MediaWiki talk:Community Portal

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Marvel UK issue pages

I feel that we need to make a change with how we handle Marvel UK comic issues. The UK comics split most of its stories up over multiple issues, and even reprinted some of the split up in a different way. This has led the story articles to become bloated with non-story info (covers, letter pages, other comics from the same issue, contests, ads) for multiple issues on a single story page. Also, navigating the UK comic is a pain in the ass, as many issues having two stories (one issue has three!), as well as the reprints.

Here's what I suggest we do:

• Make "hub" pages for the individual issues. These pages will cover issue-specific things. Those UK cover scans clogging up every Marvel Transformer story? They go here. As does information from that issue's letter pages, ads, TransFormations, and anything else that isn't a part of the actual stories. Also, there will be a list of what each issue contains, mostly the TOC from the issue itself. Non-Transformers backup strips (Machine Man, Action Force) should need nothing more beyond the name of the series and the title of the story unless more info is given in the cover, letters page, TransFormations, Coming Attractions or the like. The TOC will also have links to our story articles.

• Leave the story articles mostly unchanged The UK comic usually treated the stories like serials (think the early Flash Gotdon films or the original Doctor Who series), so splitting them up makes no sense. Aside from moving the issue-specific stuff to the hub pages, the only changes needed will be removing the story navigation box from the UK-original stories, removal of the UK navigation from the stories written for the US comic, and adding any needed "Reprinted in" links, and putting "Originally printed in" links on the stories written for the UK comic.

Marvel US 33 & 34 (Man of Iron!) and Action Force 24-27 (Ancient Relics!) would be handled in the same way. --FortMax 17:40, 1 August 2009 (EDT)

So you're suggesting that any issue which contained multiple discontinuous stories get a page for the issue, and a page for both stories? -Derik 22:37, 1 August 2009 (EDT)

Not exactly. Marvel UK is a special case because these multiple discontinuous stories are broken up over multiple issues. We would still have one page for Time Wars. I'll put together a sample tommorow. --FortMax 00:51, 2 August 2009 (EDT)

I have a very rough example at User:FortMax/Sandbox. The main reason I feel this needs to be done is because not only does the UK comic non only have multiple stories in each issue, these stories get spread out over multiple issues. For example, Time Wars was printed over seven issues. --FortMax 12:04, 2 August 2009 (EDT)

That makes sense... a 'landing page.' I'm tentatively in favor of it... but I'd like to see what others say. -Derik 15:40, 2 August 2009 (EDT)

I think this is a really good idea, because it enables us to show the very different format of the UK comic. Formats, in fact - something I didn't realise till I completed my collection is how very different the first 30 or so issues are from the rest. More like a robot enthusiast's magazine than a comic, and much more 'British' in feel. Unfortunately I've only got my scanned copies of issues 1-5 to work from at the moment, but I can mock something up to show you what I mean. --Tribimat 06:25, 4 August 2009 (EDT)

I've never been overly happy that a big, "blockbuster-that-changes-everything" story like Target: 2006 or The Legacy of Unicron only gets one issue, whereas, say, the issues leading up to US #75 get a page each. There's examples of serial storytelling and individual-issue focuses (eg, Prime surrendering, or the introduction of the Wreckers) in each. LiamK 09:25, 12 August 2009 (EDT)

I've done a fair bit across the UK comics lately and I'd be hugely in favour of breaking T:2006 (especially) into its component issues - just because they weren't individually named they get lumped together in one article which I think does a great disservice to the story. I'd compare it to a six-issue series like Devastation which gets six pages labelled issue 1, issue 2 and so forth, so I don't think articles called Target: 2006 issue 1, Target: 2006 issue 2 etc. would necessarily be beyond the pale. I don't know how far I'd want to take it though - splitting up stories like City of Fear or Legion of the Lost seems a bit pointless, more so The Fall and Rise of the Decepticon Empire which wasn't meant to be split in the first place. --Emvee 15:07, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

I'm in favour. I also think that a standard link to the appropriate letters page on transfans.net (similar to the way we do tfu.info for toys) wouldn't go amiss. --Emvee 15:07, 2 September 2009 (EDT)

I'm also in favour. This is the approach I took on Joepedia for the weekly Action Force comics where there are similar problems - see [1] for how it works on the individual issues. Timrollpickering 07:59, 26 September 2009 (EDT)

If you are taking the navigation off the stories, won't that make it more difficult to click through the UK continuity, from one story to the next one, continuity-wise? Then again, I'm not super familiar with the UK comics, maybe it is so complicated that that feature is basically broken as it is. But if the current story-based nav works I'd like to keep that as well as a issue-to-issue nav. - Starfield 10:39, 26 September 2009 (EDT)

Can the nav-template images be variables?

For example: The Henkei! Henkei! nav-template uses the logo from the toy packaging, since that applies to the majority of the pages the template is on. However, the Comic Bun Bun Henkei! material uses a completely different logo design, and it would be nice to be able to substitute it for just that page. This is one of several times I've wanted to be able to do that, and maybe there's a simple way to designate the image as a replaceable variable, but my markup-fu is weak. Any help is appreciated. - Jackpot 20:35, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

The answer seems to be "no"... for some reason, even with a default set in the parameter, the imagemap code refuses to parse the parameter's info.

You could always just post the entire code of the navigation template manually on that one page with the logo code swapped... --Jeysie 21:22, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

NM, I figured it out. You should be able to do this now:

{{nav-henkei|logo=(filename)|size=(number)(unit)}}

It's set up so that if the parameters aren't given, it'll just display the default, so you don't need to change the pages that do use the typical logo. --Jeysie 21:36, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

Awesooooooooome, thank you. - Jackpot 22:32, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

No problem. :) Let me know if you need any of the other navs altered, although you should be able to just copy and paste the code and change the defaults... (actually, with my idea for a code revamp, I wonder if it might be possible to just have one nav template with all variables...) --Jeysie 23:22, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

Hmm, I didn't know you were playing around with franchise-nav revisions. I actually have a grand proposal cooking up in my head for a full breadcrumb-trail nav revamp that would be applicable to basically any non-character/item/place article. The idea being that if you're at, say, an article about a comic issue, there would be a nav in the corner with links to the series, franchise, and continuity family going up in a column. And if you're at a series-article, you would be one step up in that chain, and the nav would have links to all the other series in that franchise (presented in the current style), as well as the vertically-arranged "title" links to the franchise and continuity family. Then if you're at a franchise, you get links to the other franchises in that continuity family, plus the continuity family itself. And, finally, the continuity-family articles themselves would have a nav with links to the other families. It would be a change in functionality to the effect that the cluster of little links would always be lateral, and digging down into more specific topics would require links within the articles themselves. Currently that's the case with most articles, the exception being franchises. But I think it would be incredibly awesome to have that kind of breadcrumb-trail so a reader always knows where he or she is in the multiverse at large. Plus it would help clarify how the hierarchy of families and franchises and series and so on actually works in specific cases, since that's often been a source of confusion and argument.

But I figure I should cobble together a working sample of some sort before I formally present the idea, and I think I might need some more markup-fu before that's even possible. Or I could make a facsimile in Flash or something... Anyway, at the very least, I think having the ability to swap out the logo image is actually a step towards making this idea happen. So thanks again!

- Jackpot 00:27, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

Well, my current idea was mainly just trying to simplify the existing coding a little, as well as adding some prev/next links to the continuity family section. I think the big problem with breadcrumb links is that people would have to put them in by hand, which would make filling in comic stories even more work than it already is. The "continuity family" section of the comicnav template already tends to be pretty inconsistent sometimes depending on how the person creating the page chooses to link it. (In other words, it's a nice idea, but it'd be too contingent on people filling it in correctly.) --Jeysie 00:41, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

The episode nav template uses standard strings to identify continuities (like "g1toon") and then uses look-up tables to find the proper series page link for this, the proper "human-readable" for that link and even look up how many episodes there are in the series, and create automatic prev/next links as long as you give it an episode number.

The reason we use strings instead of pagenames is 1) they're shorter, simpler, cleaner, more standardized... 2) it means that if the page moves (or we change our mind on the naming convention) we only have to change it in one place in the lookup tables, and the link changes on hundreds of pages.

What I'm saying is... you DON'T need to force users to fill in series/franchise/family. ...just fill in the SERIES. Let the template fill in the rest! (And let you manually override the lookup if you explicitly provide variables, for maximum flexability.)

But that's not a system you can throw together by trial and error; it needs proper architecture planning or it'll be a godawful mess.

I guess what I'm saying is... if we really want to rationalize and standardize the major templates on the wiki... we need a serious meta-talk about what that means, in the broadest possible scope. -Derik 01:01, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

Well, the problem is... I agree it'd be pretty easy to auto-breadcrumb the TV series. But when you start getting into things like the comics and text stories, you start running into many different miniseries and individual issues, all of which fit into different continuities. I think the continuity family is already enough info for those, provided we make sure they all point to the right ones. --Jeysie 01:48, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

That's not exactly a 'problem' as it's conventionally thought of. You could set up auto-fill-ins for the 6 most commons comics-- which would cover 70-80% of everything, but let manual values be set for the rest (or not set) to the level of detail you desire. No solution has to be 100% you know. -Derik 03:05, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

No, but for stuff like the Marvel Comics it would take just as long to copy and paste in manual info as it would to paste in the new code, after all. So it's the new pages where people would have one more thing to add in that you'd really need to worry about, if it's part of that other 20%. Whereas I agree that new TV series episodes would get to have the benefit of auto-ness.

I guess it just seems like a lot of work for little benefit, seeing as how the continuity part of the nav pretty much covers all the context necessary. Not that I don't think it's possible the ep/comicnav could use some overhaul (though what exactly I don't know; they both seem pretty complete to me), just that I don't think breadcrumbs would be an effective expenditure of time. --Jeysie 03:43, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

I'm pretty much in agreement with that last sentiment, which is one of the reasons why I'm not technically proposing my idea yet. It needs a more concrete starting point (like a mock-up design) from which all the discussion and probably argument can branch. I have my own notions about how it could be set up in a way that wouldn't involve as much work or personal discretion as Jeysie suggests, but... well, now's not the time. Maybe later. - Jackpot 01:12, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

So what needs revision? The episode templates-- fine. And the comic issues. And the franchise navigation. And a standard breadcrumbing system... but what else? -Derik 01:17, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

I've noticed on the Marvel wiki that the "writer"/"artist" text in their issue infoboxes links to Category: Writers. I'd liek us ot consider adding this. (Also, there's something about the size or spacing of their infoboxes I just like... I think we might want to take a look at 'em when we get around to recoding.)

Derik points out that in such a scenario, the breakcrumb need not be built into (for example) the episode infobox template. The more elegant solutions is something like:

 {{episode
  |breadcrumb= {{breadcrumb
                |continuity_family=[[Unicron Trilogy]]
                |franchise=[[Armada (franchise)|]]
                |series=[[Armada (cartoon)|cartoon]]
               }}
 }}

...where you'd be pass the whole breadcrumb template as a parameter to another template. That way if the breadcrumb also has to show up in other templates... there's a standard code, standard styling, etc. Cleaner simpler code, easier to maintain, more universal, easier to work with, less percussive maintenence, etc.

That's not a solution to everything though, because we've got two prev/next/series navs for comics, and some of the Marvel issues could use four or more. Stacking 4 of those things is retarded, and pointless. We need a more rational means of addressing republished stuff. I went to look up when a certain Marvel UK issue was published the other day and we didn't have the information. ...because it was published in the US first, and our template only has one "pub date" field. -Derik 00:52, 7 September 2009 (EDT)

Sankyuu! Henkei needs a bit more love. :D --Lonegamer78 22:59, 6 September 2009 (EDT)

CSS rationalization

While discussing rewriting our HTML... we should also probably discuss CSS rationalization.

