Talk:Phabricator/Help

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See archives at Talk:Phabricator/Help/Archives.

Phabricator seems overwhelming for newbies. Beyond what's on this help page, how should one approach using it?

Hi folks! I found myself ending up on Phabricator when following/giving backing to T403793 20250901 enwiki dump is triple the normal size and adding some observations I'd made, suggesting a component had crashed out mid-process but the management script hadn't seen it. At point of posting the issue still persists, as can be seen Here, and is probably doing a lot of damage to WMFs data export bill for the fact most users are unlikely to notice that the dump is abnormally large and are downloading it anyway.

I've also contributed to a couple of other tasks (Primarily T29653 Provide dumps using bittorrent) and I'm tempted to create a new task/volunteer to try recreating a sane pages-articles-multistream dump from the non-multi pages-articles one (I get the impression this might be simpler than it sounds; At least if I can figure out scanning XML content from bzip2 output and chopping it with dd into individual bzip2 child processes while logging article counts/titles and applicable start offsets) if I can get around the fact the enwiki dump failed at such a point the main mirrors have only sync'd a small sub-set of the data, and I really don't like pulling large data off WMFs servers/increasing WMF's export bills if I can avoid it in any way.

However; pointing out that Phabricator is the first collaboration platform I've ever used (And let's be honest, it has huge scope), the only notification I've received is for a task I haven't interacted with (I saw the note about this in the help page) and I wonder if I'm contributing to tasks that have gone dead/fallen under the radar in a way and/or are not being seen/progressed?

It certainly feels like I'm trying to run an Orienteering course on unknown terrain with neither compass nor map, and I really haven't a clue how to find my way around everything e.g. to request permissions to add my IA account to the user group that's authorised to associate Wikipedia dumps with that IA collection (I've taken on transloading many of the non-English language dumps to IA recently) or to see if it's possible to obtain user-level SSH access to a server that has direct access to the dump content so torrents can be generated without me having to employ the mirrors, SneakerNet, and a friends connection 8km away to work around the speed and quota limitations imposed by my cellular connection.

tl,dr: I can see that it's the go-to location for filing bug reports, and that the majority of WMF projects are collaborated on there...But it also feels like a total whale of a space, at least to a newcomer. When trying to find the right place to get something done, how does one find that right place in a sea of tasks that presently run into the 400.000s?

¡Mucho gracias, y Many thanks!

ᛒᚱᛟᚴᛂᚾ ᚢᛁᚴᛁᚾᚷ (Broken Viking|T·C) 22:59, 10 September 2025 (UTC)

Request for Phabricator 2FA Reset

Hi Phabricator admin,

I've lost access to the two-step verification app on my phone and am currently unable to log in to Phabricator. Could you please help me reset my access? I work under @Gabriel Birke (WMDE)

Please let me know what details do you need from me to verify my account.

I apologize for the inconvenience. I've since switched to using a desktop app for 2FA and will make sure to back up my data more carefully in the future.

Thank you for your help.

Sincerely,

Tado (WMDE) Tado (WMDE) (talk) 13:24, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

I can confirm that I work with Tanuja and that it is really her and not some account-stealing impersonator who needs this 2FA reset. Please tell us if this confirmation is enough or if you need someone else from WMDE to confirm this. Gabriel Birke (WMDE) (talk) 13:00, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Hello Phabricator admin,

Could I please get this issue resolved? I need access to Phabricator for my work. Please let me know if you need any further information form my side regarding this. I am really looking forward to your reply.

Thank you in Advance.

Sincerely,

@Tado (WMDE) Tado (WMDE) (talk) 10:24, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

@Tado (WMDE) Hi, and sorry - I usually get email notifications about changes on this page and for unknown reasons I did not receive an email about your initial posting here. Ideally we'd verify this request via a video call; let me check what I can do. AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 15:46, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Request to change Phabricator username

Hi Phabricator admin,

I'm requesting a change to my Phabricator username. Please note that I have submitted this request previously, but my question was auto-archived so I'm posting again to request help.

My Phabricator username is currently SSalgaonkar-WMF (tied to this account) and I'd like to change it to Sucheta-Salgaonkar-WMF. The problem is that there is another Phabricator user whose username begins with "Sucheta", and they keep getting tagged in Phab threads instead of me (so I'm sometimes very late to Phabricator tickets/convos that are relevant to my work).

Could you please change my Phabricator username to Sucheta-Salgaonkar-WMF?

SSalgaonkar-WMF (talk) 18:01, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Done. taavi (talk!) 18:23, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Request to rename account following Global Rename

Hi, I'd like to request to rename my account from MicrobiologyMarcus ([1]) to Bobby Cohn to match my global name. Thank you. Bobby Cohn 🍁 (talk) 19:42, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Bobby Cohn, Phabricator usernames cannot contain spaces. Please specify how you would like that to be formatted. taavi (talk!) 18:24, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

@Taavi sorry for the follow up, I couldn't find the guidance anywhere. Are underscores allowed? Would Bobby_Cohn work, as this would follow the formatting in the project? If so, that would be my preference. Bobby Cohn 🍁 (talk) 18:27, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Done. taavi (talk!) 18:35, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Multi-word search does not succeeed

When I search for e.g. browser language, I don' t find (open) ticket phab:T110489 while the words "browser" and "langugage" are clearly in the title... Why don't I find this ticket? As a consequence, failing search can lead to duplicate ticket creation. Geertivp (talk) 08:41, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Geertivp: There are thousands of tickets with these two separate words so it is likely that some ticket is not under the first results. See mw:Phabricator/Help#Searching for items how to use prefixes like title: to search for text in the title only. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 02:44, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, this worked perfect. I will think about this next time. In the search pulldown I also found https://we.phorge.it/book/phorge/article/search, and Subscribed/Authored/Owned Items". Very usefull to all of us. --Geertivp 08:27, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Reenable my Phabricator account

I presume that the reason my account was disabled was because I raised the same issue (block-related) twice. I promise not to do something like this again. May I have another chance? Faster than Thunder (talk) 02:25, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

@JJMC89 Could you please respond as the one that disabled the account? P858snake (talk) 03:27, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

I wonder if I should create a new Wikimedia account to create a new account on Phabricator, but continue using this account to edit the projects. It's been enough time. Faster than Thunder (talk) 02:20, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/people/tasks/authored/32292/ for created tasks and the ratio of valid ones, plus see the comments in there. I can imagine those are hints for reasons.

Personally I'd disable any Phabricator account created to evade a block. AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 06:35, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Sandbox task

Would it be possible to have a Sandbox task in Phabricator where users can go and add badges, remove them, change the task status, subscribe, unsubscribe, etc.?

I’m quite new to Phabricator, and it feels a bit awkward to have to figure these things out on actual, ongoing tasks. It's moon (talk) 04:52, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

See https://phabricator.wmcloud.org/ AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 05:35, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

Thanks! It's moon (talk) 13:11, 1 October 2025 (UTC)