MediaWiki talk:Community Portal

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

The move away from Wikia:

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

Our policy on having ads in the wiki:

• Transformers Wiki:Ads

The Bookworm database-crash:

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

So what now?

I brought this general line of questioning up over at the Allspark too, but that was really only because TFWiki.net was down at the time. Basically, in the wake of the Bookworm disaster, I'd like to know three things:

1. How did this happen? All I know is that Bookworm updated the MediaWiki software, which caused... something... to happen to our data. The wiki was, what? Deleted? Corrupted? I don't know. But apparently this required a reversion to a backup, and the only available one was from June 2008. Why did that one even exist? Why not September? And, honestly, the "routine backups" made after September had all failed, with no one ever noticing? How did that happen?
2. Has the backup process been fixed? This is pretty much the most important question of the moment. Every bit of our herculean recovery effort could vanish again if the June backup is still the only one on the server.
3. Where are we going from here? Walky has said that he's looking for a new host, and he has asked for advice. I haven't seen much advice appear (maybe people have been communicating with him in private?), but if anyone has any suggestions, please air them. I wouldn't even know where to start, so I'm of little help.

- Jackpot 18:03, 23 March 2009 (EDT)

Bookworm has explained to me what he thinks happened to the backups, but I couldn't begin to regurgitate that information. This stuff is not English for me. (Some would say English is not English for me.) It involves complicated server moves and DNS stuff, I think, and the bottom line is none of the backups were confirmed to have resulted in working backups; they were merely scheduled to be made, automatic-like, and resulted in, from what I understand, data being thrown into the ether, never sticking to anything. WHOOPS --ItsWalky 01:23, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

All right, so does he have it working NOW? - Jackpot 02:02, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

Scout, according to a post on the Allspark, has been doing database downloads every afternoon. I don't know about Bookworm. If I asked him, he'd probably say yes, but he would have said yes before, too! --ItsWalky 09:46, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

Is there any way we can be sure we're getting ANY service out of Bookworm?--Apcog 10:00, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

I really have no concept of what to look for in a host. While I've managed to find decent hosting for my own site in the past, it's a static, relatively low-traffic site, nothing like here. A quick search reveals that there are plenty of hosts offering unlimited space and bandwidth for about $5/month, which sure seems like something we could afford. But I have no intuitive sense of how to identify a quality host for our kind of needs. Like, are these $5 guys the first level of low-grade vendors who have Google-statted their way up the search results, and you have to dig deeper to find the more heavy-duty kind of host we'd need? Are the recommended hosts on that page just there 'cause they paid for it? Or is $5 just the going rate for quality hosting these days? How do we distinguish a reseller from an actual host? How much software and setup support do we need?

I mean, I guess I'd expect a serious host not to have cheap tarts on their front page, but anybody can make a serious, grey-toned, business-like web page... even guys who provide crappy service. -- Repowers 18:36, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

They may say they offer unlimited space or bandwidth, but I'm betting that there's a clause in the T&C which limits it to "for some meanings of unlimited". The big Doctor Who fiction archive site I help run got bumped from the cheaper account it was on to a more expensive one because it was using too many "resources" (the software it runs on is not the most efficient), though it was using less than the maximum bandwidth/disk space. --abates 19:26, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

That's exactly the kind of thing I'm wary of with these cheap places. The front-line search result hosts really don't seem like they're marketing to processor-intensive clients like ourselves. -- Repowers 20:06, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

What is our price limit, anyway? I mean, the account which the aforemented fanfiction site is on is extremely reliable, you get access to everything up to and including rebooting the server if you want. However drawback is that it costs $40 a month. Now it could be we could share costs by having several sites hosted on the same server (I'd have to check with the web host about that), but I don't know what our price range is. --abates 21:34, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

I would be very interested in hearing our budgetary constraints as well. The last time this was asked, Walky said that Bookworm was handling it and that the dude would let him know if what we were doing was costing more than the Project Wonderful ads were pulling in. At the time that was cool as school but in retrospect it seems... really skeevy. It also possibly says that Bookworm already has our ad revenue, and can effectively hold us hostage. I know that sounds paranoid, but I don't know what to think right now and would love some reassurance at the least.--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:24, 25 March 2009 (EDT)

