Benjamin Bloodworth's Blog

Posts Tagged ‘mediawiki’

I don’t know if this problem exists for older versions of mediawiki or not, but today I ran into a problem getting MediaWiki 1.15.0 to work. Everything worked fine when browsing existing urls. Whenever I tried creating a new page remotely, I kept getting a 404 error. Whenever I tried creating a new page locally from the server, it worked fine. I believe this has something to do with the way MediaWiki 1.15.0 is returning a 404 status and IIS 7’s feature of returning detailed error information when browsing a website locally and limited error information when browsing remotely.

Solution

To solve the problem, follow these steps:

1. Open IIS Manager.
2. Expand the Sites node.
3. Click on the website container where you have installed MediaWiki.
4. Double click Error Pages.
5. Right click on the line for Status Code 404 and choose Edit Feature Settings.
6. Check the Detailed errors setting from the Edit Error Pages Settings dialog window and click the ok button.

Drawbacks

It’s generally not a good idea to return detailed error messages to remote clients. This change treats all 404 messages as though you were creating new pages, so no error message is ever returned. Search engines also don’t like it when your website doesn’t return 404 errors. If anyone has a better solution, please let me know in the comments.