MediaWiki talk:Community Portal/Archive21

[[{{#sub:MediaWiki_talk:Community_Portal/Archive21|0|-0}}|«]]	Community Portal / Archive21   e	[[{{#sub:MediaWiki_talk:Community_Portal/Archive21|0|-0}}|»]]
from~? to~? notes:

Firefox blues

Slurms, as I may have said above, I am having trouble with this page. The bottom fifth of the Community Portal talk page is unreadable to me for some reason, a big white blank covers the text :( Anybody know what's going on? I can't check this page on IE since it mysteriously doesn't load the entire thing.Note: I may be unable to read this and any comments made afterwards. --FFN 11:48, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

It's Wikia's fault.

No, seriously. I'm having the same problem in Firefox 2. (I've been using Safari to read community portal all night.) I just switched back to Monobook- and the problem has gone away.

Since Firefox demonstrably can render a page that large- it's not a technical limitation in Firefox. Ergo, it's unique to Monaco. Ergo- Wikia did it.

I have no idea what Wikia did- Firebug can't track down the cause- but Monaco is so poorly put together it could be almost anything. -Derik 12:01, 26 July 2008 (UTC)

Hi, i'm comming from the Central wikia forum. I have Firefox 3.0.1 and i can see all of this talk page with it.

The sole problem i've come across is showing in both browsers (Firefox and IE7). After the section name <a href="#Section_naming_conventions" title="">Section naming conventions</a>, all following section have a big gap to the left as if something wasn't closed properly in there.

Could this solve the problem for some people ? — TulipVorlax 16:57, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and this section is align right somehow. — TulipVorlax 16:59, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

For some reason the big blank covering the bottom of the page is gone now. Hopefully its fixed for good. --FFN 17:57, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

We applied a fix this morning, please let us know if you see any more blanks. Thanks -- sannse<staff /> (talk) 18:41, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for sucking less, it is appreciated! -Derik 21:55, 29 July 2008 (UTC)

Wholesale issue renaming

Looks like a bit of this has gone on tonight without much (any?) community discussion. What gives? --MistaTee 07:03, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Can a 'bot (not an Autobot) revert these changes? --MistaTee 18:11, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

It might help if you explain exactly what changes you're talking about. --KilMichaelMcC 21:22, 1 August 2008 (UTC)

Prime Directive (IDW) to Movie Prequel. The main article was changed back but a lot of other pages and links were not. --MistaTee 03:22, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I believe Interrobang took it upon himself to change everything without evidently discussing it with the rest of us. --FFN 06:32, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

So, we made the news.

link Does this mean the wiki is now Wikipedia worthy? --FortMax 02:37, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Hahaha. I hadn't thought of it that way. The writer of the piece emailed me the link this afternoon. What a thing! --ItsWalky 02:40, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

The point about the google searcg thing penalising sites with copied content worries me. So should we drastically change our content here before moving? Hey, we still have the right to do with the content as we see fit as it's still our Wikia wiki. --FFN 07:48, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I think the issue is which site is more prominent; who's getting linked to? I have no idea how to tip things in our favor, butI think it can be done. Chip 07:53, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

Wikia's TF Wiki will likely be more prominent in the short to medium term. I noticed that it took quite awhile for this place to become neck and neck with the Wikipedia for Transformers searches on google. --FFN 12:47, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

One way to tip things in our favor is the aggressive "advertising", as noted before. Alert the messageboards. Post about it in your blogs, MySpace pages, deviantArt accounts, whatever. Alert awesome sites that link to the wiki, like brandonbird.com, and ask them to change the links. I still think the Halfpixel crew would blog post about us if we let them know the story, as they're big on the creators having more say as to the use of their content and etc. The official parties will know about the move, trust me on this, and while they likely can't link to the wiki on their official sites... well, they'll still use the new one as they use the old one now, and who knows about personal blogs? --M Sipher 17:21, 2 August 2008 (UTC)

I had some thoughts on this subject when someone (possibly Sipher) brought it up on David's blog. There's a couple replies on there, so it's worth scrolling down.

