Talk:Main Page/Archive 2

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Skills

What's going on with this stuff?

Template:Ma.Me.Ph.Ev

Where I found that thing. I'm reluctant to just change it to straight links wherever I see it, because I'm not really sure what it's supposed to be doing. But I think something went horribly wrong with it, somewhere. --Ilde 20:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

I assume it was some grand plan to create links to skills which would then reside in their own skills namespace? Personally, I think that would be overkill. The random code after the boxes must have been speculatively added against the day that the ParserFunctions library would be installed.
Generally speaking, I've been removing these as I go along and replacing them with just plain links to skills (eg. magic.spells.offensive), as:
  • (Primarily) The code leaking out looks pretty bad, and it can always be added back in later if/as/when ParserFunctions is installed.
  • (Secondarily) I hate to say this, as someone clearly put time/effort into it, but the colours and boxes just look wrong in an article - they clash with the conventional formatting and make the skill unnecessarily stand out.
As an aside, I encountered some naming issues when building articles with skills in:
  • We don't want to use their common abbreviations (eg. 'ma.sp.of') as:
    • Not everyone uses the same abbreviations (eg. 'ma.sp.off').
    • There are some that are ambiguous (eg. the much cursed 'ma.me.me.ch' is either charming or channeling), and we probably want to create disambiguation pages for those.
    • The article title looks a little unprofessional.
  • Similarly, just using the leaf portion of the skills can also be ambiguous (eg. 'misc' or 'points').
  • However, these are both the sort of things that people will enter into the search box.
So far, I've been creating them with their full name, and at some point in the future I plan to add in the common abbreviations as redirects or disambiguations as required.
--Chat 21:33, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
It may be worth later creating something similar but less stylised, to create skill statements that look something like:[[Magic_(skill)|magic]].[[Magic_(skill)#Methods|methods]].[[Magic_(skill)#Methods.Mental|mental]].[[Magic_skill(skill)#Methods.Mental.Charming|charming]] (which comes out as: magic.methods.mental.charming) or just [[Magic_(skill)#Methods.Mental.Charming|magic.methods.mental.charming]]. Either way, if we use them as templates now instead of ordinary links, it becomes much easier to change later. --B (t) 22:13, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
That's true. Though personally I think it's nicer to just link the whole thing directly to the full skill (since if you link to every level it's easy to misread the whole thing as one link and click the wrong part--and how often do you care about a category skill, i.e. magic.methods, anyway?) and have the leaf skills in categories. So faith would be a category containing faith.rituals, faith.items, and faith.points; faith.rituals would be a subcategory containing faith.rituals.offensive, and so on. Not that templates would interfere with that, of course. --Ilde 03:13, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

These boxes are left over from the merging of my wiki with this one; the player who was adding the magic articles had a Grand Plan that I didn't quite understand, but it made her happy and looked like it was probably useful, so I went along with it. -TherionAndAlts 07:22, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Moved Newbie Guides Section...

...so that all our Newbie-Friendly articles are now in one place. To this end:
1. Added the articles and external links that were in "A Newbie's Guide to Discworld" to the Newbie Guides category.
2. Redirected the link on the main page to the category article.
3. Profit!
-TherionAndAlts 10:00, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Judge crackdown

Despite various pages indicating that this is unwise, people are still:

  • Creating/editing pages that imply that there are 10 judge categories (example: '08/10 (Very good)', here) - there aren't, there are actually 15.
  • Creating/editing pages that use someone's judge category to compare or rate weapons (example: Category:Excellent swords) - this isn't helpful as judge category is subjective - what you judge a weapon as isn't necessarily the same as what someone else does, depending on ad.ev.we bonuses.

Now, I don't attach any blame to individuals here - people can't be expected to read all talk/research pages, and many of the latest ones are probably arising from copy/pasting existing articles - however, this needs to stop.

So far, I've been taking a softly-softly approach on this subject:

  • {{infobox weapon}} will accept being called with just a judge category, and will even tolerate things like '8/10'.
  • I've set the template's documentation to request that people don't do this.

Unfortunately, this just isn't working - more of the offending articles keep being created - and the more people add articles with these issues in, the harder our future job will be to fix them. It's hard for me to contact individuals on this matter and ask them to stop, as many of such edits are made by anonymous IP.

