+=== Changes since MediaWiki 1.31.0-rc.2 ===
+* (T195783) Initialize PSR-4 namespaces at same stage as normal autoloader.
+* (T196092) Hide MySQL binary/utf-8 charset option in the installer.
+* (T196185) Don't allow setting $wgDBmysql5 in the installer.
+* (T196125) php-memcached 3.0 (provided with PHP 7.0) is now supported.
+* (T182366) UploadBase::checkXMLEncodingMissmatch() now works on PHP 7.1+
+* (T118683) Fix exception from &$user deref on HHVM in the TitleMoveComplete hook.
+* (T196672) The mtime of extension.json files is now able to be zero
+* (T180403) Validate $length in padleft/padright parser functions.
+* (T143790) Make $wgEmailConfirmToEdit only affect edit actions.
+
+=== Changes since MediaWiki 1.31.0-rc.0 ===
+* (T33223) Drop archive.ar_text and ar_flags.
+* Add default edit rate limit of 90 edits/minute for all users.
+* (T187645) Use codepoint as tiebreaker when getting first-letters in
+ IcuCollation.
+* (T191947) Don't shell during the installer if shelling out is disabled.
+* (T194319) Improve duplicate config setting exception as part of extension
+ registration.
+* (T195211) Don't require trailing slash in PSR-4 autoloader directory.
+* (T186565) Fix PHP Notice from `ob_end_flush()` in `FileRepo::streamFile()`.
+* Do not incorrectly hide namespace input field in the installer.
+* (T186456) Refactor checks looking for PEAR maik libraries to be clearer.
+
+=== Important pre-upgrade notes for 1.31 ===
+* If you're using MySQL, SQLite, or MSSQL, are not using update.php to apply
+ schema changes, and cannot have downtime to run migrateArchiveText.php and
+ apply patch-drop-ar_text.sql manually, you'll have to apply a default value
+ to the ar_text and ar_flags columns of the archive table or make those
+ columns nullable before upgrading to MediaWiki 1.31.
+ maintenance/archives/patch-nullable-ar_text.sql shows how to do this for MySQL.