Teflpedia:Teachers' room/Archive/2014-2015

MediaWiki upgrade 1.20.2 to 1.22.2
I upgraded Teflpedia's MediaWiki server software from MediaWiki 1.20.2 to 1.22.2. Roger (talk) 18:51, 22 February 2014 (UTC)

Enhanced Editor Toolbar and Wizards
The enhanced editing toolbar and links and tables wizards are bundled in MediaWiki 1.22.2 and look good to me. So I followed Wikipedia's lead and enabled them both by default. Try the new _Advanced_, _Special characters_ and _Help_ links there to the right of those buttons at top of the edit field. ‎Ghoti, you might like the IPA insertion tool that is in _Special characters_. Does it work well?

Users may turn either or both off by unchecking the relevant boxes in Preferences > Editing:
 * Editor:
 * [x] Enable enhanced editing toolbar
 * [x] Enable wizards for inserting links, tables as well as the search and replace function
 * [x] Enable wizards for inserting links, tables as well as the search and replace function

--Roger (talk) 02:12, 23 February 2014 (UTC)

Succint history of teaching methods, presentation of the Direct Grammar & Writing Method.
Gentlemen,

Our fellow teachers may find interesting information, and perhaps some inspiration or ideas. perusing an essay of our authorship that was published some time ago in the World Wide Web protocol of the Internet.

The essay offers a succint but fairly well detailed and rather technical explanation of methods used for the teaching of languages throughout History. It also presents a method created by this author, a polyglot and worldwide traveller with an experience of over twenty years in language teaching and other language - related activities.

Serious warning before sending the next segment:

The essay itself is politically neutral, but the Web document that contains the essay also touches other topics (unrelated to language teaching) and is VERY STRONGLY DEFINED in its political position.

Some of our professional colleagues may feel uneasy with that ideological orientation, and may be tempted by an impulse to comment on it in an unfavourable light.

Please refrain from doing so. Those who happen to be in the case mentioned above, should not pay attention to the heading of the page. Instead, they should concentrate on the rich, well researched, well written, and highly informative text that they have before them just a few paragraphs below.

Showing RESPECT, by simply avoiding comments on the general document, will ensure the further participation of this author in this T.E.F.L. Encyclopedia, but sporting a careless or critical attitude will greatly diminish, or definitely eliminate, the chances of our sustained collaboration.

Be kind to focus all comments ON THE ESSAY, not on the Web document that contains such essay and many other essays.

(to be continued)
 * Hi and thank you for joining in. I will certainly click on the link when you post it. I'm sure that you will agree however that until such time that a particular document has actually been read it is impossible to say how any particular reader may react.--Bob M (talk) 06:22, 19 April 2014 (UTC)

I can't edit some pages with exclamation marks or apostrophes
I get a 403 error. In particular, I can't edit many tables. For example, I can't edit Heteronym or Template:IPA.

I can enter "abc!" but not a single ! between quotes (like this "¡" but with !). As I was able to infer, I can't edit Punctuation.

I can enter "a" or "b" but not 'a' or 'b" using single quotes (last quote is double).

Ghoti (talk) 19:37, 25 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Odd.  I've asked Roger if he could have a look.--Bob M (talk) 15:28, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Ghoti (talk) 19:05, 1 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ghoti for posting this notice here in the Teacher's room, and thanks Bob for the email heads up as I have not been following Teflpedia lately and would have missed this. Yes, this is odd. It might be something to do with Dathorn's (our webhost's) security filters. Not sure. But I seem to have fixed Heteronym and Template:IPA pages so that they are editable again. The Punctuation page's problem may be similar but I haven't got it fixed yet. So far I have only identified that a 403 problem is introduced into the wiki code of that page in this edit: http://teflpedia.com/index.php?title=Heteronym&diff=35948&oldid=35088 . I'll have to study that some more. This 403 error probably got triggered after Dathorn updated their security filters. I'll try to pinpoint the text on the Punctuation page that is triggering the error, later tonight or tomorrow. Also, we will want to find other pages containing these problems and fix them. Will take some study... :-) Roger (talk) 00:36, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Roger, for your research. I understand that if we want to write &#39;a&#39; or &#39;b&#39; we can't type simply 'a' or 'b&#39;. Now we must do a trick, such as &amp;#39; instead of one of the apostrophes ('a' or 'b&amp;#39;). Ghoti (talk) 02:04, 3 October 2014 (UTC)

I added some of my findings (together with Roger's explanation) in Teflpedia:Error 403. Ghoti (talk) 12:45, 3 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thanks Ghoti for creating that Teflpedia:Error 403 error fact page. Dang that was a tricky business finding the multiple triggers, but I got the Punctuation page cleaned up now. I think it only had three problems on it but it took me a while to isolate them. I did it by pasting one section at a time from that page into the Teflpedia:Sandbox page and trying the "Show preview" button. It looks like the word "or" followed by something in plain single quotes triggers the 403 security filter, but double quotes or curly single quotes are okay. We can cut and paste the curly quotes from the "Cut-n-paste" list below the edit window when we want to follow the word "or" with something in single quotes, to avoid the 403 error. Dang, that pattern may be on more pages. Alas, we will find them. And there is the issue of the word "class" in table markup, also. --Roger (talk) 01:05, 5 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Another solution (that I added to Teflpedia:Error 403) is to replace or by o&amp;#x72;. Also we could replace the o by &amp;#x6f; as in &amp;#x6f;r. Ghoti (talk) 13:38, 7 October 2014 (UTC)