Basically- this is what I've got. Several years ago- before I had formal training, i did a website for a guy. It's a terrible site- (tables, minimal CSS, click 8 times to do anything, query-string URL's, etc...) but over 3 years it rose to become the #1 or #2 google match when you search for terms related to it. (And I mean very BROAD terms- it's a printing and mailing equipment site, so it's not like there's a lack of industry peers also vying for the slot.) I KNOW the kidn of traffic this guys gets- and I can tell you that it's not the fact that it's the most clicked on choice that made him #1. The one thing I'm really proud of with his site is that I included a CMS-- a content management system. So while there are lots of /better/ flashier, nicer-looking better-laid-out sites competing for the slot he holds- they're updated on a quarterly or yearly (or often never,) basis-- because the people they belong to just hire a webmonkey every once in a while when they realize they absolutely need to add content. These sites are ZOMBIES, alternately dead with sudden lurches of new information. Whereas Steve... adds stuff to his site once a week. Reliably. For three years. Not a lot of stuff- but enough that Google's algorithm has concluded- "this site is ALIVE, and it being maintained," so not only foes it conslude that that new information is "better," it confers a better rating to all the OTHER pages on the logic that "if the site is being maintained, growing and changing... then these pages are probably not out of date, (even if they haven't changed) because that kind of routine upkeep is a strong indicator that outdated information would be removed."

People talk about Google Bombs and work-of-mouth networking and talking up your product... and that can help provide a booster to a site's short-term visibility... but the simple truth is that Google's Algorithm will reward industry. If we grow our site and Wikia doesn't, we will eventually end up #1. (And Google can tell the difference between actual content added and rearranging the deckchairs. Removing vast content from an article, like humor- doesn't look like an update to their word-crunchers.) And I strongly believe that when you compare week-to-week growth between our destination site and the one we're leaving behind... we're going to leave them int he dust every time.

Well, not every time. I'm sure their articles on the Starscream clones will be much longer than ours, and filled with stunning and relevant info about which Gundam's color scheme was the inspiration for Sycophant Starscream, and which Black Lagoon character he was obviously inspired by. (Or whatever anime they're all flocking to this week.)

Sipher, have we signed up for- say- Google Analytics for this (wikia) site? (I'll do the legwork if no one else wants to!) It's like-- 4 lines of javascript we add to the bottom of our common.js file, and within a week we'll have a real idea how much traffic this site it pulling down. (I just want to be sure we've eliminated surprises- I'd really hate to move to our new server and discover Wikia's been pulling 10 times the traffic we thought and it can't handle it. Don't expect it to happen- but I'd prefer to eliminate unknowns in advance.) -Derik 14:36, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

While I think we've mostly dumped on Hooper's (half-serious) suggestion of trashing the site on exit... can I suggest a a couple things we may want to take down on the way out?I think we should delete the Community Portal archive, the Category:User notice templates, and our policy (but not Help) pages. We've worked for two+ years to hammer out a group consensus on how things should be done, and more importantly why they should be done that way, dumping literally hundreds of hours into discussions (and often heated arguments) pinning down where our priorities lay (one of the main reasons for the move stems from our belief that the general user experience should be given major weight- just because we don't have to see ads that break our pages doesn't change the fact 95% of our readers do-- and that's unacceptable) and how that should guide our decisions. A lot of blood, sweat and tears that— completely aside from article content and the template functions... defined what we think this site should be for people.And we've gotten no end of flack for the answers we reached- dozens (or hundreds!) of shrill high-pitched voices not interested in contributing unless the site is done their way. We know that whoever moves in after us will be throwing out our rule book- so let's make it official and clear the deck for them. The new administration should inherit a site with no codified policies, and no record to refer back to of the debates we had while forming our decisions. Let all the high-pitched complainers who were always telling us they know how it should be done re-create in 2 years of policy and community standards decisions amongst themselves. We know they don't want to follow the way we did things, so why not make it easier? -Derik 15:05, 3 August 2008 (UTC)WAsn't me. But check out Seth's blog, he has a followup to the whoel Wikia thing, explaining their new ad deal with GamePro. [[1]] Just read and let the meaning of this sink in. --M Sipher 17:15, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm all about deleting all our useful discussions and info and what have you. Not slash-and-burn. Leave all the information and knowledge, that's fine. But the discussions about the whys and wherefores? That's our shit. THIS ONE IS MY WISH... AND I'M TAKING IT BACK. -hx 17:30, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

