I was browsing the open bugs today for Mediawiki (of which there are currently 2110, patches always welcome!), I came across bug 15622.

In short, it’s asking for a delay on the new RedirectFixerJob from fixing broken redirects too quickly, as vandals moving pages are able to have many pages retargeted before anyone has a chance to revert the original pagemove. I got to thinking, and I started tinkering with a new extension called ApproveJobs.

In short, it will allow sysadmins to define jobs that require approval before execution (adding HtmlCacheUpdate to this would be a Very Bad Idea ™, hehe). This way, it requires an additional set of eyes before the job goes about its business.  Should have a working copy of this in a few days, we’ll see if it goes anywhere. Note to self: improvements for InterwikiList and SubstAll are long overdue, especially if I ever plan to see either of these end up on WMF sites.

Jumping to a neighboring blog, Brion has an interesting post about some recent downtime over at WMF sites.

UPDATE: Writing a hook into a class that gets subclassed is rather annoying. Causes the hook not to be fired in child classes that implement their own methods. In this case, Job::run(). Maybe try putting it into the parent::run() and then make the childs call the parent? Ew.

UPDATE2: Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.