MediaWiki talk:Community Portal

This is the place for discussion of topics that affect the entire wiki. Some topics that would ordinarily be here have merited their own pages:

The move away from Wikia:

• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Arriving
• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Leaving
• Transformers Wiki:Community Portal/Complaints

Our policy on having ads in the wiki:

• Transformers Wiki:Ads

The Bookworm database-crash:

• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Damage Control Central
• Project:Bookworm Crash
• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Leaving2

The server move:

• Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Arriving2

	Community Portal Archives
Archive 1 Archive 2 Archive 3 Archive 4 Archive 5 Archive 6 Archive 7 Archive 8 Archive 9 Archive 10 Archive 11 Archive 12 Archive 13 Archive 14 Archive 15 Archive 16 Archive 17 Archive 18 Archive 19 Archive 20 Archive 21 Archive 22 Archive 23 Archive 24 Archive 25 Archive 26 Archive 27 Archive 28 Archive 29 Archive 30 Archive 31 Archive 32 Archive 33

Quotes

This discussion was moved from Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Damage Control Central#Quotes.

Quotes now seem to look like this:

Freedom is the right of all sentient beingsOptimus Prime

when IIRC before the crash they look like this:

“	Freedom is the right of all sentient beings	”
—Optimus Prime

Now, it seems we can get the second result using the {{bigquote}} template instead of the basic {{quote}} template that is currently populating most of the pages.

I'm of the opinion that the bigquote look is much more pleasing to the eye and it also seemed to be the norm before the crash. Should we change the quotes to bigquotes on individual pages or just have someone with template knowledge make a change there? --Bluestreak7 23:29, 5 April 2009 (EDT)

Discussion on Template_talk:Quote suggests that bigquote is the old style and quote is the new style. --abates 01:37, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Mind you I didn't ask anyone before swapping styles-- the intention was to give people a chance to evaluate the new look, but we only had it for a few days before the crash... so I don't think anyone noticed. :p

It's my opinion that the old quote template took up too much space-- which is find for a single quote at the top of an article when you want to make a big thing of it, but I thought most uses of the template would look nicer with s smaller visual footprint. (Plus the html is more contextual.)

Some people seem to dislike the chevron-style quoting... it's consistent with what, at the time, were our new reference templates-- also lost in the crash. The real appeal, to me, is that it lets you put quotes inside the quote template (such as an exchange between characters) without looking weird. The way we used to do that was multiple quote templates in a row, which (being oversize already) resulted in a massive on-screen footprint.

If the consensus is to switch to the bigQuote format for all quotes instead of the smaller one, I guess that's the community's perogative... but I'm gonna argue against it until that decision is made.

I like bitQuote-- it's great if you want a quote to be a big thing. Most of the time you don't. When you do-- why not just use {{bigquote}}? -Derik 01:48, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Ahhh, my mistake! I coulda sworn I'd seen quote in use longer! --abates 01:55, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Why I don't like "quote":

1. It's ugly.
2. It's bigger than bigQuote. That seems to defeat the whole point.
3. Single guillemots don't get used as quotation marks in English and so they don't parse as quotation marks.
4. It's incredibly ugly.
5. And finally-if-slightly-tangentially, there's a conscious effort, it seems, to change all "bigquotes" to "quotes", which defeats the whole point of having two templates.

Definite vote to revert - SanityOrMadness 11:35, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

I vote against the revert. I do not like the old quote style, as noted on the above-linked discussion page. All we need to do is change the guillemots to quote marks and it's fine by me. --M Sipher 04:08, 9 April 2009 (EDT) In accordance with the general wishes of the community, the quotes have been changed from guillemots to standard quotation... though I think it looks terribly silly that way. You can see just how silly over at Template_talk:Quote. -Derik 23:57, 10 April 2009 (EDT)

Well, one day after updating the quote template, I finally ran into exactly the scenario I was talking about in regards to quotes within quotes. I need to quote this passage (which includes but is not composed exclusively of dialog) for an article.

"Farewell Optimus prime," [Starscream] whispered to himself. "Time for Endspark."Starscream, Ghosts of Yesterday p280

That looks absolutely retarded. The guillemots may have been ugly-- but they were at least clear. And none of the user suggestions (including User:Abates idea of using multiple parameters for a series of quotes) applies here-- because the text is inline.

You all suck. Does anyone have any suggestions other than guillemots to make that look less retarded? Because {{bigquote}} looks even worse. -Derik 02:53, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

Rule four suggests it should look like this:

'Farewell Optimus prime,' [Starscream] whispered to himself. 'Time for Endspark.'Starscream, Ghosts of Yesterday p280

although you could also use ‘ and ’ maybe? --abates 03:33, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

I have restore the guillemots as an optional flag. (style=2) The entire point of using a non-english quotation mark was to avoid conflicts with English quotation marks, so the guillemots seem like a good fallback position when there is a conflict.

'Farewell Optimus prime,' [Starscream] whispered to himself. 'Time for Endspark.'Starscream, Ghosts of Yesterday p280

This necessitated html and css changes, so some quotes may look funny for the next 24 hours or so until the pages de-cache. (They'll preview properly, and if you save them they'll look right... but left on their own they will re-cache with the updated {{quote}} HTML in short order, so don't bother.) -Derik 03:50, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

Uh, why not take the easy route. Leave out the opening and closing quotation marks when you post, and the template fills them in. i.e.,

Farewell Optimus prime," [Starscream] whispered to himself. "Time for Endspark.Starscream, Ghosts of Yesterday p280

There you go, simple and doesn't involve guillemots that don't parse for anyone. - SanityOrMadness 05:01, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

What a lovely mix of smart and dumb quotes you have created. -Derik 05:46, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

Given the use of a monospaced font, it doesn't make sense to use "smart" quotation marks anyway... - SanityOrMadness 07:24, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

I prefer the old style quotes. Nobody can make me use the new ones. --FFN 06:09, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

I agree, for all the reasons that SanityOrMadness listed above (especially points 1, 2 and 4)81.108.237.26 13:44, 18 May 2009 (EDT)

I completely don't care about this discussion, but I must take the time to point out that it's "guillemet". "Guillemot" is a bird, which is decidedly not relevant to this discussion. —Interrobang 03:49, 16 April 2009 (EDT)

I don't think the normal quotes show up properly in IE6 and a normal quote overlaps an image on http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Protoform so that needs to be fixed or bigquote restored.81.108.237.26 11:08, 22 May 2009 (EDT)

That's a note, not a quote. The site unfortunately has plenty of problems in IE6, mostly caused by Microsoft's crappy rendering engine. A few of them linger in IE7 too... We really need to come up with a replacement for the messageboxes which doesn't lose the right-hand edge for one thing. --abates 17:48, 22 May 2009 (EDT)

Redirects while editing

Go to User:Derik/Sandbox7, hit edit, then preview. (Hitting shift-refresh might be required to clear out your CSS cache if the effect isn't apparent.)

Links to redirects are highlighted in preview mode only. If it's not highlighted, you know you're pointing to an actual page rather than a redirect. Should probably make it easier to just guess on a lot of links while still being assured you're picking valid ones.

(Pink is a terrible color to use for this. Any suggestions on how this should be styled? Sparkle-background?) -Derik 22:46, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

Would making them simply underlined be too subtle? --abates 23:15, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

I worry it's too subtle. What about this?

If that's too subtle I could break out the sparkling text and have the wiki chant "Septus, Dominus!" every time you mouse over it...-Derik 23:30, 12 April 2009 (EDT)

Aw, what's wrong with the pink? I think that one's clear enough. Geewunling 00:39, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Not bad. At least this way it'll be easier to catch the redirects, applying changes when necessary. Although pink... I think it'd be better if the color was a different contrast if it's in the colored section of the templates (as in the episode/comic templates). --Lonegamer78 01:34, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Abates suggested underlining... since the redirects only show up that way when in preview mode, I think it'd be a good idea to have multiple visual indications. (I don't think the previous/next links on the comicnav, for example, will change color... because they already have a color set. If you have multiple indicators (color underline, etc...) chances are at least one will remain noticable no matter what happens.

Does anyone hate the blinking? (It's a firefox-only style.) Normally I HATE anything that blinks because its distracting, but the whole point here is to be able to easily spot the redirects. -Derik 01:58, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Eh, blinking's fine. Not that of a biggy for me. --Lonegamer78 02:08, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

It's only in the preview and not in the saved pages, so the blinking is ok so far as I'm concerned! --abates 02:15, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

I think the feature is great? But yes, I hate the blinking. - Starfield 10:03, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

This might be a good time to mention this, but just because a link is pink and flashy doesn't necessarily mean it is a mistake needing fixing, right? It is sometimes OK to use redirect links. If you are talking about Goldbug it is OK (and preferable in my opinion) to link to Goldbug (G1) and let the redirect do the work. I think having it stand out so much would tend to have editors feel the need to clean them all out. - Starfield 10:17, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

There is potential for that. I agree that sometimes redirects are okay... *shrug* -Derik 12:44, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

How about "safety orange" or yellow? Those are universal "danger/warning" colors. (And less puke-inducing for me than pink). I don't mind the blinking either, considering that the idea is that the indicator is supposed to annoy the hell out of you until you change it. (FWIW, the whole thing works fine in Opera 9.63, too.)

As for Starfield's comment, eh, I just don't see it 99% of the time. If I wanted to link to something like Goldbug or Rodimus Prime, I would do [[Bumblebee (G1)|Goldbug]] or [[Hot Rod (G1)|Rodimus Prime]] instead. About the only time I could see it useful is if you were doing linking related to a spoiler (like Longarm Prime vs. Shockwave, for instance), but even then you'd still only need to do it for a month at most. --Jeysie 16:15, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

I don't personally see the sense in manually redirecting to Hot Rod when you are talking Rodimus Prime when there is perfectly valid actual redirect to use. You aren't talking about "Hot Rod". It is like word-linking that way, like you are trying to fake out the reader. "Rodimus Prime" is that character's name in that point of the story. I always thought that was the primary purpose of having redirects, and search boxes were secondary.

Plus there is the added benefit of when you use the "what links here" page, you see what pages link to "Rodimus Prime", which is interesting information that is lost if everything links to "Hot Rod". - Starfield 17:53, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Because it's the same character. We say "Spike" or "Daniel", but link to their full name. If someone refers to Bumblebee as a "giant yellow Volkswagon robot" in something, we might use that phrasing in the synopsis, but we'd still link to Bumblebee, not to "giant yellow Volkswagon robot" as a redirect. Etc. It's not a fakeout, it's just using the proper contextual name in the text, but cutting out the middleman for the actual link.

Redirects can make linking easier for editors who don't know immediately what the proper link might be, so we don't end up with accidental duplicate pages (or as a shorter way to link to something like an oft-used section link), but on the whole I think it's mostly useful for searches.

In short, while not all redirect linking is something to worry about, per se, I don't see anything wrong with encouraging editors to hunt down the correct linkage, even in those sorts of edge cases. --Jeysie 18:19, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

"Goldbug" was a character in the comic Used Autobots, the character was not "Bumblebee". In that way, it is different than using Spike's full name, or even Peter Parker vs Spider-Man. I think a link on the Used Autobots article to [[Bumblebee (G1)|Goldbug]] is incorrect because there was no "Bumblebee" in the story. - Starfield 18:36, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

And yet, Bumblebee and Goldbug don't have separate articles, because we treat them as being the same character. *shrugs a little* I don't care either way, really, and wouldn't consider it worth worrying about if someone linked to Goldbug, I just don't see that as more correct. --Jeysie 18:47, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Bumblebee/Goldbug is the same character. That is why I think it is OK to link to "Goldbug", even more correct to do so when you are talking about Goldbug. "Goldbug" is not a nickname for "Bumblebee", Goldbug is that character, at that point in the story. The article could be named "Goldbug (G1)" with Bumblebee redirecting to it or "Bumblebee/Goldbug", but for our, somewhat arbitrary, naming rules. I don't disagree with the naming rules, but just because the article is called "Bumblebee" doesn't mean that that always linking to "Bumblebee" is correct. - Starfield 19:00, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

And yet, even if you link to Goldbug, when you click on the link, you still end up at a page titled "Bumblebee (G1)". Is the little "redirected from" note really that crucial a difference? (Especially since the intro mentions the Goldbug change right at the top anyway.) It just seems like a difference that makes no difference to me. --Jeysie 19:05, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Yes, when you link to Goldbug, you end up at the right spot, so why the big push to not link to Goldbug when you are talking about Goldbug? And yes, in some way I like seeing "redirected from", it lets me know that Goldbug is just as correct but the title is called "Bumblebee" out of convenience. And don't forget about the "What links here" feature. It is a little useful being able to sort out the Goldbug references. - Starfield 19:19, 13 April 2009 (EDT)

Someone requested I link-fix a bunch of minor variants of Hot Rod/Rodimus Prime ot all point to "Hot Rod (G1)". Instead I split them, pointing to "Hot Rod (G1)" and "Rodimus Prime (G1)" as appropriate-- in case we one day decide to split the articles like we do Megatron/Galvatron.

The same principle applies. A split is unlikely, but this way if we do split the articles, all the links are already pointing to the appropriate destination, instead of having to sort through 500+ incoming links by hand (that's abotu the number Hot Rod has...) to figure out which need to go where. -Derik 10:57, 15 April 2009 (EDT)

Is the little "redirected from" note really that crucial a difference?

For me, yes, it kinda is. It lets me know that the powers-that-be have decided that "Goldbug" is heavily subordinate to the character of Bumblebee, that they are well and truly one and the same, that there's not some other Goldbug article out there that I'm missing. That in itself is a significant bit of information, even before I've started reading the text. -- Repowers 20:09, 22 April 2009 (EDT)

I think that the "What Links Here" issue is a fair point. But IMHO if you need the little "redirected from" note to tell you're in the right place instead of just by reading the intro, you're either lazy or the intro needs rewriting. --Jeysie 21:14, 22 April 2009 (EDT)
Edit: Realized I should mention that I'm liking the blinky thingy so far... it used to be annoying having to click through every new link I was adding to make sure it was the proper direct link instead of a redirect. --Jeysie 21:18, 22 April 2009 (EDT)

We should have one standard for linking or not linking to redirect pages. I much prefer being able to link to redirect pages and not get reverted, but I would go along with the other way if that is the standard. I started a draft proposal for a standard to be added to the style guide at my sandbox. Please feel free to comment or edit it or add reasons for/against. - Starfield 10:51, 8 May 2009 (EDT)

Franchise identifier consistency

At the moment, we have 34 "G1" articles with an identifier of a specific Japanese sub-franchise to distinguish them from articles on usually Western/G1 material. We also have about 9 "G1" articles who use a different kind of identifier, on basis that the Japanese continuities are G1.
This already led to a bit of moving around with the Grandus article between (G1) and (ROC) when the Animated guy was introduced. To prevent that happening with the Dai Atlas, Sky Garry and possibly Cancer articles, I'd like to have the community make a decision on how to deal with the (G1) identifier vs the (Headmasters), (Masterforce), (Victory), (Zone), (ROC) and (OC) identifiers vs whatever else can be/is used as identifier.
My preference would be to use the Japanese sub-franchise identifiers. Simple and in line with the whole "from the (Japanese franchise) portion of the G1 continuity" on top of those pages. For convenience, here's a list of the moves it would mean:

• Sandstorm (Autobot) -> Sandstorm (G1) (Note: we have a SG Sandstorm now, so (Autobot) it can't stay anyway.)
• Sandstorm (Decepticon) -> Sandstorm (OC)
• Falcon (Predator) -> Falcon (G1)
• Falcon (Micromaster) -> Falcon (OC)
• Ricochet (G1 Autobot) -> Ricochet (Headmasters)
• Metrotitan (G1) -> Metrotitan (Zone)
• Grandus (G1) -> Grandus (ROC)
• Star Saber (G1) -> Star Saber (Victory)
• Joe (Micromaster) -> Joe (ROC)
• Circuit (Action Master) -> Circuit (G1)
• Circuit (Micromaster) -> Circuit (OC)
• Convertor (Micromaster) -> Convertor (OC)
• Convertor (Recyclon) -> Convertor (G1), but I'm in favour of leaving this one as (Recyclon) because all other Recyclons with an identifier use (Recyclon).

Thoughts? Geewunling 03:48, 19 April 2009 (EDT)

Sky Garry etc... all fall under (G1.) Widest possible identifier when there's no conflict.

This confuses people because we use specific franchises for UT characters... but the UT has SO MUCH name overlap it'd be pointless-- no one would have the (UT) identifier even if it was standard. G1 has little enough name overlap internal to itself we can make (G1) the default.

