User talk:Lotroadmin/Archive3

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Some updates (May'13)

Webhost was nice enough to double our ram, hopefully that means faster response times for page requests. However, the offer came with a new location that should be all around better, so let me know if anyone experiences latency improvements or issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:39, 24 May 2013 (EDT)'

It does seem faster to Preview and Post updates. No problems that I have seen. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:06, 29 May 2013 (EDT)

Google Maps interface

Does anyone know (or heard rumors about) the Google Maps aspect of the Lorebook?

Are they simply an "extension" to Media Wiki?
Would they be possible to add here?
Would we want to?
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 11:36, 12 June 2013 (EDT)
We have looked at this in the past but it would be rather hard to create one that matches the quality of their maps. With the coordinate tooltips, the need of a google maps is reduced, imo. I'm also guessing I would have been greatly concerned with server load and bandwidth. Is there a certain need that you after that the lorebook version doesn't offer? --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:26, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

No. I was just looking at a particular Lorebook entry which referenced the Google Maps and thought about the fact they were being eliminated.

BTW as far as I know all of the Lorebook maps were used internally by Turbine to create their landscapes. I don't know what tools were used internally, but it appears that something very similar to, if not Google maps itself, were "step one" in creating Landscapes in LOTRO.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:56, 17 June 2013 (EDT)
Oh I missed that they were going to close it. Curious if there is a need and would they allow us to host it? As all lotro images are owned by turbine/lotro, i would expect them to hold on to those more closely vs the screenshots we take. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:48, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

Strange missing category

Can you see why this Category:Floid and Dewitt - NPC Imagesis not appearing in the appropriate category?

I believe it used to show up correctly. It now shows up in Special:UncategorizedCategories, and in fact does not show a category at the bottom of the page, even though one is included in the text.

Is there a typo or some interaction with Gallery...

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:18, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

Never mind.. I finally found it... the second Gallery was not closed!!!

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:20, 17 June 2013 (EDT)

is this legit?

User talk:Cora567‎ is a link to a outside game, apparently where one can play for cash.... or something.

I seem to be the only one around lately... Historically, RTC, I believe protrolled such pages.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:52, 19 June 2013 (EDT)
Looks like spam to me. I'd say delete and block the user. I'll do that later this evening if you haven't already taken care of it.
I have noticed the sparseness of regular editors too. I wish I could be around more these days. I'll do what I can. Thanks for holding down the fort Magill! -- Elinnea (talk) 20:45, 19 June 2013 (EDT)
Hiya, I came for a look the other day and noticed that page. My first thought was to delete and ban as it is just an advert and the user has made no other edits than that page. I was on my phone at the time so I didn't do it then and had forgotten about it when I was back on the computer. Amphoras (talkTalk to me!) 10:26, 20 June 2013 (EDT)
Wow that's probably our first spam in several months. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:59, 20 June 2013 (EDT)
Indeed. And it wasn't even the endless gibberish multi-page kind we suffered from before. The site is holding up well. -- Elinnea (talk) 00:25, 21 June 2013 (EDT)
I spoke too soon... or maybe I jinxed it. I've had to block seven accounts in the last week. Nothing too extreme, but I like the no-spam way better, hehe. Did you change anything on the site admin end? -- Elinnea (talk) 07:47, 26 June 2013 (EDT)
Caught yet another one this morning User:Thompson254. Blocked the user and commented out the spam so not readily visible. Took a quick look at the account creation page. The cat images are not always in the same place so the spammers can't automate that part. I did not try to create an account so I don't know if the prevention is actually working. Someone might want to do a quick test to make sure new users have to click on just the cats and all the cats (no cats missed and no dogs selected). If that is indeed working as supposed to, it might just be time to swap to new prevention. Maybe there is a pattern in how the images are presented that lets spam bots get around it.
-Shardis (talk) 09:45, 26 June 2013 (EDT)
I do check that plug-in after every update, so most likely it's a physical person or someone hammering the website with random guesses. (i will check that soon, but normally takes some time to parse the logs.) Probably the next step is to tweak the basic "user" group permissions to not allow posting of external links. Which means we would have to ask folks to request for promotions if they wanted to do that, not a huge deal though. If that doesn't work then we might consider email validation, which personally I hate sites that do that, but is probably the next big step. I will also look for a plugin that might allow us to set an initial post threshold where others have to approve before edits are accepted.
Please give me some feedback on the group permission change for edits with external links. My thought is that we would ask the new users to post on a page that we all watch and first Admin that notices can do the promotion. I believe it's possible to enable auto-promotions after X number of edits, but there's been known deficiencies in how mediawiki deals with promotions, if those are addressed I will look at that option as well. --Lotroadmin (talk) 13:03, 26 June 2013 (EDT)
Is it possible to auto-promote after X number of days? If so, create a new starting user class same as current one but without the post external link ability. Then auto-promote them to the normal starting user class after a week or two. I think most spam editors will not bother if they have to wait certain amount of time before they can start spamming external links, while most legitimate editors won't mind the small wait.
Also by the way, I am not Administrator level so I could only block User:Thompson254 from editting pages. An admin like one of you two still needs to delete the account at some point.
-Shardis (talk) 15:12, 26 June 2013 (EDT)
Hmmm... to my way of thinking, except for the List of Kinships pages, I see no reason for any new user to post an external link -- and really for very few others as well.... especially now that the Lorebook is about to become history (next week) and none of the other LOTRO sites have been updated in ages. We seem to be "the only game in town."
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:43, 26 June 2013 (EDT)

Speaking for myself, I don't have a problem with requiring an email to register. I've done it so many times now on various websites, I have the process streamlined. I have a hotmail account, set up for catching spam and holding all my various registrations from across the internet. But I do see the value in keeping it maximally easy for new editors to come in and start fixing typos or adding items or character pages or whatever they want right away.

We may not get a ton of traffic for adding kinships to the kin indexes, but it is a legitimate thing to do here, and most of them want to include a link to their kin site. If we do decide to take away the ability of brand new users to post links (and that seems like a reasonable step to me) then I would also advocate for giving them some obvious way to petition for a promotion to gain that ability. Most people wouldn't have any need to do so, but the option should be there. I'm also a little intrigued by the sound of a plugin that would require new edits to be moderated. We're already patrolling new edits for base-level users, and that could be the next step up. The trouble with both of those options is that we don't have a lot of active administrators at the moment. I'd hate to make somebody wait indefinitely because all the admins are asleep, or gone inactive for a few days or weeks. -- Elinnea (talk) 19:28, 26 June 2013 (EDT)

So i've made some changes that hopefully will help fight the war on spam, but it's not what I was after. Please provide feedback especially if you belong to user, ninja or editor groups.
  • I've enabled two auto-promoted groups, autoconfirmed and emailconfirmed.
  • autoconfirmed or emailconfirmed users can now skip captcha. We could require both to skip captcha or disable again.
    autoconfirmed hopefully requires a fortnight of daily edits before the minor promotion.
  • I noticed protected pages were not always protected, so editor level and higher can edit protected pages.
    Keep in mind that the few pages which are protected can start thousands of jobs on the server per edit (save page), not because of vandalism.
Sadly there is no way to prevent new accounts from adding external links, but it will prompt them to play with the captcha cats again. (I think this is why I never enabled auto promotion)
There seems to be several dozen anti-spam extensions these days so I will continue the searching for one that disables external links for the user group, but so far no luck.
--Lotroadmin (talk) 00:47, 27 June 2013 (EDT)

Who's on First...

With RTC moving to inactive status. I have no idea who still "Bots". Or what is involved in one here.

Elinnea and I have been discussing the need for one to edit all "Skills" to accomidate the new ToolTip functionality, as well as to "clean-up" several other old template issues. See: User_talk:Elinnea#Fix_for_Template_Skill

Any advice?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:58, 28 June 2013 (EDT)
Do you know if RTC used pywikimediabot? That's probably something I would recommend as it allows you to throttle edits (i know hinney used it). I would also recommend creating a bot account to help with minimize recent change thrash and might be easier to revert changes if needed. --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:14, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Looking at User:RingTailBot he evidently did both (a bot account and Python). ... but that's all I know about bots and botting... :)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:54, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Changes to Tooltip template and Skills, etc.

Please see: Template_talk:Skill#Change_to_be_tooltip

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:49, 30 June 2013 (EDT)

Welcome page

I just noticed that apparently none of the newly created accounts has the {{Welcome}} template added to their home page.

Has this always been true? Or did something change with a "recent" update.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:20, 16 July 2013 (EDT)
It's always been a manual process started by Xander and duties passed on to other editors throughout the year. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:34, 16 July 2013 (EDT)
The "Welcome" was usually on the talk page of the user if I remember well. -- Goingbald (talk) 03:12, 17 July 2013 (EDT)

That was my next question -- I had started to put it on a few recent (July's) accounts "talk pages" but then decided... are people more likely to look at their home page or their talk page first? So then I put it on a few home pages (June's) ... and a couple of accounts have it on BOTH! -- the only thing consistent about me is my inconsistency:)

Using Special Pages User list sorted by creation date, it looks like for at least the past year (1000 entries) there have been very few accounts "updated" with the welcome message.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:50, 17 July 2013 (EDT)

Don't know if that was an exercise in futility, machochism or what... I just went back for all accounts created since 1 April and 2013 and added {{Welcome}} to their User Talk page and [[Category:Users]] to their User page... something which I noticed that Sethladan (I think it was) had been doing for a while.

