Manual talk:IPv6 support

Format of address

This page claims that:

MediaWiki expands all IPv6 addresses to their entire length (however, the number of digits in a single group between colons is always the minimum. For example 2001:db8:: expands to 2001:db8:0:0:0:0:0:0

But this doesn't seem to be always the case: The revision [1] shows as created by the IP 2002:3e8e:71b::3e8e:71b (notice the ::). Is there any reason for this? Or is it just some sort of historical artifact? Is there any chance this could be fixed?

This is problematic for two reasons:

1. For me, this is a problem, because the address appears the same way in XML dump, which I parse in my project.
2. This also seems to mean that Special:Contributions doesn't work for this address: fi:Special:Contributions/2002:3e8e:71b::3e8e:71b returns an empty list. (I'll post a bug about this to bugzilla shortly.)

Svick (talk) 11:45, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Visually you might see the ::, but MediaWiki still stores it with :0:0 - see how the IP's talk page's title is formatted.--Jasper Deng (talk) 15:28, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

1. No, it doesn't (toolserver query):

mysql> select rev_id, rev_user, rev_user_text from revision where rev_id = 72074;
+--------+----------+-------------------------+
| rev_id | rev_user | rev_user_text           |
+--------+----------+-------------------------+
|  72074 |        0 | 2002:3e8e:71b::3e8e:71b |
+--------+----------+-------------------------+

2. I don't actually care how it's stored in the DB, I care how it's represented in the XML dump (and whether Special:Contributions works).

Svick (talk) 16:31, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Well, I said that purely based on user pages. But yes, I do see this bug... I don't seem to see it elsewhere on Wikimedia. The thing is, Special:Contribs automatically turns an address into the expanded (::-less) form when you enter it into Special:Search, or when you go to the IP talk page from contribs.--Jasper Deng (talk) 00:19, 18 September 2013 (UTC)