Another Change for the New Place

Another change we can make, and one which we really need... we need to properly map out all our "help" stuff, template lists, etc. Right now? It's a clusterfuck. I've been looking at Wookieepedia's handling of such help functions, and it's all very easy to skim through to find what you're looking for. Our help stuff needs to be mapped out, re-edited (the official info page has gotten way, way, way, WAY too goddamn huge), and redone. --M Sipher 17:38, 3 August 2008 (UTC)

God a link to a wookiepedia example? (I'm always ready to learn from a good model.) -Derik 00:13, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Probably this? Note the lower section of the editing page, there is Standard preloads. The user can select a template to preload its contents. --TX55^TALK 02:07, 4 August 2008 (UTC) Hell, just click on their Help link, which is mainly a list of helppage links... clcik on the Templates one and you soon find [[2]] , a complete listing of all the templates, organized by theme... --M Sipher 02:19, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Link template(s)

So I'm trying to import an idea from Bulbapedia, the Pokémon wiki. Link templates are used when trying to avoid disambiguation pages so that instead of writing "Psychic (move)" or "Psychic (type)", we can just do {{m|Psychic}} or {{t|Psychic}}, which is much easier.I noticed when I started editing here that there's a ridiculous amount of links like that, and I figured introducing a series of LTs could make linking to characters from various continuities much easier. For example, to link to various Optimus Primes, you would write {{g1|Oprimus Prime}}, {{rid|Optimus Prime}}, {{mo|Optimus Prime}}, and {{an|Optimus Prime}} to get Optimus Prime, Optimus Prime, Optimus Prime, and Optimus Prime. More info on LT basics can be found on this page on those rare occasions when Bulbapedia's server is working.When I brought this up on ItsWalky's talk page, a few users pointed out that with the ridiculous amount of disambiguation on this site, making several LTs would get kind of out of hand. So I figured that, as an alternative or possibly a supplement to various LTs, we could make one all-purpose template, possible at {{link}} or {{lt}}. The code for the template would look like this:

[[{{{1}}} ({{{2}}})|{{{3|{{{1}}}}}}]]

The first data field is the name of the robot, the second data field is the parenthetical phrase, and the third would be optional alternate text for the link. So in addition to Optimus Prime (G1), you could link to more obscure things like Blackout (Terrorcon) or Dinobots (Mini-Cons). As an example, typing in {{lt|Starscream|Animated}} would get you Starscream. An all-purpose LT like this would be slightly longer to type out than smaller individual LTs, but it would also be more versatile and not require you to memorize hundreds of one- or two-letter abbreviations. It's also possible that we could create or modify other templates to more easily link to things like movies or comics.So, what do you guys think? I wanted to make sure everyone here was cool with it before implementing it. --Martonimos 08:34, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

I'm failing to see the advantage, and I don't see you providing the markup. {{g1|Optimus Prime}} I get. But {{energon|Blackout}} doesn't work for "Blackout (Terrorcon)"-- there are 3 Blackouts in Energon. (Yes, that's incredibly stupid, but there it lies.) So what-- {{terrocon|Blackout}}? {{energon|Blackout (Terrorcon)}}? Please explain how either of these solutions provide any advantage over our current system? From where I stand they're worse— because while it's annoying to have to hunt downt he correct link for the Blackout you want- at least that link is the page name. You're instead suggesting we adopt a system where, if the link isn't immediately obvious we have to hunt through either the innards of the template (or more likely templates, plural,) looking for what it is, or a central index listing literally THOUSANDS of characters to find the proper link.