Right now our code has absolutely no regard for what the page looks like printed. (Those messageboxes at the top of pages probably don't need to be there when printed.) Do we want our links to have addresses when printed? For example, I believe CSS could make this link print like this link ("Optimue Prime (G1)") or like this link ( http://tfwiki.net/wiki/Optimus_Prime_(G1) ) or like this link ( tfwiki.net/wiki/Optimus_Prime_(G1) ), any of which would be 'friendlier' for printed-out versions.

Of course, if this was applied to excessively PotHole'd articles, the text it might become almost unreadable. Perhaps smaller or faded text would make tooting my own horn User:Derik less obtrusive when printed. Regardless what's decided for article text, I strongly believe that storylinks should have the disambig visible when printing. King of the Hill (Armada episode)

Printing, I grant you, is a fairly minor concern. But what about syndication? A few people are beginning to dynamically syndicate our content. Botch went to some trouble to remove our messageboxes and various other elements-- he just wanted the guts of the article. If we'd attached standard classes to templates (ones that have no CSS associated with them as far as TFWiki is concerned) he could have just syndicated the page as-is and hidden those elements with a few lines of CSS! (If nothing else, the storylinks need a class marking them... that seems like something that many would like to hide.)

Live page syndication is clumsy. (And I need to yell at Botch, because IIRC he's doing his in a terrible way, from our server's perspective.) But if we encourage it, it's another tool in our promotional quiver! (There was a PHP script I was working on the other month that actually has some fairly good TFWiki-specific syndication. If that was polished and made easy to use, it could have some legs.)

Soto-voice snark aside-- we really need classed like .noPrint and .printOnly. And when we redo our episode/issue infoboxes... the tables should be tested to they print nicely, and we should publish the CSS people can use to turn various 'bits off. (Or a 'general guide to site CSS', if only for our OWN use.)

How about this...? We've been moving a LOT of our code out of HTML and into CSS. One of the effects of this is that simply syndicating the "rendered" page... a lot of the HTML layouts are gobbeltygook. Should we have a consideration for syndicators who don't include our CSS file? Maybe templates we know are unlikely to be wanted can be flagged with a .noSyndicate class, making it easy to hide them? Or we should have a Syndicate.css file that includes the bare-minimum CSS code for templates to lay out right? Should some templates ({{quote}}, for instance) be rewritten so that they will render in a readable (if not ideal) fashion even if no css is included? Is there a "scale" these questions all fall on... a sort of "how important is this element to the content of the page?" spectum, where at the low end we don't care and tell people to hide it, at the middle we provide identifying tags so they can be hidden, or a truncated CSS file so they render nice, and at the high end we write the HTML so the element will always be readable even without CSS to make it pretty? (That last one means code that's less contextual. Where do our priorities lie?)

These are philosophical issues. None are especially high priority, but the "cost" of addressing them is relatively tiny, so if we're doing some thorough redesigning... it'd be a good idea.

Some elements we have (like main pages) sometimes get quite "big" (laid out in a fashion that accepts a minimum of 500+ pixels wide.) Is it worth adding a .bigElement class or a .mobile class so that those elements can have code written in a mobile device CSS file that reduces their size? Is this even a concern for new mobile devices, which scale easily? How to Kindles handle them? Do e-readers support javascript? What about tablets and wireless internet devices?

More and more, content on the internet is going to be viewed by something other than what we normally think of as a "web browser," and because web-developers spend all their time in web browsers they often neglect these outlets. We do not have to bend over backward to accommodate these technologies... if problems do arise, they will probably be the 90/10 sort; 90% of the solution/benefit can be accomplished with just 10% of the effort.
Example: When a certain news site rolled out their home page redesign several years ago, it mis-rendered on some versions of Safari-- pushing the story content below the left navigation bar. In short... the page appeared blank. This problem remained unfixed for almost a year-- it was caused by the nav rendering just one pixel too wide, pushing a floated layout down. This remained unfixed for almost a year. I'm sure that this bug only affected maybe 1% of site visitors. But after a year of blank pages... that 1% also probably stopped visiting. 1% over the course of a year is a lot of lost pageviews, it's like having your site be down for 3 days.

Anyway... that's my rant. There's no solutions there... just ideas/concerns/meta.

If other people are interested in discussing this sort of thing... may I suggest we create a dumping ground at Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Quantum Cycle Upgrade where we can gather thoughts/issues about long-term infrastructure upgrades? -Derik 20:35, 8 September 2009 (EDT)

Picking up on just one thing for now:

Those messageboxes at the top of pages probably don't need to be there when printed

Thing about that is that they DO contain information you might want when printed that isn't contained elsewhere on a page (the writer of a story, for instance).

I could certainly see a certain degree of stripping down the messageboxen for printing as a good idea (take a look at http://tfwiki.net/w2/index.php?title=End_of_the_Road!_(US)&printable=yes - it's not even just the {{comicstory}} [which has become a bad name for that template as its' uses have multiplied...] box - the {{featuredcharacters}} box further down could do with being stripped for print. And I'm not sure the {{disambig2}} needs to be visible at all.), but I'm not sure about hiding them by default. - SanityOrMadness 22:15, 8 September 2009 (EDT)

I agree about stripping those kinds of things down... but when I said "messageboxes" I meant things like "picsneeded"; those have an enormous footprint, and they print. Their entire purpose is to alert editors of page deficiencies.... but people reading print-outs aren't editing those the pages, it's pointless. -Derik 22:32, 8 September 2009 (EDT)

Ah. I wasn't thinking of those, just {{comicstory}} and {{episode}}. Yeah, removing {{picsneeded}} and its ilk would make sense. - SanityOrMadness 10:20, 9 September 2009 (EDT)

Jeysie's infobox

Prisoner of War!

Is he strong? Listen, Bud, he made Megatron go thud.

Marvel Comics
Cover date	January 1985
Street date	October 2, 1984
Marvel Comics continuity

«	The Transformers (US) #3	»
«	The Transformers (US) #5–6	»

Writer	Jim Salicrup
Penciler	Frank Springer
Inker	Kim DeMulder, Jim Esposito
Colorist	Nelson Yomtov
Letterers	Janice Chiang & Others
Editor	Bob Budiansky

I remember doing this rough tweak idea based on Derik's comment that he liked the Marvel wiki's infobox.

Not very much of a tweak, admittedly, as I actually like our current setup for the most part. --Jeysie 21:46, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Okay, some things:

1. {{comicstory}} is used for a LOT more than, well, comic stories, to the point that the template name is bad. But unless you want to go and find/change all of those uses (and they're pretty diverse, I don't think you could bot them), it's pretty much impossible to change the broad layout of the template.
2. Moving the back/forward navigation from the top (where it's easily accessible) to a point where it would be below the fold on netbooks, e-readers and less up to date PCs? Are you seriously suggesting that?!

Seriously, I don't "get" the ideas behind the layout here at all. - SanityOrMadness 22:00, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

They all use pretty much the same setup, actually, if you look at them. I can't think of any usage on text stories and books that is seriously different offhand... they have different credit/info types, yes, but they go visually in the same places. I would probably put things like page count and ISBN in the "publisher" box.

And like I said, I was emulating the Marvel wiki infobox, which actually has the navigation at the bottom. But essentially... I wanted to get the title up top, and make a "publisher" section, and a "credits" section... and the navigation made a good visual divider between the last two sections. I agree it's kind of weird, though... I could see moving it back up to the top under the title and just having a thick border in its place between the bottom two sections.

Like I said, it's pretty minor stuff... I think our infobox is just about perfect as-is, really. --Jeysie 22:10, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

It's not just stories. The Hasbro Q&A pages use it. The Collectors' Club Magazine pages use it, along with other non-story content from magazines, etc. What's the "title" in those instances?

Moreover, why move the title to the top at all? The title is already written in big letters at the top of the page on a single-story page, or at the top of the section on multi-story pages. Below the cover is a good place for it.

And the cover date & street date are hanging in no-man's land here, with no association with any relevant information - it looks like Marvel Comics had a street date of Oct 2, 1984.- SanityOrMadness 22:37, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

We'd leave the title off. You know, just like we do for miniseries already? Sheesh, I love it when people complain about something "new" without realizing the wiki already does it.</sarcasm>

That said, if we move the navigation back to the top, we could move the title back under the picture again. I guess it just seems to me like it's the "first" bit of info about a book, and you could use your comment as an argument towards leaving out the title bit entirely anyway.

I like my publisher idea, though... it separates the meta-info about the book from the credits. And the publisher's name makes the most logical sense to use in a section heading. Like you said, the title's at the top, so I have a hard time thinking anyone's going to think the street date has to do with the publisher's name instead of the issue the article's about. I like to assume basic intelligence on the part of the reader. --Jeysie 06:53, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Our existing comicstory template is already deficient in presenting multi-part stories: I went to look up when Target: 2006 was published... and discovered it had no date. And why should it? The article spans several issues, with no single correct date to give!

(I happen to think presenting the UK stories in 1 article like this is stupid... but I lost that fight a long time ago, so the template might as well address it well.) -23:44, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Er. What's wrong with just listing all the dates in the date section, or a range of dates? We already do that for Man of Iron, IIRC. I don't see what the big deal is there. It's a date field... no reason it can't have more than one date in it.

The only accommodation I might make is adding extra "story 2" credits to make credits for multiple stories a bit tidier, but that's less a major change and more just a tweak. --Jeysie 06:53, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Counter-proposal

« The Transformers (US) #3 » « The Transformers (UK) #5-6 »
Is he strong? Listen, bud, he made Megatron go thud.
Prisoner of War!
Writer	Jim Salicrup
Penciler	Frank Springer
Inker	Kim DeMulder, Mike Esposito
Colorist	Nelson Yomtov
Letterers	Janice Chiang & Others
Editor	Bob Budiansky
Continuity	Marvel Comics continuity
US publication
Publisher	Marvel Comics
Release date	October 2, 1984
Cover date	January 1985
Cover price	75c (US); UK: 50p; Can: $1.00
UK publication
Publisher	Marvel UK
Cover dates	17th Nov. - 30th Nov. 1984 1st Dec. - 14th Dec. 1984
Cover price	25p (each)

Keeps the basic layout of the current {{comicstory}} (including keeping the issue numbers rather than the title at the top, which I consider key), but separates the meta-info from the story info (which is headed by the title, as it should be. I would prefer to use separate infoboxen for separate stories on the same page, but you could have separate subsections for separate stories, each headed by the title, if it was thought desirable). - SanityOrMadness 08:55, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I definitely agree with San here that the navigation info needs to be at the top. It's just counter-intuitive otherwise.--Rosicrucian^Talk 12:15, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I like the idea of separate credit sections in the same infobox for separate stories in a single issue, with the titles of each story as the header; I was going to suggest that myself. We could always do a "if/then" clause so the extra section only shows up if one of the pertinent parameters is used. (I think stacking entire infoboxes might get a bit too cluttered, plus it's nice to see a whole issue's overview right at the top, but I'm willing to see a mockup if someone thinks that might work better.)

I find myself wondering if continuity should be in the navigation somehow, as then we could potentially tag it as a separate prev/next series if need be. I know that I was reading the Axiom Nexus text stories, for instance, and there seems to be a lack of a good way to show how some stories relate to each other in terms of reading order when the actual publication order in the franchise it's released under has stuff in between. (The Shattered Glass stories at least had the ready excuse of being stuck under that franchise for the navigation...) --Jeysie 18:01, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I like the idea of separate credit sections in the same infobox for separate stories in a single issue, with the titles of each story as the header; I was going to suggest that myself.

