Topic on Extension talk:AJAXPoll

Hey, could you take a look at and ideally merge this? Thanks!

Hi George, thanks for your patch, but your patch is not needed, You can simply set the MediaWiki:ajaxpoll-tracking-category text string to "-" (minus). This is not so well known, and I will have to add some documentation on MediaWiki, and perhaps also in the extension itself.

Why exactly is your patch obsolete? See the core code in https://doc.wikimedia.org/mediawiki-core/master/php/html/Parser_8php_source.html#l04167 seq.:

# Allow tracking categories to be disabled by setting them to "-"
04168         if ( $cat === '-' ) {
04169             return false;
04170         }

I also added a comment on the extension manual page "If you want to disable the automatic tracking category then set the text MediaWiki:ajaxpoll-tracking-category in your wiki to "-" (minus)."

Okay, the one problem with this is that it's really difficult to set this on each wiki if it's a farm. I work on Brickimedia, where there are several wikis, and many more being introduced in the near future (in multiple languages). Having to set MediaWiki:ajaxpoll-tracking-category on each of them would be very time consuming and difficult to keep track of which have it disabled and which don't. Also with the launch of a new project on the wiki farm, it'd be one more thing to have to remember to do on the new project. Having a config variable in the farm's global LocalSettings would make everything easier, however. I know I could change the i18n file, but that would defeat the purpose of our submodules on our server if we're just going to make dirty hacks like that. So while the patch may be obsolete on a single wiki, it would only make things easier on farms, especially large farms.