StrategyWiki talk:Community Portal/2007/November

November Collab/Promising guides of the month
We need them assigned. I have some questions though, first how do we decide which collab gets assigned? Why one over the other? Date nominated? Second, how do we nominate promising guides? Or do we (sysops) just assign them on a case by case basis or is there a page to do so? I nominate Drift City for promising. -- 18:26, 1 November 2007 (CDT)
 * Nominating? You mean this? Baejung92 20:11, 1 November 2007 (CDT)
 * I'll write up some guidelines over the weekend. For now, the PGotM is Command & Conquer: Generals and the CotM is Halo 2. If someone is able to do the writeups tonight that would be great. Otherwise, I'll take care of it tomorrow afternoon. -- Prod (Talk) 21:49, 1 November 2007 (CDT)

Category Intersection
I ran into a problem while creating my Gamecube portal page mockup. There's no way to list all pages that are in Category:Gamecube and Category:Stubs, or any other category intersection. The problem has been discussed in Wikipedia. They deal with it for their portal pages by making categories which are essentially category intersections, like Category:Chemistry stubs (intersection Category:Chemistry and Category:Stubs). However, manual category intersection isn't the only way. Somehow, Dynamic Page List has support to list pages that are in two or more specific categories. If we could custom make a category page to have just a DPL of two or more categories, we could have a working category intersection page, albeit a hacked together one. Does anyone else have any ideas on how to implement this in StrategyWiki? -- 12:11, 3 November 2007 (CDT)

The advertisements!
The ads seem to slow the site down quite a lot--Firefox lags for me every time I load a page on SW. The status bar says "Waiting for images.widgetbucks.com..." for about six or seven seconds and then everything is alright again.

This is incredibly frustrating: I came to a page to do something or read something, not wait for an ad to load. Although I recognize that we needs ads to stay alive, I feel that maybe we could do better and get something that doesn't bog users down a ton or at least try to optimize them so I can click around while they load. My connection is pretty fast, so I can only imagine (with fear) what it does to slower people. I'd utilize adblock, but that only stops them from displaying, not loading.

Does anyone else have this issue, or is it just me? -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 00:36, 17 November 2007 (CST)

The other thing I forgot to say was that on especially long pages (such as this one) the strain is so intense that I am asked if I want to stop the script from running--though I think that is a different problem. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 00:38, 17 November 2007 (CST)
 * Try using NoScript instead of AdBlock, it actually prevents the script tags from running to begin with. Of course, you have to re-enable the js for strategywiki.org for it to work, but you won't have the ads. As for changing the widget one, that's probably not going to happen as that's the one that seems to be generating the most amount of money. -- 12:10, 17 November 2007 (CST)
 * The only pages I really have a problem with are this one (took more than a minute to load) and the main page. But I don't think the ads have to do with it much for me, because shorter pages like Staff Lounge load only in a few seconds.
 * The reason the Main Page takes forever to load is because of the two DynamicPageLists on it, notsomuch the advertisements. Also, the server has fast spots and slow spots, so I guess luck has a bit in this as well. -- 12:26, 17 November 2007 (CST)
 * Alright, I had hoped this wasn't the case (both the ads being awesome and also not really their fault) so I'll just look into NoScript and see what I can do. Thanks guys. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 12:31, 17 November 2007 (CST)


 * Yeah I get the same problem, but only in IE7, not FireFox. -- 20:17, 17 November 2007 (CST)
 * NoScript stops it, but it does pop a bar up into my browser every damned time I load a page. I am still figuring out if it is actually worth it. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 00:09, 18 November 2007 (CST)
 * You can turn off that bar in options. -- 15:58, 20 November 2007 (CST)
 * That's what I ended up doing. This works pretty well, if anyone was wondering--I'd recommend it if someone has the same issue that I did. -- towers  http://media.strategywiki.org/images/a/a8/Towers_trex.gif 20:40, 21 November 2007 (CST)