Betcha weren't :p [Seriously, with the title up top out of the way, you couldn't do anything of the sort]

Anyhoo, the main reason I'm a bit reluctant to put multiple stories together in such a fashion is that it would seem to divorce the latter stories from the infobox with their credits. If they end up so close together that the infoboxen actually stack and push the info away from the story in question, put them together in one infobox by all means. - SanityOrMadness 20:39, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Betcha I was. Because hey, you could put the title of the issue at the top (or not, if the issue doesn't actually have a title), and the title of the individual stories in the credit sections. It's funny how that works. :D

And, like I said, if someone can do a mockup of dual infoboxes that doesn't look silly, I could buy it. As it is, I just think it'd be weird basically having two separate pages on one page. I like the idea of the infobox itself being devoted to the comic issue as a whole. --Jeysie 21:01, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I am uncomfortable with the "dual navigation" system simply because... some of these stories have now been published 3 or 4 times. No previous/next for them? They don't get credits or publication dates? What if I want to know when IDW published an issue of "Prey," how many parts of that story they published (IDW doubled up content from 2 UK issues) or anything else important?

We're just tossing aside republishing info because our template doesn't support it. Same problem with the dates being left off multi-part stories... if it's nto clear how to add the information, the information becomes lost. -Derik 19:40, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Isn't the point of the '"dual-navigation" system' to record contemporaneous republication? [Marvel US in Marvel UK/Marvel G2 in Fleetway G2/IDW Beast Wars & AHM in Titan TF (...actually we don't currently do that last set, although we should)/etc]. That is, we wouldn't record an IDW "Best of the UK" as such even if it was the first such reprinting, because it was twenty years later?

If you try to fit four sets of data in one poor infobox, it would become unmanageably and unreadably large. - SanityOrMadness 20:39, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I don't disagree.

Speaking of... right now our navigation at the top of such boxes is (in theory) publication order... but with a weird mix-in of reading order too.

Should it become one or the other? And which is of primary importance? -Derik 02:32, 21 September 2009 (EDT)

...Didn't I more or less say that a few comments above? I think maybe we should have both... the main navigation(s) being publication order, then a third "continuity" section with a link to the issue's continuity and the prev/next reflecting proper reading order. --Jeysie 06:12, 21 September 2009 (EDT)

The thing about THAT idea is that the issue doesn't necessarily reflect the continuity if you want one infobox per page - take the AHM "coda" issues, or the Animated Arrival issues as examples, since they have multiple stories on one page. There's no one continuity place for those issues, since they're anthologies which take place out of order. You'd have to do the continuity nav at the story level, rather than the issue level. - SanityOrMadness 13:52, 21 September 2009 (EDT)

I've started work on fleshing out changes at {{Comicstory beta}} (relevant: Template:Comicstory beta/Example), but there's one major bit that I'm not sure how to deal with - Editors. Sometimes, editors work on the story level (to the point you could have separate editorial teams working on the different stories in the same issue, although I'm not aware of any TF examples off the top of my head), but sometimes they work at the issue level, overseeing a load of non-story content in addition to any stories in the issue (the latter's more common in the UK - US comics tend to have a letters page at most for non-story content). And so I'm having trouble placing where the various editorial credits should go - I've bunged them under a separate "Editorial" header temporarily, but I'm not happy with that - I want them under the story, or under the Publication info... - SanityOrMadness 14:00, 21 September 2009 (EDT)

Images for deletion

Interrobang has marked a pile of unused images for deletion. Some of them, I suspect, are unused because of the Bookworm crash, like the pictures of Lipoles. I've made a start on some of them, but if anyone wants to pitch in and fix up some of the images we should keep, be my guest! --abates 07:59, 12 September 2009 (EDT)

True, part of them are, um, "victims"(sort of) of the Bookworm crash, such as Image:Convoy BT.jpg and several others. I think those pictures should be hold and got checked/salvage for a while before being deleted. I've check the Category:To be deleted, but I can only recognize a few. People can check their watch list or Category:To be deleted to help ID those pictures they(users) know where they(pictures) belong to. --TX55^TALK 08:26, 12 September 2009 (EDT)

I've noticed that several of them aren't "unused" per se--they're not used as images anywhere, but they're still wikilinked to. For example, Image:Fat guard.JPG says "There are no pages that link to this file", but if you check "What links here", you'll see that Capture the Cube does in fact link to it. So before anyone deletes any images, I suggest checking if anything is wikilinking to them first. --Apoc 08:42, 12 September 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, I noticed a while back that the section under the image that lists pages which link to it only includes pages where the image is actually embedded. Plus some images are used in the site skin or CSS files, like the logos Derik set up to appear after links to certain sites. --abates 18:30, 12 September 2009 (EDT)

Are we intending to resurrect the community-nav template? The images used on it were among those tagged for deletion... --abates 21:11, 14 September 2009 (EDT)

I'll take that as a no. And down to 150 pictures now. Again, if anyone wants to take a look through Category:To be deleted in case anything they recognise where the images are supposed to go, please do! --abates 08:16, 16 September 2009 (EDT)

Down to 76 images. Most of those left were uploaded during the crash period, so any information about where they were intended to go is lost. Some of them, like Mugheads.jpg, are from lost talk pages. Some, like Tflive_logo_stacked.jpg, might be still useful for something. The two covers for The Ark II probably should be on the appropriate page. Some, like Mort-icons.png and Tf gf 002 back.jpg, I don't have the foggiest what they were intended for... --abates 23:23, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

This Day in Transformers History

We should try to turn the This Day in Transformers History into an exportable module, like our Go-Boxes. It'll help our SEO by encouraging links back to us as well as give us another source of dynamically-generated deep links to help users discover our content. We have info for all 366 days, we should exploit it. --Jimsorenson 15:46, 16 September 2009 (EDT)

Speaking of history, today is the 25th anniversary of the premiere of the G1 cartoon right? Want to mention that anywhere? --SuzyP 18:35, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Boxes gone from disambig templates?

I noticed the disambiguation templates don't seem to have those gray boxes behind them anymore. Is this intentional? Because it's confusing. -Mazenoise 08:16, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Derik shifted the CSS styling into the stylesheet. Your browser probably had the old stylesheet cached, but a shift-reload should fix it. --abates 08:20, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, it did actually. Thanks! -Mazenoise 08:29, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

And they (well, the ones Derik hit anyway) sprouted a thick grey left border in the transition because...? - SanityOrMadness 11:34, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

I forget the reason. Rest assured that it did make sense though!

Main advantage of switching the disambig boxes to CSS: When you have multiple in a row, they stack prettier without a double-outline between them. -Derik 19:47, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

I forget the reason. Rest assured that it did make sense though!

If that's not a Derikism, it deserves to be. (And is the main reason why I'm scared of changing to external CSS rather than inline CSS - you having the keys to the styles virtually unfettered, since those admins who could either override or yank the emopanda CSS mostly either don't know how or are absent much of the time)

So now we have disambig templates that are unique amongst messageboxen in a particularly... nondescript way. Different enough to be irritating, not different enough to serve any real purpose. - SanityOrMadness 21:09, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Eh? Oh, I thought I changed it back. (I remembered why they had a border on the left... I was testing something and decided it didn't work, I didn't realize it was still on.)

In theory Scout was going to make some changes last week to move us out of the existing CSS situation with much less living in my dev file... but she seems to have forgotten... -Derik 21:24, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

What was she planning to do? I can have a crack at it. --abates 21:29, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

Move a bunch of stuff to MediaWiki:common.css, I expect.

(Note the difference between Common.css [all skins, including the ones no-one uses like Simple and MySkin], Monacobook.css [Monacobook only] and Monobook.css [Monobook only]. Scout forgot about Monobook the last time common.css was edited. Incidentally, where did she ultimately put those changes? They ain't in the empty Monacobook.css.) - SanityOrMadness 21:44, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

I have a suspicion that the plan may be to create a new user class with rights to edit css files here (in which case I don't have the necessary access rights to do so)... --abates 21:59, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

That was the one.  :) Either she forgot, or she tried and it didn't work. I'll bug her when I remember. (It's not like it's pressing... it's been needing doing for some time so it can wait a bit longer.) -Derik 22:33, 17 September 2009 (EDT)

And to answer the css question, the changes are in this file which isn't editable through the Mediawiki interface. --abates 00:03, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

"Scout, I have 3 requests."

"No, no, yes if I don't have to do any work."

-Derik 01:51, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Did that ever get done in the end? --abates 19:45, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

Guess what.....

I've just decided to check our statistics for no apparent reason, and we have 9,588 "legitimate content pages", whatever that means. So then I randomly decided to check out the Wikia page (which, by the way, has had the same Featured Article for God-knows-how-long), and guess what?

7,209 pages. We're beating them out by 2,349 pages, which is quite a lot. Who thinks we can hit 10,000 soon? ---Blackout- 15:15, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

No problem. ...though it's about quality, not quantity. ;) -- Silvery 15:24, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I can tell you the quality of their articles as well.

Nonexistent. ---Blackout- 15:29, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Oh, you're too harsh. Anyways, I know this wiki's the best 'cause I checked all TF wikis before I've decided to join... -- Silvery 15:45, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

I can personally testify, we delete articles that aren't up to snuff and don't look like they're going to be.--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:36, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Now I'm interest in knowing how many articles the original wiki had back before the big split. - Cattleprod 15:57, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

Somewhere around 6890 or so. I should note that our current total is artificially inflated by about 75 due to the "ghost" pages causing the macron issue, so our total's nearer 9513 or so. --abates 20:36, 18 September 2009 (EDT)

@Silvery: I'm not being that harsh. Here's some examples. And I know, this will give them slightly more traffic.

Their ROTF Soundwave page.

Their All Hail Megatron page. Count the red links. ---Blackout- 02:53, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

You're too harsh in a "hit 'em when they're down" sense. It's called "irony". :P -- Silvery 04:11, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

I get a bit of personal pride whenever I compare our Shattered Glass section to theirs. --Jeysie 06:11, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

I weep whenever i read the Animated articles...Sentinel Prime's page is the best example.--Sunjumper 15:00, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

I just removed an {ongoing} tag from their Animated Perceptor's page. What the hell? ---Blackout- 15:08, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Also, for some reason, someone back there REALLY liked deleting my stuff. They liked it so much in fact, that my contributions page has been wiped clean. ---Blackout- 07:23, 23 September 2009 (EDT)

Also, Monaco now screws up page layouts when you move mainpics to where they're meant to be! (That's what it does on another wiki I happen to be an admin on, anyway.) Woo-freakin'-hoo. ---Blackout- 07:37, 23 September 2009 (EDT)

Wikia, seriously?

Look at the image, and be confused as to why anyone would want to see the ads? ---Blackout- 13:36, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

That option was actually put in due to user feedback. It's so they can view pages with the ads still in place and modify the layout to not look like ass.--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:17, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

I just checked their Shattered Glass (comic) page, and hell, they've not even added Soundwave, Rumble, Long Haul...I also feel a bit of pride since I uploaded the images and started writing most of those :) --Emvee 20:00, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

Reading Order

When the wiki began in 2006, reading order was a clear and obvious thing. It was straight publication order-- and even if broken up into minis like Dreamwave did, they followwed a logical "volume" order.

