Talk:Main Page

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Revision as of 17:12, 21 May 2011 by Chat (Talk | contribs) (Revert reasons)

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Item Shop Inventories

I have noticed that there is not a comprehensive list of item shops (as far as I can find) and this could be a useful thing to put on the Wiki. This would help people find particular items which they want or need and is also a large but relatively easy project for me to research since I'm kind of a newbie. Can someone with some experience in adding to the Wiki tell me if this is a good idea? --Thistleryver 04:54, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

While it is something that would be worthwhile, especially if items are browse appraised (unfortunately you have to do it one item at a time), but since but Kefka has already made a fine database here I guess I don't feel an urgency to redo it all. --Frazyl 05:18, 14 April 2011 (UTC)

Judge

As of this announcement, judge now works in a completely different way. This means that:

  • All of the existing weapons rating data is invalid.
  • We can't use the judge-method to determine a weapon's rating either.

There will be a short period of silence, followed by a long period of swearing, followed by changes to several templates. Please bear with me. --Chat 19:08, 10 January 2011 (UTC)

OK, I now think we've got enough research on Judge to start putting weapon ratings back in. A word of caution, however: Please don't add any weapon ratings in unless you:
  1. Have read Research:Judge
  2. Have a JIR of at least 220 in the appropriate weapon class (If you don't know what a JIR is, go back to step 1).
Or your information won't be accurate.
--Chat 19:46, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

Spam

We seem to have a new breed of spammers (you can recognize them by their usernames, which comprise of a name followed by a random sequence of numbers) that are able to defeat the captcha to create accounts and then insert spam URLs into pages. Because they're using logged-in accounts, we can't use semi-protection to defend against them.

There are, however, a few things we can do:

  • At the moment, all user accounts are immediately promoted to auto-confirmed user accounts - what this means is that they're immediately able to edit semi-protected pages. We could change the default settings for auto-confirmation (would require Drakkos to do, but should be trivial) such that user accounts must make a minimum number of edits and exist for a minimum number of days before they are autoconfirmed - this is what most other wikis do, and would put spammers back at the mercy of our protection-settings.
  • Of interesting note is that all the pages targetted by this type of spammer have 'armour' somewhere in their title (presumably to create some sort of association with 'health shield' or some such). If they start getting annoying, we could just full-protect pages with 'armour' in the title for a while. Obviously, this has the downside of stopping anyone else from editing them too, however.
  • I'm not sure whether there are known vulnerabilities with reCaptcha that have been patched in a more recent version; if so then perhaps a simple upgrade will resolve matters.

--Chat 00:11, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Changing auto confirmed settings would be the best option I reckon. Rehevkor 14:59, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I agree. Though I wouldn't be opposed to temporarily full-protecting those pages if it kicks up again (seems to have stopped now, so maybe it was a one-off thing, knock wood), since they're not exactly busy pages. --Ilde 19:00, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I just had to revert the armour page again :( Zexium 04:03, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
and now the category:armour page .... I've tried something that assumes the script will abort if it finds an apparently already spammed page ... there's an html comment containing what looks like the spamlink as a wikilink - fingers crossed Zexium 05:10, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
Based on how spambots have behaved in the past, I really really doubt they check the page first before spamlinking - it's just not worth their time/coding effort to do so over the blunt-force approach. There've been several pages where spambots merrily competed with themselves to rewrite links in the past, before someone got around to protecting them. In any case, I don't like the idea of putting their links into comments, as:
  • It feels too much like doing their job for them, and would achieve their goal if someone naive/stupid started editing an article and felt like following the strange, commented out link.
  • Let's say it worked, and the spambot had a script that realized the page was already spammed. I think it's possible the spambot would then have logic that says 'Aha, some of my spam still exists here! Here's a wiki that's not closely monitored, where spam/vandalism aren't cleaned up very often. Focus spam effort on this wiki!'
  • Note that the spam links appear to have some kind of revision ID in them. I assume that's going to get changed after a while (to make naive string-matching based anti-spam systems fail to spot it), at which point all the commented out links will be useless.
I'm removing the commented out link for now. If we get much more spam, I'll try locking down the armour pages for a while. --Chat 10:54, 8 January 2011 (UTC)

Another idea if the update of reCaptcha doesn't stop spammers and they make it through the time limit and number of edits would be to make accounts not auto-confirm themselves automatically.