So it's inconsistent--but it's at least consistently inconsistent. -Derik 06:55, 19 April 2009 (EDT)

Diver, Planet X, Hydra, maaaaybe Overlord... No, we're not consistently inconsistent either. And now I'm only looking at G1 West vs Japan. With BW, we do seem to be consistent in acknowledging its Japanese sub-franchises in identifiers. Geewunling 07:20, 19 April 2009 (EDT)

What's this "widest possible identifier," Derik? Didn't we go through that huge "Swarm (G1)" debate (which seems to have been completely lost in the Bookworm crash, fantastic) to cement the franchise-of-origin rule forever and ever amen? The only question here is: What counts as a separate franchise? To my mind, Zone bears about the same relationship to G1 as G2 does. And, as the Swarm debate established, G2 is never ever G1 as far as parentheticals are concerned. The UT example has nothing to do with what you said and everything to do with our one simple rule. - Jackpot 00:21, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

...I don't remember anymore. -Derik 00:31, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

At least remember to curse the name of Bookworm for three to seven generations. - Jackpot 00:59, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Side note: Actually, the bit of the discussion that was on my User Page subpage isn't lost. I just didn't upload it anywhere because we never actually determined a good permanent place to move it to, so I didn't know where to upload it to. After a quickie Google search, it turns out there's still a good cache file for the Insecticon Swarm talk page, too. Anyhoo. --Jeysie 02:19, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Hey, whatever you can find and restore, please do. The biggest value of preserving a debate like that is never having to go through it again. I'd say you should re-make your Sandbox and its Talk page exactly as they were before. I don't think a more "permanent" place is necessary; it's an aborted experiment, so it can stay on an "experimental" page. - Jackpot 03:11, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

I'm for moving those pages. Except for "OC" since it's based on a bad translation of a Japanese title. 合体大作戦 (Gattai Daisakusen) means "Great Combination Operation". Everybody who knows this, including me, just has been too lazy to correct it. (And Derik, the punctuation for a sentence is out of the parentheses. I'm not sure why you consistently make that mistake.) —Interrobang 01:54, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Then maybe this is a good moment to correct it? Geewunling 03:55, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Well, problem is that "Operation Combination", as incorrect as it is, is what the majority of English people know it as. And then what to have the disambiguation parentheses as? "(GCO)"? I would prefer to have it as "Gattai Daisakusen", but my opinion of forgoing unofficial translations is decidedly unpopular. —Interrobang 16:13, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Then it depends on what this wiki cares more about: helping people find information or providing them with the correct information. By what you're saying, I'd say Operation Combination should become a redirect to the correctly named article. And from there, I don't think (OC) is going to be anymore clear on what continuity it represents than (GCO) or (GD). I don't think many will immediately guess "OC" stands for Operation Combination, and that's also not the point of identifiers. Geewunling 08:21, 21 April 2009 (EDT)

I'm in favor of using the Japanese sub-franchise names. I checked Beast Wars and we are using the sub-franchise names for that, (BWII), (BWN) so this would be consistent. - Starfield 08:51, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Except as someone (Interrobang?) keeps pointing out-- that's problematic in itself. There was no BWII Toyline. There was a BWII cartoon... and a Beast Wars Toyline. Japan considers all 4 BW series paer of 1 toyline franchise, much like Generation 1. (This argument hasn't received a lot of traction, but I'm bringing it up because it seems relevant.) -Derik 10:19, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

FortMax brought it up at least twice. One could argue that since we focus on fiction, we should base our disambiguation system on it, but I dunno how to reconcile that with Cryotek (RID). —Interrobang 16:13, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Or Sideways (RID). -Derik 18:34, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Sideways at least got a RID bio. All Cryotek gets is a quote. (And what if they have RID fiction with Cryotek in it? RID and BM are in two different continuity families which means we have to split the articles and argharghargh) —Interrobang 19:19, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Disambiguating by fiction has been argued. It doesn't work/help. --Jeysie 19:52, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

*bump* So, I like Geewunling's proposal. Objections? - Starfield 16:14, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

The Wiki calls Headmasters, Beast Wars II, etc. "franchises." I didn't know the weren't until just now. It seems useful enough to do so, even if it isn't 100% historically accurate. - Starfield 19:07, 20 April 2009 (EDT)

Technical question: Firefox and history pages

Is anyone else running the latest version of Firefox and having trouble with the history pages? I'm running Firefox 3.0.10 and when I look at, say, the Optimus Primal history page, Firefox locks up for half a minute while it runs the javasript to hide half of the radio buttons. It does it on two different computers running the same version of Firefox, but I don't have the same problem on Wikipedia or Wikia. --abates 20:56, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

Oh wow, that was a pretty nasty stutter I got when I tried to reproduce your issue. Same version, same results.--Rosicrucian^Talk 21:00, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

Ayep, same here. --Jeysie 22:02, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

Issue also reproduced on my home PC, which has more get up and go than my workstation, with Firefox 3.5 beta 4.--Rosicrucian^Talk 22:34, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

Ditto on my notebook and tower unit. --Lonegamer78 23:06, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

...interesting. Why just firefox? (Clearly the 500+ items are an issue here-- but Safari has no problem with 500 items.) -Derik 23:26, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

I'd be curious to know as well. I specifically tried it again with the beta release because it uses a different (and supposedly more efficient) Javascript engine.--Rosicrucian^Talk 23:30, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

And why only here and not on Wikipedia? Is there that much of a change in the Javascript between MediaWiki 1.12 and 1.14? --abates 23:32, 1 May 2009 (EDT)

Dropped down to Firefox 2...20 there to test, and clicking the radio buttons doesn't take very long, but the page DOES lock up for a while on initial load. - SanityOrMadness 18:28, 2 May 2009 (EDT)

And FF 1.5.10 behaves as-FF2. - SanityOrMadness 18:38, 2 May 2009 (EDT)

Bad images

My scanner is a piece o' crap. Is it better to upload dark and grainy pictures with a "badimage" tag or just put up a "picsneeded" tag? - Starfield 21:38, 3 May 2009 (EDT)

Depends. With recent comic stuff, I think "pics needed" would be better, as there's a good chance that someone else will have the issue (or can find scans, *cough*). I replaced all the Defiance ones, for instance. If you have in mind specific scenes you would have scanned, you can always leave a suggestion in the picsneeded tag or on the talk page.

On the other hand, for stuff that's old or rare, where it might be a choice between a bad image or never having an image, IMHO a bad image is better than nothing.

(If you ever replace your scanner, I recommend the Canon MP210. I use it with Irfanview, and god I love the thing. Prints like a charm, too.) --Jeysie 22:00, 3 May 2009 (EDT)

New User Template

I remember... someone before the crash (FortMax maybe?) suggesting the idea of a template we can stick on the talk pages of new users to welcome them. I rather liked the idea, so I started a mockup idea here: User:Jeysie/NewUser Any ideas for a pic, info to add/change, etc?

Also, I noticed we don't have a New Users log enabled the way Wikia does... if we do create this sort of thing, having that sort of log would be helpful. --Jeysie 16:21, 4 May 2009 (EDT)

We'd need to either upgrade to MediaWiki 1.14 or install the extension to get the new users log. It would be very useful, I'm thinking. --abates 16:35, 4 May 2009 (EDT)

Screencap templates

Er... you know we can edit the text that appears on the file upload screen. Anyone got a list of screencap templates?

(I think you might even be able to set them up for one-click adding.) -Derik 20:37, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

They are all listed at Transformers Wiki:Images, to my knowledge. I added all the ones I knew of.--Rosicrucian^Talk 20:42, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

This is what I'm looking at. It's kinda fugy. Anyone else want to take a whack at it? -Derik 21:16, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

I'm also working at templating the comics images:

• {{MarvelUScover}} (Marvel US G1), {{HMcover}} (Marvel Headmasters mini) and {{MarvelG2cover}} are maxed out.
• I think I've got all the extant & relevant images for {{MarvelG2interior}} - although I can't absolutely swear to it
• I'm currently working as and when I have the chance on moving the Marvel US G1 interiors and HM interiors to {{MarvelUSinterior}} and {{HMinterior}} from a variety of copyright tags and the absence thereof (including the ones that lost their descriptions in the Bookworm Incident)

Like I say, the covers are maxed out, but there's always the chance that other interiors will be uploaded (Walky's done a few recently), and it would help if they were added too. - SanityOrMadness 21:58, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

Propose a visually compact way of doing so.  ;) -Derik 22:10, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

General	Comic Cover
<charinsert>{{hastak}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{comicinterior}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{comiccover}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{screencap}}</charinsert>	<charinsert>{{MarvelUScover|(description)|(issue number)|(issue title)|(artist list)|(last two digits of publication year)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{HMcover|(description)|(issue number)|(issue title)|(artist list)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{MarvelG2cover|(description) |(issue number) |(issue title) |(artist list) |(last digit of publication year)}}</charinsert>
Screencap	Comic Interior
<charinsert>{{titlecard}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{G1cap|(imagedescription)|(episode name)|(last digit of premiere year originally aired)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{RIDcap|(imagedescription)|(episode name)|(last digit of year originally aired)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{BWcap|(imagedescription)|(episode name)|(last digit of year originally aired)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{BMcap|(imagedescription)|(episode name)|(year originally aired)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{TFAcap|(imagedescription)|(episode name)|(year originally aired)}}</charinsert>	<charinsert>{{MarvelUSinterior|description=|issueno=|storytitle=|pageno=|panelno=|panelnos=|script=|line-art=|pencils=|inks=|colours=[[Nelson Yomtov]]|letters=|help=|year=(last two digits of publication year)}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{HMinterior|description= |issueno= |storytitle= |pageno= |panelno= |panelnos= |letters= |help=}}</charinsert> <charinsert>{{MarvelG2interior|description= |issueno= |storytitle= |pageno= |panelno= |panelnos= |script= |pencils= |inks= |colours= |letters= |help= |year=(last digit of publication year)}}</charinsert>

...I don't know about visually compact, exactly, but considering how many image templates we have, I'm not sure "visually compact" is possible... --Jeysie 23:06, 11 May 2009 (EDT)

Well, it's something to work on. Unfortunately the charinsert plugin doesn't have any way to display s short piece of text while inserting a long one.

There's a rabid wolverine scrabbling around the back of my brain licking carnival pennies... I feel like when he comes down off his filth high he might have some ideas about Stupid CSS Tricks to make that less loathesome. (Failing that we could do something with Javascript, but it'd be a bitch to update so that's a last choice.) -Derik 01:35, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, it's pretty much the opposite... you can stick a description in the tooltip, but the actual text has to be visible. I honestly can't think of any way to do it in pure CSS without messing up the clickability of it.

I guess we could just link to the plain vanilla templates with no parameters, but I kind of want to encourage people to be as thorough as possible with their info.

I think we could also use a way to include a link to each template's page in case one needs to read the instructions. But I had trouble coming up with a way that's brief, clear, and won't get mistaken for the inserto-text link. --Jeysie 01:53, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

Addendum: We could go for a fake form with OPTION or a CSS-based drop-down list, but I think those would both need JS. (Admittedly the CSS based drop-down would need less JS, and only for the style, not the functionality.) (Why do I always have extra thoughts right after hitting the "submit" button?) --Jeysie 01:59, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

What about the Boilerplate plugin that was suggested a while back? Would that be more suitable for this sort of thing? --abates 02:04, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

No, unfortunately... it only works for articles, not on file pages. (At least, if there is a way to get it to work on file pages, I couldn't figure it out.) Although I still think we should give that extension a whirl at some point, it won't help out with this specific thing. --Jeysie 02:07, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

My Wolverine stopped tripping long enough to say "{{MarvelG2}}:<charinsert>{{MarvelG2interior|description=|issueno=|storytitle=|pageno=|panelno=|panelnos=|script=|pencils=|inks=|colours=|letters=|help=|year=(last digit of publication year)}}</charinsert>."

He is a filthy, FILTHY beast, and the hackiness of that CSS shames me. (And it's still not ideal code anyway.)

I think Javascript is a likely fate here. -Derik 03:03, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

Upload Preview

Over at Template talk:Screencap, Mr. Bates (or possibly Doug-- I can't keep them straight) suggested we look at the Upload Preview script-- a pure javascript solution to the lack of previews during image upload (which the MW software doesn't naively support.)

The script is currently available for anyone who has the kired tools plugins installed. Please report your thoughts, and if there are any problems or conflicts. If user response is positive, I'm going to recommend the relevant code be added to the Wiki's common.js file. -Derik 14:59, 12 May 2009 (EDT)

It works great - very handy (I was the one who suggested it, BTW) --abates 05:59, 13 May 2009 (EDT)

I finally figured out why I have such trouble telling you and Doug apart.

I'm actually trying to tell "apog," "apog" and "abates" apart under the impression they are two people. No wonder I'm confused. -Deceptitran 12:37, 18 May 2009 (EDT)

With no reported problems from the ppl running Kired Tools, this plugin has been moved to the common file, and is now loaded for all Wiki users.

So if anything unexpected breaks tonight please report it here, since the preview script will be the likely suspect. (But we don't expect it to.) -Derik 23:53, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

(comic issue) vs. (issue)

Is there any protest against eliminating (comic issue) as a disambiguation parenthetical? Near as I can tell, it's totally redundant with the shorter, simpler (issue) parenthetical. (again, unless there's a "Child's Play (socioeconomic issue)" article that I'm unaware of...) -- Repowers 10:52, 18 May 2009 (EDT)

No protest here. I was planning on doing it someday. —Interrobang 14:58, 18 May 2009 (EDT)

ROTF spoilers from novelizations and other adaptations

So, is information from the novelizations off-limits until the movie is in theaters, or what? (If so, we need to protect the hell out of a bunch of pages) --FortMax 22:58, 20 May 2009 (EDT)

It was discussed here and decided that no, they are not off limits, but please date the spoiler tags on character pages to a week after the film comes out. - Starfield 23:04, 20 May 2009 (EDT)

I've been stubbing in articles where I feel it's appropriate... but I've also been tailoring my content to avoid major spoilers-- more to have the infrastructure in place and ready to fill in then the movie drops.

(And realistically speaking, there's going to be a flood of detailed spoilers, including lists of every fatality and major surprise on the 10th-- the film premieres in Japan 18 days before it does here.)

Incidentally, I don't trust the tie-in novels. Characters vanish suddenly, details are glossed over or changed... I harbor a suspicion that certain plot details are being kept out of the books-- or at least obscured-- to prevent fans from being 100% certain about anything. The climax of the two movie adaptions I've read so far are different, they have noticeably divergent outcomes. -Derik 00:12, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

I do not want any novelization and adaptation spoilers on character pages or other related articles. Stuff from adaptations should stay on their respective articles. Most of my work on the wiki at the moment is updating and maintaining movie articles, so it would be a personal inconvenience to me if I had to avert my eyes every time I come across the Revenge of the Fallen movie sections of character articles. Not only that, but there will be people who will wander onto this wiki with the intention of refreshing themselves on the movie or to read prequel stuff leading up to ROTF, but have no intention of reading up on plot points of the movie itself. And, as Derik says, novelizations and adaptations often differ wildly from the final movie script.

I think it's more than bloody fair to expect that we only post ROTF-related stuff on the day of the movie's release around the world, not before. --FFN 00:59, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

That'd apply to the British Isles contingent? UK and Ireland are getting general release June 19. --Lonegamer78 02:48, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

That's a good question. (I have no opinion, I'm spoiling myself by reading the novel.)

IIRC, back during Animated season 2 we were observing a 1-week moratorium on character-page updates, which more-or-less covered the biggest broadcast markets.

• 10th - Japan premiere
• 24th - US Premiere
• 26th - UK Premiere

Since the period we're talking about is just a 16 day span, I assume the same idea applies-- hold off until the 26th (possibly plus a few days) out of respect for other TF-fans. -Derik 03:23, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

As Lonegamer just said, it's out here in the UK on the 19th. And the rule for TFA S2 seemed to be that "as soon as it was first aired in English, be it in the UK, US or Canada (all three had 'world premieres in English' at different points), go for it". - SanityOrMadness 10:02, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

I think that the modifier in that situation, though, was the fact that as soon as said Animated episodes had aired in English anywhere, high-quality encodes of them were promptly available to download for anybody anywhere who wanted them, making it all pretty much fair game. Information could be added, and editors would not be left unable to verify that information, as they could download and see the episode themselves. The movie won't have that - US editors simply wont know if what anon IPs add is true or not, because they won't be able to see the movie to verify it and will have to operate on good faith, which is laudible, but we saw how well that worked with the Dubai Animated debalce and "Animated Waspinator". While I'll be seeing it opening day here in the UK, I know that I, personally, wasn't planning to add anything about it to the wiki until it screened in the US. - Chris McFeely 11:03, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

What Chris said. "Airing in English" was a polite euphemism for "we can see it too." It doesn't apply for a 2-and-a-half hour theatrical movie. American fans will still be in the dark until the 26th, and as far as I'm concerned the wiki should honor that. --Thylacine 2000 11:04, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

While I'll be seeing it opening day here in the UK, I know that I, personally, wasn't planning to add anything about it to the wiki until it screened in the US.

American fans will still be in the dark until the 26th

Can I take it that the UK and US premiere dates above are switched?--Apcog 14:02, 21 May 2009 (EDT)

It's now been said thrice in this thread that the UK/Eire date is the 19th. - SanityOrMadness

Beg your pardon, then. It was late, and I wasn't paying close enough attention.--Apcog 13:08, 22 May 2009 (EDT)

Damn Americans think they're the centre of the Universe. If I was President of the US, I'd invade the UK and Ireland to protect American Transfan interests. 14:56, 1 June 2009 (EDT)

I read the novel and have this to say: As much detail as is in it, there's no doubt its different. First of all: there's alot more detail so that means some of the slower parts are probably shorter in the movie (novels often do that anyways so no problems there) and also: in one chapter it leads up to fight and then on the very next chapter all of a sudden Devestator appears and is fighting already as if he's been there the whole time (meaning they skipped a chunk of that fight)So as is obvious, there will be differences.--Chipmonk328 (or was it 9?)<<not that it matters

Forgive my attitude but

what the flying f***! What happened to my account. I made one, I even remember what it looked like. Where is it and why can't I login and my username no longer exsists! What..the..hell. I've not signed in for a long time but I still go here regularly and everything, don't tell me you autodeleted my account! I mean, I’ve been here when it was at Wikia, I moved with you guys here and even made a new account here! Hell, my old accounts on Wikia all got deleted, so please don’t tell me you guys stooped to their level and deleted my account as well! I’ve done nothing wrong, aside from giving the appearance of being inactive because I’ve not logged in within awhile, but so what? What right does that give you to delete my account? (and if by some means it does give you the right to do so, please provide a link proving that)--Chipmonk328 (or was it 9?)<< not that it matters

Transformers Wiki:Bookworm Crash. - SanityOrMadness 15:59, 1 June 2009 (EDT)

Thank you. I'll just make a new account then.-sighs- Forgive if I bothered any of you with what I just said.--Chipmonk328

Don't worry, incoherent rage is the proper response to the Bookworm crash... you're just slowpoking. -Derik 13:17, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Main page

I'll just leave this here...

(I'll check in after work and see if anyone has thoughts, I sure do.)

Number are per-individual-link BTW-- so two separate links to the same location have their clickthroughs tallied separately. -Derik 13:16, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

In which we learn nobody clicks anything! --ItsWalky 13:21, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

The numbers on the page should add up to 100%. It's just that a few links get vastly more traffic than the others so they show up as 0%. That might represent a few hundred clicks-- the Main Page is our most frequented page. -Derik 16:12, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

And people are obviously clicking on Kup (G1) as the page has gained a thousand hits and jumped 30 places in the Popular Pages list in the last week or so. Any idea what time frame the data covers? --abates 21:20, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

That was pretty much my thought, too. XD Although it is kind of interesting that some of the categories/continuities/series sections seem more popular than others... it's just hard to tell which ones, since the number pop-ups are in weird spots.

I also notice that the "images" link in the Editing Tips is popular... and that apparently the fake disambiguation links get some clicks. XD Speaking of which, we really should write up some more of those to replace the rotating ones that got lost in the crash... --Jeysie 13:26, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

I may have sternly directed people to our Images policy page. --FFN 13:49, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

It's the most common thing people get wrong, so it's also our most thorough policy document.--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:05, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

About 8% of clicks on the main page are to our "anyone can edit" but up top-- which just takes people to anchors within the page. (The Editing tips section and the Holy Grails section, which do not themselves then collect a lot of clicks.)

This leads me to think that people who click on these things do not get what they want/are expecting. We should look at changing those links somehow.

Another 8 % of clicks on the main page are on the "home" logo in the upper left (which takes you... back to the main page) and the "main page" link in the nav toolbar.

If there's agreement, I'd like to set it so that the "Main Page" link in the navigation on the left is grayed out when you're on the main page, so it's clearer that "you're here." (The link would still be usable, it'd just have this visual indicator.) -Derik 16:10, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

We could simply de-link the "anyone can edit" links... they just seemed like a good way to get people to actually read our policies and what we need. Or maybe we could link that text directly to Help:Contents and get rid of the "Editing Tips" box altogether?

I agree with the "Main Page" link being disabled when you're actually on the Main Page. It's pretty easy to do via CSS, and you can also change the cursor to be a regular arrow in CSS to further de-emphasize the links and say, "Hey, dude, you're already at the Main Page."