Maybe that will stir up some additional editing interest, maybe not.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:21, 17 July 2013 (EDT)
I believe the intent was for the user talk pages since that's the page they get the alert. I'm not sure if there's been a rhyme or reason other than a fellow user noticed them updating a page. I think more often than not it's added when someone new needed a bit of guidance and that was a great ice-breaker. I will typically add the welcome template if they reach my radar on a promotion, but 9 times out of 10 it's already there. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:51, 17 July 2013 (EDT)

Minor Edits

I've seen a lot of edits recently that change the meaning on a page or add new material to the page and but marked as "minor edits". I assume we operate on the same principal as Wikipedia i.e.

A check to the minor edit box signifies that only superficial differences exist between the current and previous versions. Examples include typographical corrections, formatting and presentational changes, and rearrangements of text without modification of its content. A minor edit is one that the editor believes requires no review and could never be the subject of a dispute
By contrast, a major edit is one that should be reviewed for its acceptability to all concerned editors. Therefore, any change that affects the meaning of an article is not minor, even if the edit concerns a single word; for example, the addition or removal of "not", which can change the meaning of a sentence, is a major edit.

If this is the case then it might be worth re-emphasizing the point in contributors corner so everyone is aware of the difference. While I don't deny that I in the past may have been guilty of this indiscretion myself some recent infractions are pretty overt. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Snarpel (Contribs • User Talk) at 13:58, 22 July 2013‎.

I don't think we are as rigorous as wikipedia marking edits as minor, but the same meaning should be encouraged here. I always consider that each edit can send an email to a user who is watching that page so if you make an edit that should be a consideration, any additional edits for that day should be marked as minor. There is a concept of "patrolled" edits that most use though, once promoted it's generally assumed your edits are in good faith and mostly correct, vs new accounts where we are concerned with spam. For editors that use bots to edit the wiki we do encourage them to create a dedicated bot account which are not displayed under the recent changes by default. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:08, 25 July 2013 (EDT)
  • Sorry... been off the grid since 19 July -- I moved, and Verizon simply could not get my phone to work ... they kept calling my no-working phone trying to get into the building! Duh...
"Minor Edits" are another "one of those Wiki things I don't really understand." I probably never mark mine as such, mainly because I forget about the check box. I use the "require edit summary" setting in preferences... which kind of does the same thing -- namely if I'm doing "simple" edits, I tend to just use "upd" for update, as the reason, and let folks use the history diff to see what I was doing. Some editors do check the "Mark all edits minor by default" in Preferences/Editing, but I think that is mainly editors who have been around... I don't know how many "newbees" even look at their preferences...:)
I assume (for no particular rational reason) that the default setting for new wiki accounts is to have that "minor" box "unchecked;" therefore requiring an action by the editor to "uncheck" the box on the page while saving the edit. OR, put another way, I assume that the default "edit page" has that box automatically checked. But I don't know how things are setup, and I've mucked with my preferences to the point they are "well muddied."
I suppose there is some "useful" sorting feature concerning "minor edits" -- but I don't use it (or even know what it is.) It was only very recently that I discovered that "Recent Discussions" was driven by a list of pages to be watched! Talk_Pages_Watchlist. (Glad to see you updated it as RTC was the one maintaining it lately.
A similar issue surrounds the concept of "Patrolled" edits. And the creation of "User and User_Talk" pages for new accounts. ... all of these thing are points which are missing from "The Editors Guide" ... which is also missing :) Every once in some random time period, I pick up on this project .. User:Magill/Project-Documentation. I tend to worry about and write more documentation than most people... but that's not much. Throughout my career in DP (yeah, I'm one of those old fogies from before it became IT) I always bugged my superiors by asking for documentation on this or that, especially when I knew that it didn't exist, and that certain "things" were simply folklore passed along by oral-tradition... and heaven help us when those "links to the past" go missing. So we wind up with situations like -- new accounts ... where the User page and doesn't get created, and the Welcome message doesn't get inserted into their talk page -- until someone realizes that it isn't done automatically when the account is created (could it be done?) but that someone has to do it manually. I just recently "caught up" with pages for those who had created accounts and actually done editing back through April...
So I guess we need a guide or series of guides which relate to the various "ranks' of editors. While there are "Community" categories and pages listing "Rights and Privileges" ... not only are they hard to find (even when you know they exist), but they don't list or explain things that you are EXPECTED to do, or explain things like "Bypass IP blocks, auto-blocks and range blocks" -- that must mean something tasty (or nasty), but I have no idea what these "blocks" are or who/how these blocks get setup in the first place. (Not that I really care, that one just jumped out at me, being a retired Unix SysAdmin who spent much more time "inventing" the Internet than Al Gore.)
One major need which has become obvious to me with RTC's "retiring," we definitely need an itemization of "maintenance" tasks like editing the Talk_Pages_Watchlist or inserting {{Welcome}} on a users Talk page, or using [[Category:Users]] to create a new users' home page. An explanation of "Patrolling" is another one. I don't doubt that there are others we have "lost" over time. I've just tried to come up to speed on "bots," but being a non-Python Person, and the current turmoil in pywikipedia-bot-land it has been fun. RTC is answering questions I come up with, but trying to figure out how something is supposed to work, vs how it appears to work is problematic. (As we recently discovered with the Trait template).
Maybe with the release of Helm's Deep in the Fall, some of our old (i.e. long time) Editors will return. I don't know.
I'm starting to ramble... so it's time to shut up for now... Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:59, 25 July 2013 (EDT)
My understanding was that adding {{Welcome}} and patrolling would go hand-in-hand. Once editors have been around for a while and have been promoted, then their edits are automatically patrolled, but until then it basically serves as a way to make sure that changes made by new editors are actually valid changes and not vandalism. You would check through the unpatrolled edits and mark them patrolled if there were no problems. At the same time, if the edits were made by a completely new editor, you would add {{Welcome}} to their talk page and [[Category:Users]] to their user page. That way it all got taken care of and it was possible to give any pointers to people as they started rather than someone noticing a problem by chance after they had been doing something for months. Amphoras (talkTalk to me!) 23:25, 1 August 2013 (EDT)
There also used to be (not sure if its still the same) a lot of accounts created that never actually made any edits. I imagine that adding {{Welcome}} only when they actually start editing would help keep the wiki smaller, rather than having lots of extra pages (however small each is) that are never going to be visited. Amphoras (talkTalk to me!) 23:35, 1 August 2013 (EDT)

Upgraded to MW1.21

I've upgrade to stay current with spamblacklist, let me know if you experience any issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:42, 6 September 2013 (EDT)

Seems like Cats-vs-Dogs captcha is preventing URLs on talk pages for normal users. Perhaps this is a happy accident? Any new accounts that show at least one worthy edits can request to be promoted until this is address. --Lotroadmin (talk) 03:13, 6 September 2013 (EDT)
I've noticed some wonkiness in the header and sidebar display when I use Chrome. An example:
Internet Explorer seems to be doing fine. I don't have any other browsers on my current computer to check. -- Elinnea (talk) 09:00, 6 September 2013 (EDT)
Yeah saw the same issue too, I was hoping this was just a server-side cache issue but appears either a bug or configuration setting cause a browser-cache problem. For me it works fine for firefox, safari, chrome and IE, so hopefully folks can clear their browser cache to fix the issue, otherwise it will take 4 weeks for this to be corrected by the browser :( --Lotroadmin (talk) 14:31, 6 September 2013 (EDT)
It's okay now after I've been browsing around for a while, or if I force a single page to refresh. As long as there's a solution. :) -- Elinnea (talk) 21:43, 6 September 2013 (EDT)
I haven't seen any issues with Safari. However, I've also never seen "Personal Tools" ... ever... Is this a preference I haven't found yet?
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 09:17, 7 September 2013 (EDT)
I don't see those either when it's working correctly. I'm guessing they're more behind-the-scenes titles for the sections that display in the header.
I've also noticed some small improvements - the way it handles patrolling is now pretty slick. And the spam bots have died down since the upgrade - here's hoping the blacklist keeps working! -- Elinnea (talk) 12:55, 7 September 2013 (EDT)
I've reviewed, resorted and reviewed again the wiki group permissions and confirm edit settings. At this time, captcha is enabled for users, emailconfirmed and auto confirmed accounts, to skip captcha triggers, please ask for a promotion. Probably the main captcha trigger will be the "addurl" and it doesn't always work and even though that is a bug with confirm edit, it's really become a feature to stop spam. For any new editors please ask any of the admins for a promotion once you've shown one reasonable edit. Fellow admins and editors with promotion powers, please promote any new user to ninja status if you've seen a reasonable edit. --Lotroadmin (talk) 18:26, 13 September 2013 (EDT)

Experiment with CAPTCHA and SPAM

I would like to attempt removing captcha for most triggers including account creation and page edits, but have it trigger on 'addurl' for all new accounts. Folks wanting to add a URL can just request a promotion. I think this is a worthy experiment since most edits don't add a URL. Any thoughts? --Lotroadmin (talk) 15:59, 16 September 2013 (EDT)