...IDW is nowwhere near that clean. Characters literally leave one aeries, appear in another, bunches of stories are interwoven. I think we should consider creating an IDW "reading order" page, simply because reading order is not the same as publication order, is not the same as chronological order. -Derik 04:41, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

User:Jackpot/Sandbox/IDW-G1 recommended reading order :3 --Jeysie 06:10, 19 September 2009 (EDT)

OK.....weird.

Did someone *looks at Derik* break the block log, or is it meant to only show blocks up to March this year? ---Blackout- 13:14, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Also, how didn't I get an edit conflict when Jimsorenson and I were trying to delete the same duplicate section at the same time?

Derik, please don't break the wiki. ---Blackout- 13:16, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Think back to what happened in March.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:23, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Oh yeah.

STUPID BOOKWORM! *scream is heard across the world* ---Blackout- 13:27, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, not everything is Derik's fault. On the other hand, many awesome improvements to the site are.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:56, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

I may have been reading a bit too much Community Portal Archives recently. ---Blackout- 14:23, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Derik breaking things is generally content, template, or presentational related-- despite all the joking, I have only ever broken the core of the site itself once. (And even then, it was for less than 10 minutes, Siph was nice enough to delete the page that was giving the site's database epileptic fits.)

I'm actually rather proud of that one-- insofar that it was supposed to be completely impossible, but I somehow managed to do it! (This was back on Bookworm, I suspect their server bog-down issues contributed to making my impossible feat happen.)

When I break stuff it tends to be more localized or cosmetic. -Derik 14:46, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Speaking of local/cosmetic issues, the automatic archive listing on this page does not appear to want to display archive 39.--Rosicrucian^Talk 14:48, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

The one that doesn't exist yet?

Also, This is incredibly funny. ---Blackout- 15:04, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Oh, it most definitely exists. Click on archive 38, then use the archive navigation at the top to go to the next archive. 39 is already populated.--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:09, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Vote to move that page to "Things that don't exist". ---Blackout- 15:19, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

That might be because the nav you're referring to isn't automatic. Just the ones in the individual archives. - —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Derik (talk • contribs) - who thought there actually were five lights in that TNG ep :p. 16:03, 22 September 2009 (EDT)

Something I just came up with.....

Because I absolutely loathe our current {{caption bastard}} tag, I came up with this.

---Blackout- 12:03, 24 September 2009 (EDT)

Tough. --M Sipher 12:51, 24 September 2009 (EDT)

You're pretty obsessed with caption edits.Dead Metal 12:57, 24 September 2009 (EDT)

I was very bored that day. ---Blackout- 01:50, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

Just a minor layout change. :D --TX55^TALK 09:35, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

Well it definitely looks better now. ---Blackout- 12:39, 25 September 2009 (EDT)

Keep an Eagle Eye (ROTF)

I notice that the first DVD-rips of ROTF have begun to drop-- 3 weeks before the movie is out on DVD. Be wary of a flurry of new screencaps appearing. -Derik 19:20, 26 September 2009 (EDT)

TF Wiki link forum signatures = spam = loss of google ranking?

Somebody on a Macross forum reported that posting links to their website via forum signatures counted as spam, which took a major hit in their site's google ranking, and it was the same for Digg linking. Since I'm not that net savvy, I'm waiting for the guy to provide more info about this, but we should probably discuss it here anyway: To our more tech and net-experienced members - does linking to our wiki via our forum signatures (as suggested and encouraged by our staff during the move last year) actually count as spam in Google's eyes and hurt our search ranking? --FFN 16:04, 27 September 2009 (EDT)

No. The worst that Google would do would be to ignore the links for the purposes of ranking. If Google did demote sites based on forum signatures, people would start putting links to their competitor's sites in their signatures. --abates 16:23, 27 September 2009 (EDT)

WTF?

Why does Archive 11 even exist? ---Blackout- 12:35, 1 October 2009 (EDT)

Obscure BW comic, anyone?

Alright for the past while now, I've been looking up and adding in obscure Beast Wars products. I remembered both the Mutating Card Game and both Jigsaw Puzzles, and I've already taken note to add those in. But one piece of memorabilia that has still eluded me is a really old comic... My memory's a bit fuzzy on this one, and I can't quite recall if it was a seperate mini-comic from the two-pack of "Optimus vs. Megatron!" or if the scenes I'm remembering are part of that comic as well. The only scenes I recall from said comic are the opening, where a pre-earth mode Cheetor peeks through some vegetation to reveal a (very small) crystal. The subsequent dialog explained that they had to take on beast modes to overcome the toxic radiation of the crystal (much like the tv show). Anyone has any similar recollection? Or if anyone has scans of the "Optimus vs. Megatron!" mini-comic to clear up wether or not it is a scene from that comic that I'm remembering, I'd appreciate it. In any case, I hope I'm not going crazy and remembering a comic that doesn't exist, because as far as I can tell, it's not listed on the Beast Wars comics page. Thanks --Ascendron 14:23, 3 October 2009 (EDT)

It's not the "Optimus Primal Vs. Megatron!" comic, that one starts with Primal(in beast mode) flying in the sky, and then Cheetor running in the dark with a glow in his eyes. Unless you mistake the sparkle in his eyes for a crystal, it's not the same comic.--Sunjumper 13:41, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

Categories for modes?

I've been trying to find out which transformer one of my old toys is, and I'd hoped I could compare it against each of the transformers with an aeroplane mode - but I couldn't find such a list. So I wondered whether it would be a good idea to have categories for the transformers' modes, so I could go to Category:Aeroplanes and look it up like that. Good idea? I'm not volunteering to do the legwork :-) 86.7.22.40 06:50, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

This external link might help. - Starfield 09:56, 5 October 2009 (EDT)

"Notes"

When did we start changing all the "Trivia" subheaders to "Notes"? ...And why even bother?--MCRG Again 20:17, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

Someone stated that they hated the header "Trivia" as it made the info seem inconsequential when sometimes it was actually useful/relevant, and those of us who thought they had a point started going along with that thought. (Although much to my annoyance I don't recall off-hand who said it or where, other than I think maybe it was on one of the Shattered Glass articles.) --Jeysie 20:34, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

It becomes irritating to me since "Notes" was solely confined to the comics and media articles and "Trivia" was confined to character and toy pages, so now we've got a bunch of random character pages with a "Notes" section (Hot Rod character page, for instance) and others with a "Trivia" section (Hot Rod toy page, for instance) for no particular reason. It looks sloppy and I have no idea whether I should be trying to track down and reset the headings to one or the other or if I'll get warned for it.--MCRG Again 23:32, 6 October 2009 (EDT)

"Someone" was probably me. -- Repowers 00:16, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, you're our resident cruft inquisition!--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:18, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

I think some page's contents in the Trivia sections is, um, mixed up with notes (relevant but can't be put in other section) and trivia (a little irrelevant BUT notable) things. So, maybe page like this would still need a trivia section, that is, separate their Trivia section into Trivia and Notes section. Of course, that may involve subjective view of the users who edit the page.--TX55^TALK 21:19, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

So are we going to decide on some form of consistent change or just use the two words randomly?--MCRG Again 02:31, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

I've been changing pages to "Notes" as I work them. --M Sipher 12:34, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

It'd also be a fairly easy bot request.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:38, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

Easy as long as you have a full list of the pages on the wiki. ---Blackout- 14:39, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

It's not as simple as it might appear - we have episode pages with Notes sections with Trivia subsections, so the bot would have to take that into account (and a blanket change of #Trivia anchors wouldn't be possible because some will be legitimately pointing to those Trivia sections). --abates 15:56, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

In the case of the bot request I made, I specifically said to replace ==Trivia== with ==Notes==. The pages you reference have ===Trivia===, which should be possible to exclude in a search.--Rosicrucian^Talk 16:54, 7 October 2009 (EDT)

Preventing direct image linking

As we know, the wiki costs a fair bit to run and early on in our post Bookworm crash server move, it used more bandwidth than our bosses calculated, so the last thing we need is people going around directly linking images off of our server for forums or even their blogs or whatever (The Mountain Dew Robots logo was one of our most popular articles... because some idiot linked the image to his website). Is there any way for us to prevent this? --FFN 11:54, 9 October 2009 (EDT)

Yes and no.

Yes in the sense that it's pretty easy to create an .htaccess file that redirects hotlinks in some way.

No in the sense that it might break the GoBoxes, if there isn't some way to make it so that the rewrite rules allow just the GoBox images to be hotlinked. Hrm. Although I think the GoBoxes are all PNGs, and we have very few PNGs as normal images, so it might not be that big a workaround problem. --Jeysie 17:40, 9 October 2009 (EDT)

Well, all the gobox images are in their own folder anyway, so it's simple enough to exclude them. This is probably a REALLY good idea; somebody give me a suitable (and tiny) replacement image and I'll try to make it so. --Suki Brits 08:45, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Depends on what you had in mind. You could either go the route of just making a one pixel GIF (i.e. smallest image possible), or maybe use our logo with "no hotlinking permitted" written on it. --Jeysie 09:01, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Goatse. Or the nearest TF equivalent of "ridiculous shock image." Hooper_X 10:00, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Anything from Kiss Players, then. ---Blackout- 10:09, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

...can we still let me inline images on my blog? Can we make exceptions? Because sometimes I do that, because it's technically me paying for the bandwidth anyway. --ItsWalky 10:17, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Whitelisting domains is easy. --Jeysie 10:36, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

I'm not extremely savvy with that kind of stuff (most of my knowledge coming from archived talkpages on this wiki), so I have no idea whether it's possible.

What is a goatse, anyway? ---Blackout- 10:24, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

You don't want to know if you don't already. Trust me. --Jeysie 10:36, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Sorry I asked.

• remembers the vandal that came in and messed with some talk pages* ---Blackout- 10:39, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

"Or the nearest TF equivalent" - Something like this, you mean? - Magnus Maximus 10:50, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Something more like this would be "the nearest TF equivalent", surely. [Or, potentially even more disturbing, this.] - SanityOrMadness 12:07, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Even Kiss Players is only about a 3 on the shock meter compared to Goatse. An image of Pat Lee might be appropriate... I suggest sticking to something small anyway, otherwise the bandwidth problem is still there. --abates 15:41, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

How about this with something like "You have found The Void." -- Semysane 15:52, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

I vote for Pat Lee. That's awesome. BANDWIDTH SUPERSTAR! Hooper_X 18:06, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

Well, the GoBoxes are fairly bandwidth-light, right? What if we did a variation on them, with the leeched image replaced with a notice that the image was leeched, and encouraging them to go to TFWiki.net to learn about Transformers?--Rosicrucian^Talk 15:57, 11 October 2009 (EDT)

I stand by my Kiss Players suggestion. That or the image of dead Prime from TFTM with a tagline at the bottom saying "This image is dead due to hotlinking." ---Blackout- 01:37, 12 October 2009 (EDT)

Rosicrucian has the right idea. We make it work for us, rather than just 'punish' the people doing it. We don't try to shock or dismay, just state that hotlinking is bad (m'kay?) and that tfwiki.net is the place to learn about Transformers. --Jimsorenson 11:44, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

FFN brought up an important issue! (FFN also totally forgot about this immediately after posting the original question and only just read this discussion.) And yeah, I totally forgot about the Go-Box. Since I'm not on the Allspark, I've never really seen the go box in use, other than Derrik Wyatt's blog. --FFN 01:22, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

This is about the most vindictively confusing thing you could spike someone with, IMO. -Derik 11:47, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

USE IT. ---Blackout- 11:58, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

GoBots on this wiki

Initial kick-off

This idea is getting some traction over on the Tonka GoBots page, so I thought I'd replicate the discussion here. It's certainly a big enough change that it should get broad exposure. --Jimsorenson 11:44, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

A note should be said in the [GoBots] article about canon. What is canon? I'm guessing it is like G.I. Joe: the whole universe is canon, but only the bits that appear in Transformers fiction is MediaWiki-noteworthy. Or is it like crossovers such as Star Wars: only the bits that appear in Transformers fiction are canon. Or (I don't think so) does Hasbro's purchase of them retroactively drag everything in, cartoon and all, as a "continuity family"? - Starfield 17:07, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Personally, I think that the GoBots should be covered here IN FULL.Khajidha 00:19, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

It is indeed like G.I. Joe or Death's Head, where the only stories that count for the purposes of our wiki are the ones that include Transformers.--ItsWalky 00:20, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

I'm not sure I agree. The Gobots cartoon has effectively been subsumed, in whole, into the Transformers mythos. This is a fundamentally different case than Death's Head, who left the Transformers multiverse explicitly, or G.I. Joe, which has implicitly diverged. Due to the legalities surrounding GoBots, the only licensed future stories set in the Gobots multiverse will be Transformers stories. We could certainly choose to catalog the 65 episodes and one movie of Gobots as effectively another Transformers continuity family, which it basically is. I'm not sure what the downside would be to that, other than it'll take a while for it to be up to the wiki's usual standards. I'd be happy enough to go through and start with character pages and episode guides though. --Jimsorenson 23:10, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

And just to throw it out there for reference, Counter-X is probably our best source for GoBots research on the entire interwebs. --DrSpengler 23:31, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

I, uh, I'm not sure that really fits the TF Wiki's "mission statement." I mean, this is a Transformers wiki. We shouldn't start making ourselves cover entire other properties just because there was a crossover. --ItsWalky 12:24, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Depth of coverage?

