Last modified: 2012-11-12 15:41:29 UTC
See the URL above (permlink given in case the report is archived). It seems that a user was blocked for "2.37685 weeks", and MediaWiki interpreted that as "02:37 after 685 weeks". This behaviour is certainly unintuitive, and should either be an error or act as expected (i.e. block for a bit over 2 and a third weeks). Version is current Wikipedia (Special:Version says 1.10alpha, but that's not in the list, so I've left it as unspecified and commented here instead).
In PHP 5.1.4, no non-integer appears to work as expected with time units such as "weeks" or "minutes". Up to two digits after the decimal point gives 0 Unix time, any further digits are interpreted as an integer. Was the installed version of PHP recently updated, perhaps?
Here is what goes on: The value of the "Other time:" box in Special:Blockip page (a text input named wpBlockOther) is passed to strtotime() to function on line 371 of SpecialBlockip.php (as of revision 27807). It is strtotime() which misinterprets the number indeed. See: strtotime("2 weeks") returns 1200400424 strtotime("3 weeks") returns 1201005224 strtotime("2.37685 weeks") returns 1613443020 So indeed, this is a bug of PHP's strtotime function (or, if not a bug, it is at least a bad way to use it, because in PHP documentation it is clearly stated that strtotime() expects date to be i GNU format, while "2.37685 weeks" is not in GNU format per http://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_chapter/tar_7.html). Anyways, at this is not a MediaWiki bug, I'm marking it as INVALID.
If the behavior of the function is this wildly wrong, perhaps we ought to protect against it -- either by replacing it with our own code or giving a warning on these 'deceptive' inputs.
Confirmed as still occurring as of May 2010. This recently occurred with a global block.
> this is a bug of PHP's strtotime function Nemo_bis: As you set the "upstream" keyword, does an upstream ticket exist?
(In reply to comment #5) > > this is a bug of PHP's strtotime function > > Nemo_bis: As you set the "upstream" keyword, does an upstream ticket exist? I didn't check.