Although I had actually thought that 8% of clicks was to the Recent Changes page, which would have made more sense to me. The oddness of where the stat boxes are in relation to the actual page links does make it hard to analyze. --Jeysie 16:45, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

AS FAR AS I CAN TELL (which in a few cases - the continuities box especially - is less than 100%), these are all the numbers >1.0%:

• Logo (goes to Main Page): 4.0%
• "Navigation" sidebar:
  • Main Page link in sidebar: 4.0%
  • Recent changes: 5.3%
• Fake disambig:
  • "anyone can edit" (goes to "editing-tips" subpage): 4.0%
  • "add to" (goes to "holy-grails" subpage): 4.0%
• Categories:
  • Characters: 1.8%
• Continuities:
  • Live-action film: 1.4%
  • Full Series Info: 4.0%
• Also, the cumulative links to the ROTF page appear to be >1%, even if no individual link is.

Thoughts on that... firstly, the links TO the main page ON the main page need to be nerfed. Not greyed out, killed. The logo can be just a logo, and the main page link can be replaced or removed. Secondly, there is no way in hell we should delink the stuff in the fake disambig, but redirecting to other places may be a better idea - take the "editing tips" box and turn it into a full page, linked from there (And from the ET box). Not quite so sure on "add to" - a list of stubs that we want filled out, perhaps? The "Holy Grails" box is too specific for 99.9% of potential editors, I expect. - SanityOrMadness 19:32, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Useful Extensions

Now that we have a working server again and more control over the techie side of things, I wonder if we should start up a list of extensions to install that might be useful.

My own picks:

• Extension:Newuserlog to keep track of new users so we can give them a friendly greeting. As opposed to our current status of new people not usually getting much of a "greeting" unless they screw up. :>
• Extension:MultiBoilerplate to provide a drop-down menu of skeleton codes for new pages. I find this incredibly useful on my own wiki for being able to easily keep different types of pages all laid out the same, by inserting full page structures into new pages so you can then just fill in the information. For example, here's one structure page I use to give an idea of the sort of code you can inset.

Mine:

• Extension:Title Blacklist blocks creation of pages depending on a regular expression.

I will note that Newuserlog is built into MediaWiki 1.14.0, but we haven't discussed upgrading the software yet... --abates 19:25, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Honestly, those "friendly greetings" drive me spare. I'd really rather not have them.

Suggestions:

• Extension:KeepYourHandsToYourself (prevents users or anons editing User:* pages other than their own.) [Beta] - SanityOrMadness 19:47, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

I'd be fine with blocking anons-- but I have been known to reach out and tweak someone's user page from time to time.

(Not that we've really had a problem with either.) -Derik 20:02, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Why do they drive you spare? Giving new users a heads-up regards our policies before we have to slap a nastygram user notice on their page seems like a good idea to me. --Jeysie 19:54, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

They drive me spare getting them while doing IP-edits. And chances are you'll get them again, and again, and again... -Derik 20:02, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Oh! No, no, no. I didn't mean doing them automatically on all new users, I was thinking, like, putting the greeting manually only for new registered users. --Jeysie 20:09, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Rise of the Chevy Autobots

Allright, I finally got around to putting this up. This is everything I have saved from the "Rise of the Chevy Autobots" online game - flash files, HTML, etc. It comes to nearly 60mb.

Chevy Autobots

Unfortunately, I am most likely missing the last week or two of the story, but I figure it's better than nothing. --Monzo 14:18, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Monzo- I luvers you...

And AFIK the defeat of Mainframe himself never got a news update-- the epilogue was provided by the game itself. So you should have the most up to date version.

Uh, I suppose there might have been a "he's weakening, keep at it" update, but that's pretty content-null. It'd be nice to know the date Mainframe went down... but again, it looks like you've got 99% of everything preserved here.  :)~

And now we can properly cite the Chevy Autobots being allspark mutations! (Or at least a result of Chevy's experimentation with Energon as an alternative fuel source.) -Derik 14:27, 5 June 2009 (EDT)

Possible Relicensing?

So, Wikipedia is moving from the GFDL to a Creative Commons license, which will make it incompatible with most Wikia sites from then on. (Presumably; I haven't heard if Wikia at large or any of its individual wikis--like the old Transformers one-- are making the same transition.) Should TFWiki consider switching, too? Pretty much everyone outside the Wikipedia/Wikia family goes with CC, which is a lot simpler in a lot of ways than the GFDL.

Apparently, GFDL-licensed wikis can only make the change before August 1, 2009. And unlike them, we probably wouldn't have to worry about having added any content from non-wiki GFDL-licensed things, at least. And it would completely eliminate legal copying/pasting between this wiki and its rival. --Fleb 17:47, 6 June 2009 (EDT)

I would support this, at least tentatively. - SanityOrMadness 19:16, 6 June 2009 (EDT)

On the surface, at least, it looks like a good move. It keeps the same free-info spirit, but is incompatible with Wikia's license and any info-quoting or copying from us further requires attributing the wiki, if I'm reading it right. --Jeysie 21:18, 6 June 2009 (EDT)

Hmm. I thought about bringing this Creative Commons thing up awhile back, but I'm not Legal Smarts (S-M-R-T) enough to fully understand it. Perhaps our staff should comment on this? The final decision is probably theirs. --FFN 04:06, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't really have much to say, other than it sounds like a good idea. If nothing else, the legal terms of the GFDL are nightmarish at best and I'd be happy to never think of them again. --Suki Brits 14:02, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

IANAL, but based on Wikimedia's page, it looks like "relicensing" the site is just a matter of changing all the text that mentions "GFDL" now. The one requirement is that we're using version 1.3. Transformers Wiki:Copyrights doesn't specify a version, and neither does the edit page or the footer, so that's probably okay. (If the Document does not specify a version number of this License, you may choose any version ever published (not as a draft) by the Free Software Foundation.) --fleb 18:30, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

One thing that's confusing me, looking again at that - Wikipedia's new licensing structure seems confusing in that all non-imported-under-a-CC-licence content will still be dual-licensed under the GDFL. If we adopted that, Wikia could import from us, but we couldn't import from Wikia. CAN the GDFL be dropped completely? - SanityOrMadness 19:31, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Oh, definitely. The dual-licensing is just Wikipedia's own, weird thing to keep the Free Software Foundation loyalists from bitching and Leaving Forever. (Those CC-only things should actually "poison" individual pages so they're not truly GFDL-licensable anymore without reverting, so they'll probably eventually drop it completely.) --fleb 22:05, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Which CC license would we use? Seems like from the Wikipedia CC page that a by-nc-nd license would be what we're after? --abates 19:16, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

It would be CC-by-sa. --Jeysie 19:23, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

That looks like a good idea to me. --abates 20:07, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Definitely By-SA -- If we do a No-Derivatives, how would we even edit any of our own pages? --fleb 22:05, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Seems I misunderstood how the licensing applied. :) --abates 23:44, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

ARE we going to relicence?

So, are we going to do it, is it being investigated, or are we going to just leave it until the grace period expires and we have to stick with the GDFL after all? - SanityOrMadness 17:09, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I vote we do it. Anyone else? --abates 20:14, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

It seems to be a less onerous license, and one which we have a window of opportunity to switch to. I'd say go for it.--Rosicrucian^Talk 20:18, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

+1 vote in favor of relicensing. --Jeysie 21:29, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

-1, I'm against it unless we find a copyright lawyer. The GFDL provides no provisions against re-use in commercial projects. While I'm all for 'Hasbro' poking around on this wiki and recycling bios/names/ideas/what-have-you, if someone else decides to redistribute this content for commercial purposes (for example, selling an iPhone/Android app that's basically an offline cache of the wiki,) I want to make sure that we're not on the hook for it. I get that Hasbro is turning a gleefully blind eye to us as long as we're just trying to stay alive as a volunteer effort, but if we end up attached to someone's attempt to profit off of our work, which is in itself a derivative work of at least a dozen various IP holders, the resulting storm of litigation would shut us down within hours. (And no, I am in fact the 'least' qualified person around to give advice on this situation. I'm just a paranoid freak.) --McFly 12:07, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

...I have no idea what you just said. Literally. It seems vaguely like you're trying to argue against using the GDFL on the grounds that someone could resell the wiki content. But we're ALREADY using the GDFL and talking about changing to a Creative Commons licence (Which includes the option for a -nc flag, although no-one here has proposed that as yet that I can see - and given that we carry ads, we may not be allowed to use a -nc flag. That's one I'd like a lawyer's opinion on).

[And could you login just to prove that's you? You posted that as an anon] - SanityOrMadness 13:45, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, under our current GDFL license, the content of this wiki can already be sold. Staying with the GDFL won't fix that.

On that note, I will say I'd actually prefer to change to the non-commercial version of the Share-Alike CC license myself, but I had gotten the feeling that there was that only one specific CC license you could switch to. Was I mistaken on that? --Jeysie 14:08, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

They specifically mention CC-BY-SA 3.0, so you're probably right about -nc not being an option, I suppose. For the avoidance of doubt, the GDFL section on relicensing follows in its' own section, the GDFL as a whole is here, a summary of CC-BY-SA 3.0 is here and the full CC-BY-SA 3.0 licence is here - SanityOrMadness 14:25, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Hrm. I guess that's something we should ask... someone? Who's in charge of all this wiki relicensing as a whole?

But for what it's worth, we could use an -nc flag despite the ads, if it's allowed:

Can I still make money from a work I make available under a Creative Commons licenses?

Absolutely. Firstly, because our licenses are non-exclusive which means you are not tied down to only make a piece of your content available under a Creative Commons license; you can also enter into other revenue-generating licenses in relation to your work. One of our central goals is to encourage people to experiment with new ways to promote and market their work.

Secondly, the noncommercial license option is an inventive tool designed to allow people to maximize the distribution of their works while keeping control of the commercial aspects of their copyright. To make one thing clear that is sometimes misunderstood: the "noncommercial use" condition applies only to others who use your work, not to you (the licensor). So if you choose to license your work under a Creative Commons license that includes the “noncommercial use” option, you impose the ”noncommercial” condition on the users (licensees). However, you, the creator of the work and/or licensor, may at any time decide to use it commercially. People who want to copy or adapt your work, "primarily for monetary compensation or financial gain" must get your separate permission first.Creative Commons FAQ

Of course, we obviously actually can't outright sell the work ourselves either, but that answer does seem to mean that, even if showing ads technically counts as "commercial use", we can still use an NC license. --Jeysie 14:31, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, if the GDFL only allows us to go to CC-BY-SA3, and not CC-BY-SA-NC, it's kind of a moot point. Which is annoying, since the -nc version DEFINITELY seems more desirable, since it would absolutely lock Wikia out from copying us if true) - SanityOrMadness 14:33, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

I decided to send off the following e-mail to the GDFL folks' contact e-mail:

Greetings. I'm one of the editors on a Mediawiki-based wiki dedicated to the Transformers franchise: http://tfwiki.net/

We are currently discussing the prospect of also switching from the GDFL to the CC-BY-SA3. However, we were wondering if the CC-BY-SA3 is truly the *only* BY-SA that can be switched to, or if CC-BY-NC-SA3 would also be possible. Since our wiki is obviously based off writing about copyrighted material, it would help us greatly in remaining on the franchise's parent company's good side if we could ensure that our content cannot be sold.

Your answer on this would be much appreciated.

Signed,

Liz Calkins

With any luck I'll get an answer I can pass along. --Jeysie 14:55, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

GDFL section 11, relicensing

11. RELICENSING

"Massive Multiauthor Collaboration Site" (or "MMC Site") means any World Wide Web server that publishes copyrightable works and also provides prominent facilities for anybody to edit those works. A public wiki that anybody can edit is an example of such a server. A "Massive Multiauthor Collaboration" (or "MMC") contained in the site means any set of copyrightable works thus published on the MMC site.

"CC-BY-SA" means the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license published by Creative Commons Corporation, a not-for-profit corporation with a principal place of business in San Francisco, California, as well as future copyleft versions of that license published by that same organization.

"Incorporate" means to publish or republish a Document, in whole or in part, as part of another Document.

An MMC is "eligible for relicensing" if it is licensed under this License, and if all works that were first published under this License somewhere other than this MMC, and subsequently incorporated in whole or in part into the MMC, (1) had no cover texts or invariant sections, and (2) were thus incorporated prior to November 1, 2008.

The operator of an MMC Site may republish an MMC contained in the site under CC-BY-SA on the same site at any time before August 1, 2009, provided the MMC is eligible for relicensing.

Derik causes problems

What is the actual difference between these liscences? Is there a breakdown somewhere?

The explanations I hear online are "They're exactly the same, only CC-BY-SA is worded clearer!"

Is there a more substantial difference?

Regardless, I'm going to suggest TFWiki, in addition to whatever base license we adopt, add a (God help me) signing statement making clear that our legal ability to license the content on this wiki extends only to our own value-added contributions, and not the content which is copywritten by Hasbro.

A fundamental problem with the GFDL (originally a license intended for creating collaborative software documentation) and CC-SA (a license for artists to release their work while still retaining some control of how it is used) is that both licenses operate under the assumption that the people collaborating to produce this content own the content they're uploading. If they produced it, they have the right to give other people the right to use it.

...we didn't produce Transformers. We don't have the right to distribute Screencaps-- our use of those screencaps falls under "fair use," anyone wishing to re-use screencaps posted on this wiki is not granted the use of them via our release of the screencaps... they are claiming fair use from Hasbro again. Even our article text content is a melange of "we can claim ownership" and "derived fromHasbro to such an extent that we cannot claim ownership over it" (moreso than Memory Alpha, because for many obscure characters, their entire bio is nothing but a rephrasing of their tech-spec. The amount of 'value added' work done by us in relation to hasbro's copyright on the original text is very low.)

And that's even separate from McFeely's concern that someone could create an "offline TFWiki" as an iPhone app-- citing their right to use our content under GFDL-- and then never paying Hasbro a dime. In that scenario-- we are the 'leak' for Hasbro's lawyers to plug by shutting us down. Adopting a "NC" (non-commercial use only) license just means they couldn't charge for it... they could still create a free downloadable or java app (Transformer tech-spec viewers are fairly popular as mobile downloads, apparently) with the same result. Besides-- a NC license would technically mean that Hasbro's own people couldn't use the Wiki as a resource anymore. (At least, under sufficiently draconian lawyers, like Disney's.)

Equally undesirable, IMO, is someone who has a TF license via Hasbro, like a book company, that might decide to cheap-out on their content and simply re-present wiki articles-- under GFDL from us for our contributions and fully licensed from Hasbro for the portion of the content that they own. I don't fucking want TF guidebooks cheeping out liek that-- and I'm really uncomfortable with any part of our user-generated content becoming primary source material. That's how Daken got created!

A way around that might involve a second license on our content that's dependent on a commercial producer having the TF license. (This sounds murky, but I think it can make sense...)

...

*scrolls up* Um, wow. That's a lot of text.

Basically what I'm saying is;

1. As long as we're updating our license, I think we should take the time to make it the right license, one that;
   1. Allows users to freely contribute.
   2. Allows creators to freely play.
   3. Reflect that a good deal of our content (particularly graphics) is not owned by us.
   4. Respects Hasbro's legal and business needs vis-a-vis copyright.
   5. Recognizes that TFWiki is used as a resource for commercial products. (Share-and-share-alike is good, but it can have some bad consequences on 'child' derived works, rendering them uncopyrightable.)
   6. Attempt to make sure we're not the only resourced used by those products

No existing license (that I'm aware of) actually reflects the special needs of media fandom wikis. and the degree of disconnect isn't small-- it's legally significant, and it inhibits our ability to control what happens to our content to protect both our own interests and those of Hasbro.

I think we can do that without breaking our brains or hiring a lawyer-- but it requires acting with intention. Like-- forming an exploratory committee seriously peck the problem apart. The upshot might be... well... considerable. We're hardly the only wiki in this position, and taking the hammer out a standard approach stands a decent chance of being adopted elsewhere. (That's kinda meta-benefit to TFWiki, but it's certainly reputation-building. In terms of "moral authority" a lot of people seem to feel like TFWiki is the place that did things right; our approach to WP:NPOV, leaving Wikia, stance on spoilers, our protective attitude towards the brand, etc... at least I keep running into references to TFWiki in the weirdest places, and they're almost always complimentary in terms not just related to our content.)

Is anyone else with an interest in (or at least tolerance for) copyright law interested in doing this right? -Derik 17:37, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Actually, there's no reason whatsoever that Hasbro couldn't use the wiki as a resource under a NC license. They just wouldn't be able to sell any of the exact content of the wiki, if that makes sense. It's the difference between being able to look up that Optimus Prime did some obscure thing in a certain episode, and quoting the wiki article for Optimus Prime verbatim.

Plus, AFAIK, all CC licenses allow for the licensees to make individual exceptions, meaning that even if Hasbro did want to verbatim print some part of the wiki for some reason, we could make an exception for them to do so.

And personally I don't see any big deal with someone giving copies of the wiki away as a free resource, at least in a legal sense, seeing as how the wiki is basically a free guide to Transformers. As long as we're given credit and it's made clear that it's not in any way an official product, it's exactly the same practical result as someone surfing to the wiki itself on their iPhone browser or whatever, just made more convenient. (The only difference is that we don't get the pageviews for ad revenue if people read our material elsewhere, but that's our problem to deal with, not Hasbro's.)

Having said all that, a license that allows for protections on things like screenshots and scans would be useful.

However, that's not something that could be handled before August, I don't think. Personally I'd rather change to some sort of CC license now as an interim measure, and then change again later down the road if a better CC license or other license becomes available.

Otherwise, we may end up locked into a GDFL license we can't change away from anyway, even if we do later come up with something better. --Jeysie 17:51, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Actually, there's no reason whatsoever that Hasbro couldn't use the wiki as a resource under a NC license. They just wouldn't be able to sell any of the exact content of the wiki, if that makes sense.

I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that CC-NC also stipulates that any derived work must also be CC-NC. So if they rewrite any portion of our content-- or re-create a diagram we created-- that's a derived work they can't include in a comercial product. And since the license actually says that any CC-NC element caused the entire resulting work to be CC-NC, that means that if (for example) IDW did photomanip work on a CC-NC image from here and threw it in as an image on a monitor for Spotlight: Brunt-- the entirely of Spotlight: Brunt would fall out of copyright. Anyone could copy it, alter it, and legally distribute copies of it.

What are the odds of a singe identifiable sentence lifted from the wiki ever making it into a TF guidebook by accident? If so-- the entire book is now CC-NC, legal to pirate.

At least, that's my understanding of how CC-NC works-- and I ended up having to read the entire damn license for a software thing I was working on two years ago that used a PHP-library that was CC-NC. It's the same license, right? It's not like CC-NC is "made for wikis," it covers a wide range of products. Am I wrong on this? -Derik 18:37, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Clarification-- I'm actually referring to CC-SA3 in the previous section, not CC-NC. but since we're considering moving to a license that would be SA3, the scenario still stands.

It's right there in plain english. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license. If any of our content leaked into an official product, that product would suddenly be creative-commons and freely distribuitable.

...why do you think the "free information" people have been braying for the license change? This is a stealth copyright-subversion scheme. as accidental direct lifts from Wikipedia (or any product derived from wikipedia content) slip into comercial products, they will become legally contaminated, and then contaminate anything that uses content FROM them. It's better than the Public Domain, because derived works based on the public domain are copyrightable... derived works based on CC-SA are not, they are inherently "free." -Derik 18:51, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, once again, the license outright states that "Waiver — Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder." So again, even if Hasbro or another licensee wanted to sell any wiki-based work, we could just waive the Share-Alike and Non-Commercial aspects for them alone. So that's not a problem/issue.