As much as I'd fap to the idea of having full-blown GoBots coverage on this wiki, I'd just like to get straight how deep we'd go with the coverage. Would we cover just the cartoon? Would we also cover the Robo Machine comics published in the UK? Would we do articles for each character along with complete toy write ups? Just curious. I wouldn't mind slogging through the cartoons myself, or maybe even calling dibs on the Rock Lords movie, but I'd just like to know exactly how much GoBots we'd be willing to cover.

Also, would we be able to cover the toys, or just the fiction? -- Semysane 23:47, 16 October 2009 (EDT)

I think that we'd only cover the part of GoBots that are canon for Transformers. That'd be the cartoon, basically. IMO, the toys (as something owned by Bandai) are outside of that purview. Things like Machine-Robo and associated fiction have not been brought into the Transformers canon and pretty much cannot be officially, legally, brought in. --Jimsorenson 00:35, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Machine-Robo etc would probably fall under the same classification as Diaclone and Microchange, ie general mention but little detail. I am confused by your statement that "the toys (as something owned by Bandai) are outside of that purview." Taking that statement at face value the original Jetfire, Roadbuster and Whirl toys shouldn't be here either. Khajidha 18:35, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Not at all. Those toys were all released as Transformers. Other Takatoku and Bandai toys wouldn't be fair game, and aren't. The reason that the GoBots CARTOON can be on this wiki is that it was effectively bought by Hasbro when they acquired Tonka, and then integrated into the Transformers universe by licensed stories like Withered Hope. There has been no comparable action regarding GoBot toys. They were licensed to Tonka by Bandai. That license has long since expired. Hasbro has no claim on those toys, and there has never been any attempt to integrate the toys into the Transformers multiverse. At least, that's the way I see it. --Jimsorenson 19:32, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Okay, now I understand your point. For the other side, it seems to me that the toys are the source for the cartoon; if one is fair game for this wiki so is the other. Since this site is not part of Hasbro, the licensing is irrelevant. That is, while Hasbro can't use the toys; we (as archivists) are free to use them. Khajidha 20:19, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Some initial chime-ins

If we can do it up to our usual standards, I'm for it. I just think it's a metric assload of material to be adding.--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:00, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Hey, we've all got plenty of time. What's one more metric assload? --DrSpengler 00:06, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

I welcome the challenge. --Jimsorenson 00:35, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

I could definitely help out. (Dibs on swooping in and taking care of any spelling or punctuation mistakes.) ---Blackout- 11:49, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

I'm a little indecisive - the entire point of Withered Hope, etc. was that the GoBots exist OUTSIDE of the TF universe. While a given number of GoBots have since moved in, until further notice, it's unclear how many GoBots actually have integrated into the larger TF milieu. Now, if someone from Hasbro said, even in passing, that the GoBots stories are now considered part of the TF multiverse, I'd be all for it. Maybe it's something to think about for BC or the next Q&A. Hooper_X 12:45, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

A while back there was a discussion where it was said that nothing that was once canon can be removed from canon later on, even by Hasbro. Is the reverse also true, can a block of fiction be retroactively added to canon that wasn't canon at the time? I'm thinking not really. I'm thinking only the glimpses of the GoBots universe in TF fiction belong. - Starfield 13:14, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

They're not really reciprocal arguments. Imagine this scenario: Hasbro kills off G2 and is soured on Transformers. They let their new acquisition, Kenner, start their own brand of Transforming robots, called Beast Wars, and they don't use the Transformers name in conjunction with it at all. No mention of Cybertron. No character named Megatron - call him T-Wrecks. It'd effectively be a completely different toyline and cartoon, not 'canon' for Transformers. The whole first season happens, more or less as we saw but without Starscream or the few mentions of past continuity. It's a big hit, so Hasbro decides to add the Transformers logo to the Beast Wars packaging. Then the second season starts up, and lo and behold, they make a big plot point out of The Ark, and the Predacons being descended from Decepticons. They would have changed the status of the S1 stories from non-canon to canon for Transformers.

Now imagine that it wasn't until Beast Machines that this transition happened. Different logo, different writers, but a continuity of characters and ideas. It'd STILL retroactively pull all of the Beast Wars into Transformers canon. So, sure, stories can be retroactively made canon. Hell, what about this scenario - Alignment is republished by IDW, under the Transformers banner. Boom - non-canon becomes canon, just like that.

It's possible, is all I'm saying. --Jimsorenson 13:25, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

It's totally feasible, I'm just not sure it's actually HAPPENED with the GoBots material yet. Hooper_X 13:41, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, my thought too. I don't really have a problem per se with the idea, it's just that I don't think GoBots is officially Transformers canon as a whole; just some individual characters that have shown up. Kind of like how various Marvel characters have been shown to be a part of canon, but we don't go and then write up the entire universe they hail from. --Jeysie 17:24, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

But... but... when I was a kid GoBots were decidedly not Transformers. Back in the '80's that was kind of a big deal. Not a logical argument, I know. If Alignment were published as a Transformers story, sure it would be canon. If the GoBots cartoon were published as a Transformers story it would be canon. The Beast Wars example is interesting. - Starfield 13:49, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

*IS* GoBots Canon for Transformers though?

Yeah. Honestly, I don't know about this... at least, not now. There's still a lot of TF stuff that needs deeper exploration and suchlike, including Club materials. I'd think a focus on those things before we delve deep into GoBots' non-TF-direct stuff would be in order. --M Sipher 14:45, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

I share this thought. I think if people have enough time to be writing up a bunch of GoBot stuff, surely it's better spent (for now, at least) on writing up the TF stuff we already know we need? --Jeysie 17:24, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

There is no need to have articles here for Defendor, Destroyer, Tank, Fytor, Hans-Cuff, Jeeper Creeper, Wrexx, Pincer, Pumper, Vamp, Creepy, and probably 99.1% of all other GoBot characters and story events. We have the e-Hobby team, Withered Hope, the various Crashers and Cy-Kills and a few other circa-Dreamwave easter eggs, because they actually existed in some form in the TF multiverse. Trying to add in every other character that never did anything and doesn't matter just because we can would be about as fruitful and necessary as adding in every other G.I.Joe character ever that also never appeared here. That Eskimo Quinn dude could always use another write-up, right? --Thylacine 2000 17:51, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Im free, I'll do the GoBots. --206.253.51.107 21:14, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Yeah, I'm not sure how the GoBots non-TF backstory is any more canon to TFs than the entirety of GI Joe, or Death's Head's other stories, or Spiderman comics, or X-Men, or the Incredible Hulk, or... -- Repowers 22:07, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Leaving the above joking around aside, the difference between GoBots and the other crossovers is that GoBots is tending towards convergence, where as all the other cases listed are tending towards divergence. Gobots has been, de facto, merged into the Transformers line. It started with Transformers names and lines named GoBots. Then GoBots names and likenesses started to show up, again and again. Then toys were made to represent specific GoBots. Stories were published involving GoBots, not just as new Transformers, but as GoBonaughts from their cartoon continuity entering the realms of Transformers.

This is a fundamentally different situation from the other crossovers. Death's Head started out in Transformers (leaving High Noon Tex aside) but then left for another multiverse. G.I. Joe started out in the same multiverse, really, but has slowly but surely diverged to the point where future crossovers cannot exist as a part of the main lines. The Marvel stuff, again, very briefly started out in the same multiverse (rather, the TF comic briefly started out in the Marvel universe before diverging.)

That's the real underlying reason. GoBots are being absorbed into Transformers, literally (by the acquisition of Tonka) and figuratively (as seen in Withered Hopes.) That GoBots are about a civil war between shapechanging robots (well, cyborgs, but then, Beast Wars were cyborgs too) means that it works very well thematically. That all future official GoBots stories will come from Hasbro or its licensees makes it work on a practical level. It's a finite amount of non-Transformers-branded story to catalog, a mere 65 episodes, 1 movie and some 100 characters of note. If we assume maybe 2 extra characters or devices of interest per episode, that's about 300 articles. With the 10,000 we already have, that's hardly a daunting task. Heck, it even benefits Hasbro. It gives them easier access to the information and trademarks that they've already acquired, and thus lets them better protect their intellectual property.

Basically, that means that we CAN choose to catalog GoBots. The precedent is there in the form of the Beastformers. That doesn't necessarily mean we SHOULD, but we have the option. I for one would like to exercise that option, but only if enough people think it's a good idea. --Jimsorenson 00:52, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

Marvel Continutiy side-discussion

All of Marvel 616 is totally contained within the IDW G1 continuity! Wolverine sure didn't warp from that reality to his own later on. --ItsWalky 22:39, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Wolverine appears in three solo titles, four team books, and a spattering of guest appearances every month. If there isn't SOME kind of reality warping that helps him get around, I'd be surprised. --Xaaron 23:24, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

For me, it's like kinda minor continuity within the 616 reality, since there are too many contradictory. --TX55^TALK 23:48, 17 October 2009 (EDT)

Who owns what Vis-à-vis rights

How much of GoBots Hasbro owns, I thought, was subject to debate. Heck, Sipher and Trent go out of their way to not mention anybody in Withered Hope that either didn't have a Hasbro-owned name or wasn't based on a Transformers figure. That's why we have "Doctor B" instead of Doctor Braxus, why they name Leader One and not Cykill, and why they describe Turbo but do not name him. This indicates that the GoBots cartoon, as a whole, is not something that the "Withered Hope" story itself declares is open to us. Hasbro owns Tonka... but does that really mean they now own the CotGB cartoon? They may just own some trademarks and some likenesses. That whole situation is kind of an intellectual property clusterfuck. Bandai owns the toys, Hanna Barbara may still retain rights to portions of the show, and Hasbro probably owns what little remains. --ItsWalky 01:25, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

That's a really good point. I got the impression from the IDW editors that it's all on the table, but then it hasn't come up much in my books (yet) so that hasn't been put to the test. Sipher, could you shed some light on the process? Did you restrict your use of terms because of a Hasbro missive, or was that you being proactively cautious? --Jimsorenson 03:46, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

Legally it could be an abandoned copyright. Transformers has spent the last several years walking along the train tracks to go poke it with a stick in increasingly invasive ways... and it (or whoever owns it) has not reacted as we've had Transformers toys released that are Go-Bots characters, featured them in increasingly-large roles in Transformers stories, slowly transitioning to full-on (albeit minor) characters instead of cameos, taken measures to lock out their copyrights... and finally openly acknowledging "yes, we consider Go-Bots part of our multiverse, and intend to use them." It's not even a separate universe-- the rock lords stuff is showing up in the same universe as Cybertron. (In Multiple universes, right?)

