StrategyWiki:Staff lounge

__NEWSECTIONLINK__

Welcome to all users! This page is where you can ask StrategyWiki-related questions to the staff and senior community figures, and they will do their best to answer. If you want to raise a topic for discussion (rather than just ask about it), please use the community issues forum instead. New issues are entered here, with the most recent at the bottom of the page. If your question does not pertain to editing StrategyWiki (e.g. asking for hints or game-specific information), please ask on the guide's talk page or on the forums.

Please review the Table of Contents to see if your issue has already been raised; also check the archives (to the right) in case it was discussed some time ago.

To facilitate ease of browsing and replying, please:
 * 1) Place your question at the bottom of the list.
 * 2) Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs: ==Title==).
 * 3) Sign your name and date (by adding four tildes: ~ ).

SEIWA
Hi, I am TheFifteenthMember, an editor from the KHWiki. In our recent roundtable meeting, we agreed that SEIWA's status is practically dead and inactive so we proposed that the five members of SEIWA disband and continue on as independent sites. Former SEIWA members can then be linked to each other as affiliates. We'd like to know the Strategy Wiki's thoughts on the matter; do you agree with this plan?

Apologies for dumping this here. I wasn't sure where to post. TheFifteenthMember (talk) 18:32, 12 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello. This is the best place to talk to us as a whole. What "Status" were you talking about? I thought SEIWA and other wiki alliance groups were about generally advertising to one another. This allows all members of all wikis to find good wikis to ally with - to develop inter-wiki link procedures and other beneficial cross-content collaboration. As far as I'm concerned, having SEIWA noted on each home page is sufficient for the basic requirements of the alliance. -- 20:03, 13 September 2014 (UTC)
 * By a dead status, we are referring to the fact that half of SEIWA's Wikis have reclined into complete inactivity since a single edit has not been made on them for the past 30 days, possibly longer. Additionally, the main SEIWA site itself has not had a single update for an extraordinarily long amount of time so it has been largely abandoned. The ex-SEIWA members will still be supporting and advertising each other by continuing as regular affiliations so that purpose will still be fulfilled. However, the affiliation will just no longer be under the name of SEIWA. For interest, Cronopedia has already agreed with the disbandment but we are still waiting to hear a response from the other Wikis. TheFifteenthMember (talk) 23:31, 13 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I don't think we have a strong opinion on the matter. I didn't even know SEIWA had its own site. We can make a miscellaneous alliances section to replace the SEIWA section of our homepage. We will continue to link to the other SEIWA wikis as long as they reciprocate. Thank you for notifying us.-- 01:28, 16 September 2014 (UTC)
 * There are 5 wikis that are a part of SEIWA. KHW, DQW and SW are all active. CW and SEW may not have many updates, but they are maintained (mediawiki is kept up to date).  SEIWA is mostly just to have the communities in touch with each other and provide support/guidance when needed.  I don't see much point in disbanding an affiliation, we're all still independent sites. -- Prod (talk) 20:59, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I don't see why we should disband SEIWA just because the main site is inactive. SEIWA isn't doing any harm by existing. Also, shouldn't we really try to revive it rather than just give up and disband? -- 21:26, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I think the main issue is that they want to retire the SEIWA website, which I think is fine (because it is not needed and costs someone extra $$). Otherwise I agree that we should just keep our site the same way. We can always improve our relations with the others. -- 23:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * The SEIWA site is hosted on a VPS alongside the Fire Emblem Wiki, SE Wiki, and a few others. Retiring it won't save us any more money, the space we'd free up wouldn't be enough to enable us to downgrade the hosting package. Maybe we'd save on not having to renew the domain name, but that money would then have to be put towards buying a new one for the SE Wiki. -- 00:08, 18 September 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm in agreement something needs to be done, but I don't think disbanding is the right answer. The reason it became inactive, was, mostly, due to not a lot of people helping out. And the few that were had to leave to do other things (watch over other wikis, settle offline problems, etc.). If anyone has any ideas of how to improve the site or any off the wikis, feel free to bring it up or even make the edits yourself. I'm sure they would appreciate it. Tacopill (talk) 02:32, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for replying guys. The disbandment has been rejected and instead, there are plans of reviving SEIWA. There is also a discussion going on at the KHWiki; feel free to add your two cents to the thread. TheFifteenthMember (talk) 10:13, 21 September 2014 (UTC)


 * Hey guys, I'm KeybladeSpyMaster, editor at the Kingdom Hearts Wiki. I'm really trying to get SEIWA back up, and we'd (The Kingdom Hearts Wiki) love to see it happen. However, we need your help. We need your input on how to get this done. I've started a forum on the SEIWA forums (which for some reason I cannot link, do to spam filters), which I hope you guys will get involved with. As I state in that forum, I'd especially love the people who were originally involved with SEIWA to come, so if you know any of them, please ask them to return if only to give us direction. Thanks! KeybladeSpyMaster (talk) 04:03, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Hello. You cannot post links until 10 days past your registration has occurred (at which point your user priveledges increase to 'trusted'). I do not think any of the members at StrategyWiki (note: I can only speak for myself), at this time, have the time or urge to be involved with the discussion elsewhere. Please let us know the result and how we may continue to be a member of SEIWA. We prefer 'passive' participation where possible. Thanks, -- 17:33, 21 October 2014 (UTC)