I don't know what is doing what, when ...
Several times in the recent past (most recently on the 14th) I've tried to create a page containing "notes" so I can remember stuff (senior moments and all that). Most recently: User:Magill/Project-Coursera-LOTRO-1
Note that the 2 urls are surrounded by "nowiki" tags... because, even though the preview showed them correctly and with no problems, when I tried to save the page two things happened: 1- some "warning page" pops up complaining about the URLs and 2- the "back" link takes you to the page prior to any changes... not to a page containing the "error" so that you can correct it.
So, basically, something is apparently preventing anyone from adding certain URLs.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 07:49, 18 September 2013 (EDT)
There is an extension called SpamBlacklist that is blocking that URL. If a safe URL is blocked you can add it to the MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist page. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:51, 18 September 2013 (EDT)
I found that until I earned Ninja status, I couldn't add an external link to an edit. The CAPTCHA (or CATcha as it were... sorry, couldn't resist) would just keep coming up, never accepting my selection of all the cats. If you want people to request the promotion to be able to add links, shouldn't you just mention that instead? Was the continued rejection of the correct CAPTCHA response unintended? Tuveneil (talk) 16:31, 28 September 2013 (EDT)
Sorry about that, looks like I edited the wrong addurl page to change the text to inform new users to request promotion. There is a bug in the CAPTCHA extension that makes the feature useless on any new links to a page for normal users. A huge annoyance to both new editor and spammers, but when we notice anyone with a few legit edits i've been trying to promote them. --Lotroadmin (talk) 17:56, 28 September 2013 (EDT)
Just wanted to add the URL of our kin (Snowbourn, Rangers of Eriador - rangersoferiador.com); happy to let someone else do that but it's INCREDIBLY frustrating at the momentAedfrith (talk) 06:14, 1 October 2013 (EDT)Aedfrith
You should be able to add that URL now as you have been promoted to Ninja... If you still cannot addd the URL, please let us know. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:23, 1 October 2013 (EDT)
Having same problem as above, CAPTCHA keeps coming up while selecting cats. I'm trying to re-link a dev diary to an archived copy of the page on web.archive.org since Turbine broke all old links with the revamp of their communities. Anyone who can give a promotion?
--Godun (talk) 08:19, 2 October 2013 (EDT)

Documentation Project

Please see Help talk:Editing Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:57, 27 September 2013 (EDT)

Looks pretty good! Was there a question I missed or a hint for me to correct my editing ways?  :) --Lotroadmin (talk) 18:02, 28 September 2013 (EDT)

Warning: This page contains too many expensive parser function calls.

Just making some random updates on Decoration Items and hit this

Warning: This page contains too many expensive parser function calls.
It should have less than 500 calls, there are now 504 calls.

It's not obvious to me what the culprit is. It appears to have been present for some time,

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:31, 3 October 2013 (EDT)
There's trade offs with server load, page load times and impact to users with older computers with extremely long pages. My recommendation is to move the decoration items to individual pages or review the parser function expressions in those templates to see if they can be reduced. If neither is a good option I can see about increasing the limits to see if this impacts server load in a negative way. It's interesting that the reported default limit is 99, not 500 and yet I haven't adjusted that variable. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:14, 3 October 2013 (EDT)
The page takes ages to load; definitely recommend splitting out at least some of the larger sections. Alternately, switch to using plain links instead of the Reward template, like I did back in June 2012. Sethladan 22:43, 3 October 2013 (EDT)

Future Webhost Upgrades

Over the next several weeks I will be migrating to a newer version of Linux which will also upgrade various software packages like apache, php, sphinx and even migrate mysql to mariadb. This upgrade is really a migration to a neighboring server so there's no downtime but could be brief interruptions or performance issues we will need to work through.

Please let me know if I should:
  • migrate the testwiki or disband it;
  • remove any unused extensions like Liquid Threads (unsupported extension) and perhaps Semantic MediaWiki (rarely used, but there are some SMW properties).

DNS provider has been extremely gracious over the years by allowing us to exceed the "DNS queries per month" by 2x but they are now asking me to upgrade to a plan that costs 12x more, so I will be migrating to a new DNS server rather soon.

Must be DYN DNS folks (I got the same warning) :) -- This is undoubtedly an artifact of things like my constant use of "preview" -- one assumes that each page reload requires a DNS lookup!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:40, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
Everyone SHOULD be using "Preview" constantly! Would save a lot of mess, hahah. Sethladan 14:30, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
  • After the OS upgrade I will be experimenting with browser cache settings. In the past this hasn't worked to well with MW, perhaps latest versions of the software packages will be more successful.

Also for the javascript guru's I would like to hold an IRC chat to discuss minimizing the number of overall javascript pages we have. Several of the online website optimization sites indicate issues with over all number of javascript files and the use of "?" prevents caching in certain scenarios.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 00:23, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
Unless there are any contraindications, I'd say keep SMW. There's a mountain of untapped potential there (although we've been saying that for ages and never really capitalizing on it). I happened to notice RTC did some magic with mob drops that can be built on with a little more work, and there are some very helpful little things we could do with quests and items, etc. I know you and I had talked about some more database-like options way back when, so if keeping the extension up to date is an issue, we could look into other stuff instead.
LiquidThreads can go, and good riddance I say. The only thing would be the few pages hanging around that haven't been converted over to plain wikitext - would that info be lost and do we care?
Regarding testwiki, it's nice to have a clean environment (for example, in which to clean up the Javascript code and merge it into one file!) but I'm not sure it's absolutely necessary. Depending on what's there and who - if anyone - continues doing dev work there, it might be safe to wipe it and have just a fresh install of MediaWiki with one or two pages and that's it. Depends on the cost (time, money, effort) involved in maintaining it and if you would benefit from shrinking it or just dropping it altogether.
Javascript pages - you've been after us to condense them for ages. Will try to remember to take a look and see what can be done. Having them split out was EoD's big thing, said it was helpful for debugging, but I can't see a reason we can't have at least everything-that-works all in one place. Sethladan 13:21, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
Liquid threads can go -- is it possible to "recover" the content from those pages... I've tried numerous times to edit them to fix page reference changes, but cannot. ... otherwise, what Seth said.
The "mob drops" have been actively pursued by others (User_talk:Savitara#Moblore_template) who have created new Creature templates to utilize those thingies ("properties" or whatever they are called).
The Testwiki is a useful item... but hardly used anymore.
As for Javascript. I suppose that the recent implantation of "pop-up" tool-tips for Skills, Dffects, etc. is one recent and large change. Other than that, I don't speak Javascript. :)
Especially moving things like the "Map" pages to some central location, rather than hidden in a private sandbox. That is one area I have not addressed at all in the "Great Documentation Project."
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:57, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
Re: Recovering LiquidThreads pages, I've in the past manually copy-pasted and reformatted stuff for smaller pages, but there are some lengthy discussions that would take a while to do this for. Not aware of any automated process for extracting the info. :( Sethladan 14:28, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
I use testwiki from time to time, both to test things that would be very disruptive, or to look back and see what disruptive tests other people were doing at various points in the past. It's a handy resource for some of the knowledgeable editors who aren't around actively any more. That being said, I don't go there all that often so if it's a hassle to migrate and keep around it might be fine to let it go.
I will similarly shed no tears over the loss of Liquid Threads. What pages are still out there that use it? It's been a while since I saw a talk page that was still in threaded format. -- Elinnea (talk) 20:24, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
For what pages still have LiquidThreads, check here. It's mostly user talk pages (Lotroadmin, Magill, RTC, Zimoon, Kadi), but there are a few remnants in Help and Quest talks. Sethladan 20:49, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
  • I see several references to threads under my user... however, other than displaying them at the link Seth mentions here, I cannot access them... nor can I see them from the page I call LQT archive. Is there any way to capture/edit their content? Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:37, 5 October 2013 (EDT)

Okay so I will punt liquid threads and keep SMW. I'm perfectly okay with keeping testwiki around and will probably migrate that rather soon so we can use that to test mariadb, sphinx and the new server. I'm not at all sure what to do with existing LQ pages, so if there stuff you want to keep please migrate them now. BTW, it was dyndns and they've been great from day one, but I'm not willing to pay 12x more when the current webhost offers a dns as part of the VPS costs. I did notice that the number of DNS queries was close to the number of visits, but was significantly less than the number of pageviews and hits, which probably means those previews don't cause a dns query. I will migrate the DNS over the weekend, I don't expect this to be rocky for normal users, but it might be for editors for a few hours until all the DNS servers catches up.

