MediaWiki talk:Community Portal/Archive25

[[{{#sub:MediaWiki_talk:Community_Portal/Archive25|0|-0}}|«]]	Community Portal / Archive25   e	[[{{#sub:MediaWiki_talk:Community_Portal/Archive25|0|-0}}|»]]
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A worthy cause if I've ever seen one

Not explicitly Wiki-related, but I thought it'd be a good idea to bring this little campaign to the community's attention. Spread the word! -- Cyberlink420 17:43, 6 October 2008 (EDT)

Firefox Search Plugin

Given that there's several established MediaWiki search plugins for many prominent wikis, how hard would it be for us to have one, and have it properly registered so that Firefox users browsing the site just get the option in their drop-down to add it in?--Rosicrucian^Talk 22:33, 6 October 2008 (EDT)

...nobody's invented an all-in-one Search plugin for FF net, you have to install them all separately? ...o.O

FWIW, any Opera users out there can add:

http://www.tfwiki.net/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s&go=Go

to their Search panel. I've had it there even back on Wikia; just needed to swap to TFWiki.net when the time came.

(Then again, I suppose any Opera users out there have figured this out already...) --Jeysie 07:11, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

I found these instructions after doing a search out of curiosity. --Jeysie 07:19, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

Actually, I feel silly now. I just noticed that I already had the option to "Add Transformers Wiki (English)"--Rosicrucian^Talk 10:00, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

• pats sympathetically* Still, considering how simple those instructions seemed to be, maybe creating a search plugin still isn't a bad idea. And/or an "add TF Wiki search to your browser" instruction blurb. --Jeysie 19:17, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

Search box tweaks

Not sure if this is related to the above, but is there any way of filtering redirect pages from the suggested results in the search box? It's just that if you type say, "Professor" into the search, the list of suggestions underneath gets clogged up with variations on Professor Gō, pushing genuine results such as Professor Purnel off the bottom of the list. I appreciate that it's a problem with this particular example containing a non-standard roman character, but having Professor Go, [[Professor Goh]] and Professor Gou all appearing as "valid" suggestions seems misleading. --Emvee 07:58, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

You'd have to change it on the PHP side. I was looking through the code the other day, and it made my eyes cross.  :(

From a coding standpoint though-- yeah. You'd tell it not to return matches that were redirects. (I've sorta been poking at my own implementation of the searchbox... I liked Wikia's functionality.) -Derik 08:04, 7 October 2008 (EDT)

Making finding images for articles easier.

Currently we have , which is nice but a bit unwieldy and I suspect not many people check it. However, Template:Picsneeded does have an optional field that allows you to specify which pics are needed, to help speed up the process. Still, that assumes you're actually looking directly at the page.So what I was thinking is would it be possible to have a page on this wiki, possibly in the "Special" namespace, that is a list populated by the picsneeded template including the optional field? Such that someone might see:

• Gorlam Prime - Spotlight: Nightbeat pics of its transitional state.
• Gort - Toy
• Gōryū - Toy; fictional appearances...and then they'd say "Oh, I have those!" and upload them.Thoughts?--Rosicrucian^Talk 13:43, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Potentially Useful Extensions

So lately I've had occasion to install a Mediawiki on my own server, and I've been poring over the Extensions to see what might be cool/useful. In the process, I've also found a few extensions so far that this wiki might find helpful.

• LinkedImage - Creates proper linked images as opposed to the imagemap hack. Dunno if we actually use linked images outside of the Main Page, but I figured I'd mention it.
• ForcePreview - Does just what it says; forces users that don't have the "forcepreviewexempt" right to have to preview before saving. No guarantee it'll make anyone *read* the preview before saving, but it might help with the "Preview Bastard" problems.
• MultiBoilerplate - This is the extension that really made me go, "Hell, yes!", however. It essentially lets you define a bunch of "layouts" of code in the Template namespace, then sticks them in a menu that shows up above the edit box while creating new pages so you can prefill them with "skeleton layout" code.