And again, I'd rather just make the switch now, then we can always switch again if we find something better down the road. Rather than trying to be hasty about it to fit it in before August, so we don't get locked into the GFDL for good.

Further, it's not like we don't already have all of the potential problems you state under our current license anyway. Doesn't the GDFL already require you to release any derivative material under the GDFL license too? --Jeysie 18:58, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

"The Copyright holder" in this case is every person who has ever edited an article on this wiki, or Wikia before we moved.

Did you collect thousands of legal proxies that allow you to speak for them? You can't just legally decide to 'wave a copyright,' nor can a steering committee. The copyright has to be waived by the holder.

And what the waiver notice is really saying is "you can shortform a separate license understanding independent of this liscence as long as you deal directly with the person who owns the copyright on the work." That's always true, it's not a CC thing. You'd have to get a list of every person who's ever edited an article and get them all to agree to waive their rights for Hasbro, which you so casually hand-wave over.

Maybe a better question-- if the primary reason to switch licenses is this "SAS" clause tyhat infects all derived work-- and we want to exempt Hasbro from that clause... why are we even switching?

I'm not even against switching licenses... I just think it should be a thought out decision, not a casual one. This discussion has basically consisted of "Everyone is switching, it's a good idea u wanna?" "LOL, sure why not!"

There are actual not-irrelevant legal ramifications of this decision-- and I'm not sure it's in our best interests or Hasbro's best interests to do this. Can we actually look at what we're signing off on before putting it to an up-and-down vote? -Derik 19:56, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, I can't speak for everyone else, but my end of the discussion is more like, "We only have a month and a half to make the decision, the CC switch looks like it wouldn't add any problems that don't already exist under the GDFL, it might give us some benefits that don't already exist under the GDFL, and the CC seems to be less binding anyway, so we can switch easier down the road."

Furthermore, considering how we're already going to be able to switch to the new license without requiring everyone's sign-off anyway, I don't see why we can't just put the waiver for Hasbro and their licensees into the switch from the get-go.

Then on top of that, if you want to get absolutely technical, since Hasbro and their licensees are the copyright holders for all this stuff to begin with, they get an automatic waver on our derivative work anyway, because we don't have the legal right to lock them out of their own copyright. All we can do is lock non-Hasbro-licensees out of our take on Hasbro's copyright.

So, hey, if someone here can get a lawyer to knock out a good alternative in a month and a half, go for it. Otherwise, seeing as how the GDFL we're under already has all the problems you're complaining about, I see no reason that switching would at least put us any worse off than we are already. All of your alleged problems either already exist anyway under the current GFDL license, or aren't actually problems. --Jeysie 20:12, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't see why we can't just put the waiver for Hasbro and their licensees into the switch from the get-go.

Because then you're committing a legal offense against both the copyright holders and the FSF? That's actually worse than your last suggestion.

I'd be a lot more confident in your judgment about the legal ramifications of the switch if you didn't keep suggesting things that were illegal. -Derik 20:48, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

"Then on top of that, if you want to get absolutely technical, since Hasbro and their licensees are the copyright holders for all this stuff to begin with, they get an automatic waver on our derivative work anyway, because we don't have the legal right to lock them out of their own copyright. All we can do is lock non-Hasbro-licensees out of our take on Hasbro's copyright."

As in, I already know that part, thanks.

As for the FSF part, I'm not sure how it's a legal offense against the FSF to insitute a waiver during the switch that the new license already explicitly allows as being possible.

I'd be a lot more interested in your rebuttals if you sounded like you read not only what I already wrote, but what the legal articles themselves say. --Jeysie 20:58, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

In any case, like I said, if someone here can afford to ask a lawyer about this, I've got no objections to that. But I have to admit you haven't said how staying with the GFDL solves any of your concerns, seeing as how AFAIK said concerns all exist under our current GDFL too. *shrug* --Jeysie 21:03, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm not sure how it's a legal offense against the FSF to insitute a waiver during the switch that the new license already explicitly allows as being possible.

1. You don't have the legal right to act as the proxy of everyone who's edited this wiki by declaring a waiver in any circumstance.
2. You intend to muddy those legal waters by making the acceptance of this waiver a rider on the license switchover-- the FSF debated for almost a year before finally deciding the two liscences were close enough to make the switch-- they have the legal right to determine what new licensing is and is not permissible under GFDL. That's like taking a EULA for a piece of software, agreeing to it, then declaring, "And now I'm going to make unilateral revisions to it without the other side of this contract's knowledge or agreement-- but they're totally legally binding and I can grant myself extra rights with them." And that's even aside from making them an an accessory of your unlawful claim of proxy over the thousands of editors who've created content. -Derik 21:16, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

1. We're already making a claim of proxy over the editors by being able to switch the license to begin with.
2. The whole point is moot anyway, because way I see it, we have to effectively give Hasbro a waiver on using anything on this wiki in their own commercial copyright, because we don't have any copyright powers over their content anyway. I don't see how we could legally force Hasbro to have no control over their own copyright to begin with, just because we wrote about it under a share-alike license, because we never had the copyrights to begin with! And that exact same problem already exists under the GFDL we're already under.
   Again, the only right we have at all is to keep non-Hasbro-licensees from using our content in certain ways.
3. In short, you're the one being silly by making the claim we have the right to ever lock Hasbro out of their own copyright to begin with. You can't be unlawful by having people give up rights they don't actually have anyway. --Jeysie 21:54, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

We're already making a claim of proxy over the editors by being able to switch the license to begin with.

No, you're not. All of those original users granted you the right to make a specific proxy call (switch from GFDL 1.3 to CC-BY-SA3 only) under an obscure clause in GFDL. That right was granted every time an edit was made, and has lain dormant ever since. And relicensing not explicitly made provision for under an updated GFDL would require you to contact all those users and get them to sign off on it. This specific license change only was pre-approoved. It's like checking the "Organ doner, eyes" tab on your driver's license. You granted themt he right to take your eyes if the opportunity came up. When you show up in an operating room brain dead, they can't just arbitrarily decide to take your liver too without the permission of your legal custodian. (In this metaphor, that would be "going back to the original editors or their Power of Attorney heir and asking them to sign off on it.")

STOP TRYING TO STEAL MY DAMN LIVER! I SWEAR, EVERY DAY... THAT DAMN BIRD! -Derik 22:33, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

You still have yet to explain how any license we apply can possibly block out Hasbro from having the rights to their own copyright. Therefore, yet again, the whole point is moot, because Hasbro would already technically exempt from the SA (& NC) parts of the license anyway no matter what we try to claim. Yet again, you can't take away rights from our editors that they never had to begin with.

The best you can possibly do is state that our claim of being under the GFDL is already invalid anyway, because we don't have the right to ever force Hasbro to release their own copyrighted material under the same GFDL license if they use our writings. In which case we might as well just ignore this whole deal that thus doesn't apply to us anyway, and switch to whatever Memory Alpha does. --Jeysie 22:47, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

We would not be locking Hasbro out of their own copyrights-- Hasbro would be at risk to involuntarily surrender many of their rights. That's a different thing.

Devaluation of the Transformers license? That too. -Derik 22:59, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Why would Hasbro surrender any of its rights? We have the right to say how our content is used, but we don't have any right to say how Hasbro gets to use its own copyrighted material, whether they use our writings or not. You don't get to claim copyright over something just by writing about it. --Jeysie 23:19, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

If you don't grasp the concept that we have some copyright claim over our own article text here (the starting point) I don't really feel like going another round explaining everythign that follows after that to you, because it's a non-starter. There's no point in laying out the problems involved if you're stuck on the givens at the starting point.

Refer to my previous example with Spotlight: Brunt for why SA3 would be undesirable for IDW. See how that legal ambiguity makes the TF License (which IDW pays an annual fee for) worth less money. Listen as I tell you that the people pushing for this license change intend that legal ambiguity because they have an axe to grind against copyright, and they intend to cause so much suffering (and hopefully few landmark legal cases) that copyright law gets reformed.

That's great. I think copyright law needs reform. But their method for doing so involves creating massive legal headaches for vast numbers of people. I'd prefer TFWiki and Hasbro not be among those numbers of people. -Derik 00:04, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

But like Jeysie said, GFDL already has those problems, it's a Share-Alike-style license and has all the weird ambiguities that CC-By-SA has for a fandom wiki, so I'm not sure how switching advances the Brave Copyright Cause and exposes TFWiki to legal troubles anymore than the license we're already stuck with? --fleb 00:43, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

^^ This. And, you're still not paying attention to anything else I've said either.

Hasbro has control over their copyright. And, to be perfectly honest, in the end Hasbro has full control over our stuff too anyway because it's technically unauthorized derivative works. I've known several fangames once where the parent company basically made them either sign control of the game over to them or delete the games entirely. What the fangame people wanted to do with their games regards licensing meant precisely jack, because they didn't control the copyright their work was based on. This is exactly the same situation.

We can get away with making people not licensed by Hasbro follow our rules regards our content, but that's it. If Hasbro wants to use our content, they have the right to dictate the terms of use, not us.

Now, if we were writing entirely original work here that wasn't based on any existing property, then we could dictate terms, because Hasbro would be using something that we had full copyright control over. That's where forcing people into using the same Share-Alike license comes into play. But since Hasbro made the initial things we're deriving our work from, we have to play by their rules for their content. --Jeysie 01:21, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

But copyright-- even with derived works-- is not a black-and-white thing with one owner. If I made a "Freddy Krueger vs. Aliens" fanfilm, New Line Cinema can't claim 100% ownership over my work simply by virtue of the fact that they can't claim ownership over aliens. But they also can't claim ownership over my original character heroine. That belongs to me, not New Line or Fox.

Either New Line or Fox could scuttle my project (if I was insane enough to try and distribuit it) or even keep me from putting it up on YouTube-- because the work cannot exist without their copyrighted characters.

But, even after that happened, there's nothing to prevent me from re-filming the movie as "Dr. Jeckel vs. the Moorlocks" with my fanchar heroine intact. Despite not having the right to use Fox and new Lines characters... the "value added" elements of my copyright-violating production remain my property.

And your failure to understand that is what's keeping you fron understanding the implications of SA3.

I freely admit they're largely abstract implications, because no one of us or hasbro actually cares... but I also think that this licensing switchover is being pushed by a group with an agenda in mind that boils down to "get a lot of people (mainly Wikipedia) to switch their licensing, and watch legal havoc that ensues after a couple years as unforeseen implications start fucking up the copyright of books, TV episodes and movies, making their copyright status so murky, debatable and indeterminate that they essentially become legally piratable." and while GFDL might have some of those same problems, it isn't the license they're urging people to switch to.

So if both licenses are equally bad, I'd much rather stick with the one we currently have rather than switch to the one that's probably going to be challenged in the supreme court 5 years from now.

Or at the very least have a conversation where the burden is on CC-BY-SA3 to show some benefit to us for switching, and not on me to prove GFDL is better. Why is our action simply being taken for granted here? -Derik 02:04, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, I understand how copyright actually works, because I've seen people have to deal with it. I don't understand your comment on the whole deal, no, because it makes no sense.

It's true that if Hasbro objects to our wiki writing about Transformers we could technically re-write it to refer to something similar but different enough to avoid Hasbro's copyright. However, unlike your "Dr. Jeckel vs. the Moorlocks" example, our doing that would be useless. In this case, it's not our value-added elements that make the wiki useful, it's the fact that the wiki is about Transformers. Take away the "about Transformers" part, and our wiki becomes pointless. Hasbro's copyright is the intrinsic value of this wiki.

So yes, it is an abstract implication, but it's not because nobody cares.

As for why switch, it basically boils down to: if we are compliant with the GDFL, then switching to the CC-BY-SA means we have the same restrictions, and will also have our info be incompatible for usage with anyone who stays on the GDFL, and we'll be able to require attribution. Basically, it gives us some benefits above the existing GDFL's benefits, without adding or removing any restrictions.

If we're not compliant with the GDFL due to Hasbro's copyright claims, then it turns out we're not bound by the GDFL anyway, because we never had the legal right to claim that license on our work. In which case, again, we get to ignore all this and switch to whatever license someplace like Memory Alpha has.

But in either case, switching gives us benefits over the current GDFL. So it really is on you to prove why staying with the GDFL is better, sorry. --Jeysie 08:31, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Whaaat? No, Derik's right. Windmills and copyright do not work that way. J. K. Rowling does not have the right to re-publish Dumbledore/Grindelwald Harry Potter fanfic. Original owners have the right to stop distribution of unauthorized derivatives, but they don't have the right to anything not already created by themselves. (So that would mean yes, ironically, fanfiction authors could C&D original authors infringing on the fanfiction's copyrights. But somehow I think they would restrain themselves.)
And if we're violating the GFDL by using it to document Transformers, we aren't then "not bound;" because that would mean our existence is illegal, and we don't get to throw up our hands and say "Well we're already illegal, might as well be illegal in a totally different way!" So no, we can't just ignore everything and switch to any license but CC-By-SA-3.0. --fleb 13:49, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I know that Hasbro doesn't have the right to simply go ahead and publish our work without any agreement with us. But, based on my experiences with seeing other fan creators dealing with legal things regards their work, they do have the right to either make us take our work down, or relinquish our rights to it in some manner. We don't have the right to force Hasbro to use our work according to certain terms as long as it's a derivative of their work.

As for our existence being illegal, well yeah, if you want to get technical, we're already as illegal as all other fanworks anyway. I don't see what the validity or otherwise of the contract the work was created under has to do with it, if the contract allows you to do that type of work.

But essentially, the core of my confusion with Derik's concerns is: I don't see how he could be claiming we can ever force Hasbro to follow our terms on derivative works, when our work is already a derivative of Hasbro's work, and thus we already have to follow Hasbro's terms on derivative work. I mean, it's not that his concerns don't make sense to me from a general perspective. It's that they only make sense to me if we're the originator on top of the derivative work chain, which isn't the case here. --Jeysie 17:34, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

based on my experiences with seeing other fan creators dealing with legal things regards their work, they do have the right to either make us take our work down, or relinquish our rights to it in some manner.

They have the right to threaten or strongarm someone, and the person they're threatening has the right to cave. But they have no ability to "make you relinquish your rights."

The idea that New Line owns everything in any work I created means that they'd be claiming ownership not just of my Mary Sue, but also of Fox's Aliens. So that's clearly not true on the face of it. There is a completely unprooven legal theory that a copyright owner could actually own all the value-added additions made to a derived work... but it has literally never been tested (because Paramount has no desire to own a lot of Kirk/Spock bondage fics) and there is a strong suspicion that if it ever went to trial, the entire concept would be shot down.

Regardless-- you're again arguing "my experience," and that's the fundamental source of the musunderstanding here. You're talking about how the law is actually implemented. I'm talking about what the law is. In your experience, no one cares if you go through a red light if there's no one around. But I'm telling you it's still illegal.

And since the kind of illegal we're talking about can have a slow corrosive effect on Hasbro's copyrights, that abstract legality could come back to bite us and Hasbro in the ass. So I'd like to have a real, actual discussion about this. -Derik 17:54, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Um, the entire point of copyright is that you have control over how your copyrighted work is used. If you create something using copyrighted work, then the copyright holder very much has control over what you do with it, because you're using their copyrights. Otherwise, why have copyright to begin with?

Now, if you remove the copyrighted material from your work, then, yes, the copyright holder indeed has no control over your work, because it has no copyrighted material. Problem is that, while that might help out a fancreator if they can change their work into something original, it does us no good, because the entire point of our wiki is that it's about Transformers specifically. We could technically rewrite it to not be about Transformers, but that would just defeat the point.

My experience is that fanworks are always illegal, it's just that most of the time companies turn their head because usually it nets them more goodwill and publicity than anything the fanwork is taking away from them. But it's within a company's rights to turn around and tell you to either take your fanwork down, change it so it no longer contains their copyrights, or obtain a waiver from them/sign over your rights to continue displaying it.

Basically, the reason this is weird is because, you seem like you're saying that we can tell people who create derivative work based from our work how to use it, yet also saying that Hasbro doesn't have the same right to tell us how to use the derivative work we created from their work. Why would we have certain copyright rights, yet Hasbro not have those same rights? --Jeysie 20:28, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Ehh, you know what, this is all getting way, way off track. The only real question worth considering that's been raised with all this is whether we had a right to claim our work fits under the GDFL to begin with. If we did, then switching makes sense. If we didn't, then the contract is technically void/annulled, and we need to switch to some new license regardless. Either way, staying with the GDFL itself seems pointless to me. --Jeysie 21:19, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

And, as beautifully Machiavellian as Derik's contamination scenario is, it still wouldn't negate "fair use" anyway in the case of such a small "lift". - SanityOrMadness 19:44, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

But this isn't about fair use. It's about people who've read Lawrence Lessig's book and attended Disinfocon having a pissing contest and trying to upend how Copyright works.

See how casually you said it? Suddenly instead of us claiming fair use use of Hasbro's intellectual property-- Hasbro is having to claim fair use of our property. And fair use is never proven until it's challenged-- so any instance of "fair use" derived work massively weakens Hasbro's copyright on their own material-- because anyone wanting to claim their work is now SA3 is is now free to do so... and the burden is shifted onto Hasbro to hire lawyers and prove it's not.

That kind of mad-cow subversion tactics would normally make me grin like an idiot-- but just because I approve of malotov-wielding free-culturists are planning the legal equivalent of the World Bank Protests doesn't mean I want to be stuck in the middle of it. -Derik 19:56, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

1. Derik causing problems? Never... :p
2. It's a binary choice - the GDFL3 licence ONLY allows us to change to CC-BY-SA3 and THEN ONLY if we do it before the 1st of August, 2009. The only way we could change in any other direction would be to track down every user who's ever contributed and either get them to relicense their contributions or excise their contributions and derivatives thereof from the wiki. Given that, thanks to Mr Bookworm, we don't even HAVE a complete list of contributors...
3. I think you're getting Daken mixed up with Erista (thank you Eric J. Moreels...) there
4. McFly, not McFeely.
5. The main point is number 2 - we don't have the freedom to custom-design a licence. - SanityOrMadness 17:51, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Sure we do! It just has to be a license that doesn't violate any of the GFDL or CC-BY-SA3 requirements! That's not hard, I do object-oriented programming! Same basic principle!

(In all seriousness, from a legal standpoint, you'd probably set up sort of "type-coercion comfort trap", which is like a Dan Brown novel written by a lawyer with a minor in game theory. I'd want to get a lawyer to check it-- I know a few-- but I'm fairly sure you could do it, legally.) -Derik 18:37, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm a tad confused about what you're saying - the GDFL and the CC-BY-SA are both designed to limit restrictions on the (re)use of work. If you're adding more restrictions than either specifies (i.e., if I licence my work to you under the condition that you must give a copy to anyone who fulfils condition X, and must not give a copy to anyone who doesn't; you can't then impose condition Y, which means not only that you restrict who you give a copy to to a subset of group X will receive a copy from you, but that you DO give copies to a subset of group Not-X...), then you're in breach of the basic licence, ja? - SanityOrMadness 19:44, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

You offer s separate license with GFDL+ (or CC+) permission for new content (generated after the date) for specific commercial purposes. On the date of adoption, the two liscences are exactly equal, but as time goes on, the GFDL/CC+ becomes increasingly attractive, because it offers a commercial reuser a better legal foothold on their own material. You are giving them more rights to the material, provided they operate according to certain restrictions. They could always choose to license the content under vanilla GFDL (or whatever,) but that gives up the increased privileges they have for the post-adoption material.