Bookworm absolutely cannot hold our ad revenue hostage. WE have our ad revenue. It is gathering in our Project Wonderful account, where it will remain until we can point it to a paypal account at some point in the future. Bookworm may have fucked over the wiki this past week, but he's not a jerky guy. He just loves webcomics, and basically hosts BLC at low-cost because it allows his favorite things to continue. Hosting the TF Wiki was an extension of that, and he did it because I asked him. Let's not demonify the guy any more than we have to. He's not going to screw us over, and I really doubt he has any bad intentions in mind. --ItsWalky 00:34, 25 March 2009 (EDT)

Consider me reassured, then. Likely me just taking the earlier statement too far. Understandably, the concept of how the wiki is financed and how much it is costing us has been pretty black box up to now.--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:36, 25 March 2009 (EDT)

My input:

I used ePerfect as my first webhost. I found them to be reliable and easy to administer, but we would have to negotiate our own package with them, as their standard plans are obviously way too small. (I do know a fellow who did such a negotiation for his website, so I know it was possible at least in the past, however I am not privy to what his costs ended up being.) I also have no idea how their tech support is, as I never had to talk with them for any reason.

My current webhost is Dreamhost. For $10/month you get gobs of space, bandwidth, and options (and full control over your space), and they also have private virtual server options. They also will host one domain name for free if you have webspace with them. I find their tech support people have been quick on the response the few times I've needed to talk to them.

However, they have had some hardware goofs in the past, and I've never had personal experience with how they'd handle a no doubt high-bandwidth, high-CPU-usage site like this one. They are, however, very quick and open with any and all issues they have: Dreamhost Status Blog

So, there you have it, the only two webhosts I'm personally familiar with, and I admit I can't 100% recommend either, but they might be worth looking into. (And I shamelessly request that if you do end up with Dreamhost, you use my referrer code while signing up. :3 ) --Jeysie 18:59, 24 March 2009 (EDT)

One of #wiigii!'s resident tech dudes recommends Slicehost. He immediately followed this up with a string of caveats -- it won't be perfect, we'd need someone to install Wikimedia, restoring from a backup would basically mean rolling back one day, etc etc -- but it sounds far better equipped to handle our needs than Bookworm, and it looks like exactly the kind of heavy-duty host which, as I said up above, I don't know how to search for. Some of it, I mean... no host is perfect, and we have to accept some compromise to keep things within our budget -- but reliable uptime and actual working backups would be a fantastic step up from our current situation. -- Repowers 00:17, 25 March 2009 (EDT)

I am that tech dude. Here's the deal, from what has been gathered and occasionally specified. The platform on which this wiki runs seems to need a half-gig of RAM, and under 10 gigs of diskspace, but it does apparently need dual CPUs at a decent clock speed. Fundamentally, it could be hosted on a mid-range desktop based on those specs, but the hardware, and even the bandwidth, is cheap. You either need a sysadmin to maintain everything, which is not a full-time job until something breaks, or you need a managed hosting option that knows how to run MediaWiki properly. The former gives you complete control over everything, though you may not get cPanel support and the like unless you build it yourself. The latter is what you had when Wikia didn't suck, which I'm sure had a lot less headaches in terms of the guts of the system, although it was obviously NOT a good solution based on how they presented your content. Personally, I think you're more likely to find a pool of competent techies within the fandom to handle the nuts and bolts on a volunteer basis, though you would be handing over ALL the keys to the castle to that person. -- McFly 22:23, 26 March 2009 (EDT)

I've dealt with this crap so far up until now. I have no qualms with continuing to do so. --Suki Brits 10:53, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

I thought I'd weigh in with HostForWeb, who I've hosted my personal site with since January '04. Their tech support is pretty good, and even moved my site to a different server for me when the one it was on started having persistent problems running out of disk space. The only thing I can flaw them on is that they don't announce downtime in advance, so a few times I've found the site down, emailed them, and they've told me that the server was being rebooted or something.

The larger site which I help run which is hosted with them is A Teaspoon and an Open Mind. It's been hosted there since September '06. Last month, it got an average 3,755 pageviews per day, and from user reports, it has very little in the way of downtime, but, as I mention, it's running on their $40-a-month VPS plan (you get a two-month discount if you pay for a year at a time). We started on one of the shared plans, but the site was using too many resources (The software we're using is not particularly efficient...) and we ended up being bumped to the VPS option. --abates 07:04, 25 March 2009 (EDT)

Craptacular server performance

Change we can believe in.