You could, for instance, create a Template:Comicpage that had the wikicode for the Comicstory template call code, the standard section headers, and the Featuredcharacters template call code, and then whenever you were creating a new comic page you could load that layout code into the edit box with a click and start filling the content in. It'd be awesome for things like image pages, too, with all the different copyrights... any type of article that has (or should have) a standard structure, really.

--Jeysie 19:20, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

Just curious, but have you investigated any of the anti-spam extensions? Banning by IP address is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole, because there's an endless number of open proxies and compromised PCs out there.

MultiBoilerplate looks really cool. I think it's a great idea! --abates 06:34, 12 October 2008 (EDT)

Monacobook CSS patch

I'm requesting an admin/sysop port the code found at MediaWiki_talk:Monacobook.css over to MediaWiki:Monacobook.css. It has two Monacobook-specific CSS patches designed to prevent an image-overlap problem that can render text nonselectable with Firefox 3's new zoom mode. I have tested this code on IE, Opera and Safari (PC,) and it has null effect on other browsers. -Derik 15:04, 12 October 2008 (EDT)

Transformers Primer

I'm proposeing the creation of a transformers Primer. A short-ish article (no more than 3 pages) that's a complete overview of what Transformers "is" and its history.Skipping around the wiki at random the one thing that strikes me is how unfriendly it is to relative newcomers. We're very good at identifying a character as "from the Cybertron cartoon portion of the Unicron Trilogy continuity family," but that's essentially gibberish to someone who's only seen 2-3 years of the current cartoon... the two things they might recognize (cybertron, the name of a planet, and Unicron the name of an evil god,) don't mean what you'd expect in that context.A primer, giving someone a general idea of the parameters- the length width and breadth of TF, and its major divisions... aimed at the non-editor, would be helpful, I think. Anyone else have thoughts on the matter? -Derik 22:29, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

That would be a challenging article to write. I too would like to make a suggestion. The MST3K web site www.mst3kinfo.com has a "calendar" of sorts as a kind of "on this date in history" and describes births, deaths, events related to the terrible movies they make fun of. Would the addition of a "On this date..." type of feature either on the homepage or somewhere be worthwhile? Such as, "On Sept. 27, 1985, the G1 episode Traitor aired." or similar.--SuzyP 22:40, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

I've been intermittently linking dates and years to pages... but the consensus seems to have been "Not enough happened/aired/was released to justify those 366 articles." (Which is pretty silly.)

This day in history seems pretty separate from a Primer though... what connection do you see? -Derik 22:47, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

There isn't really a connection. I should have started a different section on this. My bad. What I was originally envisioning wasn't necessarily 366 articles, but maybe some kind of widget that popped the trivia up each day on the home page. I have no clue how to do such a thing, but I think it would be a neat feature. And by suggesting it I'd be willing to help compile the trivia. I was thinking airdates, publication dates, voice actor birthdays, etc.--SuzyP 22:55, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

It's relatively easy, actually. You create 366 pages, and they're transcluded onto the home page depending on the day. -Derik 23:06, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

Nifty. I'd be willing to help put it together, but only if the community was behind it. Sounds like the idea was floated before and it wasn't popular.--SuzyP 23:14, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

Hmm. If they're all going to be just short messages, is there no way to condense it into one template, kind of like what was done with the fake disambig on the Main Page? --Jeysie 23:18, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

I was thinking it could be something simple like that. I just did a quick search here for "September" and found lots of entries with notable dates.--SuzyP 23:23, 30 September 2008 (EDT)

It really ought to be 366 pages though. Hiding the guts of the pages in a template discourages people from adding them. You use a template to transclude the appropriate page on the appropriate day is all. -Derik 04:59, 1 October 2008 (EDT)

