Teyora

News and development updates

What is this?

Teyora is an in development patrol and editing tool for all Wikimedia Wikis. It's being developed by User:Ed6767.

What's the aim?

Key: Main goal, stretch target

• User friendly
• Social features
• Patrol multiple wikis at once
• Highly yet securely expandable by the community
• Basic features on all Wikimedia Wikis, advanced features on more advanced ones
• Excellent editing experience (VisualEditor, Monaco, etc.)
• Web based Huggle alternative
• Web based AutoWikiBrowser alternative (with appropriate extension)

History

Teyora has been in development in some shape or form since July 2020, with development halting in November 2020 before being restarted a year later in 2021 by User:Ed6767. The project started out as RedWarn React, which aimed to be the successor to the RedWarn user script (now Ultraviolet), one of the most popular counter-vandalism tools on the English Wikipedia. It broke off in November 2021 and heavy development has been ongoing since then and very little of the original RedWarn React codebase remains.

Languages

On release it will be available in British English and machine translated into German, European Spanish and Simplified Chinese. I'm aiming to have it on translatewiki soon.

What's the difference between this and [popular tool]?

Teyora is a web app, which means you don't have to download anything and it's completely separate from your Wiki, unlike a user script or gadget. This also means it's much more powerful and extendable. It's also been built with user experience in mind.

Security

Under the hood, Teyora is an extremely complex web application with multiple layers of security.

• Securing OAuth tokens - your OAuth tokens are encrypted and are not stored by the server which greatly reduces the risk of your account being compromised. The encrypted "key" is sent to the server for decryption to make requests to a Wiki, then immediately disposed.
• Securing extensions - whilst most extensions will have full control of the client like a user script or gadget, approved extensions in Teyora's extension store go through a code review and approval process. The store will also use a signature based authentication method to ensure that changes being made to the code on the external repository are legitimate.
• Two factor authentication - stop your Wikimedia account from using Teyora without an authentication code from an authentication app. This may be useful to prevent abuse.

Jobs

Instead of waiting for tasks to be completed, Teyora will queue "jobs" that will be completed in the background. Some jobs may rely on another job, for example warning a user will depend on whether the edit has actually been reverted. This means that you can continue to patrol edits whilst completing other actions - if these fail, you'll be notified and you can take the appropriate action.

Feeds

Feeds can come from two sources:

1. Categories
2. Extensions

Extensions are most likely the most used type as they allow for live recent changes feeds. All edits in feeds are queued to ensure that you can read the edits and to reduce the load on your browser, so for feeds with lots of edits (such as Wikidata) you should set filters appropriately to reduce latency between edits being made and them being shown.

Who's involved?

As early development is in process, only User:Ed6767 at the moment. However, the project and some design inspiration wouldn't have been possible without User:Chlod, User:Prompt0259, User:sportzpikachu and User:Leijurv.

Administration

Teyora is a powerful tool, and with great power comes great responsibility.

Teyora is a service that runs the Teyora software. This means that you are well within your right to launch your own Teyora instance with your own policies, just as you can with MediaWiki, however by using the public Teyora instance you are expected to respect our policies and the trust given to you by the community to use powerful tools like Teyora. Full details will be in the terms of service upon release, but in short:

• Teyora is hosted by Wikimedia Cloud Services, but not endorsed or developed by the Wikimedia Foundation.
• Teyora is an independent tool with its own administration and policies (to be developed) that can suspend your use at any time if necessary for any reason if it is felt you may be at risk of causing damage to any Wiki.
• Don't try to circumvent any restrictions in place, as it is very likely that tamper detection will be triggered and your account may be automatically suspended pending a review.
• Please only use the Wikimedia version of Teyora for Wikimedia projects. We won't approve any extensions that are made to allow Teyora to connect to external Wikis.

Teyora is only available to semi-confirmed users, who can usually leave a "restricted" mode once they are extended-confirmed on any Wiki and have shown they can use Teyora or other semi-automated tools responsibly (subject to a short review by Teyora or local administrators). Users with rollback or sysop permissions on any Wiki are eligible for auto approval. Once a user has left the restricted mode, they can edit on any Wiki with Teyora without limitations.

If your Wiki would like a different process, you can request your Wiki to be completely unavailable on Teyora until a user has a role (such as rollback). To do this, please open an RFC on an appropriate talk page, and if the restrictions are accepted it will be integrated as soon as possible. For technical reasons, there is no way to place users in a restricted mode on a wiki by wiki basis.

Gallery

Teyora pre-release photos

• 
  Workspace Selector rough concept design
• 
  Teyora patrol prior to redesign
• 
  Eligibility check (light theme)
• 
  First time setup introduction
• 
  Setting up your profile
• 
  RedWarn React