Coda: Arcane Rituals
31 Oct, 2024
This is a seeeecret article! The main article is here...
Earlier this year, I watched a video about the musician Joji's quest to delete a FANDOM wiki dedicated to him. The incident in question happened about a decade ago, and the resulting changes in FANDOM's software have left some of the records mentioned in the video totally unreadable, to the point that the video creator assumed they were deleted. The only evidence of these records' existence is an orphaned page (named Thread:Jojireal/@comment-139.57.211.59-20141205182307/@comment-25515332-20141205194206) which was in Joji's account contributions. Based on the page name, the record in question was once part of a thread on Joji's message wall that involved an anonymous user ("139.57.211.59") and Joji ("Jojireal"). Reconstructing the rest of the thread would prove to be challenging. Also, for some reason, the software insisted that the title of this page was actually Talk:Jojireal/@com... instead of the correct title Thread:Jojireal/@com....
In this case, it turns out that there were only two participants in the thread: Joji and the anonymous user. This means that theoretically, I could have just gone to Special:Contributions/139.57.211.59, found the messages, assembled the thread, and called it a day. But I didn't know there were only two participants at the time that I performed this experiment, and so I will detail the events as I have experienced them. If there had been messages from several different users in this thread, then using the following excruciating method would have been an absolute requirement for its reconstruction.
I began my journey by recognizing that this discussion occurred within the subpages of Thread:Jojireal. "Thread" is an old namespace associated with the archaic MediaWiki versions of Message Walls and Forums, which were custom-made by FANDOM and therefore not part of the base MediaWiki software. In order to find the subpages of Thread:Jojireal, I had to navigate to Special:AllPages and search from there. The default namespace it searches under is "Main", so I needed to set it to "Thread". The problem is that the dropdown menu on Special:AllPages, which allows changing between namespaces, no longer contains "Thread" because it's deprecated. But, "Thread" still exists in the MediaWiki software. In the webpage URL, I could see that "Main" has an ID number of 0, and selecting other namespaces presented an ID number of 1, 2, 3, and so on.
In order to find out what the ID number for "Thread" was, I ended up consulting FANDOM's MediaWiki API (something no end-user should ever have to do). Using some API commands I quickly learned from the MediaWiki documentation, I was able to determine that "Thread" had the ID number 1201. So, going back to the webpage URL, I substituted ID # 0 with ID # 1201 and submitted the query.
The bullet points in the query results were fucking blank. But it's not like there was nothing there; using developer tools, I was able to see that each bullet point still contained a link to each page. The links were just invisible for some fucking reason. In order to proceed, I had to manually locate each subpage link for Thread:Jojireal using developer tools, open them, and read them until I found the ones I was looking for.
Some links worked just fine, but others would just redirect me to Message_Wall:Jojireal, with an error saying that "this message no longer exists", which is simply not true given that the page is listed in Special:AllPages. In order to ensure these broken redirects weren't the message I was looking for, I tried to append ?redirect=no to the URL to ensure the page didn't redirect, which happened anyway. So I appended &action=raw to the URL in order to view the raw text of the page. Instead of behaving like a normal raw MediaWiki page and being readable in the browser, the browser just downloaded the page as a text file. I opened this file up in my text editor which revealed that the message was ... a default fucking welcome message from the welcome bot.
Eventually, I was able to find the original post from the anonymous user at Thread:Jojireal/@comment-139.57.211.59-20141205182307. Thank God there were just a handful of posts, imagine doing all of this manually to reconstruct a much larger thread... Anyway, after reading every subpage, I was able to assemble the thread properly:
sincere question
139.57.211.59 (18:23, 05 December 2014):
"hey joji, why do you insist on not having your personal information be shared on the wiki?"
Jojireal (19:42, 05 December 2014):
"Would you like personal information about you put on blast by people you don't know on the internet? If you do, that's fine. I just like my privacy. Thank you!"
139.57.211.59 (19:36, 10 December 2014):
"but why do you go through so much trouble to keep it a secret? people respect you as an actor and if what you said about star wars is really true, people will know your personal information sooner or later. i just find it baffling to want to go into the film industry when you're worried about your personal information being revealed."
What a nightmare...