To that end, I'm now taking a somewhat more forceful approach to this matter:

  • I've tweaked {{infobox weapon}} and {{judge}}. Any edits to pages using either of these as of a week from now will automatically refuse to display a judge rating, and will instead display nice red text requesting that the editor stop using the deprecated syntax and provide their bonus. Note that this should only affect edits after that date - so we won't suddenly get a giant swathe of red-texted infoboxes in existing articles at that point.
  • I've created two new warning templates - {{Judge category is subjective}} and {{There are not 10 judge categories}} - which I shall be adding to the worst offending articles. These can also be added to logged-in users' talk pages.
  • I propose deleting all of 'Category:Excellent swords/axes/maces/etc.', and shall do so in a week's time unless there are serious objections. For now, each of these will be tagged indicating that it is a candidate for deletion.

Obviously, these will be fairly drastic changes - therefore, I've time-delayed them by a week to give people time to discuss/object/complain. Until that time, all that will happen is that various articles will have warning tags added to them.

If you have any questions, objections, or other discussion on this subject, please raise them here in this section (remember to indent and sign your posts!).

--Chat 17:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

How strange; I wonder how the idea that there are ten judge categories got started, then.
  • goes off to edit the category pages*--Ilde 23:02, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I wondered that too; with hindsight it seems like a rash assumption, but I can think of several good reasons why people would have thought 10 to be the correct number:
  • Coilla's weapon page may have been the original source.
  • Many people have ad.ev.we bonuses in the region of 200, at which there are 10 categories (plus 'Poor' as 'category zero')
  • Quite a lot of other things (eg. vurdere, condition) have 10 or 10+1 categories.
  • 10 is a nice round number
--Chat 23:18, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Reasonable. Hmmm... I was going to suggest some "whatevers with ratings of 94 or over" categories to replace the "Excellent whatevers" ones, but that's not really necessary, what with the sortable tables. --Ilde 23:29, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

I've been the one creating the weapons articles, and yes, Coilla's was my original source (I've been judging the weapons myself but used Coilla's /10 system, since I hadn't yet run across any weapons worse than "pretty poor"). The IP in question is me; I occasionally forget to log in.

I wasn't aware of the discussion regarding this subject until just recently. In the future, if you wish to discuss something I'm doing, please leave it on my talk page, where I'm more likely to see it. ;)

I've updated the weapon pages (all of them as needs it, I believe) to reflect the proper number of judge categories. I propose repurposing the "Excellent" category pages to display weapons whose upper rating is 100; keeping the "100 club" (or whatever) page is handy given that many players will only wish to view the best weapons available in game.

Furthermore, these pages allow someone to sort only "100 club" weapons by weight, number of specials, and so on. Mind, if any of you know how to write a table with multiple sortable parameters, that'd be even better; but in the meantime, the pages perform a valuable function. -TherionAndAlts 12:04, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

See my comments at Talk:Judge (I moved the previous discussion from Research:Judge to there) - I think it's still pretty ambiguous as to what should/should not go in the 'best weapons' categories; and for that reason we're probably better off just sticking with a sortable list in the main category.
--Chat 16:24, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Multi-infoboxes

Ever wanted to add an article that had multiple infoboxes in it?

If so, you've probably come across the Ugly Infobox Stacking Problem, and ended up with something like this:

Main Page/Archive 2
Weapon information
Precise dimensions No information
Material No information
Weight Lots
Thaums/sec  ? stable / ? talisman / ? max
Hands 7+1
Commands Dest
Melee type Bad Type!
Judge data
Speed 1 extremely slow 1
Maximum damage 1 extremely low 1
Average damage 1 extremely low 1
Str Overall Attack ease Parry ease
Main Page/Archive 2
Stat item information
Con Dex Int Str Wis
+2 +1 0 -1 -2
Main Page/Archive 2
Poison information
Effect Pain
Other names

Appearance
Mn Pg
Ingredients
Crushed Womble Soul
(highlight to see)


Or, worse, this:

Main Page/Archive 2
Weapon information
Precise dimensions No information
Material No information
Weight Lots
Thaums/sec  ? stable / ? talisman / ? max
Hands 7+1
Commands Dest
Melee type Bad Type!
Judge data
Speed 1 extremely slow 1
Maximum damage 1 extremely low 1
Average damage 1 extremely low 1
Str Overall Attack ease Parry ease


Main Page/Archive 2
Stat item information
Con Dex Int Str Wis
+2 +1 0 -1 -2


Main Page/Archive 2
Poison information
Effect Pain
Other names

Appearance
Mn Pg
Ingredients
Crushed Womble Soul
(highlight to see)


To deal with this, I've created the {{multiinfobox}} template, which you can use to combine multiple infoboxes into one nice single one with tabs, which swaps between the different infobox types when you click the relevant tab.