The beauty is that such a liscence need not differentiate as to what part of the material is eligible for one liscence but not the other... it's a diffuse legal benefit over the content that their lawyers would force them to choose-- but we are not forcing them to choose; the content remains accessible under GFDL, as the GFDL requires, but we offer incentives of increased re-usage rights for newer content in exchange for restricted action.

...this isn't going to make any sense without a chart, is it? There are force-gradients involved. -Derik 21:33, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Okay Derik, simple basic question - if Creative Commons licences are so set for copyright Armageddon, how come Memory Alpha (one of the biggest wikis on the internets, and one which many ST creatives - including the writers of this year's movie [who also happen to write Transformers movies] - have freely admitted to using) has always been under a CC licence without Viacom/Paramount/CBS imploding? - SanityOrMadness 21:04, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Because Memory Alpha is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Generic license. Note the absence of the "Share and share alike" clause, which in the source of the Copyright Armageddon I'm ranting about. -Derik 21:20, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Okay, Derik. Bottom-line it for me. How likely is this to result in Tina Turner forcing me to fight in a cage with a brutally strong man with the mind of a child?--Rosicrucian^Talk 22:04, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, Tina Turner is signed with Virgin, and so was The Verve, whose "Bitter Sweet Symphony," got the band sued out of existence due to a 3-second sampling they claimed was "fair use," but Mick Jagger felt was a big enough use to be a copyright violation. The courts agreed, and for a 3 second sample, they lost all rights tot he song and Jagger is now listed as the songwriter.

So I'd say the odds of Tina Turner smacking you around for not paying attention to this important and non-trivial legal issue involving copyright are in the range of at least 30-35% if we plow ahead heedlessly. -Derik 22:23, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Wow. Okay. Lots of words to catch up on all of a sudden. Glad I sorta-started all this, I guess?
Going waaay back to Derik's first question: There is, indeed, a breakdown. In table form.
"which is like a Dan Brown novel written by a lawyer with a minor in game theory" I would totally read that. --fleb 00:13, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't trust that table. I dont' feel informed after viewing it, I feel brushed off.

I think I need to re-read me the full GFDL to do a proper comparison.

*sigh* I was hoping I wouldn't have to read this thing again. Last time I had drugs to make it better. -Derik 01:20, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Okay, so from what you're saying, the problem with Creative Commons is that... by jumping on the CC bandwagon we might become part of a bigger target in the culture wars or otherwise pull Hasbro into the line of fire, because a CC-licensed thing is more likely to get its day in court someday, because it's popular. Whereas the GFDL, with which we shall stay for ever and ever, will safely gather dust in the FSF's basement for the next hundred years where the light of legal precedent can never touch it.

And also a problem is if Hasbro or its licensees try to reuse our content and unwittingly license their own work under Creative Commons. Honestly, if they make a mistake like that... it's their mistake. It's no different from plagiarizing a random Transformers blog. It shouldn't happen, and it's not our responsibility if someone, somewhere might forget to do due diligence in a hypothetical future. --fleb 21:33, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Oh, hey there

Look who else switched to CC-BY-SA. --abates 00:20, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Pfft. We shouldn't not switch just because Wikia is.

I finished auditing the fine print of both licenses last night. (Whoever said the CC one is easier to read: Lies.) I need to digest 'em... I think the GFDL is a better license for where we are now, but CC-BY-SA includes a clause I was hoping would be in GFDL that might play into future legal wrangling. (Simply because-- it's a license intended to be used by artists, and it doesn't handle our copyright situation well any more than GFDL does.)

Regardless which one we pick, I think TFWiki needs to do something unique to better position ourselves, legally. I'm still ruminating what that might be. (Fortunately, we've got time yet.) -Derik 00:41, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

FWIW, I got a reply from the GNU folks, and the CC-BY-SA3 is indeed the only license we can switch to under this particular allowance. --Jeysie 00:58, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Yes, I got that. They had to amend the GFDL to even make that possible. I don't think we can even make it CC-BY-SA3-NC.

So if we do intend to wriggle around it somehow, it will probably require some vigorous legal calisthenics. (Fortunately legalese doesn't intimidate me.)

I just haven't figured out which license is a better starting point for those calisthenics yet. Maybe I'll blog about the subject to get my thoughts straight. -Derik 01:34, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

The full reply, if it helps:

Unfortunately, the GFDL 1.3 (which enables the relicensing) specifically lists CC-BY-SA3 as the license that a wiki can migrate to, and so that is the only license available under this relicensing provision.

In addition, a non-commercial license is not really a free license, instead it is considered semi-free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/categories.html#semi-freeSoftware). The GFDL (as well as all GNU licenses) permits commercial use and distribution. While I understand your concerns, being able to use and distribute a work for any purpose, even a commercial purpose, is a part of the freedom that we work towards protecting here at the FSF. Thank you once again for your interest, and good luck with your project.

--Jeysie 01:46, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Right, any gymnastics would have to take place outside of this licensing provision, which we're not allowed to do.

(Law can be wonderfully fun when you see it as the illusionary cultural construct-- like a monster in a fairy tale whose terms must be met, but is stupid and easily tricked by turning its words against it.) -Derik 02:15, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

You see, this is exactly the kind of granola-crunching BS that I'm worried about. "Woo, look at us! We're so clever, Information Wants To Be Free, Fight The Power!" Er, no. Information wants nothing. It's data. It's a thing, an inanimate pile of electron states jumbled up into a system which we can comprehend. We can claim that we Mean No Harm, that we're a Free Information Repository For All Things Transformers, but in the end, we have screencaps, quotes, bios, comic summaries, and roughly 25 years worth of history all crammed into this site. If Hasbro wanted to, they could shut us down right now just by scaring us with enough of a nasty C&D. I don't exactly see us armed with a high-powered law firm, for one, and second, unless someone in this thread *coughDerikcough* wants to produce a JD and back his comments with actual legal expertise, we're merely guessing as to what we can and can't get away with. On top of all of that, flaunting what we can theoretically get away with on a public web page with an ideally-infinite revision history means that you've just peed in the swimming pool that is the Internet. Perhaps we can make this all easier by just charging for access, thumbing our noses at the law, and even hosting a torrent of the movie, just to make damned sure that we get dragged into court? Smartassery + Law is a combination best left to those who have studied the practice of law. --McFly 21:09, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Your sarcastiggestion seems like the opposite of what's going on, if the goal's more to "get away with" adding more pro-Hasbro restrictions to ourselves/the content. And how does their granola-crunching email impact anything? That's them. Not us.

Anyway, I think there's one other plus point to a switch; the CC licenses get updated at a reasonable rate. There's a chance the folks in charge will listen to concerns about fanwork and adopt language into version 4.0 or 5.0 to fit it better-- they seem to solicit feedback like that. There's not much of a chance of our use case being relevant to version 2.0 of a license intended for software documentation... ---fleb 22:16, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Going back to the well

Alright, in my mind we need to re-center this discussion. The first question is:

1. Why did we originally want to re-license?

Which, scrolling up, seems to be "because it would provide a legal barrier to Wikia stealing what new content we've generated since the move." This, as also shown above, has become a moot point due to Wikia re-licensing in the exact same fashion.

So, that particular aim coming to naught, we instead need to ask these two questions.

1. Is there any remaining benefit to re-licensing?
2. Does said benefit outweigh the hassle of doing it?

I look forward to answers to these.--Rosicrucian^Talk 22:33, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Asking for permission to post links

I'm the current Bureaucrat at Ghostbusters Wiki, and there was interest in placing links to articles on this wiki to Ghostbusters wiki articles, and likewise placing links on Ghostbusters wiki to articles relating to content which has been brought up. I don't know a great deal of your wikis past dealings, other than wikia apparently kept your old wiki's content when you moved. Anyways, the wiki would rather reference to your present wiki than the one currently at wikia. We are hoping you wouldn't mind the links to our characters on pages related to the Race with the Devil article. Devilmanozzy 02:10, June 8, 2009 (EDT)

Can you give a few examples of articles on your wiki which would benefit from having links to this site? --abates 03:37, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

IIRC it's whatshername's assistants-- the ones from the Earthforce story (Running with the Devil?) that Wildman based on the RGB models.

(I personally have no problem with the links. Though I think this guy added 'em once, misformatted, and they got reverted.) -Derik 13:06, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

That wasn't Nozzy but Liberal Noob, while not logged in. I told the original guy to take a step back and mind their P's and Q's before we start crosslinking, especially since it was an anonymous IP at the time. But yeah, he wants to crosslink with Race the Devil and Susan Hoffman.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:43, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Only direct link between the Ghostbusters Cartoon and the G1 Transformers cartoon is Frank Welker sounded like one of his TF roles when he voiced a ghost from time to time. I a am sorry for my wanton linking and it will not happen again. --Liberal Noob 22:57, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

I meant which pages on the Ghostbusters wiki would benefit from having links on them to our wiki. I'm curious, because I regard myself as reasonably familiar with Ghostbusters, and I can't think offhand of any references to Transformers in it. Perhaps in one of the cartoons? --abates 16:55, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Thanks for the replies on this matter. A good user Liberal Noob had requested that I would more address this, apparently the mod needed to say something and form a partnership in order to have links posted related to one anothers material. To answer the question of what articles would be hyperlinked, I believe he was planning on linking to the animated pages for Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz. Thats what I understand is being requested to being linked to.Devilmanozzy 19:42, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

We're not wondering which pages on our wiki would link to your wiki. We were wondering which pages on your wiki would need to link to our wiki. We didn't know there were any Transformers references in any Ghostbusters media, and thus didn't know you'd need to link to us from your wiki. --Jeysie 19:59, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Race with the Devil, Susan Hoffman, Starscream's Ghost, Horri-Bull, and a few others. Links will be on is a article on Ghostbusters Cameos. Note I believe that the section will be better built soon.Devilmanozzy 20:21, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Seems like there's a few other connections in terms of voice actors (Tara Strong, Frank Welker, Maurice LaMarche etc) as well. I think linking between the two sites is a good idea. --abates 23:37, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah I had noticed that too as I looked around here the last few days. Never knew how much Ghostbusters and Transformers had in common.Devilmanozzy 23:40, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

While I'm broadly in favour of this, could you maybe change "Starscream's Ghost" to "Starscream's ghost" - I understand you want to keep the ghost theme going but the first is a link to an unrelated episode of the cartoon series, rather than the character himself. --Emvee 07:02, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

OK Emvee, I fixed the link on the Ghostbusters wiki as you requested. Devilmanozzy, Star Wars also has a lot in common with Transformers. --Liberal Noob 14:52, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

We know, we got named an official friend of Wookiepedia about a week into the Project: Bookworm Crash. If we hadn't been scrambling to pick up the pieces, our pages would probably reflect this more. (I assume we'll integrate more when Clone Wars starts up again, since we love to attention-whore ourselves that way.) -Derik 23:56, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Here is an obscure crossover from The Real Effing Deal. - Starfield 00:09, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

Quick Links?

You know, now that I think about it, one thing Wikia actually did do right was having some "Quick Links" on the sidebar. I find myself missing being able to quickly get to the main continuities/series without having to search or click to the Main Page first. (Especially now that there's lots o' ROTF toys to keep tabs on...)

Nothing extensive necessary; just one linkie thingy with a fly-out menu for our six main continuities and the full series list would probably work nicely. --Jeysie 03:03, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

I think notably M.Sipher *really* hated that because any time a cursor went within a parsec of the menu, it would pop out in an annoying manner. --FFN 04:09, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Wasn't just Sipher - it drove me nuts too. - SanityOrMadness 09:09, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, in that case, maybe just an extra sidemenu then, kind of like the "Campaign Navigation" box on this sidebar? I just figured that a fly-out menu would save space, but an extra link sidebar would work for me too.

But I'd definitely like something. As Abates points out below, we don't currently have any sidebar links for actually browsing. --Jeysie 12:47, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Could we make so that they're fly-out menus, but that they only fly-out if you actually click on the title? That would save room while avoiding things jumping out when you're waving the cursor around. --abates 22:11, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

I think having a link on the sidebar for Revenge of the Fallen would be good too. While the Community portal and Recent Changes links are great for us Editors, they're not likely to be used much by casual visitors. We should be using the menu to draw attention to major articles. While I'm thinking about it, we could probably change the Main Page link to read "Transformers Wiki"... --abates 04:11, 8 June 2009 (EDT)

Would anyone object if I went ahead and popped a link to Revenge of the Fallen in the navigation menu? I'm thinking between "Main Page" and "Community portal". --abates 18:44, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm not of the upper brass but given the increasing coverage of ROTF as we come down the wire, it'd make the most sense. --Lonegamer78 19:00, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

We need a new adspace

The TFwiki on our new server is doing super mega amounts of bandwidth! (Note I've broken up the OPtimus Prime (G1) page, because, dude, that thing was a monster.) So, uh, I think we need to add a new adspace. One that's *above* the fold, since the ones we have are shoved down in the corner where no one can see them. What advertiser would want to dump loads of money on those? What I'm proposing is a 486x60 banner-shaped ad up above the "article/discussion/edit/history/delete/move/watch" links, nestled in between the Teletraan 1 image and the personal toolbar. (You know, OUTSIDE of the content.) If this is a terrible idea, I will also accept $5 donations. --ItsWalky 11:14, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I've no qualms with that. That was one of the "acceptable" adspaces, if I recall from the old discussions.--Rosicrucian^Talk 11:18, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Long as they don't dance or talk or sing, that'll work. Are we actively pursuing advertisers these days? -- Repowers 11:22, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, "actively pursuing advertisers" is somewhat incompatible with our current ad setup. To put an ad on our site now, that requires signing up with Project Wonderful and bidding. This is good for us because it's mostly automated. If we were to set up a "real" in the traditional sense, we'd need a full-time ad pursuer to fill those spots. The best we can do in our current situation is to try to convince Big Bad Toy Store and its ilk to sign up for Project Wonderful. --ItsWalky 11:33, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

IIRC, above-the-article is what we wanted Wikia to switch back to. I have no objection. -Derik 12:20, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Works for me. How does Ant handle TFU.info's advertising? Hooper_X 12:35, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Doesn't bother me... but can we either put it under the personal bar, or somehow make it so the personal bar would wrap? Otherwise, I'm staring at the top of my screen and realizing that I'd have an annoying horizontal scroll bar afterwards whenever I'm logged in.

I have to admit I'm kind of befuddled that we're apparently doing so much more traffic after the move than we were before, to the point of having all those initial problems because we weren't expecting it. Did the new server somehow improve our traffic, it is sheer coincidence that traffic increased for other reasons, or was it more like the old server wasn't keeping track of bandwidth or anything, so we had no idea how we were actually doing? --Jeysie 12:38, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Hosting with Bookworm was cheap. I mean, he was doing it at-cost. Or would have, if he ever invoiced us. Now that we've moved on, we're purchasing hosting from people who actually want to make money off us. --ItsWalky 12:41, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, the money's part of it, but I was also thinking about how most of our initial operational troubles seemed to stem from having more traffic to deal with than we realized we were going to have, to the point of even having to run a caching setup I'm guessing we weren't running on the old server. --Jeysie 12:45, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

The way Bookworm had his servers set up, it was difficult for him to separate out what was our traffic versus what was other traffic on the same server. He gave us an estimate which turned out to be wrong. --ItsWalky 12:55, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Aah, OK. Wasn't sure if it was something we needed to worry about or not. --Jeysie 13:29, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I was kinda expecting this :( I'm cool with more banners, and I think you should beg us for money now and then. We may be able to help when we can. --FFN 13:15, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Caching is what most mediawiki installations do. We happened to start off on the most resource-intensive wiki software imaginable, and any stats from Bookworm were not only inaccurate based on whatever he was doing in the logs, but also because back then, the wiki was constantly crashing. You get zero hits per hour when it's down, and no stats in the world would help clear that up. I'm still tweaking the hit stats, and it'll be at least a week before I can start extrapolating growth numbers, but suffice it to say, we're going to go over our current bandwidth limit before the month is out, and while we won't get shut down, we will get billed for overages. Think of it like a normal cellphone plan instead of a pre-paid one. --McFly 11:47, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, that's mainly what I thought Walky meant. Nestled between the personal bar and the article tabs seems like fertile ground for a banner ad.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:39, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I've got the ad code ready to go, whenever we can edit the CSS or whatever to make room. Here is our awesome new placeholder "please bid here" graphic: [1] --ItsWalky 13:48, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Looks good so far. Potentially odd question: are these particular dimensions popular with Project Wonderful?--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:55, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

The Leaderboard (700ishx90) and the Big Box (300x250) are the most popular sizes, but those would really ugly up our page. --ItsWalky 15:58, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

And now it has its first client! That was fast.--Rosicrucian^Talk 01:52, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Ahhh, Dreamland Chronicles is awesome. I spent a week a few months back reading through their archives after following an ad on our sidebar. --abates 02:20, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

One interesting thing looking at the Project Wonderful stats is that our ad hits are stabilizing now, and they're stabilizing fairly high relative to where they were when the site was still spotty. That's got to look good for advertisers, and if the site holds up to the abuse that the film debut is going to subject it to that's only beneficial to us in the end.--Rosicrucian^Talk 02:48, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

This = bad

Uh, I'm using Monobook, and as a result of this, the watchlist/preferences/etc bar has somehow ended up at the bottom of the page, just above the About Transformers Wiki/Powered by MediaWiki/etc... - SanityOrMadness 10:36, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I got that on a couple of pages, too, and alt+F5ing didn't work. How I fixed it was I signed out and viewed those same pages as an anon. The userbar went back to where it should be, and it stayed there when I logged in again. - Magnus Maximus 10:49, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Tried that, didn't work.

In fact, it's worse than I thought, because I didn't notice at first that the page/discussion/edit tabs have gone wandering too, and are floating around the place (the "discussion" and "edit" tabs are currently in the middle of this edit box, and I can't see the others anywhere). - SanityOrMadness 10:58, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

THE PROBLEM IS IN common.css.

The following CSS borks monobook. This is why you should use the specific stylesheets for each skin, NOT the common file:

#p-personal {
   position: relative;
}
 

#p-personal .pBody {
   float: right;
}

#p-cactions {
   position: relative;
}

#content {
   margin-top: 16px !important;
   position: relative;
}

-SanityOrMadness 11:30, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

The new ad space at the top of the page, which was fine yesterday, is now looking screwy in Firefox, with the ad behind the top of the Autobot symbol in the logo and the tabs at the top of the bar. Like so:

--KilMichaelMcC 16:43, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Works fine for me in 3.0.10 and 3.5b99, both after clearing cache.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:47, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I made some CSS modifications in response to SanityOrMadness's issue, which may cache improperly. Try a hard refresh/clearing your cache. --Suki Brits 16:51, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Okay, clearing my cache fixed it. --KilMichaelMcC 20:19, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Is it working?