Instead, having admin users approve new users manually either on request or regularly (by checking if there's a discworld user by that name?) would probably frustrate spammers enough that they move on elsewhere.

I'm not sure which is least annoying to actual new users, to have to go through a testing period or ask someone through the mud. For catching spammers it would be spotting bad small edits vs approving new users regularly.

--Frazyl 20:02, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Archiving

The main talk page was getting pretty big, so I've archived the old bits off.

The process for doing this is:

  • Archive talk pages when you start seeing the "WARNING: This page is X kilobytes long; some browsers may have problems editing pages approaching or longer than 32kb. Please consider breaking the page into smaller sections." message when editing them.
  • Move any sections which have not had edits within the last 30 days to the archive page.
  • The archive page is called 'Talk:pagename/Archive X', where X is 1, 2, 3, etc.
  • Put the {{talkarchive}} template at the top of each archive page.
  • Put (or update) the {{archives}} template at the top of the main talk page.

--Chat 17:25, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Viewing figures

Just thought you guys might like to know - unique daily visits to the site for the month of December 2009 broke 1,000 - we hit 1,001, as a matter of fact.

For interest, here are the figures for the past few months:


Mar 2010        1104
Feb 2010        1212
Jan 2010        1114
Dec 2009 	1001 	
Nov 2009 	919 	
Oct 2009 	796 	
Sep 2009 	676 	
Aug 2009 	540 	
Jul 2009 	398 	
Jun 2009 	279 	
May 2009 	165

Great work everyone - many thanks for your continued work in making this wiki a great resource for DW players everywhere! Drakkos 21:54, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

January 2010 hit 1114 unique daily visits, FWIW. Drakkos 00:21, 2 February 2010 (UTC)
February 2010 : 1212
Interesting. Increasing fairly consistently. Rehevkor 13:31, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Quest pages

What's the plan for the quest pages to remain in sync? That is, quests are duplicated on several pages, odds are modifications on one page won't be made on all of them unless everyone is aware that the quest is also present on another page.

I thought that maybe there was a wiki thing in place so that sections from one page came from another or that they mirrored each other but apparently not. Not sure if that's something that actually exists. Anyone know?

Barring that, should we remove duplicate quests and replace some of them with links? Or some other way to keep all the quest text in sync?

I came up with some ways to handle the issue:

  • Make a page for every quest, the other pages link to the quest page. Downside is there will be lots of pages.
  • Put all quests on one page, then the other pages link to the section of the quest. Probably a bad idea because the page would be too big.
  • Make sure each quest is only on one page and that other pages are only links. Would need to decide on a level (domain/area/city) which would hold the real quest text.
  • Add comments in the source of duplicated quests that the other version needs to be updated as well. People could miss that though.
  • Insert idea here.

Or does everyone feel quests duplicated on several pages is no big deal after all? Frazyl 22:31, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

The third one would be easiest, but... eh. The first one is probably the best solution (possibly we could even stop using hidden text), but I don't like that they would then show up in Special:Random. They do currently, but it's not especially important because 1)there are comparatively few of them, and 2)spoilers are hidden and mostly below the fold anyway. There are only 1,234 content pages currently, so if we added a few hundred quest pages they'd be a significant portion of that. Maybe if we had a separate namespace ([1]) for them? Then they wouldn't show up randomly. --Ilde 02:23, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
A separate namespace sounds good especially if it allows us to show the text unhidden. As it turns out Special:Random also excludes redirects, so we could add redirects from the normal namespace for pages people might search or we want to link to... Probably only entry pages with warnings like Category:Quest pages and Unofficial_Quest_Solutions. --Frazyl 02:53, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
I actually like the hidden text as it enables me to uncover the mystery line by line if required (for example if I get stuck just because I cannot figure out the right verb, "exacto" comes to mind...). --Gunde 23:19, 31 March 2010 (UTC)

So, will someone create a quest namespace for quest articles? Or should we put them in the research namespace?

The primary advantage of a quest namespace is that this will stop quest pages appearing in Special:Random, which can send someone who doesn't want to be spoiled to a quest page and it will stop them appearing in default search (happens when the article doesn't exist) Special:Search, which will reveal the context of the search, that is unhidden quest info.

