MediaWiki upgrade problems

The Compressed Output Problem

Unintelligible ASCII symbol characters after upgrade.

My wiki is hosted on GoDaddy. I used Installatron to create the original installation.

When I upgraded to version 1.35 and 1.36 of MediaWiki, all I saw on the welcome page was undecipherable strings of ASCII characters and symbols. The page was completely illegible and unintelligible. The image in the thumbnail is from a MediaWiki discussion on Discord.

Solution for MediaWiki 1.35 upgrade

Disable output compression in LocalSettings.php:

## Uncomment this to disable output compression
$wgDisableOutputCompression = true;

Solution for MediaWiki 1.36 upgrade

If you already have an .htaccess file in the root folder of your MediaWiki installation, add this line to it:

SetEnv no-gzip 1

Or create an .htaccess file with that line.

I do not understand why $wgDisableOutputCompression was not sufficient. I had my 1.35 installation running side-by-side with the 1.36 installation. The two versions each had their own folder, but both connected to the same database through the configuration in LocalSettings.php. 1.35 worked perfectly while 1.36 produced gobbledeygook.

Lost formatting and images

It is essential that $wgScriptPath be set correctly. If not, the software can't find the image and skins folders.

I am not sure how I caused this problem, but I saw it a couple of times while trying to solve the main problem of seeing encrypted content instead of a properly formatted wiki page.

$wgScriptPath = '/mywiki';