So, between the new banner and our ad display stats in general being much better since the server stabilized, does this mean that we're taking in what we need to?--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:57, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I think so! We're averaging about $5 a day, which means $150 a month. Our hosting is... $80-ish? But how much of that $150 we'll have to spend a month remains to be seen, since we're going to be doing a lot more than our monthly allotted bandwidth. And there's a movie yet to premiere! So, uh, we'll have a better idea once the month is over. --ItsWalky 15:00, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Assuming we ever end up with more money than we need, David, I suggest you cover yourself in gold. 14 caret gold. --FFN 16:42, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

If anyone's getting covered in gold, it's McFly and Scout! --ItsWalky 16:51, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, but I can actually imagine you as the World's Biggest Man, resplendent in gold and jewels, laughing maniacally. --FFN 03:28, 20 June 2009 (EDT)

I second McFly and Scout being covered in gold. Also what rate are we paying for extra bandwidth? --abates 04:42, 20 June 2009 (EDT)

Consolidate front page?

Man, that front banner is huge! Can it be smaller? And when we make it smaller, can we stack up the top-most two boxes next to it like so? --ItsWalky 15:58, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

The cropped image shown, of course, is just a placeholder. --ItsWalky 16:00, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

That looks about as clunky as Wikia's frontpage, IMO.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:05, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, it's not fine-tuned or anything. Thing is, either that banner's going to be cut down or removed entirely. It's huge, it's bandwidth-wasting, and it pushes all our real content down off the page. What's your choice? --ItsWalky 16:07, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm probably knee-jerking based on the placement of the boxes. I guess it could be made to work if it's finessed a bit. It's not like we're running a ginormous ad there like Wikia was suggesting.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:31, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I dunno, personally I like this new idea. It reminds me of how our franchise navs look: Logo on the left, linkage on the right. Plus, yeah, unlike Wikia, our content on the right of the logo will actually be... content.

As for logo ideas, why don't we make a few different options where it's the TFWiki.net logo over a pic of a single character? We could have one for Prime, Megatron, Starscream, Jazz, etc. using the <OPTION> thingy. --Jeysie 16:37, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

As long as the site-name logo thing itself is HUGE. I really want to make sure the URL is shoved in your face. Branding continues to be important as we war against Wikia for Google prominence. --ItsWalky 16:40, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

If branding's important, why not change the actual on-every-page logo to use the actual TFWiki.net logo? And put TFWiki.net in the page <title>? - SanityOrMadness 11:01, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Alternately, each one could be a group shot from a different franchise, with the font altered to match. Play up how many different continuities there are, eh?--Rosicrucian^Talk 17:00, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

This image to the right is what I'm now thinking. And it should probably have movie characters predominantly, at least for the next few months. --ItsWalky 17:04, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm inclined to agree with sticking with the movie characters now, considering it's almost two weeks till the US premiere/release. --Lonegamer78 17:19, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

That's pretty darn good. Brings a lot more info above the fold, and the layout's pretty clean. The white background is good too, so any other images in the rotation should follow that example.--Rosicrucian^Talk 17:21, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

How do we make it done? The table markup on the frontpage is foreign to me. I'll upload the new image itself... --ItsWalky 17:32, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Since Derik doesn't seem to be about yet, I'll have a go with it. Hmm. --Jeysie 17:42, 9 June 2009 (EDT)--Jeysie 17:42, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Actually, we're really going to have to do something like your first example above, with the Continuity/Category tables underneath each other instead of side-by-side, because trying to fit the logo and the two tables all side-by-side looks hideously awful on a 1024px-wide screen. I tried just simply having the smaller logo, the text notices under it, and the two tables on the right, but it looked kind of... eh. --Jeysie 18:04, 9 June 2009 (EDT)

Mrr. OK, I made an attempt at tweaking, although I think it's going to need some external CSS tweaks at least, if only to center the Continuities table. --Jeysie 03:44, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Looks okay, but the jarring thing about it is that the red and blue boxes aren't the same width, though they share a column.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:19, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

That's something Derik needs to tweak in the Featured box template and/or external CSS... I can't do it just by editing the page itself.

Also, yea or nay on the link buttons? It just seemed a little more "Click me!" than the paragraph o' links. --Jeysie 16:49, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I dig 'em. Good design decision, IMO. --Rosicrucian^Talk 16:52, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Quite aside from anything else... what's the point in liking to tfwiki.info with an image link. It just about made sense as a text link, but is only going to confuse people who click on the Autobot symbol and end up back where they started. We need to cut down on main page-to-main page links, not obfuscate where they link to. - SanityOrMadness 17:30, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Visual consistency. (And the mouseover text indicated it was an "alternate URL".) But, I tried tweaking it again. --Jeysie 17:52, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

It's fixed! Huzzah!--Rosicrucian^Talk 20:46, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I realized I was just approaching it the wrong way. Eheh. --Jeysie 21:15, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm a little ambivalent towards the "new" logo, just because I think it's a little bland, although I'm sure it's a work in progress. I am all for putting "TFWIKI.net" in the header and all over the fucking place as a branding effort, though. On a slightly related note, I'd consider flipping the "current series" in said box, so ROTF is closer to the center of the page and Animated is on the outside - if we're really trying to bring in ROTF traffic, having that logo front and center is probably a pretty smart idea. I also like the idea of a rotating logo box - maybe we even jigger it so that it links directly to the article for whoever's in it - like the Go! Boxes, but focused entirely on core characters (More Fallen, Movie Optimus, etc., less Irwin Spoon and Dinobots Strike Back). Stick with primary Movie-verse guys for now, and then in a month or so when the hype dies down, we can start to shuffle in some sufficiently advanced and significant articles (making sure that the characters are both important to the fiction and that their articles are nearly, if not entirely complete). Hooper_X 11:17, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

That sounds like a good idea. I'm down with that. --FFN 17:00, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I has new idea for what module ought to be above the fold, and more ROTF promotiony stuff. --Jeysie 21:15, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Sure, I'd go for it. --ItsWalky 21:26, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Considering how crowded and text-heavy the front page is, I think the best way to draw attention to the banner is to surround it in as much empty space as possible, something like this, especially as the new banner's white background assimilates the page's whitespace so easily. - Magnus Maximus 03:10, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm not sure how that's really different than it is now, other than putting the site notice at the top... which I kind of hate doing, because that pushes all of the content stuff down. The site notice is temporary anyway.

I was thinking we ought to make the movie stuff more prominent, rather than the continuity/category modules. I was also thinking of placing the banner, site notice, and external website links in one cell instead of two like it is now, which further creates whitespace... I just didn't think of that until after I made the layout change proposal pic.

I do agree/think maybe we could stand to lose a few modules, though... maybe ditch the Categories module entirely, and consolidate the Holy Grails and Editing Tips somehow. --Jeysie 03:32, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

Oh yeah, you're running a 1024 desktop, aren't you? I changed my res to 1024, and you're right, it really doesn't look much different. But this is how it looks in 1280, and even that little bit of extra space makes a huge difference compared with how it is now (in my opinion).

I agree about the notice, but I couldn't think where else to put it. Putting it under the banner (thus between the blue and grey boxes) made it seem wedged-in and out of place. Lesser of two evils, you dig?

I also agree about making the movie stuff more prominent, but the red and blue boxes are narrower, so they take up less of the horizontal space. I did think that maybe we could change the featured series box so that ROTF is on top of Animated instead of beside it, and shift that up next to the banner somewhat like it is on my temp page now. That also adapts to 1024 better, I think.

And yeah, losing some of the boxes would not be the worst thing in the world. - Magnus Maximus 03:52, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

Ehh... my problem with that idea is that, one of the reasons we redesigned the Main Page to begin with is because our greeting was so big that it was pushing useful content down below the fold. This sort of recreates that exact same problem.

But, I tried tweaking my Main Page design here: User:Jeysie/Main Page to give more whitespace. I figure that once the movie's been out for a while and we don't need to pimp it as much, we can replace the Featured Characters box with the Continuities box. --Jeysie 11:50, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

I was looking at the front page right now and thinking about some things - I'm glad to see most of them are in line with what's already considered. :)

That said, I suggest taking TFA out of the featured series box, even if only temporarily, and using the logo from the franchise page. I feel it's more recognisable as the ROTF logo than the more colourful one we have there, plus we can make it a bit bigger.

I also wonder if we should have "Transformers Wiki" written on there somewhere other than the site logo in the sidebar. --abates 07:11, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

"TFWIKI.net - THE Transformers Wiki"? Hooper_X 07:49, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

I made up a PSD template of just such a logo this morning. It's layered, so the transparent overlay of the Autobot leaders is optional.--Rosicrucian^Talk 12:18, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

I definitely prefer the font of the current TFWIKI.NET logo to that one.

Whatever we ultimately do though, surely we should use the same logo EVERYWHERE, including for the top-left logo, ja? (There's also the recurring thought that we have a G1 Autobot sigil for the top-left logo, but a G2 Autobot sigil for the favicon. I understand that the G2 favicon is unique, which was the main reason we went for it, but if we're thinking about branding...) - SanityOrMadness 12:37, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

Logo

If we want to be movie-centric AND use the TFWiki.net logo extensively for branding reasons, shouldn't we change the Animated-based logo to something more like this? (NB: Quick mock to make a point, not intended to be actually used, and may clash with the Teletraan on the Monacobook skin). - SanityOrMadness 17:30, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

I think we do need to keep some visual distinctiveness. If we go too far into the grey look of the movie we end up with understandable confusion concerning its resemblance to this.--Rosicrucian^Talk 17:59, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah. I'm really really fine with keeping our current page design/color scheme. The Wikia site is really gray, and I'd rather not veer to close to that. --ItsWalky 20:48, 10 June 2009 (EDT)

[Joke Suggestion] How about we make ours on fire? --FFN 04:27, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

It wouldn't actually be that hard to do... -Derik 12:08, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

Featured-series box

vFeatured Series Movie | Toyline | Comics | Books Newest: Revenge of the Fallen issue 4 -6184 days until TF: Revenge of the Fallen! Cartoon | Toys | Comic | Books Newest: Endgame, Part II

Should we perhaps rebalance the featured-series box to be more like this? (Yes, I know there's a too-high gap between the two lines to the right of the TFA logo. It didn't preview like that, and I can't see why it's doing that.) - SanityOrMadness 14:41, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

That's pretty darn sweet-looking, IMHO. I tried swapping around my take on the Main Page to include a slightly modified version of it. --Jeysie 15:16, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

The way it is on the mainpage right now looks really great. Good density of info above-the-fold.--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:19, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Or rather on Jeysie's test page, I see now.--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:21, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Thing about including Main Page/featured-characters in it like that (which I just edited to increase the header-size to be visually bigger than the character names, and debold the character names themselves) is that if you separate that from above AND below with a line, you visually make it into a franchise by itself. TFA needs a stronger separator from ROTF than the ROTF stuff does within itself. - SanityOrMadness 15:39, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

vFeatured Series Transformers One "Hometown Heroes" "Legacy of Hope" "Waves of Guilt" "Everybody Dance, Ow! Core Rulebook Transformers One Sourcebook "Unnatural Disaster" "From Yesterday to Today" Transformers #32 Void Rivals #29 G.I. Joe #21 Energon Universe 2026 Special

How about this? - SanityOrMadness 15:41, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Works for me. I added it to my test Main Page with a few minor formatting tweaks. --Jeysie 16:38, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

That looks excellent to me! --abates 07:23, 13 June 2009 (EDT)

Are we doing to do this then? - SanityOrMadness 11:06, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Was wondering that myself. Any more tweaks or suggestions to add, or should we go with my mockup? --Jeysie 13:02, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

The mockup looks pretty solid to me.--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:11, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

I say go for it! --abates 16:46, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Looking again at the featured-characters bit... is Sideswipe really the best choice for that fourth spot on row 1? I already changed Soundwave to Devastator, because the latter has been a LOT more prominent in promos for the movie, but I'm not sure who would be best for a fourth Autobot. Jetfire? Skids & Mudflap? (I'm not even sure if Ironhide is best for the third slot). - SanityOrMadness 18:54, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

I was trying to think of a balance between which characters were most prominent and which people were likely to be excited about... we could go for Optimus, Bumblebee, Jetfire, and Skids & Mudflap together in the last spot. --Jeysie 19:03, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Made that change for now, then. I think "prominence" should probably be the main factor, if we want to grab users. - SanityOrMadness 19:14, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Featured article

Now that the featured series box has been sorted... nothing against Kup, but do we have a movie/ROTF article that could possibly take the featured spot at some point between now and the 19th? - SanityOrMadness 17:57, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

The Fallen is at Featured Article status. --Jeysie 18:07, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

And has been the Featured Article for awhile at A Certain Other Place. I'd rather not mirror them in that respect, personally.--Rosicrucian^Talk 18:22, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

In that case... I've got no idea. None of the rest are at FA status, and I can't think of which one would be most relevant to pick on for cleanup. --Jeysie 18:31, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Surely the three most obvious non-Fallen articles "to pick on for cleanup" are Optimus Prime (Movie), Bumblebee (Movie) and Sam Witwicky, ja? - SanityOrMadness 18:51, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Simmons might be mroe fun.  ;)

And Megatron more enlightening, if someone wants to take a whack at his DS-game backstory. -Derik 19:17, 14 June 2009 (EDT)

Looks like Primal Prime is the featured article at that other place, not The Fallen. In fact, it looks like their Fallen article has a cleanup tag, not a featured tag... - SanityOrMadness 17:07, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, someone replaced it a couple of days ago after noticing that their "The Fallen" article wasn't up to scratch. --abates 17:40, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Any objection to us featuring our superior The Fallen article after all, then? --Jeysie 18:08, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, on the 24th, the Fallen's page is going up. ESPECIALLY if it's also up at Wikia. Our Fallen page has to supercede theirs, and burying it on the most important week of its life isn't gonna work in our favor. --ItsWalky 18:19, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Hell, if we want to upstage 'em over at Wikia, just put Sideswipe as one of the featured characters. I was over there just to see how far the site had gone downhill and it surprised me. They don't even have a page for Sideswipe, it just redirects you to G1 Sideswipe. How sad is that?--AWT88 00:13, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

How hard did you look? I wont link it for obvious reasons, but there IS a page for him. - Cattleprod 00:22, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

I think he got messed up by the fact that the Main Page links to "Sideswipe" without the parenthetical, which does indeed redirect to G1 Sideswipe.

Having said that, their proper ROTF Sideswipe page is still miserable compared to ours, as is the fact that they got the Main Page linking wrong.

Not only that... I also noticed that one of their registered users, while editing their Main Page, managed to change their Twitter link to our Twitter in the process. --Jeysie 00:44, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah I didn't look very hard (alcohol is a helluva thing), the link was what I went for. Obviously someone over there screwed up. You got a problem with it Cattleprod, kiss my shiny, metal ass.--AWT88 01:29, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Text Purging

Next possible round of changes: I've tweaked my setup to remove the Categories module (is it really that useful?) and try to reduce/consolidate the Editing Tips/Holy Grails section.

I also think we should do a purge of the Series box and stick to just the "major" series/franchises: Generation 1, Generation 2, Beast Wars, Robots in Disguise, Armada, Energon, Cybertron, Animated, the two movies, and Universe. (Possibly also Classics and/or Beast Machines). We have the comprehensive list linked to for anyone who really wants to look at everything. --Jeysie 19:52, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

The categories box is useful for two reasons: (1) In and of itself, it's useful. I certainly use it. (2) Without it, your mockup has an empty white space in the right column almost the exact size and shape of the categories box... - SanityOrMadness 20:49, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I further note that, per Derik's statdump, it gets used. - SanityOrMadness 20:53, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, if you can suggest other ways to clean up our Main Page, I'm all for it. As it is, I agree with Walky that it's getting to be too much of a sea of text, and that struck me as being one of the least useful of the modules. I guess we could consolidate it somehow with the Continuities module as a sort of "Quick Links" box...

We possibly could also get rid of the Editing Tips and Holy Grail modules, but I kind of hate doing that, as it's nice to try to encourage new editors to look at that sort of information. --Jeysie 21:02, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Thing is, if I click on the first link in the Categories box because I want to find a particular character, I get a big confusing list of subcategories and... Mickey Mouse. If I'm a casual user looking for,say, Soundwave, that doesn't help me much, because then I have to hunt through the subcategories for something that looks like it might lead me there. Yes, it's possible that I might notice the search box and use that instead, but that kinda takes away from the point of having that there in the first place.

Though technically I guess I'm complaining about the organisation of the Characters category rather than the box itself. :) --abates 21:20, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Jokes?

It is sometimes very hard to find relevant information on this wiki among all the juvenile humor. It's a little off-putting for a casual user like myself. I know this wiki is about robots who turn into cars, but, c'mon... Maybe tone it down a bit?71.107.102.102 16:56, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

No. Hooper_X 17:00, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

If you can point out specific instances where the humor is getting in the way of the information, we'll take those under consideration for adjusting, but on the whole we here tend to appreciate the humor. (Including this editor back when she was a newbie/casual reader.) --Jeysie 17:04, 11 June 2009 (EDT)

As does the overwhelming majority of the readership, it seems. We've gotten praise from all circles for the "do not take it too seriously" approach, even from industry professionals. --M Sipher 15:22, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Tech Upgrades

Since we're cracking 1.5 million hits per day, I'm running an alternate webserver for testing over on port 8080. It's *not* cached, so I expect it to be a smidge slower, but I'm also aggressively tweaking it for better content compression and lower memory usage. It probably doesn't matter *now,* but I suspect that as we close in on the movie, and then as the movie is released and the edits go up, we're going to need to squeeze out every last ounce of performance available to us. That said, can you guys try to break it via logging in/out, editing articles, etc.? It's all on the same database, so any changes made there WILL show up here (and vice versa,) but my major concern is that we don't have those damned login session problems and their ilk going forward. Thanks! --McFly 11:05, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

So... an "editing copy" on one server, and a cached copy on another? Because 99% of TFWiki readers aren't editors? -Derik 11:53, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Let's not overcomplicate it. Test on the new link, the software driving that will replace the existing (more resource intensive) software if it's any good. At this point, I want to find out if there are any bugs, and that's that. --McFly 16:38, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

I got a 405 error when I tried to upload an image on there, but otherwise it seems to be working great. --abates 20:41, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

"Wikia wiki" boilerplate

Between FortMax, Skyjammer and myself, I believe all instances of "Teletraan-I a wikia wiki" etc have been removed from our webpages. Huzzah! Hopefully that will help our Google stats and suchlike, unless I am mis-remembering how those things work... --Monzo 18:31, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

• thumbsup!* --FFN 07:28, 13 June 2009 (EDT)

Special:Imagelist

Is there any way to strip out the deleted images from Special:Imagelist? It's kinda useless as things stand. - SanityOrMadness 20:11, 12 June 2009 (EDT)

Anonymous users

Right, the movie goes wide-release in the UK on Friday (I think there may be some previews on Thursday). Thinking about the chaos that may result [and noting that Memory Alpha - much to Wikia's displeasure - disabled ALL editing between the first opening of Star Trek and its' wide release in the US.]... I think we should give serious consideration to disabling anonymous editing from at least the 18th to the 26th of June.