For those unix gurus interested, my plan is to migrate from Fedora to Arch Linux since they have the rolling release and should be easier to keep the OS current. With each Linux distro's there are positive and negatives but I think Arch Linux has just the right balance of flexibility and usability. And honestly how could you pass on a Linux distro with a package manager named 'pacman'? Seriously? Hopefully with testwiki we can spend some cycles testing it to make sure it's tuned for us, but like any of the past webhost migrations there's always a few gotchas and then several week of fine tuning.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 01:57, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
It's always fascinating to watch the ebb and flow of Linux distributions. "Arch Linux" is apparently the current winner, seeming to replace Ubuntu --- although according to ZDnet, it's Android! https://www.zdnet.com/the-most-popular-end-user-linux-distributions-are-7000017223/ -- but Linux.com still lists OpenSuse, which I could have sworn died several years ago.... oh well, it all depends on what lists you are subscribed to! (I used to run Suse on my now-finally-retired Alphas!)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk
Any need for the Gadget extension? --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:27, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
I never quite understood the benefit of the Gadgets extension (although I can see the point, to let people enable or disable given JavaScript). I suppose it could be used to let people turn on or off tooltips or something like that, but Special:Gadgets is as empty as the day you installed it, so while there might be some potential uses, I don't see any point in keeping it around until such a need actually arises. Sethladan 12:28, 8 October 2013 (EDT)
I will probably remove Gadgets tonight then. I will remove Liquid Theads over the weekend to give anyone time to migrate data they want to keep, sadly this text is stored in another table, so when the extension is removed the text will no longer appear. Both extensions can be brought back, but liquid threads development appears to be cancelled. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:54, 8 October 2013 (EDT)
  • DNS Migration should be complete. Let me know if you experience any issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:50, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
  • LiquidThreads extension disabled along with DataValues --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:37, 12 October 2013 (EDT)

strange sort response

type "template" -- use the suggested "Containing Template".... all you get is a blank page. However, "templates" works as expected.

I have noticed this with other similar searches. "I think" they have all been related to other than the main or standard namespace. (i.e. looking for Categories or Templates)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:55, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
Both work for me when selecting the "containing template" Can you post a screenshot? Might also identify version of the browser. --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:31, 6 October 2013 (EDT)
No problems here. Sethladan 01:58, 6 October 2013 (EDT)

Screenshot is "easy" It's a blank page when searching for the singular "template." It simply never returns. The plural however returns instantly with the expected information.
By blank page, I mean blank -- nada --nothing -- no wiki header/ads or sidebar
This is Safari 6.0.5 on OSX 10.8.5.

... the url for the singular in the top shows as: https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php?search=template&title=Special%3ASearch&fulltext=1 same as for the plural.

Is there any local Java involved?... I have ONLY Java 7 (64-bt) installed. i.e.no Java 6 libraries installed.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:13, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
Java's not used. Sadly I don't have this issue, but let me tweak timeouts on the server tonight to see if that helps. --Lotroadmin (talk) 17:31, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
I've made a change, let me know if things improve for you --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:30, 7 October 2013 (EDT)

No change. The strange thing is .. for "Template," I get two suggestions -- "template sandbox" and "containing." Selecting "template sandbox," it goes there directly, but "containing" simply yields that blank page ... with no lotro-wike "adornments." :Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 11:36, 8 October 2013 (EDT) I should add... using the various developer hooks... the page being displayed is a complete page...

<html>
  <head></head>
  <body></body>
</html>

And a bit more... it turns out there is a 500 error being generated -- Internal Server error.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 11:44, 8 October 2013 (EDT)
I also cleared the server-cache last night as a long shot, but no luck there. So I assume firefox/chrome work fine and just Safari has the blank page on your Mac? What extensions are you using with Safari? (BTW, I don't have those issues on either one of my macs, adblock installed, flash and java not installed). Another long shot, but curious if one of the advertisements is causing issues here if blocked? I've never experienced that with lotro-wiki, but other sites I have where they employ popups. So both of these result in a blank page?
advanced search
search bar
I will do a wiki update tonight and try to review the logs. Can you confirm this isn't an issue with other browsers? Can you also try with "https://lotro-wiki.com"? --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:50, 8 October 2013 (EDT)

No extensions (extensions disabled)... it does work as expected with Firefox, UNTIL I log in!!! then it fails the same way. I log out and it works again. Yup... safari works the same way -- log out and all is as expected... log in and get a blank page.

For search preferences I have 100 hits per page and "enable simplified" and search in all namespaces.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:53, 8 October 2013 (EDT)
Bingo - your search preferences did the trick - error log actually blames liquid threads:

PHP Fatal error: __clone method called on non-object in extensions/LiquidThreads/classes/Hooks.php on line 260

I planned on disabling liquid threads over the weekend but if you wish, and no one raises issue, I can disable it sooner. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:12, 8 October 2013 (EDT)
Congratulations on finding the needle! I don't even want to think about how the two might be related -- No rush on disabling it. I've lived with the silly quirk this long...
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 11:21, 9 October 2013 (EDT)

An observation about transclusions..

I don't know if this is a new effect or if it has "always" been this way and I just never noticed before.

If you take a section of Stable-master and transcludes it into another page Travelling#Stables -- what was a section of text (top of the page) which is broken up into paragraphs by blank lines in the source, when transcluded, becomes a block of text.

To get the first paragraph in the destination, I added <br /> to the source page.

Note that the "trigger" is the <blockquote> in the destination page -- i.e. removing them makes it work as expected.

It's easy to fix either way, I just never noticed the interaction with <blockquote> before.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:19, 12 October 2013 (EDT)

IRC Chat

IRC Chat on Saturday, October 19th at 2pm EDT (11am PDT)

We haven't done an IRC chat in a very long time and was curious if anyone was up to having one on the 19th? My only agenda topic will be to discuss the up and coming webhost server upgrades and request for testers, but others topics are welcome in addition to the typical meet and greet of admins, editors and curious bystanders. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:25, 14 October 2013 (EDT)

Fine with me... afternoon onwards EST (or is it still EDT) is best for me. Pick a time. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:49, 14 October 2013 (EDT)
I'd love to. It feels like ages since I talked with anybody here in real time. Afternoon/early evening would be fine here. -- Elinnea (talk) 14:59, 14 October 2013 (EDT)
How about 11 AM PDT then? Also I we might want to discuss long pages and user javascript pages. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:01, 15 October 2013 (EDT)
I'll be around. :) Sethladan 10:53, 15 October 2013 (EDT)
Ok.. I've put it on my calendar... now all I have to do is wake up that early :) ... bad habits, like staying up till 3 or 4 am... oh wait PDT -- lets see, that's 2pm EDT,Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:59, 15 October 2013 (EDT)

testwiki is migrated

There's an issue with server side cache, you might not notice if you are logged in, but please feel free to test anything. For those that don't know it's testwiki skunark net, please don't make it a live URL on this wiki (avoiding spam/search bots) --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:26, 22 October 2013 (EDT)

Collapsing sidebars are behaving a little oddly (close and then open, or open and then close). There's nothing in any of the site-wide .js files so I'm not quite sure where the hyperactivity is coming from. Sethladan 15:31, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
I thought the auto-collapsable sidebars was a feature :) I somehow managed to get the toolbox to stay open, but I've been focused on getting the php5.5 cache enabled and haven't debugged that yet. With the php-cache, I might have to downgrade to 5.4 if I can't resolve that over the weekend. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:56, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
I've fixed the auto-collapsable issue, (a 1.21 -> 1.22 upgrade issue) and also installed/enabled memcached on testwki. Memcached is a common server side cache that is used on larger wikis, so thought I might try it out for testwiki. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:27, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
When you say migrated, you mean the server software only, correct? No content has been moved over yet.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 06:20, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
Whee, glad to see that fixed, and I guess you'll just have to be aware of that for if/when you upgrade the main wiki, too. From the version info, I guess the Vector extension was the culprit? And it seems like Memcached is used all over the place, so hopefully it'll help us here. Won't really get to stress-test it on testwiki, but if you're happy at how it's working there then I'm happy, heh. Sethladan 14:50, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
Testwiki is fully migrated, data on a new machine and all new software like php, apache and updated mediawiki to the latest alpha
Yup it was the vector skin, I normally upgrade MW on two wikis before i upgrade MW on lotro-wiki and that normally helps me catch everything. It's mostly scripted now, just have to do a manual scrub of defeatured settings like the vector skin. Server migrations are always a little more rocky though, different software versions works differently. i.e. we are using php5.5 and it's not officially supported yet, so that might delay when we migrate lotro-wiki to the new server, but the only issue is with server side cache. There's ways to stress test a server, but nothing comes close to actual users clicking around on the site and then report any issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:27, 23 October 2013 (EDT)

mumble

I have mumble.lotro-wiki.com is up and running on the new webhost, if it doesn't consume much resources, we probably can run it locally. Feel free to register a user and leave a message of your username so I can promote you. Consider this a trial run and if you are a mumble guru and know how to set up the permissions and channels let me know. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:29, 22 October 2013 (EDT)

  • What port do you have configured? The default port 64738 is not working … simply getting "host unreachable" -- however, I can ssh to it. (no account so I can't login).
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 20:09, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
Ah yes.. it is the default port… One of those quirks … had to quit and restart Mumble client to get it to connect.
One thing to consider is creating a certificate for the server. It's not necessary, but would (I think) enhance access controls. -- I don't really know how they work in that regard.