I dunno. Aside from being kind of bleh at the thought of 366 itty-bitty pages, I'd find scanning one page for the right date and adding the info to that section (since you'd pre-make the template with 366 lines, they wouldn't need to add code or anything) quicker and easier than having to sift through 366 pages to find the right one to edit, but maybe that's just the way I tend to think. --Jeysie 07:03, 1 October 2008 (EDT)

To whoever did it, thanks. I like it.--SuzyP 19:51, 1 October 2008 (EDT)

Back to the original discussion... I think I'll take a whack at it sometime. I end up doing a lot of "briefly summarizing for the uninitiated" in the guidebooks I write, so this shouldn't be too hard. Just give me a couple days... --M Sipher 18:17, 1 October 2008 (EDT)

I'd like to see a "So you're writing about transformers..." sort of primer. The sort of thing someone doing an article about the new movie coudl read to come out with a real picture of what TF is instead of relying on 25 year old memories of what the cartoon was like. I offer the following things I think distinguish TF;

• TF never 'went away.' It remained on shelves, with product and promotions tied to the comic through the original line's cancellation, and the G2 line followed right on the heels of Action Masters. BW came less than a year after G2 ended, etc. TF has never 'stopped' fore more than 12 months, and those were strategic stops before relaunching.
• G1 is still 'going'. Stories are still being added to the original cartoon and comic timelines (or branches threof) in Japan and the US respectively. And that's even without getting into Dreamwave or IDW's NEW Generation 1 'universes'. (And probably something about hwo the BW stories were set in G1?) The 'original timeline' (both cartoon and comic regardless of which you consider the original, and ignoring some ambiguity about whether or not BW counts as either of them in specific) has not gone more than... 2 years at most without new story material set in it since 1984.
• TF doesn't have 'one cast' like most evergreen franchises do. Optimus Prime isn't even IN half of the G1-continuity-family episodes (JG1 + BW + JBW + BM...) You can-- and do-- get stories about very marginal characters (Sparkabots for example,) that are every bit as 'central' to the story as the ones featuring the main cartoon cast. Characters grow and change-- Thunderwing and Bludgeon got PROMOTED to leadership of the Decepticons-- these guys are Pretenders, the second-most-loathed toy gimmick in TF's history. The shift to BW is the classic example here... the universe is wide, and no one take or characters is 'right' as opposed to others. (Except BM and Kiss Players. They are wrong.)
• "It All Counts." Every TF story ever told co-exists with everything else. The cartoon, comics, etc. The idea of a multiverse. Bits of continuity, characters and backstory, from coloring books comic books and what-have-you are all equally valid in Transformers... not just in theory, but in practice. Pretty much everything surrounding The Cube in the 2007 movie came into the franchise after the original cartoon ended-- some late Marvel Comics stuff, but really more BW/BM. Heck-- the simple fact the main villain of a 200m motion picture doesn't come from the original cartoon-- or a recent cartoon-- but instead made one prior appearance in some (relatively obscure) Canadian comics in 2003. (This and the previous point both deal with 'lack of centricity' in fiction I think...)
• Hasbro/Takara owns everything. Did you know that Hasbro is the sole copyright holder of TF:Legends? iBooks has no claim on the text-- or even cover art. (This again feeds back into the idea that new TF stories indiscriminately mine anything that came before.)
• TF's 'story' is ongoing. The current backstory still being explored with The One, the Multiverse and The 13 Prototypes and The fallen was added in 2003. Prior to that you got Sparks, the Vok and Protoforms int he mid 90's. Primus in the late 80's comics. Unicron from the 1986 movie (not in the 'iconic' era of the TV show at all.) Just-- the top-level TF 'story' is ongoing and has never stopped. The very fact The Fallen is rearing his ugly flaming head in the new movie is testament to this-- he's part of a meta-story that's been going in a steady line for 25 years. Now he's stepping out of the Dreamwave U and into the Movie U-- because his storyline is still going on. (I'm not saying this well... but there's a sort of... inconsequence that comes with the Gundam or Final Fantasy reboots... every year matters to itself only, and when it's over has no lasting impact on what comes after. TF might have similar 1-year or 3-year stories that begin and end... but there's a parallel overarching story that's been going since 1986 that weaves freely between the cartoons, comics and movies. Fun Pub is telling stories right now that, via a series of baton handoffs, form a continuous chain back 11 years, jumping continuities between BW, BM, RiD, TFU, Arm/En and heavily featuring into the Cybertron cartoon... and are now revising the original Marvel Comic!)