Thoughts? Objections? Flames? - SanityOrMadness 22:26, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I've been advocating that for over a month. It's the same thing we did with Animated: material is blocked for anons until it comes out in America. --Thylacine 2000 22:51, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I wasn't talking about blocking specific pages, though (in the way a load of Animated pages were semi-protected) - just a blanket ban on anonymous editing until at least the 26th (and I would prefer a week or two beyond that). - SanityOrMadness 22:57, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I'd much prefer if it wasn't a total block. Block anons on all the movie char character articles, etc. -Derik 23:02, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

Block until a week after the movie's released in the States, namely the chara articles and the film page itself (who knows what poor soul will "unknowingly" put in spoilerific in the synopsis/trivia/notes/what-have-you). It's already difficult enough with the adaptation... --Lonegamer78 23:06, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm not just worried about spoilers, but about the casual vandalism associated with a sudden & short-lived spike in visitor numbers, which probably wouldn't be limited to the movie pages. - SanityOrMadness 23:10, 15 June 2009 (EDT)

If we do so, should we have a site-wide message like Memory Alpha? --FFN 02:08, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

At least I know we can use MediaWiki:Sitenotice, I'm not sure whether there is any other similar message. --TX55^TALK 07:37, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Wow, some serious US-centric bias being spouted. If you don't want spoiled, then don't visit. It's now well established internet etiquette to avoid forums about a week before a film's release. Same should apply here. Or..... wait til the DVD is released before unlocking movie edits, just in case you're stuck in Outer Mongolia at the time of the cinema release. Anonymous editing should be blocked, if only to stop the inevitable trolling and vandalism. 82.7.126.27 14:07, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Er, no. For one, the 24th is the world premiere, meaning the vast majority of countries are getting it on that date, not just the US.

For two, we need to be able to monitor all edits made to ROTF articles to make sure they're accurate and factual, and we can't do that if most of the wiki's regular editors haven't even seen the movie.

So this has less to do with spoilers, and more with the entirely practical aim of being able to keep tabs on all ROTF edits effectively. --Jeysie 14:19, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Gosh, thanks, I'll take your advice under consideration.... wait, no, I really won't. If you have a problem with "U.S.-centric bias," you are in the wrong place: this is openly stated as a U.S.-centric wiki. We blocked anonymous edits to the new Animated episodes that for some damnfool reason were aired first in Dubai, until they were uploaded online for everyone to see. Our U.S.-based editors shouldn't have to stop working on a website that, to a large extent, they created, just out of fear that some collection of I.P. numbers will thoughtlessly spoil the movie for them. Better to just anon-protect all the movie-related pages until after all the major markets have had their premieres. --Thylacine 2000 15:12, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

My vote is for blocking all anons from the movie-related pages for at least one week after the world premier, maybe two. I would not be opposed to a site-wide block, however. I really have no interest in cleaning up after a flood of one-timers and trolls and crap. -- Repowers 15:23, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Hey, I'm all for the lockage. But to stop the wave of trolls that will come. Not because Americans seem to think they have the <insert deity>-given right to subjugate the free speech of others who have the rare opportuity to experience something before the Americans do. That hardly ever happens. America gets everything first; cars, movies, fat, gadgets, first dibs on invasion etc. Thankfully they don't get irony first.82.7.126.27 15:38, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Did you even read the post where I pointed out the vast majority of TF fans, both US and non-US, won't be seeing the movie before the 24th, because the vast majority of countries in general aren't getting it until the 24th?

Basically, all TF fans not in the UK and Japan aren't going to be getting to see the movie before the 24th. It's not as if we're making editing wait because everyone else is getting the movie early and the US is the only country that isn't.

All of our Canadian, Australian, non-UK European, non-Japan Asian, etc. editors are likely equally glad we're waiting. Maybe you should stop and actually think before you go off spouting jerkass strawman accusations. --Jeysie 15:46, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Are you intentionally aiming for self-parody, or did you actually seriously just try to frame your potentially being locked out of our privately-run, privately-financed web site about giant alien space robots for a few days as a freedom of speech issue? 'Cause that right there is some serious comedy gold, sir. -- Repowers 15:54, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

I'm afraid there are no Internet Oscars for maudlin self-victimization, otherwise you'd be a shoo-in. Here we only talk about Transformers. You are free to start doing that any old time. --Thylacine 2000 15:55, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Hahaha, did he just equate being able to post to a wiki about cartoon robots for a few days... to the right to free speech? Man, and I thought education was bad over HERE! --ItsWalky 21:03, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

One derailment later...

So, then, back on the subject... I still think we should do it. Mr Anon isn't making me think less of it as an idea. And yes, a MediaWiki:Sitenotice would be essential. - SanityOrMadness 21:33, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

So, we're all for blocking anons for a week after the 24th? --Lonegamer78 00:31, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

They're gonna get pissy, but sounds good to me. But what about the editors who can't log in, is that still a problem?--AWT88 09:52, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Most likely. --FFN 12:48, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Which editors who can't log in? The problem with IE users not being able to log in was fixed when McFly fixed all the other problems on the site. I haven't heard of any reports of anyone else having the problem... --abates 16:32, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

It's not a case of being technically unable to log in. Its a case of NOT DESIRING to log in because people are at work or at school or where there are shared computers. When I was at school, I certainly didn't want to log in, and a few other people felt the same way. --FFN 04:09, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Ah! Of course. --abates 04:46, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

"Transformers Comic"

Okay, I've got three issues at present with the titling treatment of the Titan Movie comics:

1. Ambiguity - if you look at, say, Transformers Comic issue 9, there's at least three Transformers #9s with no subtitle - Marvel G1 US #9, Marvel G1 UK #9, and Titan Movie #9; and currently the only one at "Transformers Comic issue 9" is the Titan Movie issue
2. DO we go by issue, or by story? - We're all over the shop on this:
   • The Marvel US issues are all at the story titles, but these pages incorporate any "Transformers Universe" bio material
   • The Marvel UK issues almost all have multiple stories or parts of stories, and I think there may even be some issues with multiple UK-originated/non-reprint stories, and each story is at its' own page, which incorporates multiple issues (e.g., Time Wars), leaving aside editorial and other non-story material.
   • The Marvel G2 issues almost all have backups, sometimes nominal, sometimes not, and they're all at the title of the lead/non-"Tales of Earth" story (e.g. New Dawn).
   • The first Panini Armada issue is at the story title (First Encounter!), while the rest are at "Panini Armada issue X" (e.g., Panini Armada issue 2).
   • The IDW issues are at the issue title even where the issue is split into multiple, titled. stories (e.g. The Arrival issue 4)
3. The actual title of the Titan Movie issues - Titan Movie v1 #22-25 are actually titled Transformers: Universe #22-25 (mostly in reflection of it absorbing the cancelled Animated comic), but are still at "Transformers Comic issue XX"; while v2, titled Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen #XX, is at the truly bizarre "Transformers Comic 2.XX". Really, just because the letters page said 2.x once, rather than "Revenge of the Fallen (Titan) issue X", which is what's on the cover?

What are we doing with this? - SanityOrMadness 21:17, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

As I've said before, I do NOT favor consistency here. A one-size-fits-all approach will inevitably fail to encompass the widely variable situations with various comic series.

The Marvel US book are under the story titles because, for all intents and purposes, the story and the issue are one and the same. Likewise for most of Dreamwave's G1 run. Sure, we could move 'em all to "The Transformers issue 2 (Marvel US)", but what do we gain? How is this any better than "Power Play!"? What is the benefit? Mere consistency is insufficient reason.

This is much, much less true with the UK comic, where stories were broken into two and even three parts, and multiple stories shared page space in the same issue. Now, I've heard rumblings to the effect that each UK issue should have its own page, and there's merit to that, insofar as each issue's contents are a mixed bag - minicomics, letters pages, and pieces and parts of various stories. It might make sense to have a page for each issue, basically a list of its contents, with See main article links to the entire story -- so, say, UK #88, #89, #90, or whatever, all link to a single page for "Target: 2006".

With G2, it absolutely makes complete sense to combine the two stories. The "backup" strips are such in name only; they are absolutely integral to the main strip, and neither can be read without the other. Separating "Tales of Earth" bits into their own pages is only going to confuse things and make them less informative. Furthermore, the main strip clearly is the MAIN strip. It makes sense to cover the whole story under that strip's title. Our current system for G2 acknowledges this, while still distinguishing between the contents of each section. The alternative is to move each page to "Generation 2 issue 2" or whatever... and I don't see what we gain by doing this.

The Titan comics should be moved to whatever the cover and indicia call them. If they're just Transformers or something equally generic, well, that's what parenthetical disambigs are for. Likewise for the ROTF reboot. A simple (Titan) should cover the bases well enough, yes?

A recent trend has been issues with 2 discreet stories, such as the Animated books you mention. I've long been in favor of having a single page for the issue for such books, with See main article links to the individual stories within them - so "Animated: The Arrival issue 2" would be a list of stuff, with two prominent links within to pages about the two stories it contains. Still, I can understand if people see that as unnecessarily messy -- so long as they can agree that, since the stories are pretty much co-equal, it would make no sense at all to give one or the other naming precedence.

So, that's my take. Case-by-case basis FTW, baby. -- Repowers 21:43, 16 June 2009 (EDT)

Also, to address item #1 specifically... if we do stick with "Transformers" as the title, there should be a disambig note for Transformers at the top. Unless "Comic" is in the title, it shouldn't be in there. I'm thinking the article names should be "Transformers issue 1 (Titan)", etc., with the parenthetical at the end of the page title, rather than the middle.

These books generally have stories from different continuities, don't they? That's a point in favor of separating the story content out from the containing issue. -- Repowers 11:19, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Personally I've been using "Comic issue" because that's what the pages were before I started adding to the wikli, and "issue 2." stuck with the former way of numbering things (and was easier to type...). If naming them after the title (so from #22 it's Transformers Universe or Transformers ROTF etc) would make more sense, I'd be happy to go with that.

As for whether or not to have specific issue or story pages, I'd say if we're going to have individual pages for each issue of IDW and Dreamwave miniseries (not to mention multi-parters in the cartoons), it wouldn't make sense not to for Titan. There's already a precedent that if we do this for post-Marvel comics. -- Charles RB 20:25, 19 June 2009 (GMT)

Non-movie (Movie) characters vs. movie (ROTF) characters with the same name

Anyone else think we should, at the very least, have {{disambig2}}s on pages like Jetfire (Movie) and Mudflap (Movie) to the ROTF characters of the same name? Yes, I realise users could go via the disambig page, but I see it as making things simpler & easier for newbies, and in that scenario one click is always better than two. - SanityOrMadness 22:20, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

I think I'd cautiously support adding a {{disambig2}} for characters of the same name within the same continuity if there seems like a good chance for confusion. I'd oppose imposing it as an across-the-board standard though. (You're nto suggesting that though.) -Derik 22:23, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

I oppose it on the principle that multiple disambig templates on a page is ugly. —Interrobang 22:47, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Ugly, and you can get to where you need to go through the disambig. --ItsWalky 22:48, 17 June 2009 (EDT)

Here's the thing though - is it intiutive for a complete newbie, who came in via ROTF, to see "Optimus Prime (Movie)", "Bumblebee (Movie)" and "Megatron (Movie)" and not immediately conclude that the Jetfire article will be at "Jetfire (Movie)", rather than some incredibly obscure card-puzzle that even we don't have a final picture for?

Hell, even take it a step up from "complete newbie" to someone who sat through Beast Wars/Machines or Armada/Energon/Cybertron, where characters changed bodies between series so that they had very little resemblance to their prior selves (in the UT's case, without any explanation). Those guys might assume that "Mudflap (Movie)" *is* Skids' twin even if he bears no resemblance to him. And it was a guy making that exact mistake and getting reverted by you last night that caused me to post this.

I really think a BIG, prominent link DIRECTLY from the obscure (Movie) character to the prominent (ROTF) character is required. - SanityOrMadness 20:26, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

As long as there's a link to the same-universe namesake in the intro, I see no need for an additional disambig template. - Jackpot 01:21, 18 June 2009 (EDT)

And on that note, I added just such a line for Mudflap (Movie). It seemed especially appropriate for him, since he's an Autobot wannabe who precedes an actual Autobot of the same name. That having been said, though, I don't dislike the Template:disambigrotf template you cooked up, Sanity. It's a little unwieldy, but it's probably as succinct as such a thing could ever be. - Jackpot 00:46, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I did the same for Jolt, who had the wal-mart version for the first movie and it was deleted... I was told "that's what disambig is for." Cliffjumper prime 01:12, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, I'm generally in favor of intro-links because they allow for a bit more elaboration. If it's just a disambig, then we're presenting the characters as though they are definitively separate individuals with no connection to each other, even though in most cases there's just too little evidence to say one way or t'other. The absence of information is, itself, noteworthy. - Jackpot 02:57, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I favour user-friendliness over concerns about how ugly or pretty it makes things look. I think those of you arguing about how ugly it makes things look and disambig3 doing the job are working under the assumption readers are fairly knowledgeable about how this wiki operates. I find that attitude to be rather unhelpful and presumptive. --FFN 04:13, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Indeed. I still have a problem with not redirecting Optimus Prime (Energon)->Optimus Prime (Armada), Optimus Primal (BW)->Optimus Primal, Optimus Prime (ROTF)->Optimus Prime (Movie), etc. It seems almost wilfully inconsistent to not have an equivalent parenthetical available for every character in a series to aid in newbies' browsing & editing. - SanityOrMadness 09:01, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't like the expanded ROTF disambig box. I like how Charles RB did it on the Sideswipe (Movie) page. A little tack-on to the continuity note. Although in Sideswipe's case I think the pages could actually be merged. - Starfield 10:11, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

As opposed to assuming that every reader is retarded and can't figure out Jetfire (Movie) is not the same character as Jetfire (ROTF)? —Interrobang 13:43, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Go look at pictures of the UT Hot Shots and get back to us (NB: First example which leapt to mind, but by no means the only one).

It's not as if there isn't precedent for stuff without any real resemblance to each other to be randomly declared the "same character" in Transformers. Especially since "Jetfire (Movie)" is no character at all - SanityOrMadness 14:32, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Why on god's green earth would someone look at a page called "Jetfire (Movie)" and assume that they have NOT found Jetfire from the live-action movie series? Why would the expected, logical, inevitable response be, hey, there must be another guy by the exact same name in the movie series! ? That's like, the exact opposite of retarded. It's unretarded. It's logical. The truth of the matter, that there's two guys in the same continuity with the exact same name, doesn't make a damn lick of sense.

Assumption of prior knowledge is a rampant problem in this fandom. Around here we're supposed to be smarter than that, though! We should be able to step back from our microscopic inspection of things and say, "Hey, this whole deal really is retarded. Let's clarify it." Thus I am heavily in favor of liberal disambiguation. Not only does it make things clearer for the reader, it also increases the chances of the reader working their way into the obscure backwaters of the site -- which is what we want, is it not? If it makes the page look "ugly", well, that's OUR problem, isn't it? Why should the reader experience suffer because of a shortcoming on our end? Maybe we need to expand our diambiguation template options, instead of rejecting the notion on aesthetic grounds. -- Repowers 16:14, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I'd agree with not keeping this in the disambig. Though I see pages that had it outside the disambig section have been edited, so I presume it's now the policy to keep the information there? -- Charles RB 00:56, 20 June 2009 (GMT)

Well said. I agree without reservation.

And on that note, I'd not only like to see more liberal redirecting (really, if "Optimus Prime" appears in Energon there is no way on Xal's green Earth there shouldn't be a valid Optimus Prime (Energon) page, even if it's just a redirect), but ALSO a general desnarking of mainpics (not captions, the actual pictures themselves) - stuff like the "self portrait" on Grimlock (G1) or the Cyber-Slammers pic on Brawl (Movie) (why... I mean WHY?!) only - and I quote from {{desnark}} - "interfer[es] with the delivery of information on th[e] page." Have the pics on the page, sure, but NOT as a mainpic. - SanityOrMadness 17:49, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

That Cyber-Slammers pic will be removed over my fucking dead body. --ItsWalky 17:57, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Why?

No, really, why? The jokiness is stated, in an official policy, as being all right as long as it doesn't replace something more useful. The whole point of a main pic is that it's the ur-version of a character, the single most representative version. If you need a pic of the character to show off how it would look in most people's minds, it would be a strong candidate if not a shoe-in.

Other than you, WHO THE HELL WOULD THINK OF THE CYBER-SLAMMER FIRST?! - SanityOrMadness 18:22, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't see why the Cyber-Slammer image is anti-information. It's a perfectly good image of Brawl/Devastator! Just not one that you particularly like. And it's not just me. It's not like I put the image there! The only people I've ever seen speak out against the image are you and random anons. So there. --ItsWalky 19:24, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

The only problem I see with spare diambigs like "Optimus Prime (Energon)" is that if you're typing in "Optimus Pr" into the Search box, a list of "Optimus Pr*" pages is gonna come up. It's already a long list, limited by our software to 8 results. With the extra disambigs, potentially useful results might scroll off the list entirely.

As for the images... eh. We're not *that* rampant with the jokey images. More importantly, you can scroll down Grimlock's page and quickly see lots of pictures of him across various media. The main pic isn't significantly inhibiting the flow of information, IMO. For Brawl... we *could* use a few more full-body shots of him near the top of the page, last time I checked at least. -- 99.151.96.72 18:11, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

Redirects are automatically flagged in several ways by the software - is there really no way to either exclude them from the search suggestions, or (preferably) just throw them to the bottom of the pile?

Yes, but every time I've suggested doing just that instead of the zealous (overzealous, IMO) purging of redirects, someone comes up with like 3 examples where "we really want this redirect to show up." And those 3 examples somehow outweigh the 3000 links you don't want in the search suggestion box. -Derik 20:26, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

And no, we're not "that rampant" - all the more reason that we shouldn't be doing it at all. Like I say, the whole point of a main pic is to show the single most identifable version of the character in one shot. The two examples I mentioned (I'm sure I could find more, but those are the two which stick in my head) are completely the opposite - a kid's-scrawl "self-portrait" from an obscure 5-page B&W Marvel UK backup, and a version of a character that barely resembles the movie/fiction model. - SanityOrMadness 18:22, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

WHERE WILL SOMEONE FIND A PICTURE OF GRIMLOCK IF NOT AT THE TOP OF THE TFWIKI ARTICLE?! -LV 20:09, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

I withdraw my "ugly" comment now that we have the disambiguations melded into a single table. I just didn't want a tower of them. I see no reason for not doing it this way we're doing it now. --ItsWalky 16:29, 19 June 2009 (EDT)

"Wanted Pages" clean-up

The Wanted Pages list is cluttered with links to pages that... aren't wanted at all. There's a big chunk of that list that are actually just links from discussions, along the lines of: "I don't know if this is the right name for this page. How about we name it 'Alternate name 1' or 'Alternate name 2'?". There are also quite a few links that come from userpages, that do nothing but clutter up the list; "My favourite tv shows beside transformers are 'Beavis and Butthead' and 'Batman'."

