Last modified: 2006-02-22 21:27:58 UTC
This makes it very difficult to find some specific discussions when full-text search is disabled. It may be that many talk pages are "orphaned" from Google's perspective, and will never be found during a regular crawl of the website. For example, searching for "Discussions about the MediaWiki namespace" produces two results only, ''on a mirror''.
I am having this problem as well. I was running 1.4 and a few days ago I upgraded to 1.5beta3. I ran the two commandline php upgrade scripts in order -- upgrade1_5.php update.php. The upgrade seemed to have been completely transparent and successful. Then late friday afternoon (it's always a late friday afternoon, isn't it?), people began to notice that searching wasn't working. I'm not that familiar with mediawiki's internals yet, but I think I narrowed it down to this: Search works, but new articles created since the upgrade are not getting into the index. I even dropped and rebuilt in search index (with rebuildtextindex.php) hoping that would fix it, but I still get the same results -- only content created while still running the 1.4 version is showing up in the search results even after a rebuild. I *think*, but am not really not sure, that it has something to with how stuff gets into the index. The index update is triggered by data in the 'recentchanges' table? The updateSearchIndex.php script seems to select against the recentchanges table to find out what to put in the search index. In trying to track in down further, I found that running the 'rebuildrecentchanges.php' script dies with this error: php rebuildrecentchanges.php Loading from CUR table... Loading from OLD table... A database error has occurred Query: INSERT INTO `recentchanges` (rc_timestamp,rc_cur_time,rc_user,rc_user_text,rc_namespace,rc_title,rc_comment,rc_minor,rc_bot,rc_new,rc_cur_id,rc_this_oldid,rc_last_oldid,rc_type) SELECT old_timestamp,cur_timestamp,old_user,old_user_text,old_namespace,old_title,old_comment,old_minor_edit,0,0,cur_id,old_id,0,0 FROM `old`,`cur` WHERE old_namespace=cur_namespace AND old_title=cur_title ORDER BY old_timestamp DESC LIMIT 5000 Function: Error: 1146 Table 'midev_wiki_db.old' doesn't exist That is correct, the 'old' table does not exist in my schema. Further, when I ran the script, *I lost all of the recent changes data made since the upgrade.* The content and history of individual articles was not lost, and new edits do still go into the recentchanges table. But I'm afraid I just lost several days of recent changes data by running a maintenance script. I will continue to investigate as time allows.
