code browsing
• setting workboard column triggers to add or remove subscribers
• the initial value of due dates and story points shown in task history
• ending up on your previous page after "Log In to Comment" (instead of the homepage)
• a warning in the task comment field when it is closed as duplicate
• no more "Unknown Object" shown under "Referenced Files" in tasks
• (admins only) no more getting subscribed when deleting a comment
• (admins only) disabling vandal user accounts from a mobile device
• and a good bunch of other bug fixes.

Downstream dependency tree of tasks: T370266: Update to Phorge upstream 2024.35 release
Upstream changelog: https://we.phorge.it/w/changelog/2024.35/

Apart from that stuff above, we recently also

• fixed incomplete global search results for tasks
• added a more useful error message when fulltext search times out (while we are also looking into Search issues in general)
• made video/mp4 files render inline

If you have comments or questions about Phab, please bring them up on the Phabricator Talk page!

Over the last months, the Release-Engineering-Team of the Wikimedia Foundation put efforts into making improvements and fixing issues in Wikimedia Phabricator, our main software planning software. Here is an incomplete list of achievements:

• Reduced visual complexity by removing or hiding unused functionality, such as the Differential code review tool and other tools, and the contact numbers panel in personal settings.
• Made message improvements and user interface tweaks, such as explicitly linking from the Global Search to the Advanced Search to raise awareness of its existence, and disallowing creating projects with an empty description.
• Phabricator reuses your confirmed MediaWiki email address during registration of a new Phabricator account - no more manually entering your email address.
• If you have multi-factor authentication (2FA) enabled for your account, re-authenticating skips the additional OAuth access dialog on mediawiki.org.
• When resolving a task and explicitly not setting a task assignee, no disruptive "Action with no effect" warning is displayed.
• Pppery contributed many fixes to our neglected internationalization and translation setup (thank you!). This also made Slovenian and Sicilian translations available in the language user settings.
• Fixed inaccurate data in project reports and fixed anonymous access to burndown charts.
• Transparent embedded image files have a checkered background.
• Each Phame blog links to its atom feed.
• Fixed various crashes and exceptions.
• Improvements to fight vandalism and made the corresponding checks more performant.
• API user queries include the MediaWiki username if you have sufficient permissions.
• Corrected some bad and missing data in our database (thanks to Valerio for the Bugzilla data!).
• Deployed the latest stable Phorge version from upstream - see the full upstream changelog.
• Reduced the number of custom lines of code in our Wikimedia downstream installation by contributing some of our changes to the upstream Phorge codebase and by removing obsolete or uncommon custom code in our installation ("technical debt").
• Fixed PHP8 compatibility issues in upstream and in custom downstream code.
• Developers and testers of our installation can use the "lipsum" script again to create projects.
• In the meantime, the WMF SRE team also upgraded the host machines from Debian Buster to Debian Bullseye.

We hope you enjoy your Wikimedia Phabricator experience!

As usual, your thoughts and questions are welcome on the Phabricator talk page.

Wikimedia had been using the Phabricator software since 2014 for project planning and task tracking. In June 2021, the company behind upstream Phabricator stopped operations.
In response, numerous Phabricator users started a community fork, taking a copy of the original free and open Phabricator source code to continue developing it under the project name Phorge.

The Wikimedia Phabricator instance had not caught up with all the changes in Phorge until lately.
After some preparation and testing functionality to make sure that Wikimedia's custom changes in the codebase will also work well with Phorge, on August 23rd, 2023, the Wikimedia Release Engineering Team migrated the codebase behind Wikimedia Phabricator from an older version of upstream Phabricator to a recent version of upstream Phorge:

We now benefit again from improvements made by the larger Phorge community and it has become easier to contribute to Phorge development ourselves.

Enjoy some Phorge bug fixes and enhancements now also available in Wikimedia Phabricator!

Phabricator upstream has implemented a search engine that does not depend on an external full-text index service. It's been the default in Phabricator for quite some time, however, we have been using the ElasticSearch engine for a few years now due to previous issues with the old engine. Specifically, the old phabricator fulltext engine depended on MySQL's built-in fulltext index functionality. Unfortunately, the fulltext engine in MySQL had inconsistent performance and often returned low quality search results.

To avoid using MySQL fulltext, the new Phabricator engine uses SQL joins against specially designed index tables. Surprisingly it works quite well. As of last week we are running fully on the new engine. @brennen and I implemented some missing features to achieve feature parity with the ElasticSearch engine. So far I am happy with the performance and the quality of search results using the new engine. If you notice anything strange in search results please let me know in the comments.

This week a long-standing "bug" has been fixed in Phabricator.

Actually, it's not technically a bug because it was the intended behavior that has been changed.

For quite a long time now, several Wikimedia teams have been using Milestones in Phabricator as a convenient way to organize tasks into a hierarchy of workboards.

Take for example: #core_platform_team_workboards, this project has several milestones which track different categories of tasks. Some of these include Platform Team Workboards (Initiatives), Platform Team Workboards (External Code Reviews) and Platform Team Workboards (Clinic Duty Team).

Each of these milestones is conveniently represented by a column in the parent project workboard, allowing for easy movement of tasks from the parent to one of the milestones or from one milestone to another. This suits the specific workflow that our teams have developed, however, until now there was one rather annoying limitation: Workboard columns could not be moved. They were always displayed at the far-right side of a workboard in the order that the milestone was created. So if you were to create a new milestone, it would always be at the end and there was nothing you could do about it. Although it was annoying to our users, this behavior was by design. The fact of the matter is that we have been sort of abusing the Milestones feature for a use-case that wasn't quite intended by the Phabricator developers. You see, Milestones are intended to be used for tracking the progress of strictly sequential software releases. In the context of the original design for Milestones, the "next" milestone should always follow the current one and it shouldn't be possible to re-arrange them because they have a natural order that must not be violated.