Whoever owns Go-Bots seems to have just given up. Go-Bots was never popular enough for a DVD set, even during the Maximum Nostalgia period. And with Hasbro owning their trademarks-- not just character names but the name of the damn line and species-- it's functionally impossible for them to market Go-Bots as a nostalgia property. When they didn't bring Machine Rescue Robo over to the U.S., the last real hope of a revival or relaunch died. (and most fundamentally... He-Man and Thunercats died. If they can't sustain revivals, Go-Bots doesn't stand a chance. The perception that all nostalgia properties are money-mines seems to have finally died out.) They just... what are they going to ever do with the part they own? Convention-exclusive comics that can't even be called "Go-Bots," it'd have to be "Guardians vs. Renegades" or "Challenge of the Guard-Bots"?

A fine distinction... TF does not own the Go-Bots fiction-- that's © whoever owns it separately from the property. (This might be why Dead End (Armada) couldn't be called "Gobotron," Hasbro owns Go-Bots which is enough to prevent Tonka from using "Gobotron" as a replacement name, but AFAIK the name itself comes from the fiction and wasn't a trademark Hasbro acquired-- it's owned by Warner Bros., and a handful of other fiction-producers who did books and records.)

In theory all the Go-Bots we're getting is a new universe that may resemble some past incarnation, but is actually based on the cardback bios... or something. (Which I don't think we actually have the rights to either... or maybe as part of the packaging they were part of the rights Kenner owned-- I dunno.)

(Someone who knows more than I do about Go-Bots could probably figure out better than I who owns what part of the brand, which has been sawed up and redistributed like one of Dexter Morgan's victims.)

Critical point: The 'abandoned copyright' thing I said above? It's a theoretical classification. No one relies on that, ever. It's even worse than Fair use. It is incredibly hard to abandon a copyright simply through neglect-- it basically requires an explicit declaration by all owners that they choose to do so, so all of the above theoretical musings are just that-- legal theory, and the law operates differently in a vacuum than it does in the real world.

This would make a good question to ask in our Hasbro Q&A. Not who owns Go-Bots... they won't answer that because it's too legally fraught. Ask a simple question like "we know you got the trademarks via Kenner... does that include the cardback bios?" (Because I'd like to be able to fill out the Narliphant page using its go-bots bio.)

Hypothetical aside-- remember the "Duck Dodgers meets the Green Lantern Corps" episode a few years ago? I'm not entirely sure, but I think WB could have had him meet the Go-Bots. Drop him into the full-on Hanna Barbera cartoon, using the names under a grandfather clause like Captain Marvel. ...they just have no reason to-- the trademarks effectively lock out their ability to create a new cartoon, sell toys, etc etc etc. I'm just pointing out how screwed up the rights are. -Derik 13:06, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

Interesting musings. The missing piece, though, is what kind of agreements Tonka structured with Hanna-Barbara, which have since passed to Hasbro and Warner Brothers, respectively. It's well known that Hasbro was savvy-enough to put legal agreements in place that ensured that new elements introduced in Transformers fiction continued to belong to Hasbro. Hence the manoeuvrings of Marvel with characters like Circuit Breaker and Death's Head. I don't know how Tonka structured their agreements, but that'll have a huge impact on where the rights stand now. I'm not sure, thought, that the failure to use 'Gobotron' for Dead-End had anything to do with legal wrangling.--Jimsorenson 20:38, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

Sorry if I'm beating a dead horse here, I'm just rather interested in the whole situation. I went and dug up the posted copyright notice for GoBots. Note that the actual episodes ARE indeed copyright Hanna-Barbera. On the other hand, GoBot names, characters and property is definitely copyright Tonka corp. So, the episodes themselves may not be kosher. The characters, and especially the character names, should be fair game.--Jimsorenson 02:36, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

If we do come to the conclusion that the GoBots cartoon is fair game for us, I think we should go ahead and do it. As to why someone would "waste their time" on GoBots stuff when they have regular TF stuff they could write about, well, a few reasons. First, they might have access to the GoBots episodes but not a lot of TF stuff. Second, they might decide a lot of people would be willing to write TF, but GoBots, not so many. Third, they might be more a fan of GoBots and use this as an "adoptive wiki" for the show instead of starting a brand new one just for the GoBots. Thanos6 03:40, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Ok, so by that image Jim has established that GoBot names and most importantly characters are definately Hasbro's and the Toon epsisodes themselves are pretty certainly not. It seems the logical thing to do then would be to include GoBot characters in this wiki when they appear in TF material. Cover the characters personality and personal backstory in their main bio paragraphs at the top of of the page, as that IS their character. But leave the "Fiction" section for things that happen in TF stories or are atleast referenced there. That fits the way the material is owned AND the interests of the wiki. --76.28.72.27 08:20, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Anonymous McBunchanumbers pretty much sums up how I feel about it. The GoBot characters and the GoBots property are Hasbro's now, but the cartoon isn't (and I wonder about the other ancillary stuff - there was a GoBots Magazine that I remember seeing as a kid, it was done by the same people who did the official He-Man Magazine, and that's without getting into the Machine Men stuff). Cover what Hasbro owns and has acknowledged owning, leave out what isn't available. Hooper_X 08:59, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

ETA: The GoBots Magazine was published by a company that now is owned by Time Warner. So it looks like most, if not all, of the ancillary GoBots media is owned by TW. Hooper_X 10:02, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

I think the problem hinges on what we mean by official. Do we mean "owned by Hasbro/Tomy" or just "produced under license from Hasbro/Tomy". For TFs those are basically the same thing, for GBs they are two different things. The first would exclude all the toys and media from the classic GoBots, leaving only those appearances under the TFs banner. The second definition would include the toys and media as they were produced under license from Tonka or by Tonka under license from Bandai. Khajidha 10:27, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Not exactly the same thing - while Hasbro always had the ability to make any derivative work they pleased from the G1 cartoon (hence the Marvel comic quickly adopting the cartoon models, and the various toys along the way - compare to He-Man, where Mattel can't touch any of the Filmation cartoon designs), they only acquired the cartoon itself in the past couple of years. I don't think they even own the actual BW, BM, RID and TFA cartoons now, and they certainly don't own the 2007 and 2009 movies. - SanityOrMadness 19:42, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

The Tick is a better example. There's the "base license," which includes all the character, setup and the story of the original 12 issues.

This was the basis for the cartoon.

When FOX went to make the live-action Tick, they licensed the base-license again-- the character, setup and original 12 issues-- and discoverered they did NOT have the rights to the characters that only appeared in the cartoon.

This is like that, except that the "base license" is much smaller-- the characters, names, likenesses and (presumably) their cardback bios. (Possibly also a series bible.) No fiction at all.

And that's assuming that Hasbro even owns all of that... I thought it was just the Trademarks, but the increased willingness to reference Go-Bots material in recent years, beyond the "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" level would seem to indicate that Hasbro believes they have a right to the characters, not just the trademarks. -Derik 11:20, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

What Derik said, Khajidha. Basically, this wiki covers things officially Transformers. That includes things owned by Hasbro and things made under license from Hasbro. There is no transitive property for things now owned by Hasbro but made under license from the previous owner. Though, Derik, I'll point out that we don't actually KNOW the Ts & Cs of the GoBots license. It's possible that Tonka had even more draconian license terms than Hasbro. The characters, names and property is just about the most conservative case possible. Which, as 'sharecroppers' on Hasbro's farm, is probably the safest position for us to take, barring new information.--Jimsorenson 11:42, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

The G.I. Joe Counter-Example

The thing is, G.I. Joe is also owned by Hasbro. What makes GoBots different from Joe? --ItsWalky 10:37, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

See my above argument starting with "Leaving the above joking around aside." --Jimsorenson 11:42, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

In the future any GoBots appearances are likely to be under a TF banner. They are not likely to carry their own franchise again. GIJoe is likely to continue making many appearances apart from TFs. TF/Joe stories are going to be rare, TF/GB stories are going to be the norm. Khajidha 10:48, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Canon or not-canon

So that just means Hasbro owns the characters, names, etc. like they own G.I. Joe. The way I see it, that says nothing of the TF canonicity of those things. TF canon is TF fiction. The characters, names, etc. are not TF fiction. As the characters are used in TF fiction, they get into canon. What we need is a TF profile book with all of them in there. It shouldn't really matter to us who owns what. We cover Spider-Man's comic appearance and Roadbuster's toy because they were in TF fiction. - Starfield 11:35, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Hasbro ownership lays the foundation for POSSIBLE inclusion. It was further stories that pulled the GoBots multiverse into the Transformers multiverse.--Jimsorenson 11:42, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Possible inclusion does not equal actual inclusion - let's say Hasbro made a TF of one of the Air Raiders vehicles - would that warrant adding the Air Raiders as a concept to the Wiki? Does the Allspark Almanac mentioning the existence of the Darkling Lords of Prysmos require us to do a full entry on the Visionaries universe? Right now, we limit our coverage of "Darkling Lords of Prysmos" to "There are these dudes called the Darkling Lords and they live somewhere called Prysmos." Even though we all know WHO they actually are and WHY they matter, it's not immediately relevant to TF fiction. If Leoric or whoever were to show up in a future TF story, we'd do a page for him, but not necessarily for Merklynn or any of the other Visionaries characters, unless they appear in the story too. Hooper_X 12:22, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Agreed, 100%. However, for reasons sketched out above, I feel that criteria HAS been hit for GoBots. A mere throw-away reference is one thing. A crossover is more, but still not enough. A years-long pattern of name usage, toy creation and eventually official stories that specifically pull the existing GoBots fictional universe into the Transformers multiverse is something else.--Jimsorenson 18:47, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Eh. Even if that's true, I still kind of think it's a waste of time. Write up whatever GoBot characters/items and referenced stories show up in TF fiction, and that's it. I really don't see why we need any more than that, as that's all that is required to be informed about Transformers fiction, and that's ultimately what we're here for. A full-on GoBot wiki is a nice idea, but... really not our purview. Maybe if folks wanted to start a sister wiki instead? *shrug* --Jeysie 18:58, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Damnit, Jeysie, way to reply while I was replying! Withered Hope brings the GoBots into the TF canon, but it does so by explicitly saying they exist outside that canon - they're unknown to the Transtechs (whose entire POINT is that they know everything), etc. As it stands, I think the current setup is an adequate compromise. We cover the GoBots characters/concepts that have appeared in TF fiction, but the rest are beyond our purview until such a point as something happens to integrate the two franchises (which I figure will happen, eventually (current most likely scenario in my mind: Someone at IDW introduces GoBotron, full of GoBots, and then promptly blows it up/has Unicron eat it/some other puerile "joke." Second most likely: We finally get a sequel to "Withered Hope" that somehow merges the realities - or retcons that there IS a variant TF universe where the GB stuff happened, we've just never seen it until now.) Or eventually Hasbro just does something akin to the Matt Trakker figure from the Joe line, where it's mentioned in passing that "Oh yeah, MASK was part of the Joe universe all along, we're just now connecting the dots." At that point, I'd be totally cool with it. Hooper_X 19:02, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

There's a certain driving frustration behind this (one which I share,) the Go-Bots aren't ever gonna get a proper wiki, and the cartoon will never be cataloged unless it's done here.