--Frazyl 18:31, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

AFAIK, creating a new namespace requires editing the server's LocalSettings.php; as such it's something that only Drakkos can do, so you should speak to him.
Please don't move quests into the Research: namespace - that will end up polluting Research: with things that aren't research, and we don't want that.
--Chat 22:45, 7 May 2010 (UTC)
Hey, what about the Help: namespace? It is somewhat appropriate and not really in use (the only thing in it is Help:Contents), and I don't think Special:Random catches pages in it.
--Ilde 18:42, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so I came up with a few ideas to improve quest pages. For the namespace I was waiting for the captcha to be installed first so as not to ask too much at once...

So I made a template {{Prehidden}} that basically is like {{prebox}} with white on white text. The advantage of prebox is that it preserves line breaks and spaces and other characters without breaking out too easily as with <p> (making a list with * or : makes everything after visible) while removing then obsolete <br> tags and allowing some formatting like bold or italic. Also it puts a pretty box around the text.

See Alchemists'_Guild_quests for examples.

If it is agreeable we could turn {{Hidden}} like {{Prehidden}} unless there something that I didn't think of.

As for quest duplication, it is possible to include pages with {{Include}}. It's only a matter of merging quests into the subpage and the template includes them with formatting and a link to the included page.

As for what includes what Unofficial_quest_solutions looks good, there's some difference to the structure of the Discworld quest pages though.

If we get a namespace for quests, I was thinking that each quest could get its own page in non-hidden text, which would then be included in the lists in {{Prehidden}} boxes. So if you don't want to be spoiled too much you can check the lists and to edit the quest and to be spoiled it would be easier to see it all at once in the quest page. It would use a tweaked include template.

--Frazyl 07:02, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Ooooo! The include templates are a neat solution for the duplication issue; kudos for that. --Ilde 03:04, 12 June 2010 (UTC)

Slight issue, when including a page with the template include it doesn't work. You'd think it would check if there really was a loop, but no it just refuses to do anything. The only workaround that comes to mind is to make duplicate {{Include}} templates, one per level. --Frazyl 07:14, 11 June 2010 (UTC)


Ok all pages have the same format and duplicate quests have all been merged except for Sentimentalist and Distant Exhibitionist which have several versions.

Some quests fitted several areas, put them in the most important area. To place a quest in several areas would mean putting the quests in individual quest pages and including those in all list pages that is concerned, but we said that would be too many pages so we'd need the quest namespace. --Frazyl 02:01, 9 July 2010 (UTC)


It occurred to me that while we can't include the text of the quests that could go in several places in more than one place (because we can't include sections, only pages as far as I know with mediawiki) we could place links to the quest.

Might be worth going through the quests vs the mud quest pages to put stubs for quests missing and links to quests that are somewhere else, at some point.

--Frazyl 23:20, 13 July 2010 (UTC)

Articles that are categories

I've noticed a few of these. Categories that are masquerading as articles. One example being Category:Dibbler_clones - all the information there should be in an article. I've noticed several of these scattered about. Would be there be any opposition to cleaning this up? Rehevkor 23:21, 18 December 2010 (UTC)