The OTG server has a self-signed certificate, and when you login you create one of your own and save it.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 20:22, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
It was rather easy to set up so I haven't looked through all the options. I assume we can change certificates when needed, vs having to restart all over if we set up channels and such? --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:52, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
I don't recall if I asked this before... is there a way to restrict the viewing of a page to "registered users" or "Ninja" etc. -- working on Mumble
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 06:56, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
The default port for a Murmur server is UDP and TCP 64738. I don't know if the client defaults to that or if you have to configure it. I think you have to configure the port number in the client.
  • I've created a bunch of Channels which match the Projects listing.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 09:06, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
  • Is this a quirk of Wiki?
If one creates a link like: [irc://irc.freenode.net/LOTRO-wiki #Lotro-wiki] ... it works as expected. It launches (in my case) Colloquy, and connects me to the expected chat channel.
However, [mumble://magill@mumble.lotro-wiki.com:64738/?version=1.2.0] does not launch mumble.
If I create [[irc://]] and mumble:// I get very different results on the page:
  • [[irc://]]
  • mumble://
This implies to me that the IRC entry is somehow "known" to MediaWiki, and causes the appropriate action (a launch url) to be created.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:07, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
With the port, it's the murmur server default, mumble clients should just auto configure to it.
I will look into the mumble://, i'm guessing i will have to enable something.
As for hiding pages from unregisters users, it's an all or nothing feature, something we can do on the testwiki, but probably not something we can do on lotro-wiki. I have no issues broadcasting our trial mumble server since it allows channel security. We should try to configure where:
  1. No one can talk in the top channel
  2. Unregistered users need to register and wait for promotion to gain access to channels, nice thing is you don't need to be around to get promoted.
  3. Channels require a certain group to enter. I'm guessing we only need to add a users type group since we have admin and auth.
  4. Hopefully there's enough bandwidth where this just becomes a perk for editors and admins beyond editing discussions.
I will cap the number of slots to not impact the lotro-wiki, but we might have to consider ending the trial and consider other hosts. We have tons of extra bandwidth, it just boils down to memory load. I have noticed a few performance issues with backups, so I might actually consider another server to take on those duties, which we could probably run mumble on. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:49, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
The [mumble://mumble.lotro-wiki.com mumble link] should work now --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:12, 23 October 2013 (EDT)
Yes, it does, thank you. I put descriptions of how to go "straight" to the mumble server on the Mumble page.
I've gotten a bit sidetracked since "Tuesday" -- been upgrading to 10.9 and related stuff -- it's really painful on a 2meg DSL Line... boy do I miss my 20meg FIOS!
For what its worth... OTG has a "manual" interface between their Forums and murmer. A Guild Officer has to look-up the "registered" mumble user and then "register" them for access to the channels. I have to finish reading the ACL stuff, as I believe that is how they control access. (So far, I haven't been able to contact the people who actually administer murmer, only the "game level" admins who are responsible to "register" folks.... one of those "chain of trust" deals... I don't know them, they don't know me... have to relay the request up the chain... sigh.
And I should add, it was all setup 2 administrations ago :)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:02, 24 October 2013 (EDT)
  • At the moment, I don't know if the Mac Client for Mumble works the same as the ??? client -- the "Advanced" check seems to only change the options for modifying the client. None of the docs I have found so far describe it. And the docs describe actions that I don't find it performing... so off to the Mumble forums... :( (I don't see any of the ACL info for example.)
  • There are still quite a number of "terms/functions" that "obviously" are understood in some context; however, I have not clue what that context is. "Link" is one for example.
  • Phrases like: "Adding an authenticated user can be done through various means." -- "various means" are undefined as is "Authenticated user"... it's obviously something past the certificate creation authentication and the "+" on the icon relates to it... but it's undefined as far as I can tell so far. (I really don't want to get involved in ANOTHER documentation project.) Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:50, 24 October 2013 (EDT)
I think mumble is something we can figure out as we go. If folks use it and we hit an issue we can discuss on how to correct it then. As for authentication, all i would expect is someone to register their id on the server and then ask for a promotion on the mumble talk page which we all can watch and then we can manually promote them. At least for now that should work, and since mumble has a wiki that discusses installation, configuration, etc we can just link to that and focus on our usage model. If it does become popular, i'm sure we will need to address a few things, but I think it's a good start.
BTW, my hunch is mumble.lotro-wiki.com will be like IRC and might not see a lot of traffic for editing discussions because of timezones differences, but i would expect editors and their friends use it to hang out as they play if they so desire. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:01, 24 October 2013 (EDT)

I don't know if this change will impact MediaWiki -- New Unicode domain names will break your software...

Programmers (and to a lesser extent, software users),

As you may know, new Internet domain name extensions are rolling out
this week.  I hadn't been paying too much attention, but I just
realized that it will likely break a lot of software.  It's a mini-Y2K
problem.  Why?  Unicode vs ASCII.

Details:

I knew that the domain name extensions (or "gTLDs" - Generic Top Level
Domains) would no longer be limited to the original seven:
- .com
- .edu
- .gov
- .int
- .mil
- .net
- .org
or even to the new ones added in the past decade or so:
- .biz
- .info
- .name
- .pro
- .aero
- .coop
- .museum
- .asia
- .cat
- .jobs
- .mobi
- .tel
- .travel
- etc...

So, I knew that any softwre that assumed the gTlD was 3 chars or less
would break, but I figured most programmers would be smart enough to
not build such an assumption into their software.

However, I saw an article today that says 4 gTLDs are rolling out that
are Arabic, Cyryllic, and Chinese words.  So they consist of Arabic,
Cyryllic, and Chinese (Unicode) characters.  

Oops!  We can no longer assume that e-mail addresses and Internet
domain names consist entirely of ASCII chars -- we have to support
Unicode in all of them now.

Start reviewing your software for places where this will cause
problems.  And start thinking about software packages, services, and
servers you use that may break as a result.

BTW, business owners should also start thinking about whether to
register their own custom gTLDs before someone else grabs them.

For more info, here are some links to info about the new gTLDs:

And here's the press release that got me thinking about it:

FYI,
--Fred

Copyright (c) 2013,  Software, Inc.
Nope not a concern. --Lotroadmin (talk) 14:15, 26 October 2013 (EDT)

calling all testers - aoe dot lotro-wiki.com

I have a snapshot of the wiki at aoe lotro-wiki com. You will note that the map tooltips work fine but the others don't work or behave weirdly, from past upgrades this is expected and probably something we can't test until after the upgrade. There's an issue with extra lines past the footer and some weirdness in the sidebar, if you notice anything else, please let me know here. (i.e incorrect text characters) BTW, any edits on the aoe version can be wiped at any time as I will periodically update the data from the this wiki. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:04, 3 November 2013 (EST)

Things are progressing pretty good on the new webhost and if I have time this weekend I will migrate the wiki to the new webhost. Let me know if you see any glaring issues on the new webhost. I did sync the database last night but forgot about the image files, so there might be some missing images on this snapshot. --Lotroadmin (talk) 17:51, 8 November 2013 (EST)
I haven't done any extensive testing, but what I've looked at is acting how I would expect. -- Elinnea (talk) 09:44, 9 November 2013 (EST)
I think I will pull the trigger in the late night/early morning, which means I will lock the old version from edits, final sync and then the DNS update. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:52, 9 November 2013 (EST)

load times

Is there something different about the Main wiki? I'm seeing incredibly long load times for pages, both while editing and just viewing -- frequently the page never completes loading and I have to quit the load and refresh. (for those times, I just have a blank page displaying.) I don't know if it is an effect of my Mavericks upgrade (Safari) or the new Ads I'm seeing. I can't absolutely say that it is unique to the WIKI, as I've "always" had similar issues with the LOTRO Forums. Doesn't seem to bother the game, just HTML traffic. It could also just be my 2meg Verizon DSL line.
It looks like I'll be getting a Comcast Internet link sometime after next Friday (15th), so I'll have to see what the "new world" looks like.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:34, 9 November 2013 (EST)
Nothing changed for the MAIN wiki in a long time, and there's nothing showing up in the logs either. if you can compare the page load times of the same page between lotto-wiki and the aoe.lotro-wiki and between two browsers that might shed some light. Also do the comparison being logged in vs logged out to seek if server page caching makes a difference. With that said, there are periods when the webhost slows down briefly to do the nightly backups, typically around midnight (EST). But hurry up, i'm probably going to migrate after a few more tests and reboots of aoe. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:47, 9 November 2013 (EST)
I think I found it... It seems that there is a new "feature" in Safari/Mavericks aimed at "battery powered" devices -- Safari Power Saver...
"Many websites display animations using power-hungry plug-ins that can drain precious battery life. But OS X Mavericks is watching out for you. The new Safari Power Saver feature recognizes the difference between what you came to see and the stuff you probably didn’t. If the content is front and center it plays as usual. But if it’s off in the margins, Safari Power Saver pauses it. You’ll see a static preview, and it won’t run until you click to play it. So if you don’t want to watch something, it won’t take a toll on your battery life. With Safari Power Saver, when you’re browsing websites with plug-in content, your CPU will use up to 35 percent less power."
Thank you Apple for fixing a problem I don't have -- on an iMac! At least there is an option to turn it off in Safari Preferences. --- argh! Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:12, 9 November 2013 (EST)

New toy for iPhones

1- https://forums-old.lotro.com/forums/showthread.php?529940-LotroComplete-version-1-0-now-available-in-the-App-Store - the announcement

2- https://googledrive.com/host/0B9h9JDLX-AG-QUx2QzZQdnFyb0E/index.html - the website

The app downloads from the App store.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:10, 10 November 2013 (EST)

Lotro-wiki.com has migrated to a new host

It might take up to 24 hours for all the DNS servers to update, but let me know of any issues here. --Lotroadmin (talk) 09:08, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

One thing I noticed right away was that the setting to group recent changes by page had been erased from my user preferences. But now I've set it back and there's no harm done. My other preferences seem unchanged, though I mostly leave them at the defaults so it's a little hard to tell. I also notice that the links to [Edit] on page sections are now right next to the heading, rather than on the right side of the page. Is there some setting that controls this as well? Although actually, I think I like it better this way now that I see it. -- Elinnea (talk) 18:53, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Yeah the relocation of the section edit link caught me off guard as well, I'm not sure i like or can live with it yet... Also the 'group recent changes by page' default change with the MW1.22 upgrade, well mostly now that it is an option, i removed it from the custom configuration. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:36, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
I think I'm seeing them in two different locations -- but it might just be because I have a "huge" number of pages/tabs "sitting around." :)
Otherwise, it looks good. Parser profiling data is an interesting "thingie." I'll have to look at it some more to see what it is telling me, and how to use it. (any hints?)
Turning off that "Stop plug-ins to save power" feature makes a HUGE difference in Safari's performance. -- we do have a HUGE number of "flashy" plugins!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:07, 10 November 2013 (UTC)
Once the DNS caching is cleared up with the ISPs the section edit link will consistently be in the new location, typically takes 24 hours. What is the 'parser profiling data'? Is that one of the new features of safari that I disabled once I did the upgrade? --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:16, 10 November 2013 (UTC)

Upload error

First upload attempt generated the error:

Could not open lock file for "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/archive/6/6d".