What about characters who aren't disambig'd? Mayor Edsel, for example. Would he be linkable to using {{animated|Mayor Edsel}}? Either he is, and you're expecting editors to go in and edit link templates to make additions every time a new page is added- or he isn't and you're suggesting we have two separate systems for "major," and "minor" characters. (Which can still conflict of course- but now the means for resolving those conflicts is obscured from the casual editor.)

Almost every character article on this wiki is disambig's. And they don't break down neatly by generation- every generation has more than 1 case of characters who /break/ this system.

I am voting against implementing character link templates unless you can explain how the proposed system that would address these concerns, or a show consensus opinion favoring their creation despite the massive pain and suffering they would unleash into the world.

(Not to say that I think link templates in generally are a bad idea— I think there are potentially some very useful applications concerning non-character pages and I thank you for raising the suggestion... but while I can see how link templates would be useful for many other franchises... rampant name-use has rendered Transformers so disambig'd that I think implementing them here would do more harm than good.)

And seriously- why in your mind is {{g1|Otpimus Prime}} supposed to be any easier than Optimus Prime (G1)? Especially when the former requires additional upkeep to make it work? Am I just missing something? -Derik 12:21, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I agree with pretty much everything Derik said. The sole advantage I can see is that we wouldn't have to type the character's name twice in a link. But the extra work of figuring out which link-template to use, or if there's a link-template at all, negates the benefit. As Derik said, if it were as simple as "g1" and "bw" and so forth, I could dig it, but when we've got crazy shit like this all over the place, throwing link-templates in too would only add another layer of complication. Thank you for the suggestion, but I'm afraid we're just too convoluted here for clean and elegant ideas. - Jackpot 15:31, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

We don't have to type the name twice anyway, thanks to link magic! You need only type Starscream, and it automatically shows up as "Starscream". --M Sipher 17:39, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Well, hell. - Jackpot 17:57, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I, too, see no advantage whatsoever, in terms of either presentation or amount of time required to write it. We're changing enough already--now is not the time for random experimentation. --Thylacine 2000 13:28, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

All right, consensus against.

Derik, the idea was that you wouldn't have to write out Optimus Prime, not just Optimus Prime (G1), which is much easier. But from what M Sipher said, that's already easy enough without the templates, so there's no need for them anyway. Thanks anyway, guys. --Martonimos 21:35, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

I still wanna use 'em-- just not for characters. I've got a couple ideas you gave me for where they can be useful-- I just have some other stuff I have to do first. -Derik 22:04, 7 August 2008 (UTC)

Main page

Hi, I'd like to revisit the main page. When we first added the main page tabs, some of you had problems with broken formatting. We aren't clear on why that is, because the same tags have worked on other wikis without that happening. So I've set up a duplicate main page on a test wiki with duplicate css/js. This page has all the same content as the real main page, the only change is the two column format introduced by the tags. Please can you let me know if you see any formatting errors here, with details of your browser etc. Many thanks. - sannse<staff /> (talk) 18:40, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Ohai! Awesome timing! We're having trouble sitting an article at Echo Across the Galaxy! Bell of Love!!-- Wikia's spamtrap keeps yelling at us, and refuses to yield even before Admins. (See: "Talk:Echo Across the Galaxy! Bell of Love".) Can you do something about it? -Derik 19:03, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure. Done. Things generally get added to that list when there is massive cross-wiki spam. But that one was rather generic. I wasn't sure if the title should be "Love!" or "Love!!", but either way you can move it now. -- sannse<staff /> (talk) 20:50, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Why thank your Sannse! It's always nice to see you continue your tradition of not sucking. (I guess it must be the exception that prooves the rule with Wikia, eh?)

At right is a screenshot of how the proposed format displays on screens that are 1024px wide. (About 30% of web users.) Now 'ahm just' a simple digital sharecropper, 'ah don't pretend to know nuthin' 'bout these "internet tubes" or "ruby monorails" y'all be so hot about... but that there page layout is ugly. Powerful ugly. And it seems to me y'all wouldn't want to be rendering the main page y'alls "advertizers" be hot for busted-lookin' for 1 in 3 users! (T'say nothing of the some-tiny percent of users that still'b havin' 800 pixel wide monitors! Why- you can't even collapse this design past 1008 pixels a'tal!)