...yet you could say the same of G.I. Joe, and no one's suggesting we go back and start adding every G.I. Joe comic, cartoon, etc.

The question unique to GoBots is the possibility that they have been, essentially, "folded into" the Transformers property to a degree greater than Inhumanoids (a dead property which TF references, but which remains separate.) But we don't know that that's happened, that it legally can happen, and what part(s) of GoBots TF Hasbro does own.

And even if we knew that... it does not automatically follow that we'd treat it as part of the TF Franchise for documentary purposes. Or that we wouldn't. There'd have to be a discussion about it.

The TF Multiverse (Which you could really call the Hasbro Brands Multiverse, incorporating TF, Joe, Jem, Visionaries etc...) is the 5th largest fictional shared-universe every created. (And it keeps gobbling up other franchises-- G.I. Joe has annexed MASK and Action Man in recent years.) There has to be a sane limit on how far outside the Transformers franchise you 'follow' information... otherwise we end up documenting C.O.P.S. episodes. And of the 4 fictional multiverses larger than TF... TF has crossed over with 2 of them! (Marvel and Star Wars.) And Marvel has crossed over with the other two. (DC and Star Trek.)

So... yeah. Knowing our limits is important. (I'm not even opposed to documenting Go-Bots... they're certainly closer to TF than anything else... but I'd want to have a serious discussion of the implications first.) -Derik 19:10, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Marvelverse side-discussion redux

Hell, given that Marvel published a SW comic for ten years or so, you could argue that Marvel and SW are part of the SAME multiverse. Thanos6 19:20, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Not even all Marvel's wholly-owned stories are in the same multiverse (I'm serious - Marvel have multiple multiverses. Thank you Mark Greunwald) - the New Universe in particular is explicitly in a separate multiverse which works by slightly different laws. The "big" Marvel/DC stories (Marvel vs. DC, Amalgam and JLA/Avengers) worked on a similar principle, although some of the smaller (Spider-Man/Batman, etc - along with Image crossovers like Spider-Man/Badrock. Again not joking on that one) crossovers just played the "imagine they lived in the same universe" game. [New Avengers/Transformers was an example of the latter].

Marvel's most significant overlap on that front is actually with Doctor Who - besides Death's Head, who met the Seventh Doctor at least three times, there's been several references to characters meeting The Doctor, and a Doctor Who Magazine (published by Marvel UK at the time) comic story which included a multiverse-spanning splash page included the "Spider-Man recognises the Burglar" panel from Amazing Fantasy #15. - SanityOrMadness 19:42, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

IIRC, one of the Access minis clarified that sometimes universes (even between multiverses) simply collide and temporarily overlap, or a character crosses from one to another. (Crossover, present-overlap, full-history-overlap, amalgamation.) The first 3 just... happen, naturally, and usually sort themselves out, though it's Access's job to help unsnarl them. (It's a bit like icebergs colliding. In a low-speed collision, there's some mashing-effect on the border, but they'll separate themselves out eventually... more or less.)

And in fairness to Grunewald... his multiple-multiverses thing seems more like a recognition of the fact "it's harder to cross from some realities than others." Earth 616 does not "border" the DCU in the same way it borders Earth-712 (Squadron Supreme's Earth.) In both Earth-616 and 712, there are Skrulls, a Sorcerer Supreme etc etc etc... the larger metaphysical "structure" of the universe is the same, regardless of the surface expression. But in the DCU (and the New Universe) they are fundamentally different.

The reality which has emerged is that while a Multiverse may have a certain fixed scope (1,000,000+ Earths in the Marvel Multiverse, 52 in the DC, 15,000,000,000,000,000 in the TF Multiverse) a universe can belong to more than 1 multiverse at a time-- like sitting in the overlap area of a venn diagram. -Derik 20:06, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Multiverse side-discussion

Buuuuut then we get into multiverse vs. omniverse, which I think we agreed some time back to avoid for the sanity of the wiki.--Rosicrucian^Talk 20:43, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

DC and Marvel both lack an Axiom Nexus for a reason. They desperately want to avoid dealing with this.

No sane Multiverse has an Axiom Nexus. Hub realities like this are almost always confined to micro-fiction dealing with the Omniverse... because in a large functioning multiverse, they create incredible long-term headaches.

I have to believe there's a sticky-note in Marvel's Editor-in-chief's office saying "Don't let anyone destroy the TVA," because it's their only multiversal singularity, and they've (somehow) managed to avoid screwing it up-- despite employing writers and editors that don't understand their own Multiverse. Example: The supervillain behind Avengers: Disasembled was Steve Rogers. Yes, even on Earth-616, it's just that no one ever figured it out here. Oopsie! -Derik 21:11, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Derik, I gotta ask, you being you, how did you arrive at 15 quadrillion universes for Transformers? The highest number we saw was in the DW Armada comic at about 76 million. Even given that they found Optimus in a random universe, the expectation would be that they'd have to search about half of the realities to find him, which puts the figure at around 152 million. Granted, that's not a hard and fast figure, but with numbers that large (and the assumption that each reality was as likely as the next to contain their universe's Optimus Prime), it's likely to be close.--Jimsorenson 21:03, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Do you know that there are more than fifteen quadrillion concurrent universes? It's true!Bug Bite, "Games of Deception"

I arrived at it by remember a direct and explicit quite by someone who's actually a traveler from outside the Transformers multiverse, and thus in an even better position to know the length and breadth of it than the poor Transtechs, who think there are only 75 million, and are doubtless in for a Rude Surprise someday.

I suppose arguably you could say the Hasbro Brand Megaverse is 15Q, and the TF Multiverse is 75M... but that would require making a delineation between multiverse and megaverse that, while fairly clear in regard to other fictions and whose structures TF mirrors, is not explicitly laid out in TF fiction itself. (A Multiverse is defined by a touchstone that exists in all realities. A M'Kran Crystal, an 11th-dimensional snowflake, a "Cybertron, stable axis of the Multiverse...")

And of course, one is never entirely sure... was Bug Bite aware of the existence of negative-polarity universes?

(I tend to think that the Transtechs are simply vastly underestimating the size of the multiverse-- Bug Bite seemed to have a fair idea how the TF Multiverse worked, and there was some in-continuity reason why the Transtechs underestimating things make sense I'm currently blanking on. So assume there are 15Q, possibly 30Q universes with Cybertron in it.) -Derik 21:29, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Ah. I knew there was a reason. Though, at the time I read it, I took his quote to mean that there were 15 quadrillion realities in the Omniverse. One point of contention - the trantechs cataloged about 16 million realities. The 76 million figure listed on the web site comes from backtracking from the Armadaverse. And given that there was an episode of GoBots, "Transfer Point", where the guardians traveled to a universe where Guardians were evil and Renegades good, I think Bug Bite is probably well aware of negative polarity universes. --Jimsorenson 21:39, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Ah, thank you, yes, the Transtechs being aware of fewer realities than demonstrably exist in the Armada comic was the reason I think they've got their heads up their afts.

(Splitting... this section is far too long to not be sub-divided.) The number discrepancy between the Techs' catalog and the Armada search is not intentional. Frankly, "Worlds Collide" was so fucking forgettable, well, we forgot that bit of it. Had we remembered, the number stated in WH would have been far, far, far higher than Armada's. --M Sipher 03:01, 21 October 2009 (EDT)

And 15 quadrillion cannot be the number of universes in the Omniverse, because by definition the Omniverse contains everything ever, and Heinlen wrote about an Omniverse with 10.3 Octillion universes. The 15 quadrillion can be a Megaverse which Bug Bite has mistaken for the whole of the Omniverse, but not the thing itself. (The Heinlen Omniverse model is the largest AFAIK, and it shows up a lot in fringe fiction dabbling with the Omniverse. It pretty much has to have been used by Marvel or someone Marvel's crossed over with at some point.)

And good point about the negative universe. Bug Bite may have indeed been referring to a Megaverse with his number-- a "local group" in astronomical terms, which means that number would include realities not part of the TF Multiverse. But that really just means we have no idea how big the TF Multiverse is. If 15Q is the containing set, the minimum set is 75M, and the group who's supposed to know what's going on only thinks there's 16M.

*shrug* -Derik 22:00, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

15 Quadrillion concurrent universes doesn't necessarily preclude 10.3 octillion TOTAL universes. Concurrent just means "existing at the same time." We know that a couple million in the TF multiverse *alone* have come to an end. Of the 10.3 octillion total, how many have ended? How many are yet to come into existence? How many exist for seconds, minutes, moments, and are gone? If Forest is to be believed, the Fallen creates those all the fucking time. They exist, then they don't, like someone save-scumming a video game. Just the actions of multiversal singularities who exist and act nonlinearly would suggest that there'd be a shitfuckton of these hi-then-die little timestreams. Hooper_X 22:24, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

*IS* GoBots Canon for Transformers though, Redux.

I think my stance is... we document anything officially branded as Transformers toys or fiction, and what characters/concepts are contained within. So unless the GoBots cartoon (or toys, or whole line in general, or whatever) is ever officially stated as being Transformers fiction specifically, we should stick to only documenting what shows up in Transformers fiction. Otherwise, as previous posts indicate, we could start getting really crazy in what we should be documenting, especially since there's still significant amounts of definitely official TF stuff that needs writing up. --Jeysie 19:47, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

lost count:A years-long pattern of name usage, toy creation and eventually official stories that specifically pull the existing GoBots fictional universe into the Transformers multiverse is something else

The thing with "years-long patterns" is that you can never tell when they're over. Looking backwards across 17 years, yeah, there have been an awful lot of GoBots references in TF, and there will probably be more, but the only one of real consequence was Withered Hope and so far that just appears to be a one-off. We always hold off on including material that hasn't come true yet--unconfirmed rumors and stolen toy protos and such--so what is the difference between that and holding off on writing the TFWiki Jeeper Creeper article until after he appears, if he ever actually does?--Thylacine 2000 21:19, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

I'm not saying that we should document him because he might appear. My contention is that this pattern, culminating in a story that effectively says that yes, the GoBots universe DOES exist somewhere in the Transformers Multiverse, pulls the GoBots universe retroactively into the Transformers Multiverse. I'm saying it's ALREADY happened. --Jimsorenson 21:52, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Yes, but there's still lots of non-TF things that are technically part of the TF universe that we still don't document in full because not all of their bits are official TF fiction or toys. --Jeysie 21:58, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

And I'd say that GoBots is sufficiently different from them that they warrant inclusion. I'm having a hard time understanding what the 'cost' of adding in GoBots would be. I don't buy the camel's nose arguments here - if we decide GoBots are close enough and interesting enough to document, it doesn't force us to then add C.O.P.S. The benefits, on the other hand, are multitude. It brings us more pageviews, allows Transformers creators more access to this material and in general enriches the universe. If it costs us a few (hundred) hours of editorial time, is that bad? We may get new editors or more activity out of our existing ones. (Oh, and Thy, I don't think I'd call seven toys (almost eight, but for the rights) no consequence. Games of Deception was a solidly GoBot story as well.) --Jimsorenson 22:13, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

See, this totally is the "camel's nose" thing you just said it wouldn't be: seven or eight GoBots involved in two or three TF stories is now the rationale for adding at least 90 other characters, 65 episodes, and a feature-length movie that are of no significance whatsoever to the TF mythos. Even if we could magically press a button and have it all appear instantly at no effort--they still just wouldn't belong here. We don't know what "future stories" may ever exist, and longstanding precedent on this wiki has been that we don't base our coverage on future assumptions--even revelations of future facts through unofficial sources when we all know full well it is actually true, and that's certainly not the case here. While it may indeed be cosmically unfair for GoBots to have been so generally forgotten and without a wiki of their own, that really isn't necessarily our problem. I really think it would dilute the spirit of what we've put together here. It is canonically established that Visionaries takes place in the same universe as Animated--and frankly I suspect more people read the book in which that notion appeared than read Withered Hope. I think I can rather confidently predict that any future Visionaries story material would consist of more TF references like that and not an actual freestanding Visionaries revival. Withered Hope says the GoBots stories are being "folded" into TFs, but the Almanac says all the Visionaries stories were already taking place on a normal planet that existed normally in the Animated universe. There is at least as valid a reason to add Abraxas the Sun Imp to this wiki as there is for Zod the Super Gobot.--Thylacine 2000 22:41, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

The cost kinds of boils down to...