There's some overlap here with "Myths and urban legends about transformers..." but it's really more "exploding preconceptions about Transformers," and I'd like to see that included in a primer... somehow.

Everything I'm rambling about here really does boil down to some variant of "Truk Not Monkey..." I have rage that I can't quite articulate about...

You know how every mainstream media article about comics for the last 20+ years has been "Bif, Pow! Comics aren't just for kids any more!" The same clueless Adam-West-era-Batman POV repeated ad infinitum because popular consciousness never clued in that that era has been over for 30+ years, not even when Maus won a Pulitzer? (Obama reiterated it 2 days ago...) I want a primer that can spare TF some of that, that violently beats the G1-centric mindset out of anyone who reads it and gives them some glimpse of--

Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Star Trek... Transformers. TF is the 4th largest shared fictional universe in existence. (Star Wars is smaller in terms of #'s of stories told, if not # of characters.) There are... what 600 episodes, and like 700 comics- and dozens upon dozens of text stories, radio plays, mini-comics, animated DVD's and novels? This universe is unimaginably vast, and unlike Gundam (which has a similar episode count if you add all the universes together) These things are all actually interrelated, with characters actually jumping from one universe to another.

TF is ginormous and weird and wonderful. And if you can say without any braggadocio that TF is among the 5 largest fictional universes ever created (bigger than Star Wars's expanded universe!) I think that should be the face we present and be unapologetic about saying- "TF isn't like He-Man or any other dozens of retro-stalgia fandom... it is a top tier fandom, and if you want to find other examples and "big" as we are, you have to go back 40, 50, 80 years-- and even then we're in the top 5."

Ah! I think what it boils down to is... TF is different. And if you come at TF with the preconception that "TF is like X..." you're already doing it wrong, and that perspective needs adjusting so you don't come off like an idiotic print media reporter claiming he represents an expert viewpoint on comics... then troting out "Bif, Pow! comics aren't just for kids anymore!"

(That's what I feel like a TF Primer should accomplish. Or at least one of the things.) -Derik 18:51, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

The media can't be trusted to get things right on things that actually fucking matter. You're basically spitting at the tsunami. --M Sipher 19:15, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

Then it's propaganda aimed at our own constituency. Let Transfans actually see their fandom for what is it in perspective- the largest shared fictional universe created since 1984. TF is not "like" He-man fandom, the two are not... comparable. They exist on completely different scales. It's like comparing Invader Zim to Star Wars.

Complaining that the media is uninformed without giving them a legitimate possibility to be informed strikes me as a pointless argument. If we get good information in there's at least a chance of getting an accurate picture out some of the time. No chance at all without it. -Derik 20:46, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

CAPTCHA

Considering the recent wave of spambots, I'm curious. Do we still have the CAPTCHA that was on Wikia for anonymous edits? Because if we don't, perhaps setting one up again might stop those spammy edits of the CGI and Gobotron pages... --Detour 22:26, 17 October 2008 (EDT)

We do not appear to have the "you added a new external link" spambot-for-anons that Wikia had. I'd probably put it on our feature-request list. -Derik 00:09, 18 October 2008 (EDT)

While I think such a thing might not be a bad idea in general (along with my other extension suggestions, nudge), in this particular case it seems the spammer is human, so I'm not sure how much it'll help. --Jeysie 01:15, 18 October 2008 (EDT)