With multiinfobox, the above become:

Weapon Stat Item Poison
Main Page/Archive 2
Weapon information
Precise dimensions No information
Material No information
Weight Lots
Thaums/sec  ? stable / ? talisman / ? max
Hands 7+1
Commands Dest
Melee type Bad Type!
Judge data
Speed 1 extremely slow 1
Maximum damage 1 extremely low 1
Average damage 1 extremely low 1
Str Overall Attack ease Parry ease
Main Page/Archive 2
Stat item information
Con Dex Int Str Wis
+2 +1 0 -1 -2
Main Page/Archive 2
Poison information
Effect Pain
Other names

Appearance
Mn Pg
Ingredients
Crushed Womble Soul
(highlight to see)


Enjoy :) --Chat 23:48, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

That is amazing. :D I guess we finally have a neat solution to those weapons with two different states, too! --Ilde 01:44, 27 January 2010 (UTC)
That is handy. Anyone familiar enough code wise to incorporate this? Would be handy for custom infoboxes, and would make making new ones easier. Rehevkor 03:23, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Template:Abbr

I tried to add a template for showing the meaning of abbreviations on mouse over but I can't seem to make it work.

I'm not sure if this needs to be done by someone who can escape the tags < > so it works or if I'm missing a dependency...

I believe this template could be helpful for:

  • Using shorthand while allowing people to hover over it and see the whole meaning.
  • Allow some data in tables to be shortened or not showed until you hover over it, since some things like description can be huge and not really helpful to always be displayed but interesting to have if someone wants to check it.

I suppose being able to show/hide columns could do it for the second, though I'm not sure how that could be done.

Frazyl 17:30, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Fixed the template. 'abbr' isn't a tag that this wiki's parser allows, but 'span' works fine.
--Chat 18:13, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
Thanks!
There's just a slight issue, there's no visible indication that you can hover over it to get more, it's not putting the dotted underline...
Failing that, normal underline wouldn't be too bad, trying to add <u> to the template didn't work and anyway it's deprecated, using style="text-decoration:underline;" doesn't seem to work either for some reason....
Frazyl 19:44, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
No problem - using the 'border' elements works well as a pseudo-underline. See {{Lmoney}} for an example of where this sort of thing has been done in this wiki.
--Chat 22:28, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
Yay, Happy! Thanks!
Frazyl 22:52, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Line wrapping and <pre> tags

As pointed out be several people, <pre> tags cause issues because long lines are not wrapped when they don't fit the browser's width, making the user scroll to see it all and breaking the look of the wiki.

I've tried to fix with the {{prebox}} template so that it would function like a <pre> tag with line wrap but replacing newlines doesn't work for some reason (<nowiki> tags not working? might help, not quite sure.)

I've found an extension to use string functions with special characters by using standard c-type escape character sequence: StringFunctionsEscaped, this would most likely allow the template to work.

But then I stumbled on a possible way to fix the <pre> tags themselves, it would appear that adding this (to the existing pre section) in css might fix it:

pre {
 overflow-x: auto; /* Use horizontal scroller if needed; for Firefox 2, not needed in Firefox 3 */
 white-space: pre-wrap; /* css-3 */
 white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important; /* Mozilla, since 1999 */
 white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4-6 */
 white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
 /* width: 99%; */
 word-wrap: break-word; /* Internet Explorer 5.5+ */
}

Adding this to the pre section in main.css file in a locally saved copy (save Web Page, complete) of a page of the wiki with <pre> tags works for me in Icecat (Firefox rebranded).


Obviously I can do none of the above myself, perhaps adding to css might work pretty well enough with the least effort for people with modern browsers?

It would also fix the formatting if you put many white spaces at the start (same as <pre> tags) which would be hard to hunt down.

The template could then just use <pre> itself. --Frazyl 04:40, 17 March 2010 (UTC)

Fixed thanks to Drakkos! Thanks! Frazyl 22:42, 31 March 2010 (UTC)


Collapsible navboxes

By popular demand, I've now imported all the relevant javascript/css for making navboxes collapsible, and set all existing ones as 'collapsed' by default.

This means that by default, pages with navboxes on will look less cluttered than before (especially if it's a short page with a big navbox).

All navboxes are now by default collapsible, and start collapsed. You can change this, if you wish, by altering their 'state' parameter:

  • 'state=plain' results in a navbox that can't be collapsed.
  • 'state=collapsed' results in a navbox that can be collapsed, and starts collapsed.
  • 'state=uncollapsed' results in a navbox that can be collapsed, and starts uncollapsed.

--Chat 20:23, 9 April 2010 (UTC)