StrategyWiki:Staff lounge

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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:

Place your question at the bottom of the list.
Title the question (by placing the title between equals signs: ==Title==).
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Runescape

I am playing Runescape and am in the lower section of the house on the hill. I have made it through the door with the water barrels, but the creature I find around a sharp bend in the path is spitting poison at me and I do not know how to kill it so I can move on. Can you please help me? Thank you.

Pop-ups

Several times now, when I go to SW, I see large, window-filling Flash-based pop-up advertisements. What's more, the "close" buttons on the ads don't always work (in which case I must refresh the webpage). I have seen the "Dominion" ad on the main page, and a video game ad on the sign-in page. Prod, Procyon, is there anything you can do about this? Thanks! Wjk (talk) 18:47, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We will investigate it and do our best to stop it. Pro cyon 23:50, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

...and it's still happening, today with a Jeep ad on the home-page. ~~(Note that I was logged out at the time it happened; maybe this has something to do with it?)~~ Wjk (talk) 00:49, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

And it is still happening, again with the Jeep ad on the homepage, even when logged in. Wjk (talk) 00:56, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Wjk (talk · contribs), some of these we are aware of, and we are contractually obligated to display them. We don't love them either but unfortunately, they keep the site in business. The ads are our single revenue source since we don't charge anyone anything to access the content on the site. Without them, we wouldn't be able to pay for the server hosting fees. We try to keep pop-ups to an absolute minimum, but sometimes you have to agree to a certain amount, or the ad server companies aren't interested in working with you. Please understand that for the site to stay alive, they are necessary, but we will do everything we can to keep the annoyances to a minimum. Pro cyon 01:12, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

We don't have any ad-related customization for logged-in vs. logged-out so that won't change what you see. I'm not sure how much we can do about popups, but if you see interstitial ads please let us know. If you can get us a screenshot of what you're seeing and upload it, I can ask. -- Prod (talk) 13:37, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Do pop-ups have to display for StrategyWiki to get money? I have Adblock Plus and don't get any. Flufftailer (talk) 14:49, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

Technically, if the ad server is unable to deliver the code to your browser to display, they don't count that among the impressions that they owe us money on. I'm not going to say what our users should and should not do. I will simply say that using ad blocking software reduces the amount of money we earn to fund the site. Pro cyon 15:30, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

"Whale" skin broken

When I logged on to the site today, I discovered the "Whale" skin (which I have been using since the old "BlueCloud" one was killed off in 2012) was broken; it is now just displaying as blank white pages with Times New Roman text! Is anyone else using this skin (if anyone else does) suffering this problem, or is it just me? Namcorules (talk) 16:00, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Strange, I'll take a look into it. Thanks for letting me know! -- Prod (talk) 16:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

This should be fixed now, please clear your cache. -- Prod (talk) 16:06, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

There's some *extremely* serious issue at the moment with ALL pages. There are no scrollbars, at all, for the default theme. It's been that way for at least a week now. It's pretty much impossible to make use of the site due to this.--75.185.60.9 04:36, 9 August 2015 (UTC)Anonymous

I see no such issue with the site, I am able to use it perfectly fine. What device and browser are you attempting to view the site through? Pro cyon 12:02, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

There seems to be something broken with the beta versions of Chrome. It used to be a problem in 44, but I just tried it and it seems to be working. Maybe it's some experimental feature that keeps getting pushed off? -- Prod (talk) 16:58, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

It's caused by Chrome reacting to the height CSS property applied to the HTML and Body tags. Height:100% causes Chrome to think the element should be as large as the window, but it doesn't account for overflow. --Sigma 7 (talk) 04:36, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Ace Attorney Trial MWException Error

A few days ago, all of the Trial walkthrough pages for the Ace Attorney Series started displaying the error message "Fatal exception of type MWException" instead of the page. This happened fairly recently (Within a week or so ago) and I'm not sure what's causing it, and I'm also not quite sure where to post about this, considering that a bunch of pages are broken. Hafo (talk) 22:30, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Thank you very much for bringing this to our attention, this is absolutely the right place to post this kind of thing. We will be looking into it immediately and try to fix it as quickly as possible. We'll keep you posted. Pro cyon 23:41, 17 July 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing this out! There was a problem with our Scribunto extension that we use in quite a few places. It's fixed now, sorry about the inconvenience. -- Prod (talk) 01:37, 19 July 2015 (UTC)

The Pages still display the error unless another edit is saved, is there some way to fix this or should I just do an edit to the pages as I go through them? Edit: Never mind, it fixed itself. Hafo (talk) 04:43, 20 July 2015 (UTC)

I'm still getting this error on all Ace Attorney (and related) pages. Is there any fix that I can do at my end?

Hmm, it should have been automatic. I'll try another server side cache purge and hopefully that'll fix it. -- Prod (talk) 19:07, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

Independent games scope discussion

I've started a discussion about moving Super Mario 63 off strategywiki. This hits at the heart of our scope discussions. One of the big previous discussions was here, but I think it's time for a fresh discussion.

I feel that games like Super Mario 63 and Mario Adventure, or even the whole Category:ROM hacks, shouldn't fall within our scope. Mario Adventure is probably one of the most famous, but I was still having trouble finding a mention of it on any of the bigger video game news websites. Wikipedia also discussed deletion. There are some websites which discuss this game (vintagecomputing.com, romhacking.net), but I don't think they can serve as reliable sources. -- Prod (talk) 03:04, 23 July 2015 (UTC)

Guide completion stage categories

How are guides assigned to these categories? I can't find a word about it in the SW:GUIDE. Are guides audited by a mechanism (bot, etc) or the admin on an ongoing basis? Or are users responsible for updating them (presumably on the honor system if so)? A couple guides I've added content to in order to flesh out are categorized as stage 0 when by now they're closer to 3.5. It'd make more sense if their categorizations more accurately reflect their present state. -- HighLeveller (talk) 07:14, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Guide completion is determined by users, usually sysops but there's no hard rule about it. The exception to this is stage 5: Featured Guides, which has to go through a nomination and voting process. You can find criteria for completion stages here. If you want to change the completion status of the guide yourself, simply go to the main game page, then edit the "num" parameter of the Header Nav there according to the guide completion state you want. T.testLP(talk) 09:17, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Test is correct, it's very much an honor system. Guide completion is very subjective and can't be calculated or determined by a bot. We trust the primary authors of each guide to make the most appropriate determination, although that can be overruled if it the error is blatant. Please feel free to update the "num" parameter in the Header Nav of the main page for your guide. Thanks for all your contributions. Pro cyon 13:33, 31 July 2015 (UTC)

Live preview breaking save button

When I enable live preview, it updates the preview pane whenever I push Show Preview, but Save Page still asks me to click Show Preview first and remains unusable (at least in Chrome). Is that a bug in Chrome or in the wiki's live preview system? --MandL27 (talk) 23:34, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

I tried it from firefox and it's a problem there as well. I'll try and get in touch with the developer of the ForcePreview extension. Once you're autoconfirmed you won't be forced to preview anymore, so this should only be temporary. -- Prod (talk) 01:56, 15 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, at least it isn't browser-specific to the one most people use. :P And thanks in advance for relaying this to the devs. --MandL27 (talk) 03:03, 15 August 2015 (UTC)