This is a Transformers wiki. So far our purview has been limited to only official Transformers-branded merchandise and fiction, and we're hardly lacking for material to write up within that limitation. I see no reason to "dilute" our focus, or open up a can of worms of people with other pet fave universes connected to TF trying to argue for us writing up those franchises too.

Bringing in editors that are only interested in documenting GoBots (or other non-TF) material doesn't do us any favors, and having our existing editors working on it just takes time away from all of the Transformers-focused articles still left unmade/finished.

My thought: If people really, really want to write up GoBots stuff, just start a sister wiki somewhere. Best of both worlds, IMHO. That way it can really document all of the GoBots stuff (whereas if we forever have only a limited GoBots writeup here, that will either end up discouraging anyone who ever wants to start a more comprehensive wiki, or result in pointless duplication), and we can just do what we do with Star Wars/GI Joe and write up only what's relevant to TF here and provide links to the other wiki. --Jeysie 22:28, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

OK. I'm seeing two objections. Stop me if I'm unfairly characterizing them.

1: Time writing GoBots articles could be spent writing up Transformers articles.

2: Saying 'yes' to GoBots, which is admittedly a boundary case in terms of scope, means that someone may come along and argue about some other universe.

For point one, I think Thanos6 had a very good counter-argument. Most non-document Transformers stuff is pretty esoteric at this point. If you're not a paying member of the club, you won't have access to that sort of fiction. ARE there any other large swaths of fiction not covered? Some of our editors, myself included, have more access to GoBots material than Transformers material. I'm hardly alone in this, though I am the apparent champion. Rosicrucian, DrSpengler, BlackOut, and Khajidha have all expressed a willingness. There are some high-caliber editors here.

For point two, again, I just don't find it compelling. We shouldn't cover material because someone might someday start an argument about something else? Really? I can pretty much guarantee that if we don't do GoBots now we'll have another discussion about it within the next year when more GoBots stuff comes out. (That's not a reason to go forward with it, I'm just pointing out the futility of this argument.)

The visionaries counter-example is kind of a strawman anyway, Thy. The Almanac states that

1: There is a place called Prysmos

2: Some group lives there called the Darkling Lords

3: Speaking like the Angry Archer might be useful for dealing with them

You see how that's pretty different from a story set in their cartoon universe, where they use an existing technology to travel to our realm. As well as 7 or 8 toys. And another ten or so appearances throughout multiple continuities. AND another story featuring explicit GoBots characters. --Jimsorenson 10:12, 21 October 2009 (EDT)

GoBots as a Multiversal Entity

How is this different than the G.I. Joe cartoon being in the same continuity as the TF one? -Derik 22:04, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

I feel like I've answered this. It's different because it's thematically closer to Transformers (civil war between alien robots and all that) AND because we can be about 99% sure that all future GoBots stories will be Transformers stories, whereas we can also be certain that the vast majority of G.I. Joe stories will not be Transformers stories. Also, G.I. Joe is a MUCH larger universe than the GoBots universe. Documenting it would take a lot more work. Maybe if Hasbro stops making new Transformers stories it would be worth it for us to go back and fill out that portion of the Transformers universe, but we haven't come close to hitting that point yet.--Jimsorenson 22:13, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

the only one of real consequence was Withered Hope

Which was a direct sequel to the toy-only fiction of the Go-bot 6-pack bios. Also "Games of Deception."

Also, you're discussing "Go-Bots" like their universe is a multiversal singularity. It's not. With Bug Bites running around, it's probably safe to assume that Fracture actually is Crasher too. Who knows... maybe all the Cy-Kills are Cy-Kill? The Go-Bot diaspora does seem to have scattered them across all points of the multiverse.

(It's not like Go-bots was ever 1 universe. They had comics, right? And storybooks, and audio adventures, and a negative universe...) -Derik 22:16, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

But we already cover all those characters you named, precisely because they had fully-realized appearances in TF fiction. We weren't just assuming them into existence by weight of related characters who had come before.--Thylacine 2000 22:41, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

(de-indenting) The problem is that if you treat Go-bots as part of the TF Multiverse, it doesn't create the amount of work you're describing. We're not just documenting it's characters, or it's episodes... we're also documenting storybooks, audio adventures, coloring books...

...plus the need for their own disambiguation, backstory, history... if the Go-Bots cartoon is "really" part of the TF Multiverse, then that means its description of the negative universe should be valid and binding for Transformers.

But I don't think the Go-Bots cartoon is necessarily part of the TF Multiverse. Quite aside from the fact it's owned by someone else... I think it's more likely what we're seeing are "new" Go-Bots universes similar to what's been seen before, but distinct from them. (Similar to how every post-BW G1 story includes Sparks-- because they're new G1 universes that adhere to how the TF Universe works.) So if the Go-Bots negative universe episode says that negative universes are shadow-universes that are 1:1 reflections of positive ones (as in the Xenaverse) that doesn't have to apply for the TF version of the multiverse... because the cartoon is not "canon" in the same way a TF Coloring book is.

And God damn it, if we're gonna take our rules for how negative universes work from outside the TF canon, it's gonna be from the goddamn G.I. Joe cartoon, not the goddamn Go-Bots! What are you, a communist? -Derik 22:34, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

I don't think we should pretend that the characters that do appear in TF fiction are blank slates. We could fill in bio type information but then act like the TF story is there first and only fictional appearance. The same might be true of characters that haven't appeared in TF fiction. No matter what, all the GoBot characters are assumed to exist in the TFGoBot continuity (no matter what that continuity looks like), right? Maybe bio-only pages for those guys? - Starfield 22:53, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Ultra Magnus seems not to have existed at all in Marvel US continuity. Presuming that all Go-bots exist in any single reality is... presumptuous. -Derik 23:37, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Actually, for reason above (arrived at in the "Who owns what Vis-à-vis rights" section), I'm with Starfield. I think that this wiki should, at least for the moment, only cover the parts of GoBots that Hasbro owns. That means that, while you're ABSOLUTELY RIGHT about GoBots having its own universe of coloring books and negative universes and whatnot, we could ONLY cover the characters. The fiction sections would have to remain blank, until and unless they show up in licensed Transformers media. (Or, of course, the two multiverses converge more.) This gives us AND our corporate landlord the maximum possible benefit while limiting our scope of work to a mere, I dunno, 90 characters. More than 10% of which have already shown up here. --Jimsorenson 10:20, 21 October 2009 (EDT)

A potential solution

We were talking about this in WiiGii! (omg hivemind) and while I don't think anyone is opposed to a wiki for GB info, grandfathering it all into THIS wiki seems a bit beyond the stated scope. One suggestion was to do a separate GB wiki, hosted on THIS wiki's servers, as a side project - the GoBots Wiki, presented by TFWiki, if you will. When necessary, they would share information, link back reflexively, share userbase, etc. If the stated event comes to pass where Hasbro or someone says "Yeah, all that GoBot stuff happened somewhere in the TF multiverse" then fuck it, we roll the whole thing back in. Given how unlikely that seems to be as per the conversations above, a dedicated GB wiki run as an official side-project of TFWiki is probably the best outcome I can think of. Hooper_X 11:24, 21 October 2009 (EDT)

I don't know how much work it'd be to set up and run (less that the ours due to the limited scope, but certainly some work) but I do like the idea on the whole and would definately contribute to such a wiki should it be born. (ZacWilliam, who really needs to log back in one of these days)--76.28.72.27 11:31, 21 October 2009 (EDT)

Audio file problems - they don't seem to work

I don't think we ever resolved this when Derik brought it up a long time ago, but whatever script we use for audio files doesn't work, at least it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. On Wikia wikis, when you click on a "listen to this audio file", your browser should activate java, buffer the ogg file and play it. However, on TFWiki, the browser merely tries to download the file, not play it. If you choose to open the file via your browser's download dialogue, the file downloads into your temp files and plays it off the nearest compatible media player, which is a *remarkably* roundabout way of doing things. Is there any way we can fix this? (I'm using Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 6)--FFN 01:19, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

I'm assuming that Wikia must have some embedded audio file player installed or something, which is probably doable via an extension. I have to admit I don't see it as a high priority... having the browser call up a helper file is a normal way of handling such things, plus I like being able to download and save the file.

Not only that, but we barely have any audio files to worry about... I think the Scene Transition page is the only article I've come across that has an appreciable number of audio files on it. Although now that I think about it, I wonder if creating WAVs of characters' main quotes where possible might be an interesting idea, to give samples of what characters sound like. --Jeysie 03:09, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

Downloading - well, there's the minor issue that the majority of our users will be unable to play .ogg files anyway, for even if codecs are easily had, it's a fairly obscure format. Hell, I never even heard of it until 2005. --FFN 03:27, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

WinAmp plays OGGs just fine out-of-the-box, among a number of other media players out there, so I don't see an issue. --Jeysie 03:35, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

In case we want to install an extension to handle this: [2] --abates 04:50, 18 October 2009 (EDT)

Editing Go Boxes?

I've utterly failed at finding a guide to editing a Go Box address, so I figured I'd just note that the Go Box for "Tankor (ROTF)" instead links to a blank "Revenge of the Fallen Tankor" page for some reason. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by MCRG Again (talk • contribs).

Fixed. Someone put the destination page down as "Revenge of the Fallen Tankor" in Template:Goicons, thus causing the GoBox to send you to a non-existent page. ---Blackout- 02:51, 19 October 2009 (EDT)

When was the last Database backup?

Just curious. -Derik 12:10, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

That is exactly why we need that "Database last backed-up by: (insert-person-here) on: (insert-date-here)." thing someone suggested a long time ago. That way, we may avoid Bookworm Crash 2.0. ---Blackout- 12:15, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Of course, one of the major causes of The Bookworm Event was that corrupt or otherwise failed backups were being registered as successful. That backups are regularly checked is just as important as backups being made in the first place, and "(insert-person-here) on: (insert-date-here)" wouldn't prove that. - SanityOrMadness 12:31, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

At least we know if there is a backup to check at all. ---Blackout- 13:02, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

By us, manually? I dunno. We pay for automatic backups every week as part of our hosting. --ItsWalky 12:22, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

Ah, that last one is slightly more reassuring.

I mean-- they're the same automatic backups Bookworm was theoretically making, but IIRC the current host was picked (in part) for having a good reputation for such things. -Derik 14:32, 20 October 2009 (EDT)

McFly confirmed a while back that the auto backups were working, so hopefully they still are. Good news for when we eventually upgrade the software! --abates 15:57, 20 October 2009 (EDT)