And also, bred and butter information such as this should not be in categories as they will not show on default searches. Rehevkor 23:22, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
Category:Furniture is a pretty bad offender too. Rehevkor 23:30, 18 December 2010 (UTC)
I'm not so sure about this. If I search for "dibbler" or "dibbler clones" then the category obviously doesn't show up in search without someone creating a redirect for it. (Redirect to specific clone within the clones page might be ugly or bad usability?) But I think there should be a page for Dibbler himself, which includes a link to dibbler clones. Meanwhile the clones page shows under category NPCs, and the pages of each of those NPCs can be grouped together that way.
Furniture is an example but is it good or bad? It has a redirect from the search term "furniture" which could also be a Furniture page (instead of category page) that explains furniture in general. The Furniture would probably need a link to the furniture category because individual pieces of furniture can certainly deserve their own wiki pages. In this case a few of them already have one and Category:Furniture indexes them nicely. Whatever is the final setup Furniture should probably also happen to Container(s) (which is a sibling category but not really parent or child) and its potential sub-category Scabbard(s). (Both currently pages but individual containers or scabbards could well have their own pages, especially if there's something special about them that needs explaining like involved acquisition, unique commands, room chat etc.
Similar discussion might also happen under Category_talk:Items since the big Items and Weapons category pages are being cleaned up right around now.
Rhonwen 12:37, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Well the purpose of categories are to list articles currently within the wiki. The ability to add text to them is just so a brief description can be added, no information should be there that isn't already in the article space. I see no reason why this information should be listed within a category page. As for the furniture page, a good option would be to move it to Furniture and split the list itself into List of furniture, or similar. These articles can all be categorised/subcategorised as required but the infornation should be in the article space. Rehevkor 15:15, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
Hmmm. Well, I guess since it's messing up searching, it would be better to split them. It's just a bit annoying to me to have what's basically one thing split up into several pages (I mean, the category itself is a bit of an afterthought... for most furniture, I see no reason whatsoever they should have separate pages--since all the relevant information about them is in the list (in a superior format, imo, since you can easily compare it with others that way), it's just very redundant and basically extra work to make... clutter) so that you have to hunt around and wikiwalk to find something. But meh.
Maybe it would be best to just have Category:Furniture, Furniture and List of storage furniture (since that one list is really the thing making that page huge).
--Ilde 18:40, 19 December 2010 (UTC)
I guess Category-articles started off with a need to have the category pages be more useful, to combine purposes to make them more complete, especially when the content is (initially anyway) rather small. Or maybe you want to include all the member pages which you can do for free in the category page, sort of like a See also section that updates itself when anticipated new pages come in (which may not actually show up).
I suppose the list of member pages can be seen as adding little to the page, especially when they are also integrated in the text or tables... But if you do want to include them I don't think you can otherwise without adding a module. It's possible to include a normal page inside a category, but then if it's not just parts of it it's just a duplicate page without the list of member pages.
For the technical search issue it should be possible to add the Category namespace (or any other namespace) to the default search of anonymous users and users who have not changed it in preferences. There's also many other namespaces in this wiki that are not searched by default: "Discworld MUD Wiki", talk pages, user pages, template pages, Research...
So beyond the search issue which looks fixable, is it better to have category-articles with list of member pages or is this wholly undesirable or what's the criteria that makes it bad/ok?
--Frazyl 08:36, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
Hrmmmm, maybe. I think I'm coming around to the "categories shouldn't also be articles" view a bit, though, even if the search thing isn't insurmountable. I mean, in some instances it does clearly seem to be better to have them separate, like with Weapons and Category:Weapons, because the pages are for fairly different things. I was going to hold up Category:Contractor npcs as one where it does seem to work better for the information to be in the category, but actually I think that can be moved to Real estate decoration, where it will fit better. It might be neater to do them all consistently, instead of only separating them out when one or both aspects are really large... also, I guess if you click on a category from a page in the category, it's probably in order to see what pages there are that are similar, so the bit you'd be looking for is the category bit, and it's nice to have it right there rather than at the very bottom after a bunch of other stuff you need to scroll past.
One that's caught my attention is Category:Finding_and_seeking. Well, I like the table, and it's not as big as Category:Furniture was, but it seems a bit... I don't know. Like it would be better to have the table on a separate page. And maybe rename it all, too--the current name is more than a little unintuitive (I remember the search for a title that actually encompassed all the things in the category...). Maybe Scrying and tracking methods? /tangent
And of course the aforementioned Category:Dibbler clones is pretty similar. They've both got the useful tables of everything/everyone that is (or should be) in that category and in both cases separating it out would pretty much just involve cutting a chunk out of the article, moving it to a similarly-named page, and cross-linking. There does seem to be something weird about having a list of pages in a category, and then, underneath it, having the "Pages in category" thing that every category has.
--Ilde 06:35, 25 December 2010 (UTC)
Ok that makes sense. I'll leave Category:Finding_and_seeking for you to do. Maybe just Seeking methods? Since there's no seek command and seeking can mean seeing from afar it's a bit more generic that find.
--Frazyl 03:52, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
I don't know, Seeking methods as a name has the same problem with being sort of awkward and unintuitive, I think. While track is a command, in context I think it'd be clear that the category's broader than just that command (and the article titles wouldn't be similar enough that linking to the wrong one would be likely to be a problem)... and "ways to track someone" seems like a natural way to describe track, Find, Find Corpse, or flying to someone (actual scrying stuff, too, but there's an extra level there in that you have to recognize the room... a less direct (even if potentially more informative) way to find someone. I do think they're alike enough that they should all be in one category as they are currently, though).
Also, eh, some of the things in there--A Cup of Tea and Sake, Far Sight, Worstler's Advanced Metallurgical Glance and Worstler's Elementary Mineralogical Glance aren't really about finding people/things as such, but they are definitely scrying.
--Ilde 06:01, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
I don't think the name needs to be exactly what everyone will type. Say they type find, they'll see the links back to the more generic page. We can add links at the top and bottom, some redirects...
Actually, the far seeing things fit with seek because you're seeking those locations and seeking beings, corpses, etc. whereas track doesn't work so much for everything.
--Frazyl 06:57, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Well... it's not going to be what everyone would think to call it anyway, but I think titles that are at least intuitive once you've seen them are better (I know there are pages I've made with sort of wonky titles, but it's because I couldn't think of anything better :( ). I mean, we have Category:Light sources, not Category:Things with brightness. And it should be pretty clear what a page/category is about from the title, which I'm not sure is true for it currently.
Not everything fits under tracking, no, but the others fit under scrying.
--Ilde 18:23, 26 December 2010 (UTC)
Ok I vote just Seeking them. Simple and to the point and the definition in the free dictionary fits all. If a better name is found it can be moved. --Frazyl 21:33, 7 April 2011 (UTC)