Achievement lists
I've just created Achievements Header for use in standardising the appearance of achievement lists. It's closely modelled on Moves Header, and should be flexible enough for use across all three types of achievement list. An example of the new template in action is Gears of War/Achievements. The header bar colour can be changed if people don't like the colour I copied from existing achievement lists; it's just there to differentiate achievement lists from other boring tables. :-) Any thoughts? If people don't mind it, it can be rolled out to the other achievement lists. --DrBob (talk) 15:23, 19 November 2007 (CST)
 * Looks good to me!-- Duke Ruckley Talk 10:09, 20 November 2007 (CST)

How do you nominate a guide to move to a higher completion stage?
I've written quite alot of content for the Disgaea: Hour of Darkness strategy guide. I wrote the entire walkthrough, the Getting Started section, and a few misc pages. It is my understanding that guides with complete walkthroughs are at least at stage two, yet the Disgaea guide is still at stage one. Is there a way to increase it, or nominate it to be increased? DeathWeasel 15:47, 20 November 2007 (CST)
 * The completion stage is based on the |num parameter in the Header Nav on the main page. If you feel it's ready for a higher stage, simply increase the value of num. No nomination required :) -- Prod (Talk) 16:00, 20 November 2007 (CST)
 * Yeah, looking through, you could probably bump that up to 2 using the method Prod stated above. -- 16:06, 20 November 2007 (CST)

Staff meeting December 1st
Due to the holiday weekend in the United States, and the relatively short notice for next weekend, the Staff Meeting will be held on December 1st. We will continue with the start time of 2PM EST / 7PM GMT since that seems to work for most of our members. Please let us know, however, if you can't make it. Please place any concerns you would like to address in the Agenda below. Thanks. Procyon (Talk) 10:06, 21 November 2007 (CST)


 * I'll try and go to bed early so I don't sleep through this one... -- 23:01, 21 November 2007 (CST)

So-ooo... Did any uber-important decisions get made? I wanted to attend and all that, just that the abyx irc java server (for those of us who can't/don't want to download an IRC running programme) hasn't been working for the past 2 weeks or so... and is there any news on when it'll come back up? BTW, is there a log of proceedings?--Froglet 05:19, 1 December 2007 (CST)


 * Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know I’m in the middle of moving so my home PC isn’t online yet. Sorry for not mentioning this earlier. --Zaiqukaj 07:34, 1 December 2007 (CST)

REMINDER: The meeting is today. I should be logging on just around 2pm, but I will be there. Hope to see you all. Procyon (Talk) 08:09, 1 December 2007 (CST)
 * IRC's down for me-- The preceding signed comment was added by Rocky (talk • contribs). 12:15, 1 December 2007 (CST)
 * Teddy should have it back up momentarily. -- 12:29, 1 December 2007 (CST)
 * Ok, here is the PJIRC client, all ready to use :) -- 12:44, 1 December 2007 (CST)

Agenda

 * 1) Further discussion about ads and fund raising

Performance issues
I'm sure everyone has noticed how our server hasn't felt as "snappy" as it used to in the past. Dan and I did a bit of research and we have made a change to the backend that we hope will help improve the performance noticeably. Speed increases are somewhat hard to remember, and highly subjective (especially based on the page), but please browse a bit and pay attention to the load times. Let us know if the site feels faster or slower. -- Prod (Talk) 22:18, 22 November 2007 (CST)
 * It appears to load smaller pages a lot faster, but as for larger pages (such as this one), it doesn't make a noticeable difference for me. However, even pages that use DPL (like Main Page) load a lot faster, so that's good :) -- 11:25, 23 November 2007 (CST)
 * It seems to do the opposite to me. This page (which used to take up to a minute to load) just came up in like 20 seconds. However, I didn't really see much difference with: Staff Lounge, Main Page, and Recent Changes. Baejung92 13:00, 23 November 2007 (CST)
 * Also... both the StarCraft and Call of Duty 2 pages (and all of COD2's guide pages, as far as I can tell) took even longer than CI used to take to load. Baejung92 13:00, 23 November 2007 (CST)
 * After browsing with FireFox, the site seems SO FAST. It's friggen awesome.  Internet Explorer 7 takes like 10 times longer to load (because of the flash application I believe, which also causes fatal crashes as well).  -- 03:02, 28 November 2007 (CST)