I don't know what the hell is going on, but shortly after the crash, I saw a message that we were moving servers to allegedly better handle our traffic volume. However, my experience with this site since is that it's actually performing worse, far worse than pre-crash. At least back then, I could predict when the server would go down (apparently for this mysterious backing up our host apparently did that didn't work anyway) at around 5-7PM my time. But now, the server stops working (sometimes for quite a while) whenever it jolly well wants to. My connection to every other site is perfectly fine, so it's clearly not a problem on my end. What is going on?

I dare say we may have to consider the (fictional) Adequate Host. Can't be worse ;) --FFN 07:47, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

We haven't changed servers yet — we're still on the original one. --abates 08:19, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

I didn't say we moved hosts. I meant this message on the 19th of March:

"Due to high loads, the TFWiki is in the process of being moved to another server. Please be patient. Bookworm Computing"

What, so we didn't move to another server? --FFN 12:42, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

I didn't say anything about hosts either. :) You can see the story of what happened on Leaving2. An attempt was apparently made to switch the site to a new server but... failed. --abates 16:32, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Ahh, I see. I assumed we HAD moved. Sorry mate. --FFN 17:12, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Image aspect ratios

I notice a lot of Animated screencaps, like Image:SariLayingDown1.jpg, are out-of-aspect ratio, which is kinda annoying - neither NTSC (480i, typically 720x480, US/Japan) nor PAL (576i, typically 720x576, UK/Europe/Australia) use square pixels, while computers do. A screencap from a 4:3 NTSC source should really be resized to 640px wide for uploading here, while a screencap from a 4:3 PAL source should be resized to 768px wide. - SanityOrMadness 21:39, 26 March 2009 (EDT)

Since screen caps usually have to be trimmed of black borders, I'm not going to bugger about trying to get the aspect ratio correct. I just upload whatever my DVD software gives me. --FFN 03:05, 29 March 2009 (EDT)

News from Wookieepedia

A while back, one of the users here suggested a partnership between Wookieepedia and this wiki. In case you're wondering what happened with that, the ongoing nomination process is here. Silly Dan 22:44, 26 March 2009 (EDT)

Awesome! Now, settle this argument - could Death Star transformed as Darth Vader beat Unicron? --FFN 07:13, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Cool. I think I made a vague overture there at one point specifically about the coverage of Attacktix and that weird Star Wars vs. TF packaging - I understand there have been some direct and less-direct TF references in SW (which I imagine will only continue to crop up, given that the current and incoming generations of SW official content creators are likely to be of the age where they're at least casually aware of TF, if not fans in their own right), so this is probably a pretty reasonable networking opportunity. We can explain to you guys why the Optimus Prime that fought Darth Vader doesn't look like the one you had as a kid, and you can explain to us how the entire thing was totally non-canonical anyway. Heh heh. Hooper_X 07:54, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Purging redirects

I've noticed that the recovery process has been used as a good excuse for deleting useless redirects. I'm totally in support of this, and I'd like to figure out what counts as "useless." I used to think the more redirects, the better, since that would increase the chances of good results from people's misspelled or ill-informed searches. But now that we have that auto-drop-down suggestion thing, I've pulled a complete 180. Every redirect just clutters that menu up. To my mind, there are only five justifications for any redirect:

1. It's the base version of an otherwise parenthetically-disambiguated set (Optimus Prime)
2. It's an alternate official term (Rodimus Prime)
3. It's a fan-term that is equally or more prevalent than the official term (Big Floating Head)
4. It's an alternate parenthetical that had received notable support in discussion (I think Sideways (Armada) was heading in that direction before the crash)
5. It's a valid alternate spelling/parsing, especially if the auto-drop-down wouldn't naturally correct the user (STARS)

I can't think of any other valid reason for a redirect existing. I bring this up because I've noticed in repairing the S.T.A.R.S. articles that there are both vestigial redirects from past improper capitalization (Have the Decepticons Defeated Us Once and For All?) and newly-created redirects compensating for a grammatical mistake on Hasbro's part (Rodimus Prime remembers the Transformers' greatest battle on Earth.). I don't think either of those have sufficient reason to exist. What say you?
- Jackpot 12:38, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

The less redirects, the better, I think. They just clutter up the search suggestion box, thereby getting in the way rather than helping. Talk page redirects should be killed on sight.

