StrategyWiki talk:Community Portal/2007/December

Signatures
I think we should follow wikipedia's example with this policy, especially signature templates. -- Prod (Talk) 21:46, 19 October 2007 (CDT)
 * And I don't. I don't see any valid points in there that really refer to us. Granted, some people are worried about the influx of images, but it doesn't cause all that much of a drain on resources for the few people that actually have them. As for templating, I'm actually more for it than making sigs take up tons of wiki code. Yes, you could say "just reduce your sig's size", but I represent my sig however I want to. As for vandalism attacks, that's why every aspect of my signature is protected (the image, the templates it uses, etc.). If any of these things become a major problem, then I'll consider placing restrictions on signatures, but it so far has not been a problem. -- 16:28, 21 October 2007 (CDT)
 * This was one of the things the devs stepped in to say that it could affect performance, so I think it was a significant drain. You can do whatever you want, but that's what rules are for, otherwise this site would be full of vandals.  Not everyone has the benefit of protecting all the required pages.  Sigs don't need images anywayz, they're just there to show who you are and give access to your page. -- Prod (Talk) 16:45, 21 October 2007 (CDT)
 * Well, currently we don't have any guidelines/policies on signatures, so based off this debate, it might be a good time to make one. Here are the following points that I believe should be illustrated in such a policy:
 * Use of Images:
 * No more than 2 per signature
 * No animated gifs
 * No overly distracting/offensive images
 * Should have transparency
 * As an added nicety, images should be wrapped in a span class of "sigimage" so people can disable signature images in their personal CSS if they wish not to see them.
 * If they are linked (elsewhere then the image page), the link targets should be appropriate as well, and should be wrapped in a class of "plainlinks".
 * If you wish to protect images in your sig from a vandal attack, notify an admin so they may be protected.
 * Use of Templating:
 * Long signatures should be in template format or, if not possible, shortened.
 * Templates used in signatures may be reported to an admin so they may be protected from vandal attacks.
 * Other conditions:
 * Must contain a non-image link to user page
 * May contain a link to user talk page
 * All links (external and internal) must be appropriate
 * Only sign on talk pages at the end of the comment
 * Cannot contain line breaks, large images, etc. that interrupt the flow of text and indenting.
 * Of course, this needs polishing and input from other people, but how's that? -- 17:10, 21 October 2007 (CDT)
 * I'd propose the following two changes:
 * Use of images: not allowed
 * Use of Templating: not allowed
 * -- Prod (Talk) 17:19, 21 October 2007 (CDT)
 * I can see where you're going with that, and I'm just against changing so many signatures so drastically without having hard statistical evidence to back up my claims (about server stress and distractions, etc.). If echelon or Dan would be so kind as to perhaps discover how much stress these templates are causing, I'll consider removal of them (if it's a problem). As for images, I've added in a "sigimage" class to mine, so you can just put .sigimage { display: none; } in your personal css to hide it. If images start to become a problem, however, I'll support you in disallowing them. Also, if vandalising signature templates becomes a problem, I'll support disallowing those as well. -- 17:35, 21 October 2007 (CDT)
 * As far as I can tell, Skizzerz and I are the only people who template signatures, and I think it's fine. For one thing, templating helps to keep signatures constant even as users change them--for example, if I were to change my sig to Towers (talk) in the template, every instance of my green font and t-rex head would go away and be replaced, keeping everything consistent so people aren't confused when someone switches sigs.
 * And as far as images go--they seem fine to me! Again, as far as I can tell, only Skizzerz and I use them at all, and they are small, classed properly (as per his guideline anyways), etc. While I concede extravagant signatures belong more on the abxy forums, I hardly think being noticeable in a cloud of blue and white is a bad thing. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 16:11, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * I'd really like us to disable the use of "external" images in sigs. It makes things difficult to track (what links here doesn't work) and it adds tons of markup.  If you really want that image to link to your page, you can just put a #REDIRECT on the image page.  However, I'd suggest checking the reasons against images. Some of those I don't really care about, but things like server performance and vandalism targets do concern me.  And from what I'm looking at now, Towers, you aren't actually templating your signature (Skizzerz does).  The problems with templating are similar to images and listed. Also, protecting all the images and pages is not practical (they can't change it either).  -- Prod (Talk) 16:38, 2 December 2007 (CST)

Ok, fine... I made it a normal image and a new template, happy? As for protecting, they can just upload a new image if they want to change it and request the old one be deleted or something. And for protecting sig pages, just append .css to the end of the sub-page name (although I don't think it can go down more than one level, so User/sig.css would work but User/sigs/sig1.css won't, not sure about that though). Anyway, mediawiki then treats that as a user's skin css page, but it still gets parsed with normal wiki markup. Plus, strategywiki is not wikipedia. Things are overly retarded and bureaucratic over there. I'd rather not bring that here as well. -- 17:14, 2 December 2007 (CST)