State of the Wiki

So we've been at the new location over a month now, going on nearly two. This definitely would be our first taste of the "real world" conditions and stresses the server will go through. Granted it's been a period without new episodes of Animated, nor with any major movie news. Still, it's at least a way to see whether our projections were correct.So the admins can answer this probably better than anyone, are things working out like we'd hoped? Are we using the bandwidth we expected? More? Less? Are the ad numbers hitting the targets we need?And if not, what can the community do to pitch in?--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:36, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

Apparently, all our hosting so far has been free, as Bookworm said he hasn't figgered out how much we owe him, and that he doesn't plan on charging us back-time once he figures that out. So while I can't give you any concrete answers on what our money in/out situation is, since it's all "in," we certainly can't complain! My educated guess says, though, that we're solid. --ItsWalky 01:42, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

Bizarre thing with my webspace and this wiki

This is really weird, to say the least. I was idly looking through the stat logs for my own server today, and I noticed that one of my subdomains for some reason shows at least one referral from seemingly every article I've ever edited here. I don't particularly care, exactly, since it's a "files to link to" subdomain rather than one of my real websites, but it's given me a definite "buh?" reaction. Any idea why on Earth this would happen? --Jeysie 00:47, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

Are you running any custom CSS? Does said CSS reference your domain?--Rosicrucian^Talk 00:51, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

• facepalms and chuckles* Oops! Yes, and I'd totally forgotten I did that... OK, I feel silly now. :> Thanks for setting me straight... --Jeysie 01:02, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

No problem. It just made sense when you said that it seemed to be every page you'd visited personally that it was likely the referrals were coming from you somehow.--Rosicrucian^Talk 01:04, 26 October 2008 (EDT)

Comic/cartoon infobox and the tiny ass back/forwards arrows

I brought this up a couple of times over the past few months, but apparently nothing was done. Can somebody, somewhere please change the current comic/cartoon infobox template (and whatever other new infobox templates that have been copied off this) so that the last issue and next issue arrows are much larger and much more prominent? As it stands, right now they are tiny, difficult to click on and not very helpful to either long-time users or the many fans we are serving by creating this wiki. --FFN 02:59, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

This has actually been nagging me for a while. Hell, I'd replace with arrows with "PREV" and "NEXT" myself. --M Sipher 03:22, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

It requires someone with permissions to edit the css files, I think. I notice too that the top navigation cell of that template has a background colour on the old Wiki but not the new one, but they have the same code. Odd. --abates 06:34, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

Actually, I stand corrected - I've made the arrows bigger and fixed the background colour by editing the template. --abates 07:04, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

There was CSS changes created to address this in a clean fashion-- but they were never adopted by the group. (We were knee-deep in moving preparations at the time.)

Jeysie asked me if i still had them recently, but when I finally went back to check ont hem today-- I foudn they were no longer working. Apparently Abates removed the needed classes in his last round of editing the template. -Derik 14:38, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

I replaced 'em with style tags. Feel free to change them back of course. :) --abates 14:57, 27 October 2008 (EDT)

Our friendly neighborhood spambot

so... this spammer thing whatzit that keeps hitting us... is there anything we can do about it? It uses a different IP address every time, and its inserts seem to be completely random characters, not even an actual or consistent web site address. If it's an ad bot, it's the worst ad bot ever. At the risk of sounding paranoid... it almost seems like it exists soley to attack/disrupt the wiki. -- Repowers 15:59, 29 October 2008 (EDT)

I'm puzzled by this. I haven't clicked any of the links so they're valid links (to malware/spyware/adware) or if it's all fakey stuff to bug us... But what really leaves me clueless is the fact that all those IP addresses are valid addresses from valid internet providers from all over the world... I have no idea what's going on. --Detour 16:13, 29 October 2008 (EDT)

Most likely virus-ridden Windows machines which the spammers are using as zombies to do their dirty work. --abates 16:58, 29 October 2008 (EDT)

I recall someone asking if we could set up a Captcha or Recaptcha system for unregistered-user edits. Would it help? If so, who could implement it?--Apcog 21:11, 29 October 2008 (EDT)