But in this regard, we have Optimus (G1) redirecting to Optimus Prime (G1). Same for other Optimuses and Nemesises and the like. I'm in favour of getting rid of these as well (one such shortened version could stay to redirect to the dismabguation page, but that's it), but I'm not entirely sure. Geewunling 12:46, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Actually, looking at the auto-drop-down menu results for "Optimus (", it looks like every single series has its own version of that. That strikes me as silly; Optimus is all we need. But it depends on your approach: I'm taking a guilty-until-proven-innocent view, where redirects are assumed to be deletable unless they can be defended on the grounds stated above. I checked out how Wikipedia does it, and they seem to favor the opposite view, based on the logic that a deleted redirect can cause unforeseen breakages (like if other websites link to the now-defunct redirect). I personally find their arguments unconvincing, but I don't know how other people feel. - Jackpot 14:03, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Not to mention it is confusing, like in the case of Nemesis (G1)/Nemesis Prime (G1) - most "Nemesis (" are redirects to their respective Nemesis Prime, but Nemesis (G1) leads to the ship, breaking any sense of consistency. As far as common shortened versions of names go, I think all we need is one that redirects to the disambiguation page. Geewunling 14:58, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Absolutely agreed. - Jackpot 19:00, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

I believe we need to give a little leeway to those who are even less than a casual fan. Having extra redirects for characters vaguely remembered (Optimus, Soundwave). Some people may just find the search box, type, and hit enter without even taking into account the drop down menu. One thing I think should remain to a point as well are acronyms minus the periods, i.e. GI Joe or STARS. A quick type, enter, and it redirects. I say this especially with GI Joe in mind since we may be getting traffic with the new movie and the JoePedia seems deader than the wikia TF.

I agree with Jackpot when it comes to redirects being linked to. I highly doubt that will be a problem. In-wiki we have a great team to fix all links before the page is deleted. In the case of out-wiki links, those who place the most around the net are very unlikely to link to a redirect. Those that do I think are too much of a minority to tip the balance against cleanliness of page numbers. Savvy? :::--Bluestreak7 16:53, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Good point with the acronyms. I've added it to the list up above. I'm not sure what you mean about the "extra redirects for characters vaguely remembered", though. In the Optimus example, what less-than-casual fan is going to type "Optimus (G1)"? They're just going to type "Optimus", which will go to the disambig. All those "Optimus (__)" articles still seem completely useless to me. - Jackpot 19:00, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

I'd argue that gramatically correct forms of titles should remain as redirects. I don't want to expect a user to remember that one STARS flyer skimped on an apostrophe or that "Inferno Imprisoned" is actually spelled "Inferno Improsoned". Everything else I agree with you. —Interrobang 19:16, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

Though both of those would be wrong because it's actually Improsoned Inferno. I'm not being needlessly nitpicky: It demonstrates the point that I always make a habit of double-checking my links if there's the slightest question about them (especially given how many disambig-pages we have these days). Plus does this mean we should have Scorponok (episode) and Transformers (Italy) pages?

That having been said, I'm not particularly die-hard about this question. The "improsoned" example doesn't bother me that much because it's such a short title and therefore people would likely try to link it from memory. "Rodimus Prime remembers the Transformers greatest battle on Earth.", on the other hand, is so ridiculously long that I wouldn't expect anybody to try to use without looking it up first. It certainly took me a while to get comfortable with it, and I'm the S.T.A.R.S. expert here. Plus having the two(!) apostrophe'd redirects adds a level of absurdity to the drop-down, since you can't even see the difference in the limited space.

Incidentally, right before we left Wikia, a feature was implemented that made the drop-down appear every time you typed a double-bracket while editing. I hadn't decided if that was awesome or annoying before it went away, but if it ever comes back, the argument for "correction" redirects will become even weaker, I think.