By th' by... d'yuh happen to know if the class "userengagement" is used by anything but the harassing messages to "Join!! join now, log in you poor miserable bastards and be freed of our unholy ads!" at the' top of the articles? ('ahm paraphrasin' of course.) Is that class used with any other essential user notices, or is it 'reserved' for marking y'alls' signup-spam? -Derik 22:24, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the image plus text on that line are too wide. How about the image over the text, with the "transformers animated" logo shrunk to an icon and alongside the text? See the page now. And if anyone wants to make adjustments there themselves, please do.

And yes, as far as I know, that class is only used for the user engagement banners. -- sannse<staff /> (talk) 10:01, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Huh. That looks pretty alright actually. I'm interested to see what others say- I am not a plurality of one after all! -Derik 17:02, 14 August 2008 (UTC) (sig added by sannse, discussion split for clarity)

Adspace0 qestion

Hey Sannse, I've got a question about adspace0. Like many users I am running Adblock Plus, and with enabled the page renders as shown at right. (and a link since wikia's thumbnailer is having problems.) Not only do I get the unsightly userengagement-harassment messages, but I get this big unsightly chunk of whitespace for an ad I'm not seeing because adspace0 has an explicit height set. (It does this on the main page too, I just thought this was a better example.)

The adscript didn't USED to do this, and it really baffles me why it's doing it now-- I mean the EMBED and OBJECT tags for the ad both have heights set! Surely giving a height to the enclosing dig is redundant, right? (And if those embed and objects don't display, the space in question collapses as if it didn't exist.) One of the things you guys stressed when rolling out Monaco 2.0 was how 'transparent' the ads were and "if users were so upset they were welcome to hide them with CSS or a blocker program." (Paraphrasing.)

What I eventually figured out is that the ads aren't displaying in adpsace0-- that div is in the 'shoulders' of the page and its entire purpose is to shove content aroudn to create a chunk of whitespace- and for some reason you've stuck the actual code for the ads aroudn the 'kneecaps' and then absolutely positioned it to fit in that anticipated space. I mean that's... anti-contextual as hell. It's outright nonsensical- and the fallout of that nonsense harms the user experience even for the people who aren't seeing the ads.

I mean- your adscript used to be (reasonably) well-coded. Why is it coded badly now? What prompted this change? ...can it be made to not do this? I mean- well-coded HTML is supposed to fail gracefully if an element fails to load. This breaks from that paradigm and (surprise!) that means it... breaks messily. -Derik 17:02, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

I've split this off to allow others to continue the above conversation on the main page draft.I think it best if we don't try to paraphrase each other Derik. That's caused misunderstanding in the past.The ad space is pre-loaded to prevent the "jump" as the ads load. This can't be done on article pages (yet) because the code checks for conflicts before adding the advert... so the content needs to be loaded before the code knows what shape to reserve. But on the main page, the ad area is predefined, so the area can be reserved for it. -- sannse<staff /> (talk) 19:23, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

So- main page ads are always the same height, so that's being built into the CSS permanently, but actual pages could conceivably have banners of different heights, so the javascript is making the change? that seems reasonable.

It's not really an answer to my original question about why the page scripts were using a back-assward non-contextual layout with the code for the ads stuck at the bottom of the page and then absolutely positioned over the spacing div instead of WITHIN the spacing div. But hey- I guess if Wikia wants to use rube goldberg code that hacks things into place, that's their business. As long as it works in Internet Explorer, right? (By the way, some users are reporting the site is completely broken in Opera in next section down, but you might want to give it a read.) Edit: On you saw alrwady...

You're probably right about the paraphrasing BTW.

Does anyone else have a reaction to Sannse's proposed mainpage redesign? -Derik 19:43, 14 August 2008 (UTC)