File failed to upload. Same error on subsequent retries. That was for the file "Vault-empty.jpg"

The next attempt was for a file named "Vault-Selector-Wardrobe-icon.png"

File extension ".jpg" does not match the detected MIME type of the file (image/png).

Both files were created using "Preview" in OSX; uploads did work Saturday.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:37, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
First issue is fixed... the second one, well jpg !=png, did the wiki make that conversion? I don't believe i changed anything that would have impacted images. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:42, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
I suspect the jpg/png issue was an artifact of the first error.-- first file I tried to up load was a jpg that generated the error; then I tried to upload the .png file.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:19, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Return of old behavior?

1- "Historically" I have had the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" preference selected.

That still behaves as it has in the past, with the possible change -- if in fact I did NOT enter a reason, the Preview would take "forever" if it completed at all.
Quitting the page refresh and entering data into the reason line and the preview would happen immediately.
Note that this does NOT happen consistently, but frequently.

2- For some time ?the wiki? generated a pop-up "do you really want to leave this page" (or something like that) on canceling a blank edit.

I say "the wiki" because I would also get it on other sites, like forums if I abandoned something without saving.
That behavior stopped some time ago and I just forgot about it. Now I find that if I "Show Changes" and then "Cancel" I get that pop-up again.
Is that tied to Java SE6 RTE? by any chance... as I just re-installed it for another application. I've had 6 completely UNINSTALLED since about February 2013.
But again this could relate to my Mavericks upgrade 2 weeks ago.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:51, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
They've been improving the editing, if you notice if you safe there's little html5 popup telling you the page was saved. There's nothing on this wiki that requires "java", but a current browser does help the html5 features that utilize javascript. Do review your editing preferences as Elinnea noted some default values have changed. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:47, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
The only one I verified was the "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" -- it was still selected. "All" of the other editing options are also "correct" (as If I could remember what I had before.) i.e they all "make sense."
I'm thinking more and more that this "loading" issue I'm seeing has to do with Verizon. I'll find out next week after I move to Comcast.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:23, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Strange image behavior

See: Vault -- the image there (which I just up loaded) is sharp and clear in the File section... but the text is "destroyed" in any size on a "normal" page.

I do note that the "thumbnail" on the file page has a similar problem.

If one looks at category: UI Element Images that effect is common.

A problem with how the Wiki creates the different image sizes?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 05:01, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Great find, i'm searching for bugs on this, not sure if it's related to the convert command or a MW1_22 setting that i need to add. In the mean time I will be install vips to see if that corrects the problem. Good thing is thumbs are just cache and can be recreated easily --Lotroadmin (talk) 05:45, 11 November 2013 (UTC)
Well vips is an improvement but then i notice:

Error creating thumbnail: vips warning: shrink: not integer shrink factors, expect poor results vipspng: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile vipspng: iCCP: known incorrect sRGB profile vipspng: known incorrect sRGB profile vips2png: unable to write

Still searching, but if your refresh your browser cache, at least that image will be readable. --Lotroadmin (talk) 05:57, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Image is readable.

My hat is off to you... having spent 30+ years in System Administration (not programming!) I am well aware that the number and diversity of "things" necessary to get/keep a "System" like MediaWIKI working boggles the mind. Good luck with this one! Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:38, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

Not sure if there's been any progress here, but just tacking another case to the list in the event it helps figuring stuff out: Bashkuga's loot all look fine except for Cuguru which is encountering the same funny vips stuff on the icon. It seems possibly to be something about that particular image - although it comes over fine on Item:Cuguru, if I try adding other items that have the same icon to the lootbox, the same error text appears while I get no issues doing the same with a couple other items with different icons.
This is on Chrome; tried clearing cache as suggested above and didn't help. Sethladan 05:05, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
I disabled vips, so we are using imagicmagick again, better to have a poor icon vs an error message. Hopefully this gets resolved soon. --Lotroadmin (talk) 05:38, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
I don't see any issue with the icons on Bashkuga. However, the image at Vault is unreadable again.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:47, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
I'm having some image weirdness on Cosmetics - Back as well (2nd/3rd cloak). Following the image to the File page, the image itself looks fine but the smaller version goes crazy. --Savi (talk) 20:00, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Oddly, Vault looks fine to me. I can see the difference with Savi's cosmetic images, though. Sethladan 03:05, 15 November 2013 (UTC)
Crazy white space seems to still be present in many of the scaled images...Any new insights on this issue? --Savi (talk) 14:58, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
The question becomes -- is this an artifact of the old upload? (i.e. is the file stored on the Wiki corrupt and a new copy needs to be uploaded?)
I have not seen this happen recently with new uploads, however it is clearly still present with files uploaded in the past. (Helm's Deep images come to mind.) But I have also NOT uploaded any large images lately.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:21, 25 February 2014 (UTC)
If we haven't seen this issue in a while, i can rebuild the image cache to see if that addresses the lingering old images. I will try to do that this week (and also try to archive some of these topics on my talk page..) --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:03, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

A couple new issues

I don't know if this is related to the recent migration or not, but today the sidebar lost the special pages section and all the other custom links that we normally have there (Recent discussions, whatever else used to be there that I'm not remembering offhand). Also performance has been quite slow overall. -- Elinnea (talk) 15:40, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Sidebar should be back up. I've been doing daily mediawiki updates to see if it addresses our image problems, and must of forgot to flush the server side cache.  :(
Has the performance been slow since the update or just lately? I noticed google hammering on the server just a few minutes ago.... --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:55, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
Yay, all my beloved links! You never notice how much you click on something until it's not there any more... I only noticed the slow performance this morning, so it's possible it's just a high load. -- Elinnea (talk) 02:38, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Ambox use

Hi, I've been side-tracked on an internal wiki at my work and was wondering if you have any advice on how the Ambox template and all the related templates & images can be "installed" on a new "bare" wiki? Is it a bunch of pages that need to be created manually? Is there somewhere an exhaustive list of related templates to create? The images used need to be uploaded manually, like any other image? Thanks for any info! (I should get back to crafting stuff here in a near future now that Helm's Deep is released.) -- Goingbald (talk) 16:39, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Hello Goingbald, I've been meeting to get in touch with you!... Send me a private message with your email and I can send you the xml from "export pages" that you can edit and then import into a new wiki. This will just get the template(s) though, the images you will just have to manually import to the new wiki. Might be a good time to convert it to a sprite :). --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:05, 21 November 2013 (UTC)

Group rights and links

Hi boss - just giving you a quick heads up because you're often the chief Ninja-fier: Did a little research and work with the interface pages today, so all of the user group pages (Lotro-Wiki.com:Users, Lotro-Wiki.com:Ninjas, etc) should now be plural - no more some-of-this-and-some-of that. Might have some recommendations for resorting the user rights themselves in a few days if that's something you're open to. Happy Turkey! Sethladan 23:06, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

I'm open to anything :).. and also believe less is more :) I might go as far to say, only worry about groups editors and higher. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:19, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Questions about "protections" & patrolling.

I don't know if either of these is "normal" or a bug with the new version.

1- Is there any way to tell if a page has any protections active?
1a - When you use the Pulldown "protections" does it actually SHOW any current protections, or does it always "reset" to "none."
1b - Is there any reason other than "not logged in" that a registered user, (level=user, not higher) would be unable to edit a page?