Well lets not let the proper intended use for a feature get in the way of a perfectly good workflow that suits our teams quite well. The alternatives to milestones have significant drawbacks which I won't get into right now. No worries though, it turns out that reordering milestones was a simple change and it has been rolled out to our fork of Phabricator. So go ahead and reorder milestones! You are now welcome to violate the sanctity of properly ordered milestones on workboards.

You may have noticed that Phabricator's real-time notification service ("Aphlict") is currently disabled. This means that you will not see real-time notification popups in Phabricator and workboard live-updates aren't happening.

This is due to some changes in the way traffic is routed within Wikimedia's network which started causing problems for Phabricator, resulting ultimately in Aphlict being disabled temporarily. The underlying issue is tracked here: T238593: Phabricator downtime due to aphlict and websockets (aphlict current disabled)

I have been working with @Dzahn on various Phabricator issues and projects, and we intend to resolve the issue with Aphlict as soon as possible. Last week we finished migrating Phabricator to a different server in the eqiad data center and in the process we tested several disaster recovery scenarios. With that work finished we can now focus on getting real-time notifications back online. Although I can't commit to a definite timeline, I am aiming to have everything back to normal by the end of December.

Along with this status update I would like to express my sincere regret and apologies for any inconvenience that this causes you. With the limited amount of time we had to work on issues before @Dzahn had to leave for holidays, we had to prioritize the server migration over fixing Aphlict.

If you have any questions or concerns you can comment below.

This will be a brief introduction to this new feature which appeared recently on Phabricator workboards.

A trigger associates a set of one or more actions with a workboard column.

These are the actions which are currently available:

• Add or Remove (specified) Project Tags
• Assign Task (to a specified user)
• Change Priority (to a specified value)
• Change Status (to a specified value)
• Play a Sound

A trigger can have one or more rules associated with it. Each rule applies one of the aforementioned actions to any task which is dropped on the associated column.

Limitations

Triggers only work on workboards. They are not applied when you use the "Move on workboard" action from the task comment form.

Example

The most obvious use for this feature is to automatically resolve tasks when you drop them into the "Done" column on a project workboard, and here is a screenshot of what that trigger would look like:

To add a trigger to a workboard column, click the "cogs" button at the top of a workboard column and choose "New Trigger" from the popup menu, as seen in this screenshot:

Changes for 2019-02-27

New Features

Significant new functionality just landed in the wmf/stable branch of rPHAB Phabricator which resolves some minor headaches we've been living with for quite some time.

Subtask Subtypes

It's now possible to specify which types of Subtasks are valid for any given parent type.

Once configured, phabricator will choose the appropriate task type (and corresponding custom form) whenever someone creates a task via the "Create Subtask" menu. If there are multiple valid types, the user is presented with a choice of which type they would like to create.

This will eliminate one confusing situation that has come up a few times. When adding blockers to the weekly train tracking tasks, because the tracking tasks are instances of the custom "Release" type, and the default behavior is that subtasks to inherit the type of the parent task. This meant that subtasks would automatically inherit the type, and behavior, of train blockers which includes a big template at the top of the page with release schedules and whatnot. This is definitely not what we wanted to happen. This is no longer a problem, because now we can specify which types are valid (in this case, either one of Application Error or Security issue are allowed).

Here is an example of what that choice looks like:

Changing the type of a task

There is another somewhat minor improvement to the types functionality which is worth mentioning in case readers have not noticed it already: It's now possible to change the type of a task from the transactional "Add Action" menu found above the task comment form. Previously this was only possible via conduit api call or the bulk editor interface.

Bugs Fixed

Last week's update came with a couple of nasty bugs which were identified quickly. The following bugs are now resolved with a bit of debugging by yours truly and quick response from upstream maintainers. Thanks to @epriestley for being awesome as usual!

1. T216849: Search broken in phabricator project tag/subscribed fields
2. T217082: Unable to edit Herald rules:: "Argument 1 passed to HeraldTokenizerFieldValue::setValueMap() must be of the type array, object given"

Background

After many months with only a few minor updates deployed to the wmf/stable branch of Phabricator, we were long over-due for a major update. With All-hands 2019 behind us I was finally able to find the time to merge and deploy a huge batch of upstream changes.

Highlights

This update includes several changes which directly address a problem or implement a feature that directly affect one or more of the users on this instance of Phabricator. Specifically, I've seen each of these changes requested in various tasks and IRC discussions. That's why I've compiled the following list of highlights, derived from the upstream changelogs with the addition of some commentary:

Task Types

• "Change Subtype" is now available as a comment action. This was requested more than once since we started experimenting with task types a few months ago.
• When Creating a subtask, you will be given a choice of which form to use. This can be customized based on task types so that certain types always use a specific form or a specific set of forms. This new functionality gives us a lot of flexibility to build custom workflows using task types and custom forms. I will have more to say about this in a future blog post.

Notable Bug Fixes

• T199207: 404 on workboard for an existing project (due to custom filter applied which did not exist in database)

Other notable changes

• The "Can Configure Application" policy for each application is now editable by administrators. This allows you to deputize users to, for example, configure Maniphest without giving them full administrative powers. Notably, this policy also controls the ability to manage edit forms.
• i18n: Lots of new translation strings have been imported from translatewiki.net
• The Maniphest task graph now shows more nodes (200, up from 100) and suppports a standalone view which draws up to 2,000 nodes.