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Support and Sessions

As we enter Spring, we want to provide a quick update on a few rather important recent changes.

Ever since we updated to MediaWiki 1.28 in December, users have been reporting session and cookie issues, caused by a change in MediaWiki core relating to authentication and session storage. The appropriate tasks are filed in Phabricator as T144 and T154. We’ve changed the backend storage for sessions at ShoutWiki and we are now confident in saying we have fixed these issues.

Anyone still experiencing problems is advised to clear any cookie and session data for ShoutWiki in their browsers. We would like to remind users that while most ShoutWiki sites are available over HTTPS, that HTTPS is not supported for wikis, and there are a number of issues with the setup. The current HTTPS set up was for testing has not yet been disabled. If you have been using HTTPS, please cease to do so, and ensure you clear all Strict Transport Security (STS) headers and cache for ShoutWiki from your browser.

You should notice any session issues clearing up after following these steps have been completed. Anyone still having session issues is encouraged to provide details on the linked tasks.

The second item we would like to comment on is our support infrastructure. We’re currently experiencing issues with the contact form (Special:Contact) and how Google handles emails sent through it, affecting the amount of emails making it into the support ticketing system.

Due to changes in Google’s anti-phishing detection, we are currently having to manually force many support tickets through into the system. You should receive an automated message when this has been done, however, you may experience delays due to this.

It is strongly advised that users email us directly at support @ shoutwiki.com to ensure a ticket is opened as soon as possible. If you have not received an automated message from the system, your ticket has not been processed. Please do not create a Hub forum as we will not be changing any wiki settings from Forum posts.

We understand that this is in no way ideal, and we are currently working on trying to solve this issue. Thank you for your cooperation!

By Lewis Cawte

Lewis is ShoutWiki's technical director, responsible for keeping the site working. He's also responsible for ShoutWiki's finances... for now.

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