2- Red Exclamation-mark in "Recent discussions." I see a number of them related to user "Elgileth" most of which are on talk pages. When you mouse over the exclamation mark, it says "This edit has not yet been patrolled." (You have to pause 5-10 seconds when you mouse over it for the pop-up to appear.) However, when you click on the link to the page, there is no "mark this page as patrolled" box appearing. And, even if I edit the page, the red exclamation mark does not go away.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:56, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
Not sure why Elgileth couldn't edit Troll-height, as I had no problem doing so with a brand-new account (see my minor edit in the history). Re: Patrolling, use the "diff" or "prev" link to get the exact revision to patrol (approve). That'll clear the red exclamation point.
For an example of a protected page, check Main Page where the pulldown will say "Change protection." I guess this implies that any page that's not protected will just have "Protect" instead. Sethladan 22:13, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
Anything that interferes with browser cookies, e.g. browser security plugins, may cause problems with editing
You can also check that the page is protected in Special:ProtectedPages Snarpel (talk) 22:29, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
Ok, I see the "change protections" -- that makes sense.
Not seeing any obvious way to tell which revision to patrol. I don't see anything in the diff header nor at the bottom of the page. Using User talk:Elinnea --- ARGHHHHHHHHH just realized "mark as patrolled" moved from the right side of the page to the left! (like those [edit] tags... :(
BINGO -- if you click on "diff" in the left column of the line with the exclamation point -- it will show the correct edit without hassle!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:43, 1 December 2013 (UTC)
I've always found the "mark as patrolled" link near the top right when looking at a diff page, just underneath the "(latest) revision as of..." information. Beats scrolling down to the bottom of the page and trying to find it there. Sethladan 00:18, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Recent Database errors

Last evening (Sunday around 8pm EST ish) I found I was unable to "edit" any page (including this one) because of "Database Errors" on the read, preview or write.

  • Did these get fixed, or did they simply stop happening? :)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:21, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
It stopped working after one of my updates, I hope I didn't corrupt something for an unknown reason... Lots of renaming to do in Forester, I was almost done, T6 to continue. :| --Goingbald (talk) 15:42, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
From the logs, maraidb did go offline after a few tables were marked as corrupted, the restart seemed to have cleaned this up. Sadly there's nothing in the logs to indicate why the crash happened, if this happens again I can increase the verbosity on logging. How long were things down? --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:11, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
I had the error happen three times over about 20 minutes before I sent that email on the 1st... then I went out. The problem was apparently cleared when I made the post here. Previously I was unable to post on this page. So, clearly less than 24 hours.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:31, 3 December 2013 (UTC)

Blocking promoting

  • I just blocked User: Johnmmcraea and deleted his user page. This page contained a link to an external site. I thought that including external links was not possible for plain users. (I assume that I did this the correct way. I don't see any other "autoblocks" on the Special Pages, Blocked users page.
  • What is the SOP for promoting someone. I've been patrolling a number of edits from two new users who should get promoted. However, I don't know what the "correct" technique is.
  • The Corollary question is -- I thought Ninja edits did not require patrolling? User: Laineth was promoted, but I'm still seeing edits asking to be patrolled.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:33, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
User: Laineth has only Users status in his User page, but he is doing good work in Crafting and also Sethladan wrote, that he gives him Ninja status. Barny (talk) 16:22, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Ah, Laineth does have Ninja permissions, but had not been added to the category. That has been rectified.
Magill, it looks like you figured out some of these things about promotions after you posted here. Ninjas have the ability to patrol edits - only upon promotion to Editor are their edits auto-patrolled.
I also am curious about the external links. Were the permissions fiddled with again? We've been having an upswing in spam recently. -- Elinnea (talk) 16:33, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks for catching the missed category, heh - my oversight. User-level editors are able to post external links, but they need to pass the CAPTCHA in order to do so; getting bumped up to Ninja allows bypassing this check, which is why we tell people to request a promotion if they're having trouble. Unless there's some sort of secret workaround, this means that the spammers are either human and manually going through the CAPTCHA or they've figured out how to break it. Frustrating, either way.
Regarding standard promotion procedures, I think it's generally that (and we can document this in a help page for Bureaucrats at some point if it's agreed upon) anyone with a couple of valid edits is eligible for Ninja; people with high-quality contributions (to the point where they don't need to be monitored) can be Editors as they'll - like Elin said - be auto-patrolled. Admins would be those we trust with deleting, and Bureaus are the wiki leadership who have contributed to the community as well as to the site - they're the ones to promote and regulate the masses.
There are a few specific permissions that I'm going to recommend get moved around (see my comment above about Ninjas), but that's my general understanding of the editor levels. Lotroadmin's the boss, though. :P Sethladan 17:54, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
I just created a test account to verify the CAPTCHA's were working and it turns out I did not need a provide a CAPTCHA to add an external link to a page until the user was added to the users category! Snarpel (talk) 19:19, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
I just played with it some more and was surprised that I could add links with a User-level account to Lotro.com until I realized that Lotroadmin probably has that as a whitelisted site so you don't need a CAPTCHA check for it. See if you get the same results form www.google.com or the like. Sethladan 22:54, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
New users can link to all external sites. They don't need to defeat the CAPTCHA, as they are never shown a CAPTCHA. Once the user is added to [[Category:Users]] however then the CAPTCHA mechanism kicks in. So to get the system working as it should we need to either:
  1. Change the CAPTCHA plugins' settings to include users not in any group
  2. Add new users to the Users group on account creation. This might require adding a few lines of code to a .PHP file but shouldn't be too hard Snarpel (talk) 12:38, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
This is simply not the case. I created yet another test account, made no changes to the user page (i.e., didn't add [[Category:Users]]) and was faced with the cats when I tried to add a link to [https://www.google.com Google]. Further, it makes no sense at all that adding a page to a category would magically bestow or restrict rights on a user. All accounts are in the Lotro-Wiki.com:Users group by default regardless of the categories to which the associated user page is (or isn't) attached (you'll notice that there's no option to "promote" someone to "User" level here).
Additional evidence that spammers are somehow able to defeat the CAPTCHA - you actually need to do so in order to create an account in the first place. Sethladan 14:43, 9 December 2013 (UTC)
New users can add URLs if it already existed on the page or found on the whitelist. Validating an email address might also allow you to skip the captcha, but I think the MW/Cats no longer support that feature. I've gained some satisfaction with emailing the spammers when they do leave an email address, even if it's a temporary account. Ideally I would configure this such that a) the url needs to be on a whitelist, b) user needs to ask for a promotion and/or c) edit has to be patrolled before being displayed. Sadly MW w/cats only allows us to do a), b) might be coming in future drops, there's been rumbles about better permission hooks with external URLs, and c) last i checked, there was an outdated unstable beta extension that claimed to do this, but held off since the cats captcha had a bug that prevented users from adding any URL on successfully selecting the cats. --Lotroadmin (talk) 18:36, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


  • I've updated Help: Patrolling "Why do this." hopefully it makes sense. (It used to claim Ninja's were auto patrolled.)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:49, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Magill, or any admin for that matter, feel free to promote folks as you see fit, i'm in line with what Seth mentioned about Ninjas. As for the CAPTCHA, yeah, there's a few whitelists where certain sites don't require captcha, admins should have rights to edit that page. As for the blacklist, MW runs one that we feed from mostly.
BTW, my rule of thumb on promotions:
  • Other editor's rule's of thumb
  • Ninja, any good edit or they request to be promoted to avoid captcha.
  • editors: promote anyone to editor once they've showed up in the top 30 list and have been around for more than a month. Of course this list does change daily and it's possible that I've missed folks.
  • admins+: quality edits, longer tenure or they revamp something (even if feathers are ruffled), are all good reasons to be promoted here. Feel free to promote or send me a message if you think someone should be an admin. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:00, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Changes to Wiki documentation

I've made some significant changes to

Regarding the Left-hand navigation column:

  1. Contributor's Corner (possessive singular) should be "Contributors' Corner" -- possessive plural, to match the page name.
  2. Because of changes made, Community Portal is now redundant with Contributors' Corner and can be eliminated.

In the process, I "cleaned-up" and "standardized" the look and feel of the User's Rights pages and their respective Categories (but did not verify the correctness of the content):

Please look those pages over and feel free to fix or otherwise expand them.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:10, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
I was meaning to ask what you were thinking in transcluding one page onto another in its entirety. In my mind, Community Portal would be a space for socialization and communication info, like IRC and Mumble, while Contributors' Corner would be more for announcements and information - sort of a launching pad for editing. Of course, I never said that to anyone, so I can't fault you for preempting me. :P (P.S. Shouldn't this kind of update go over there instead of on Lotroadmin's talk page? It sort of concerns everyone.) Sethladan 23:19, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Yeah, probably. I never can decide if people will really look to see things in random locations. :)
As for the content of the two pages -- before I transcluded the one into the other, they both contained about 90% of the same information but in different orders. i.e. the "double updating" issue. The other 10% was the "random" stuff, mostly editing pointers and the like, that didn't fit either one.
And, the Commuity Portal page and Talk page has had almost zero activity
FWIW, Contributors' Corner, the Page, as almost nothing in common with Contributors' Corner Talk. LoL.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:05, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
Yeah, the Portal was definitely underutilized - we do all our chitchatting on personal talk pages anyway. I have no qualms with doing away with it; consolidation and streamlining always makes me happy. And hah! to your FWIW. That's the nature of the beast when people grope for places to talk, eh? Sethladan 03:51, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Sidebar change

The Sidebar has changed, but I don't see any record of it. (I actually don't know where to look.)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:37, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Are you still doing those daily updates? Sidebar went out of whack again. Sethladan 18:41, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Took a few times, but realized what's causing the sidebar to freak out.. it's memcached crashing... and systemd not restarting it... I will dig into that this weekend. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:40, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Salutes for fixing it! :) Sethladan 01:18, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
Good and bad news..... Good news is that my fix to auto-restart memcached worked tonight, bad news though memcached keeps segfaulting. --Lotroadmin (talk) 05:55, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
Rargh. Is there an update on the horizon that could fix it? I just encountered my first segmentation fault on a programming assignment two weeks ago and I'm glad I'm not in charge of finding that bug in memcached. :P Sethladan 21:04, 19 December 2013 (UTC)
LoL... now you understand why the Mac Client MTBF is only 45 minutes -- then it tries to address never-never land :(
03:04, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Windows client is pretty shakey, too, especially doing anything Mounted Combat related (although I just got through all five Epic Battles without a hitch). I will, however, now be adding that expression into my vocabulary: "address never-never land." Hah! Sethladan 04:50, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Good thing about Arch Linux, well at least to me, it's rather easy to compile the versions of the software you need. I've already locked php versions since MW doesn't fully support 5.5 yet, any downstream dependancies i can upgrade by compiling those versions with the php version that is supported. Managing these weird dependencies has always been hard and it won't be easier with archlinux, but with a simple package builder, i should be able to keep older versions of packages as needed. --Lotroadmin (talk) 05:59, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Does that imply a possible resolution for the Image problem? (topic 26 above)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 06:11, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Eventually it will.... I've built my own versions of vips and imagemagick with no luck using this approach... BTW, if you notice more images that are bad, can you include them on my user page, I hope to dig into this some more over the next two weeks. --Lotroadmin (talk) 06:16, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Looking for image issues..

