Last modified: 2013-03-15 16:59:30 UTC
Some special pages are cached. Sometimes they are cached for long time and some big maintenance can be done in the meantime and it's necessary to update the list right at the moment. So some "purge_specials" right should be added, assuming by default perhaps for bureaucrats, which would allow them to purge the cache of such special page.
If the special page updates are disabled, they are probably expensive enough that we generally wouldn't want crats to be able to do them.
I iwas talking about cached, not disabled special pages.
(In reply to comment #2) > I iwas talking about cached, not disabled special pages. That's what a cached special page is. (A page where auto-updates were disabled, usually via $wgMiserMode). In the Wikipedia case, I highly doubt we want crats being able to rebuild those pages. Some sort of inbetween mode, where they get cached, but users could trigger a rebuild if the cache is to far out of date might make sense for moderate sized wikis that don't want to set up cron for some reason. However, in that case I think we'd just want a "on page view see if cache is to far out of date, then rebuild" rather then a specific group being able to cause rebuilds.
OK, let me try to clarify one more time - I was talking about special pages which are being updated e.g. weekly. They are not disabled at all, but they don't work on demand. I thought we elect bureaucrats as reasonable people, which among other means they won't be rebuilding it every other minute. On the other hand, there can be any other group of users added with such right. Situations when you do a bot maintenance and in the middle of it you have to wait another week for update are very frustrating. That's why we need some way, how to purge on demand.
> > Situations when you do a bot maintenance and in the middle of it you have to > wait another week for update are very frustrating. That's why we need some way, > how to purge on demand. Bot owners can always get a toolserver account and run the query themselves ;) >OK, let me try to clarify one more time - I was talking about special pages >which are being updated e.g. weekly. They are not disabled at all, but they >don't work on demand. There really isn't a difference on the MediaWiki side between the two cases. One of them is just so infesible that no one runs the maintenance script for them. ------ The only way I could really see this happening (for big wikis anyways) is if the crats had a request rebuild button, which would put the special page in a queue to be refreshed, which some other server designated to handle such things would eventually get to (possibly several hours, maybe days later). Which would be quite a complicated feature for not a lot of gain. (Of course I'm not really familiar with the intimate ops related details of rebuilding special pages, so I could be over-estimating how expensive they are)