Question on Deletion
I was preparing to add content to the Pokémon Emerald guide, when I noticed its /Glossary subpage is practically empty. It has exactly one revision, dated 16 January 2013, which adds a spurious table of contents that contains nothing but redlinks. As I cannot (currently) think of anything to place there, I was considering nominating that page for deletion. Unfortunately, I do not know what the relevant guidelines are here. Should I just remove links to it from its Table of Contents, ask an administrator to delete the page, or what? Thanks! Wjk (talk) 01:21, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Thank you for bringing this to our attention. It's probably a test page created by a random visitor that no one noticed, since the link to the page on the ToC was there before the page was created. As for nominating a page for deletion, you can insert the delete template at the very top of the page, as well as putting a note in the edit summary about marking the page for deletion. T.testLP(talk) 04:01, 13 October 2014 (UTC)

Asirra Captcha Service Shutdown
Signing up for a new account isn't possible right now because the captcha service the Wiki uses has shut down! The captcha element is currently set to be hidden on the page by default, which made me think it might be fixed already, but clicking the submit button does nothing. If you inspect the element and make it visible it reads:
 * WARNING: Asirra, the cat and dog CAPTCHA, is closing permanently on October 6, 2014. Please contact this site's administrator and ask them to switch to a different CAPTCHA. Thank you!

Until this is fixed new users will be unable to sign up! - 23.253.125.119 19:21, 21 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for bringing this up, and we apologize for the inconvenience. Our lead tech has been a little busy as of late, but he is working on finding a suitable replacement, and will have it in place ASAP.  We'll keep everyone updated.   Pro  cyon  18:47, 22 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I've switched up the captcha so people should be able to sign up again. I'm going to probably change it to something a little different in the near future. -- Prod (talk) 21:06, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

Notice to site admins
So Prod had to change our captcha because the one we were using disappeared. It's a real shame, because not only was that captcha incredibly difficult (if not impossible) for bots to solve, it really served a great purpose for the adoption of animals without homes. We've defaulted to a rather vanilla system and I am very suspicious of the flood of new users. Too many of them consist of a first-name-last-name combination, and this just isn't typical of users. So be on alert for an increase in spam, and Prod is going to look into a stronger captcha alternative in the meantime. Thanks for your continued efforts to keep this site in great shape!  Pro cyon  13:30, 23 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for dealing with the issue man, I was someone who was unable to sign up due to the problem - I hope it doesn't cause too much extra work on y'alls part. Based on what Microsoft has posted, Asirra was shut down because it was no longer considered secure because it's apparently easier for bots to identify animals than letters, which boggles my mind.


 * Might I reccomend Google's reCAPTCHA service as an alternative? It seems to be in use everywhere these days and my understanding is the images it uses are ones that even Google's OCR can't figure out, which seems like a pretty high bar to me.
 * Kyjibo (talk) 01:13, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Asirra was actually working quite well for us with a minimal spam able to get through. We actually switched to it when reCaptcha was broken 3 years ago, and we were getting tons of spam.  I'm going to be trying something else soon, so stay tuned! -- Prod (talk) 03:29, 24 October 2014 (UTC)


 * ReCaptcha can be easily broken, simply because it's a well known target. The simplest way is relaying the captcha to an equivalent of a sweatshop, even just ~30 being solved/day/person is enough to allow spambots to get through and hit most known wikis.  That said, I've seen an implementation on dandwiki.com, which is ReCpatcha + javascript computation, and a result of practically no spambots despite being well known enough and having public IP editing. --Sigma 7 (talk) 06:59, 24 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I've activated a new captcha system. If anyone comes across it, please let us know how you find it. -- Prod (talk) 17:33, 26 October 2014 (UTC)

OUYA button images
Hello! I go by Bluestarultor online and have an open offer for you. While I see you aren't covering OUYA games at this time, a quick search showed it was at least in one of your admins' talk pages and a table in another user's sandbox. I'll admit I've borrowed a lot of button images from you guys for use on Final Fantasy Wiki and thought I'd return the favor by offering the images I created for OUYA. It's probably more than anyone will ever need and I'm not sure the look or quality is up to your standards, but the individual pages provide brief descriptions if you're not sure what my intent was. I also realize you tend toward making button presses blue and that I used orange to keep more toward OUYA's color scheme. I'm explicitly granting you exclusive permission to modify them for your own uses here in whole or in part. There should be enough "blank" bases for you to work with (and it should be easy enough to color shift most of it since all the grays are pure grays) and I can provide additional base images to work with if needed. :)

If you have any questions or other items, feel free to ask on my talk page over there and let me know how you'd like to continue communicating. 24.183.93.10 17:38, 25 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Those look pretty good. We wouldn't use the button press images. We usually just say "press ". Your depiction of button pressing is ambiguous unless you are using a symbol that is backed by officially by a developer or Ouya, Inc. We could use most of them here, for sure.


 * As far as Ouya guides available here, no one has yet had an interest. Since you spoke up, I created the basics. The category now exists, and the games list can now be populated. Feel free to start guides by clicking on a red link, or going to the game's title and creating the page that way. Use the Main game pre-load button to fill in the infobox, Continue Nav, and ToC. -- 00:45, 28 October 2014 (UTC)

Address verification email was never received
I signed up the other day, but I never received the email to verify my address. Is that working properly? I've tried resending it twice now, but no luck. What gives? Can an admin check it out? --JimTheta (talk) 22:28, 11 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I've double-checked my email address; it's correct.
 * No, it's not in my spam folder.
 * My email is Gmail-hosted, so I'm sure it's not getting wrongly rejected.
 * Please check now. -- Prod (talk) 14:27, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * I got mails from all 3 of my attempts now. Looks like you solved it for me.  Hopefully the problem is solved site-wide.  Thanks. --JimTheta (talk) 15:45, 12 November 2014 (UTC)
 * Yea, the mail sending process had stopped. I started it back up and it processed everything that was pending.  Thanks for the heads up! -- Prod (talk) 15:47, 12 November 2014 (UTC)