- Jackpot 20:13, 27 March 2009 (EDT)

While I agree about keeping useful redirects like the aforementioned STARS and Imprisoned Inferno, I do want to point out that our visitors are not either minimally knowledged on Transformers or complete retards. Someone with barely any knowledge on Transformers should still be able to find the correct article, if not through the search suggestion boxes, then through disambiguation banners or related pages (like "Energon (cartoon)" for Improsoned Inferno). And I doubt anyone would be annoyed about a tiny bit of searching. Geewunling 04:00, 28 March 2009 (EDT)

Page load issues

For further information, see: Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Leaving2

Wikia credits in redirects

I just discovered this... it looks liek all of our redirects have wikia credits in the code. They don't show up normally, but hit the edit button, and there they all are. --M Sipher 01:33, 30 March 2009 (EDT)

I noticed this as well, and pointed it out over on the Damage Control Central section.... What I'm curious about is, is there any way for a bot to seek and destroy these? Because there's no way to see them unless you hit the edit button... --Detour 01:42, 30 March 2009 (EDT)

I'm wondering if, when we move servers, we can run the same script we used when moving here in order to purge all Wikia links. --abates 01:47, 30 March 2009 (EDT)

I think we're gonna run a SQL database import when we move servers- so probably not.

I (finally) have a complete list of all wiki pages (as of about a week ago) including redirects. I'll rig my de-wikia-er script over the redirects tonight as soon as Big Sweep 2.0 is done-- at least on the 4000-odd redirects in the name namespace. (2.0 does about 1/3 of what I'd hoped it would... the regex's were just breaking my fucking balls, so I resigned myself to taking baby steps. Right now it's fixing one sort of in-page template and fixing all the escaped HTML-- so stuff will at least start looking more right, even if it's not properly template'd.) -Derik 01:21, 5 April 2009 (EDT)

Icons on external links

Derik is experimenting with sticking icons on the external links for common external link sites (both for branding, and because it lets you visually scan the links without reading them-- "I want the profile-- NTFA!") These icons require CSS3, and I THINK they work on all modern browsers... but I really dont' care because they fail silently (creating no problems) if they don't. These icons should only show up in the External Link section-- I'm worried they might screw up layouts elsewhere.

If you hate it, think it could be improved, or just want a site added- let me know. The community can feel free to vote to toss it out if it's annoying... I just thought it was worth trying. -Derik 01:12, 5 April 2009 (EDT)

Epnav working?

I remember someone complaining that our episode navigation was broken when we first did crash recovery. Is that still the case?

(Let's pretend that this inquiry is NOT related to me going through goggle analytics and realizing, to my horror, what % of page traffic passes through those previous/next links.) -Derik 04:06, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

I have no idea about the previous possible issues, but I'll point out here that some articles with epnavs converted so they look right, but when you edit them you'll see the epnav sectiosn were just converted to HTML equivalents of our epnav templates. I don't know if this is a problem, but I've placed a bookworm 2 on pages where I have found them regardless. --FFN 07:40, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Interrobang fixed any issues with that a couple of days ago, I think. --abates 08:14, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Project:

For whatever reason, links to Project: Transtector (see Japanese Self Defense Core and Minerva) are automagically translated into links to "Transformers Wiki:Transtector". I'm thinking that's probably not the intended result. --abates 08:44, 6 April 2009 (EDT)

Seems to be a kludge to redirect links to wikiprojects.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:51, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

Blue boxes

Not sure where else to ask this question: Is there a reason the blue boxes (stub, coming soon, etc) don't have right hand borders? Or is this just something wonky with my computer? This has bothered me for some time, just thought it would be a good time to fix this (if it isn't just me) while all the other corrections are being made post-disaster.Khajidha 13:44, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

Better suited for the community portal. The main page discussion is specifically for the main page itself. I've moved your question over.--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:50, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

Are you using IE 7? I lose the right-hand side of the stub box in that too. --abates 16:04, 7 April 2009 (EDT)

Orphaned pages

Now that things are starting to get in order, I've started my work on the orphaned page list again. I've noticed something odd. It seems there are a bunch of pages with special characters on the orphaned pages listing that are obviously not orphaned. It mostly seems to be Japanese voice actors and such. If you go to the pages and click the "What links here" button, there are pages linking to it.

At first I thought maybe it was an old list, but since then I have integrated in other orphaned pages and the list does continue update. The question is can we even do anything about this due to the automation? I really would like to get that list down at least to one page. Orphaned pages annoy me.--Bluestreak7 17:12, 7 April 2009 (EDT)