Upcoming events

3 May 2011 Xola (Talk | contribs) (6,652 bytes) (n.b. prev edit doesn't mean I'm comin, people remaining=diffrent type of ppl frm whn I was @school, met few cool ppl alrdy. the culture of cres attractd OCD & PK obnoxiousness rathr thn creativity...)

3 May 2011 Xola (Talk | contribs) (6,651 bytes) (+ current/soon/previous events ( Category:Events ))

3 May 2011 Chat (Rolling back. Not worthy of being at the top of the main page, and clashes against the existing main page layout. Use the 'people of discworld' box if you really think this is necessary.)

15 May 2011 Xola (Oh come on,"not worthy"? :) Boxes too cluttered,current &upcoming stuff is *really* important, if more people knew was a place to put stuff up,would encourage more things being organised!)

15 May 2011 Frazyl (Considering there has not been any upcoming events, it seems better to put it in "People of Discworld". Now we could put it in the navigation sidebar but I'm not sure if the category is the best page.)

Stop thinking like librarians! :)

http://community-roundtable.com/2011/04/the-fallacy-of-the-organic-community/

Build it and they will come! Don't base it around what's there, make it an open environment for people to add and start new things, and it will happen! Probably!

Though I don't know why I'm doing it because none of the events are even vaguely social anymore just grindy stuff or related to minigames so pff, just nostalgia of what the place used to be I guess hehe

--Xola 09:57, 21 May 2011 (UTC)

No need to give it such prominence on the main page, there's already an events link in one of the boxes below. And there's no need to dick around with the formatting of the main page, it's fine how it is. I don't really wanna have to protect it. There's a whole wiki out there for you to create whatever articles you want. Rehevkor 14:19, 21 May 2011 (UTC)


And not long after I reverted the main page I put a link to Events in the navigation bar (to the left just below the turtle). So for a while now that link is present in ALL pages. Surely that's present enough? I suppose I could make it a different colour.
Now granted the page looks a bit messy right now, I think it would be best to turn it into a table but I haven't had the time yet. --Frazyl 19:00, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
Ok I put the Events link with a yellow background. Should stand out enough. You'll have to force refresh (not just refresh) the page to see it, or clear the cache of your browser. Or you can restart it. --Frazyl 19:20, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
I changed the Events page into a table, I think it looks usable. Just need people to add upcoming events or even past events to the table. I added some past events but getting dates for when it happened wasn't always easy. --Frazyl 20:48, 21 May 2011 (UTC)
The yellow link stands out even worse than the original overly-prominent link on the main page. Sorry, but I really don't think that's warranted - events is not the most important page in this wiki. Really it isn't. And punting it right up to the top of the main page, or putting it in an extra-special stand-out colour gives that impression.
Xole, there's a new events command in-mud (see here) which ought to cater to your needs. If you have events to advertise, that's the command to use. The wiki really isn't suited to being an announcement medium, nor is it intended to be. --Chat 21:12, 21 May 2011 (UTC)