All these unnecessary links make the Wanted Pages hard to navigate through at times... Creating pages that appear on that list is the main way I contribute to this wiki, but it's getting harder to do so when half the links I find there aren't necessary. However, it felt quite rude to just go into someone's userpage and edit what they had written about themselves, or change other people's words in a discussion. Would it be ok to actually go through these pages and tweak them a bit? Like just killing the links themselves? Or for something along the lines of the user's page, just changing the links to an outside site, such as Wikipedia?

Additionally, it'd be nice to encourage people not to create random links like this all the time... I'm sure if you put quotation marks around your suggested link name, people will understand thats a link you're suggesting, you don't actually have to create a link that goes nowhere. Any opinions? --Ascendron 14:50, 20 June 2009 (EDT)

Bluestreak7's been doing this sort of thing already, so I don't see why it'd be a big deal.

If you're worried about userpages, and you see the person's still an active editor after checking their contributions, you can always just leave them a quickie note about the matter on their talk page. (If the person hasn't edited in a long time, I'd say just go for the change yourself.)

Plus, there's no particular reason why you'd need to actually change a person's words: you can either just remove the link, or create a piped link to the correct link, whichever is more appropriate.

Also useful would be going through and fixing any links that are spelling errors or alternate ways of linking to an already existing page or already "wanted" page. I try to do that myself from time to time, but they're not always easy to catch, especially if they're for people/things I'm not familiar with. --Jeysie 15:22, 20 June 2009 (EDT)

Heh, I had no idea that my pet project had got any notice. One thing I have noticed is there is a good percentage of "wanted pages" that come from talk pages. Many times when editors are figuring out how to name the particular page they actually wiki-link to multiple choices. It would be nice just to put them in quotes or such. I think we'll all understand what it means when discussing possible titles. I'm hesitant in modifying these talk pages until we come up with some sort of standard. However, I'm not hesitant in removing dead links from user pages. Many users are now unregistered since the bookworm crash. All those are fair game in my opinion to remove any links. In the past few weeks we've gone from more at least 4866 to less than 4500. That's a good start. --Bluestreak7 22:32, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

Doctor Braxis/Doctor B

Withered Hope has a redlink for the Go-Bots Dr. Braxis character, but apparently he is only identified in the actual story as "Dr. B." Two questions:

1) If I start the article, should it be as "Doctor Braxis" (what we know is his real name, and what the redlink already points to) or "Doctor B" (which, technically, is all he's called in TF fiction)? (such as Nick Fury vs. 'Nicholas')

2) How much non-TF info on the doc would be appropriate to include in said article? Especially as there's no GoBots wiki as there is for, say, Marvel, Star Wars, or Godzilla that I could provide an external link for...

I know that when it comes to crossover stuff, most every Wiki has their own policy on handling it, so I just wanted to check. Thanks in advance! Thanos6 04:54, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

I'd create it at "Doctor B". Then give the "Fiction" section that explains his role in Withered Hope. Then a "Trivia" or "Real world' or some such section that explains "This guy is Doctor Braxis, he was a bad guy from Go-Bots." I'd say err on the side of too much info and then we can edit it down. Hooper_X 09:09, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

Proposal: Reorganizing movie character pages?

The general arrangement of the fiction sections for the movie character pages has... not annoyed me, per se, but made the back of my brain itch for a little while now. They take an approach of trying to present all the events that happen to a character in a chronological order, which is a laudible goal, and an approach taken in many, if not most other pages of the wiki, and one that in those other situations, I generally advocate. However, becuase there are so many different pieces of ancillary media for the movie, which take place before, during, after and aaaalll around the movie and each other, they're getting very muddled. The "Titan" seciton is often placed before the section for the first movie, since it begins in the past... but then has to summarize events, including its alternate timeline, which take place after the movie... before the movie's event have been related in the article. You follow me? Further, I feel that this approach tends to create the appearance of one cohesive timeline, and we all know that's just not true - there are innumerable discrepancies between the movie and the ancillary media, and - avoiding any spoilers - ROTF is one of the worst examples of key parts of the movie's backstory conflicting wildly with what the ancillary media has said. So, I think that a more divisive, clinical approach is necessary, and I've quickly knocked up this.

I think that the movies should be the first thing on the page, just there, on their own. They are the core of this universe and its characters - they are the pieces of fiction around which all the others are written. Everything takes the movies as its starting point and works backwards or forwards from there. Making them the first thing on the pages frees us up to more freely explore past and future depicted in other media. Also, I'm in favour of just making sub-sections for "IDW continuity" (again, the discrepancy between what the IDW comics have shown and what is actually in the ROTF movie is prompting this line of thought), and describing the eventts of all of its comics in one, long section, rather than splitting in two like we had it before, is preferable. As a follow-on from this, Titan gets its own section, with a sub-section (a la "Marvel UK future timelines") for its alt. universe, rather than just a note, making the division between the stories a lot clearer. Also, it removes the need for odd notes like the one on Scorponok's page which has to mention that he only dies in the Titan comics and nowhere else - now, it should be obvious, because the continuity has been isolated instead of interspersed with all the others. The prequel novels are about the only thing I'm not sure on - I haven't actually read them, so I don't feel capable of making a decision, and have just put them under their own heading like this for now (after the movie, but before the comics since surely, more ordinary people on the street have read the books than the comics?). Could they potentially just be put under the "Movies" header, around the movies themselves, or do they feature any major conflicts?

Right, then. Thoughts? - Chris McFeely 09:06, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

I agree. How does Wookiepedia arrange all that ancilliary stuff I wonder? Drmick 09:15, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

As the person who has been doing the most work on the movie articles on this wiki: I am not really enthused with the idea of rearranging the articles and re-learning how to deal with them. A few months ago, I determined the layout of the fiction sections (with the exception of the Titan stuff) on the assumption it is in one rough continuity (continuity errors and contradictions and all), and nobody objected, probably because nobody cared very much about movie fiction at the time. In my mind, if you ignore the Titan section, from start to finish, it reads reasonably well. May I suggest we just fence off Furman's Crackpot Titan Continuity? --FFN 10:11, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

FWIW, I don't think the IDW Prequel comics from the first movie are supposed to be in-continuity with RoS/Destiny. (Or at least, I don't think Mowry used them as references, just the scripts for the movies, so if it all matches up it's kind of coincidental.) --Jeysie 10:28, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

IDW has stumbled over its own prequel material continuity twice, which is not encouraging. The Planetfall story contradicted the first prequel which established the Decepticons landing in America, and then The Reign of Starscream contradicted Planetfall by showing Starscream's crew getting to Mars via starship, not by transition form. --FFN 10:37, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

I remember at some point saying, verrrrrry explicitly, that there will be errors and contradictions and inconsistencies and multiple timelines in the Movie fiction -- I believe it was back when someone or other was arguing in favor of integrating Reign of Starscream et. al into the main movie summaries, and italicizing them like we do with the UK comics. It seemed like a bad idea then. Sounds like a bad idea now. Sorry if my protestations weren't fervent enough to register at the time.

In general, our approach is and should be to divide up a character's appearances by media source. There are exceptions to this rule (UK comics, Animated comics), but they should always be approached with caution. I don't think the multi-timeline-spawning film series is a good candidate for this approach. Derrick Wyatt knew what was going on with Animated, but I doubt that Michael Bay really gives a crap about Alliance or whatever else. -- Repowers 10:44, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

That's not really the issue, though, Rob. We already do have the fiction broken up by media source - I'm just advocating a rearrangement of the order in which that fiction is laid out in articles, to make the individual, splintering "continuities" a bit more individual. Really, I'm not expecting a conclusion right away - I'm raising this now so we can get a bit of discussion going before ROTF hits in the US. Because I gotta say, I think the sheer failure of the IDW ROTF prequel stuff to line up with any of the backstory in the film will help convince folks that this is a good reason to go down this road, but it will require you Yanks (and Aussies!) to see the film to decide first! - Chris McFeely 10:51, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

It boils down to... when reading RoS and Destiny, you're supposed to treat the movies as part of those comics' timeline, as they're intended to fit, not be deliberately AU like the Titan stories apparently are. Hasbro had certain elements be changed because they would clash with the movies, and so on, so there was at least some attempt to make it somehow fit together. The Movies are an integral part of the RoS/Destiny continuity.

However, apparently the converse isn't necessarily true: the movies may not treat RoS/Destiny as part of their timeline.

So... *shrug* Structure that as you will. And the IDW Prequel comics are off doing their own equally separate thing regardless. --Jeysie 11:00, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

Don't forget about prequel novels. I prefer FFN's proposal but I would definitely mix in The Veiled Threat fiction as happening near the end of Alliance. IDW+films seem to make up the backbone of the continuity, but maybe that isn't fair to the Titan comic. To be honest, from what I've heard, I'm prepared to treat the ROTF film as a micro-continuity, at least for my own fanon purposes. The adaptations seem to match the prequel material fairly well. - Starfield 11:43, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

Something to consider - the fact that The Veiled Threat, a novel from a writer(s) and a publisher who has nothing to do with IDW Publishing has taken pains to ensure it fits (more or less) within the continuity of The Reign of Starscream and Alliance suggest that somebody, somewhere, most likely Hasbro, wants us to consider the prequel material (excluding Furman's Alternate Universe stuff) as one single continuity, and to address contradictions and continuity errors as we come across them. That's my view of the movie articles and how we should do them. Without the prequel stuff, you'd just get several fenced off sections where "Stuff just happens", and that's why off-screen material exists, to explain or expand upon things that cannot fit into the movie or episode because they're too complex or too geeky for the audience. This wiki exists to tell people what happened off screen or why Bay's movies are so incoherent, and the way I see it, if we fence off Furman's UK alt-universe stuff, it more or less fits in together, and you get a decent story out of it. Sorry to ramble. --FFN 23:56, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

Here's the simple answer-- document the movie as it's own thing, and in the IDW section, use the IDW movie adaption as a stand-in for the movie, with all the retcons, mucked-up timelines, etc. Best of both worlds. -Derik 00:41, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

I meant leaving the damn articles as they are, except for fencing off Furman's stuff. I'm not about to track down those adaptation comics to (essentially) tell an abbreviated version of the same story already detailed in the same articles. --FFN 06:33, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Representing the tfwiki at an IMAX premiere?

I've managed to get myself into an IMAX premiere or screening of Revenge of the Fallen tonight, and the promotors/Hasbro want to do a photo op/press thing with aussie fans. Should I like, hold up a sign that says "TFWIKI.NET THE TRANSFORMERS WIKI"? Or would that bring down unnecessary official scrutiny on us? --FFN 22:19, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, thanks for your advice, guys :/--FFN 23:01, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Do you have a "decaf" setting? --ItsWalky 23:18, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Well the promoter let us know at the very last minute so plans are rushed. I have to time manage this thing with the free time of other people I am probably going with. Because frankly, the only reason I'd want to do the photo thing for the promoter is to represent the wiki, and if I was given the go ahead by you, I would have endeavoured to turn up if at all possible. I hope you at least appreciated that dedication to the wiki. --FFN 23:25, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Oh, and another thing - we were invited due to our association with Ozformers, but instead of promoting Ozformers, I want to promote the tfwiki. --FFN 23:27, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Guess you know where your bread is buttered! --ItsWalky 23:34, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Hell, give of us a break, it hasn't even been an hour. I say do it, give us some representation, it might help us in the Google rankings and get us past the craptastic Wikia.--AWT88 23:05, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Not good enough, Jan. *folds arms* --FFN 23:14, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Doesn't Hasbro kind of know about us already, seeing as how they answer questions from us every other month and their licensees send us pics and stuff sometimes? It's not like they're not scrutinizing us already if they're gonna. --Jeysie 23:10, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Now I gotta make a sign... --FFN 23:14, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Try the Universal Greeting Dance. They'll reciprocate. -Derik 23:32, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Or they'll try to eat you! --ItsWalky 23:33, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

Is our motto "Transformers is Serious Business"? Or am I associating Shortpacked!'s motto? --FFN 23:44, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

"Toys are serious business" is a Shortpacked! thing. I don't think the Wiki has a motto. The one on the Twitter feed is "We know more about Transformers than you." --ItsWalky 23:51, 22 June 2009 (EDT)

That sounds a bit confrontational, though, like people may not realise we aren't being aggressive or jerkish. Hasbro AU and Eric Siebenaler thought it was funny when I interrupted somebody complaining about Robot Heroes and Mighty Muggs by saying "Transformers is Serious Business". --FFN 00:08, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Considering how many TF creators use us as a reference as of late, I feel like it ought to be "We know about Transformers so you don't have to."

But I have to agree that something like "Transformers is serious business, yo." would make for an amusing sign blurb. --Jeysie 00:37, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

"Transformers are serious business" is thrown around as a joke a lot, but I don't think it's actually our motto.

• TFWiki.net: We know more about Transformers than you want to.
• TFWiki.net: Cooler than Star Trek, not as cool as Star Wars
• TFWiki.net: Great, there go 4 hours of my life
• TFWiki.net: Nerdgasm Evolved
• TFWiki.net^[1]

[1] amusing footnote

• Transformerology: Finally, a degree you can use in real life.
• TFWiki.net: serious intellectual debate about transforming space robots
• TFWiki.net: Disambiguiously Gay
• TFWiki.net: A Gold Standard of Geekdom
• TFWiki.net: Amazing and Kinda Scary

-Derik 00:44, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

I've chosen the serious intellectual debate and we know more about TFs than you want to, as it fits my sense of humour. I'd do more signs, but I am the only TFWiki guy there, so two signs is already pushing it, and there's every chance they'll just crop the sign out or tell me to put it away. Cheers, guys. --FFN 00:58, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Incidentally, I love "serious intellectual debate about transforming space robots." Also:

• "TFWiki.net: Remember that one guy? He was so cool!"
• "TFWiki.net: We remember who Groundshaker was, so you don't have to." (alternately: "TFWiki.net: Who the hell is that!?")
• "TFWiki.net: Come for the information, stay for the inevitable flamewar about funny captions."
• "TFWiki.net: Unhealthily fixated since 2006."
• "TFWiki.net: Because you're just dying to know what they called Thundercracker in Hungary." Hooper_X 07:41, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

I just got back. I have no idea if the sign got into pics or not. However, I am pleased this discussion spurred creative ideas in potential official slogans for the wiki. --FFN 09:16, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

"Come for the information, stay for the funny." has a certain ring to it. As does "We remember who Groundshaker was, so you don't have to." Or "Revering and ruining your childhood all in one website." --Jeysie 11:33, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Meanwhile, in other promotional exploits...

I was interviewed this morning for the Fayettesville Observer. Soon North Carolina will know alllll about Shortpacked!, our wiki, and Starscream's French-Canadian name. --ItsWalky 13:11, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Totally read that as "Fattysville". Home of the BBQ Double Stackticon! - Chris McFeely 13:21, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Ridiculous Transformers

The StreetLevel blog recently posted a list of the Top 10 Most Ridiculous Transformers, Ever.

It is very dumb. I want to counter with a better list.

Anyone have any suggestions? Legion and Pepsi Convoy are already a lock. -Derik 13:16, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

It hurts my braaaaaaaaain. (And don't forget there's a Megatron that transforms into a shoe.) --ItsWalky 13:18, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

And Esmeral. --ItsWalky 13:21, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Piano Transformer guy?

Is this just for ridiculous transformations? Are there any in-universe guys who are ridiculous?

...I'm so putting Drift on this list. -Derik 13:23, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Don't be that guy, man. You might as well start adding Nightscream and Wheelie. --ItsWalky 13:25, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

They have redeeming features. Drift is Poochie. "Designed-by-committie awesome" always looks ridiculous. He's not just a traitor or a samurai-- he's an albino-japanese-streetracer-taciturn-former-Decepticon-honorbound-samurai-ninja.

So then I hope you're putting Animated Prowl on that list, too! --ItsWalky 14:28, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Much less ridiculous than Drift. I am adding Break though. There are more ridiculous transformers, but "Penguin Antagonist Naruto" is easy to shorthand. -Derik 14:51, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

I'll give him a fair shake and note he hasn't been that annoying in the fiction itself... but in concept he's clearly ridiculous. -Derik 13:28, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Looking at that list, I'm assuming that "ridiculous transformation" is the one major factor. I could nominate Signal Lancer and his friend Pay phone refugee on that criterion.

If we're going for the whole package, Misfire's gotta be on there somewhere. I have a big soft spot for the fellow, but there's no getting around a Con that can't shoot being ridiculous. Plus he's the only male TF I can think of off-hand that canonically has pink as his main color. --Jeysie 13:43, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Energon Wars Sky Lynx. He's pointlessly obscure, to boot! (And yes, definitely the Victory Decepti-wives.) Hooper_X 16:15, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Eh, their focus seems to be different than ours. They're internet hipsters mocking things you thought were cool when you were a kid (something that's in plentiful supply on the interwebs). They're not looking very deeply, and have constrained themselves to US G1 because that's all most people even remember exists. So it plays to their target audience, rather than people that actually pay attention to the brand.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:35, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

True, but I've always been of the firm belief that if your parody doesn't focus what actually is wrong/stupid about the thing you're picking on, instead of just generic put-downs, you should step back and let someone who actually knows comedy do the writing. --Jeysie 13:43, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

I don't have a problem with their targets being so generic... I just think the nits they picked were so... obvious. And not very accurate. (Apparently Blaster is inherently racist?)

Sky-Bite! Awesome and ridiculous. -Derik 13:47, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Well, yes, pretty much. Saying Megatron or Scorponok are ridiculous is kind of missing the mark. Especially when, as you say, there are TFs who are quite delicious in their actual ridiculousness.

I mean, now that I think about it, in addition to my nominations above, there's also Shortround, a toy-collecting dork of a Con with a hopeless crush on the "hot chick", who can also be mistransformed into looking like a toilet just to polish it all off. --Jeysie 14:04, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Heinrad is definitely up there with the most ridiculous, as are the Jointrons..but I'm sure you've already thought of them. -Mazenoise 14:19, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Much as I love the KP TFs, Glit's profile always makes me wonder why A.) he is a Decepticon and B.) how on Cybertron he's still alive. Gary Stu right there. Geewunling 14:49, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Dude. They used Wikia as their resource. Of course they, and their article, suck. Hooper_X 16:16, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

List is up, thanks for all the help guys! -Derik 22:21, 23 June 2009 (EDT)

Consensus on the Allspark seems to be that your list has much better choices but needs more humor in the descriptions. --Jeysie 11:05, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

Aww. I think the Wiki has ruined me with it's dryly informative style. -Derik 12:27, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

You just need practice in channeling copious amounts of sarcastic hyperbolic incredulity when chronicaling stuff that's ridiculous. --Jeysie 17:38, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

Four hour downtime of June 24

So, was today's downtime caused by massive server backlog of people wanting to add info to Revenge of the Fallen, or did we just get another unforseen downtime again? -- SFH 17:23, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

Probably the latter. We'd more likely get a shitload of visitors than a shitload of editors. --FFN 17:28, 24 June 2009 (EDT)

It was most assuredly the former. The server has not actually been down at all. --Suki Brits 23:53, 24 June 2009 (EDT)