User blog comment:Robin Patterson/Form:Person problem - we hope it's short-term/@comment-2763-20141207044117

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Robin Patterson (robin-p@slingshot.co.nz) http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/User:Robin_Patterson

User Robin Patterson reports a problem with feature "Form:Person (our main data input form)".

URL to problem page: http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:FormEdit/Person/Emanuel_Henry_Custer_%281806-1892%29

Description of issue:

This is probably one for Tim Q!

Something has happened in the last few days disabling the main function of Form:Person. It can no longer be used for its most important function, creating new person-articles.

Starting from Form:Person, we insert a proposed page name in the indicated field (as we have done thousands of times before) and click. We get told "You have requested a special page that is not recognized by Familypedia. A list of valid special pages can be found at ...". (It has been successfully recognized for about the last four years. It is still recognized when we click "Edit with form" for an existing page - see http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Familypedia-FormEdit-partlyOK.jpg )

We are referred to "Special pages" for a list of valid special pages. Going there, we find what we want, under "Semantic Forms" - labelled "Edit with form", it links to Special:FormEdit; i.e. http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/Special:FormEdit; we click on it - see http://familypedia.wikia.com/wiki/File:Familypedia-FormEdit-SpecialPage.jpg - nothing apparently invalid about that! Its red warning/instruction text says "This is the page for editing with a form. You must specify both a form name and a target page in the URL; it should look like 'Special:FormEdit?form= &target= ', or 'Special:FormEdit/ / '."

Even worse than creating a new page from scratch - with Form:Person - is the attempt to create a new person-page from a green button-link on an existing page. Parent or spouse, usually. That has been OK for several years but now produces a blank white pane.

Please help to restore proper functionality to one of Wikia's biggest sites.