Mass Effect spoilers
People need to be careful, there are some ENORMOUS plot spoilers appearing on various pages of the Mass Effect guide, such as the Characters section (wherein they should not exist). --LeftHandedGuitarist 15:09, 1 December 2007 (CST)
 * Be bold and


 * -- 15:24, 1 December 2007 (CST)
 * Skizzerz, the spoiler template isn't working here because you've indented it. If you remove the indentation, it works fine. :-) (Goodness knows why.) --DrBob (talk) 12:33, 2 December 2007 (CST)

ABXY Forums
I've added a link to the abxy forums in the sidebar (replaced the donate link). Thoughts? -- Prod (Talk) 11:58, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * Seems OK, but can we get rid of the donate button that's randomly under the help link.-- The preceding signed comment was added by Rocky (talk • contribs). 12:23, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * The donate button is there to stay, however we can discuss a better layout. -- Prod (Talk) 12:35, 2 December 2007 (CST)

Oh and to note, if you do sign up for abxy, please use the same username and email address as when you signed up here. -- Prod (Talk) 12:35, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * Bit late for the username part, but I have the same email there, so it shouldn't be a problem, right? -- 14:51, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * I think you'll be okay. From what we've talked about over at abxy, it seems that matching emails will be enough--though it will make it a tad harder if you have different names. Then again, maybe not--I'm just a moderator, not a developer. But I'm getting my name changed to match this one, so if it's any real problem I am sure you could get your name changed too. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 15:59, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * I don't think we should link to abxy's forums at the moment. There's no StrategyWiki-specific forums there yet (so it's a bit confusing to link to somewhere seemingly unrelated), and having people create duplicate accounts just further complicates matters. Also note that the URL should be http://forums.strategywiki.org because, in the future, this address will be used so that cookies can be shared between the forum and the wiki. GarrettTalk 16:22, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * I agree with it not being the time yet, however the infrastructure is in place once we need it. I've also changed the url, however it might be a bit weird to have the whole abxy theme for a site supposedly under strategywiki. -- Prod (Talk) 18:08, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * Teddy is supposed to be making a skin for it (like how http://forums.dsmeet.com connects to abxy's forums using DSmeet's old skin). GarrettTalk 19:12, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * Cool! Will that cookie be able to carry over to http://abxy.org though (so that we can browse all three seamlessly)?  Or is that impossible? -- Prod (Talk) 19:31, 2 December 2007 (CST)
 * It will, yes. Otherwise doing this whole "awesome skin thing" would be pointless and irritating to people switching between them. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 11:59, 3 December 2007 (CST)

Main Page changes
The DPL stuff is killing the caching of the page and most likely causing some performance issues. It would be nice if we could add the Announcements page back to replace it. Another change that I've heard suggested was to replace the What is SW with something more dynamic and move that information off to About. The featured guide hasn't been updated in months, though we are (possibly) getting a new one soon. However, I don't expect it to change for another few months. Finally, the promising guide section looks good and keeps changing every month and I don't believe it needs to be changed. Any thoughts or suggestions? -- Prod (Talk) 01:50, 23 December 2007 (CST)
 * Agree with everything stated, except that it's Guide/About ;). As for VFG -- nominate and share your opinion on some :) -- 10:00, 23 December 2007 (CST)

Site news
You may have noticed the site go down Saturday afternoon, and then go really slow for the next few hours. The reason was that we upgraded from MediaWiki 1.9.3 to the latest stable build, 1.11. You can check the newest features from http://mediawiki.org (and there are quite a few). With the new upgrade, we have also been able to update all the extensions to the latest versionss. If there are any issues with pages not looking right, or strange behaviour, leave a message here and we'll try to fix the issue quickly. -- Prod (Talk) 01:59, 23 December 2007 (CST)

New RfA
has been nominated for adminship. Please voice your opinion here. -- 18:58, 24 December 2007 (CST)

Ad problems
I keep getting this message box:

"Adobe Flash Player 9

"A script in this movie is causing Adobe Flash Player 9 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive.  Do you want to abort the script?"

If things get too annoying, it might cause me to choose to block ads on SW (I run ad-block, but I only selectively block ads). I'd suggest sending feedback to your advertisement provider and get rid of the offending ads. -Afker 02:14, 26 December 2007 (CST)
 * Do you know which ad is causing it? -- 10:21, 26 December 2007 (CST)
 * My guess would be one of the ones in the right side, since that's the fancy stuff. Oh, and since SW is on ads anyways, can we get more bandwidth?  Things load really slow around here, and I live in California... -Afker 19:39, 26 December 2007 (CST)
 * That's the only reason we have the ads. We're saving up for some better hardware to support the site.  Once we can sustain the levels of traffic we get with decent response time, we are hoping to get rid of the ads.  -- Prod (Talk) 02:18, 27 December 2007 (CST)