There are many anti-bot extensions that can be installed. I personally suggest TorBlock, SimpleAntiSpam, SpamBlacklist, AntiBot (if you want bots, you can add an exception to the default bot script), ForcePreview and ConfirmEdit. They have been effective on WikiFur and I suspect they would be here as well. GreenReaper 00:57, 3 November 2008 (EST)

Okay, then the remaining questions are who can implement these changes and when.--Apcog 12:29, 4 November 2008 (EST)

I can do that-- although not tonight, I'm pretty busy. But looking over these extensions, they do all seem like good ideas. --Suki Brits 17:13, 5 November 2008 (EST)

• puts in a vote for these possible extensions as well* --Jeysie 17:38, 5 November 2008 (EST)

I VANT TO KILL -- Repowers 22:27, 23 November 2008 (EST)

No kidding. I had to block five of these bots in just the last hour or so. Suki, can we possibly get the appropriate safeguards installed by, say Thanksgiving?--Apcog 22:30, 23 November 2008 (EST)

They've really been hitting hard lately. What's the word on those safeguards? --Detour 05:17, 26 November 2008 (EST)

Increasing performance?

TFWiki is great. However, it could be greater. One area that I think would be worth focussing on is performance. It doesn't need to take half a second or more to generate a simple page, and five seconds to deliver it (more for a user who hasn't visited the site before - try simulating this with Ctrl+Shift+R using Firefox). Performance improvements would aid all users, but especially those who have slower connections and/or who live far from the server.The things we've done for our new WikiFur server (example site) - and specifically the things mentioned in this post - may be of use. Some (e.g. installing APC and Squid/Varnish) would require root-level server access, but are not overly complex, while others (enabling HTTP compression using .htaccess when serving CSS/JS/PHP, minifiying CSS/JS) merely require the ability to edit files on the server.HTTP compression alone would make a huge difference (examples: main page - Optimus Prime (G1) - Misconceptions and urban legends), though I urge you to take the time to follow the other steps for maximum performance. Properly implemented, they would greatly reduce the impact of TFWiki on the server from both a CPU and bandwidth standpoint, as well as encourage contributions by making TFWiki more responsive. GreenReaper 02:01, 3 November 2008 (EST)

Another thing that might be useful is making a robots.txt file. I noticed that the site doesn't currently have one, whereas the wikia site did, so the search engine spiders may be indexing all sorts of pages that they don't need to (edit pages, etc) which would create unnecessary work for the server.

Incidentally I've noticed that the site seems to become somewhat unresponsive at the same time every night (must be about half-past midnight in one of the US time zones) - or is that just me? --abates 18:20, 4 November 2008 (EST)

Just a further note on this, as the problem doesn't seem to be going away - I've noticed that shortpacked.com and blanklabelcomics.com both become unresponsive at the same time, so I assume it's a BLC server problem in general. I don't see anything on BLC's forums about the issue. Is it lingering problems from the weather, or a DOS attack or..? --abates 03:05, 21 November 2008 (EST)

I've noticed the same thing. I just spent nearly 20 minutes trying to read the newest Shortpacked! comic. -- Semysane 03:18, 21 November 2008 (EST)

The BLC web-gurus are looking at it, as I've been told. It's apparently a maintenance issue, but they believe it doesn't need to be run every night. --04:51, 21 November 2008 (EST)

Slightly annoying for me, as given I live IN THE FUTURE (another timezone), I tend to have free time to edit just as the server goes down. --FFN 03:17, 24 November 2008 (EST)

Is there any update on the investigation into this? AFAIK it's still happening. It happens right in the middle of the evening for my time which sucks for trying to edit, not to mention it can't be helping our google ranking if Googlebot finds the site non-responsive for 1/2 an hour every night. --abates 18:29, 7 December 2008 (EST)

thanks for the postAcitiaddy

Terrific work! This is the type of information that should be shared around the web. Shame on the search engines for not positioning this post higher!