It seems to me that the images render issues have improved, let me know if you have any other examples. Please do add ?action=purge to the end of the URL on the webpage to update the file cache (doesn't seem to work on special:* pages though) to before reporting here. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:04, 29 December 2013 (UTC)

I see no change for Vault -- "?action=purge" doesn't seem to have any effect. Interestingly, on File: Vault-empty.jpg the "big" image is correct, however the thumbnail at the bottom is distorted. Same on Safari or Firefox (26). Hmmm... double interesting.... By including the image on this page (I left out the : when I previewed it), it displays correctly.
  • Implication being ... ?action=purge" doesn't have any effect; but that there is a cache problem somewhere.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:49, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Completely deleting the cache directories for both Safari and Firefox does not clear the issue.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:59, 29 December 2013 (UTC)
Well, I do see an improvement on some images. Let me know if you have more examples. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:51, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

A SMW dependency has gone rogue, so currently disabling it

If anyone will miss SMW let me know and I will bring it back. Since it's rarely used and has substantial overhead and the dependent extension has gone off to the loony bin, i've filed a bug with them and disabled both. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:49, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

That's a shame. I can't say I'll miss it as I don't think the (one?) use for which it'd been implemented ever saw much penetration, but it always made my head spin with what we _could_ do with it should anyone ever get around to coding it in. I still wish we had more database-like features, but I guess SMW is too top-heavy for the little practical benefit we do get from it at this point. Sethladan 05:38, 30 December 2013 (UTC)
I revered the SMW properties for the mount pages but the lootbox drops and a handful of the item pages that queried that information have yet to be changed back; so it will look like wrong links for now. I'll add it to my list of things to do but not sure when I'll be getting much editing time. For example: Item:Adamant Shard now shows a red link in the Drops information due to the SMW disabling. It should not be too widespread an issue however as they are only present on the mobs/items in the Shire for the most part. --Savi (talk) 17:32, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Don't change anything yet, I will look into dealing with the issue on the testwiki and report back soon. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:09, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
I can hold off on those changes if you'd prefer. Though even if the SMW sticks around in the future they still should be reverted (which I was the only one that changed them awhile back anyway). It makes more sense to add/modify the current templates that are used on those pages than try and manually change them to something new one by one. --Savi (talk) 15:28, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
In that case I don't have a preference if you were planning to move it to a template. A few independant issues caused a perfect storm with the MW jobs, which will is trumping my time to set up the testwiki for SMW, so perhaps give me a few more days before I can give you my response. (I believe the backlog of jobs are cleaned up, categories should be back to normal, etc, but a future change is still coming...) --Lotroadmin (talk) 06:54, 3 January 2014 (UTC)
I haven't forgotten about this, I've been working through issues on testwiki and it's not as smooth as the SMW devs make it out to be... The issue I have with SMW isn't resolved, but this will take longer than i thought. --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:49, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
Savi and Matthew.zellmer have cleared out most of the SMW-related stuff on the live wiki, and I'm not any closer to implementing any of the ideas I had for it yet, so I'd say fixing this isn't a major priority. It's something that's nice to have, of course, but I'm okay if "we get to it when we get to it." Cheers - as always - for your hard work keeping this stuff running. (I just started playing with PHP in Linux Mint and got stumped trying to install a simple extension, so I'm glad it's you running this gig and not I, ugh.) Sethladan 14:38, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
I think at this point SMW extension is on a hiatus, strangely an issue being address by SMW causes more issues and is becoming a nightmare when updating the wiki. I will probably look at this on a monthly basis to see if things improve. --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:56, 4 February 2014 (UTC)

Yikes, another bug with the MW jobs, sorry about the downtime

Sorry for the downtime, appears my haste to fix the image issue forced an unrelated bugs with the running the MW jobs.. Hopefully things are back to normal --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:35, 30 December 2013 (UTC)

Got me worried for a bit. Had a little existential crisis wondering what I should do with myself if the wiki went down for good. :) Sethladan 01:00, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
  • Possibly an unrelated problem but -- "Special:UncategorizedPages seems to be listing ALL pages ... i.e. the first 10 definitely all have categories.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:17, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
You likely know about this already, but seems like something went haywire with patrolled edits - everything's now marked as unpatrolled going back at least a month. Seems like some massive can of MediaWiki worms got opened up here, yikes. Sethladan 08:43, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
I've been patrolling stuff pretty heavily the past week -- lots of changes by new folks -- and yesterday morning, there was nothing to be patrolled, I was caught up. So, yeah --- ARGH!!!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:24, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
These should clear up over the next few days as the MW jobs will clear these up if they land on a given page. I've kicked off a rebuild of the links to help speed this up but that also takes time. I've send the uncategoried pages shrink from 2k to about 50 overnight, but I haven't checked the patrolled edits. --Lotroadmin (talk) 18:38, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
Yeesh, you've been busy. I saw you making minor edits to some templates, so I thought maybe you were trying to trigger jobs or get caches to clear or something. I'll just be patient and let the software catch up, heh. Sethladan 21:17, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

An interesting observation about images...

While cleaning out the Special:UncategorizedFiles I noticed a "strange" situation -- all of the .jpg icons were smaller than the .png icons. I left one of them around as an example.

  • -- File:Tutelage of the Brown Wizard.jpg - 1KB
  • -- File:Tutelage of the Brown Wizard (trait)-icon.png - 5KB

This contradicts the comment in Help:Images:

Since icon files should be saved in the PNG file format, ultimately you use some other utility to take a snapshot of the in-game icon. That way quality is not lost while converting from JPEG to PNG and during other image processing. PNG files usually have a much smaller file size for icon-styled images, but this is not the case for photo-style images.

I don't know enough about graphics to know if that original statement is wrong... or if something has changed -- possibly related to the earlier image processing problem.

I converted the .jpg files to .png files using Preview under OSX. One simply duplicates the file, then saves it in the different format.

  • I also noticed that several of the images in that uncategorized category had the same distortion problem -- Category: Promotional Images -- various Helm's Deep images. The truly interesting thing is their DATES. They are all from around the end of November, beginning of December.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:11, 31 December 2013 (UTC)
PNG has various options that influences the file size where it can be larger or smaller than GIFs and JPEGs. To support transparency on Icons we generally prefer PNGs of GIFs because of the past licensing issues, also they are general smaller and look better. Probably the main reasons to use PNG for all icons is to be consistent and at one time the templates based the image file name on the page name and was just coded that way. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:51, 31 December 2013 (UTC)

Ads

Have been seeing adverts today for buying Diablo II items/gold, and recalled you usually want to block that sort of thing. <censored> :) is the url. Can't believe there's still a market for this stuff. Sethladan 19:58, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Appearing both with and without www, not sure if that affects anything. Sethladan 20:04, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks Seth, It's added to the list. When I do block I do block *.site.com --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:47, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

Is this possible

While looking for a particular topic in Release Notes (Category: Patches) I realized I did not know how, or if it was possible, to search for a word or phrase across a group of pages, other than by using the advanced search feature.

The advanced search feature is still pretty "broad" i.e. being able to restrict the search to a specific category, and for many queries, the number of hits returned is as bad as via Google.

  • How do I restrict a search to a specific Category? (i.e. not a namespace)
  • How are the returns returned by the search feature ordered?
  • Is there any way to "search again" within the group of returned entries?
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:17, 6 January 2014 (UTC)
Yup there's some advance search options, mostly those supported on wikipedia are supported here.
Since we are using Sphinx as our search engine, it's a little more powerful than the default, supporting
  • Proximity search -- 'hunter armor' results in Hunter's Armour
  • Boolean search -- Hunter AND Armor
  • Phrases in double quotes -- "Hunter Armour"
  • Wildcard search -- *land
  • Exclusion -- -hunter
  • Supporting intitle:, incategory:, prefix: -- i.e. intitle:Hunter
Of course there's also google as an alternate approach.
There's more on the way for Sphinx, like page ranks and the ability to weight namespaces, but I don't plan on touching that until they are fully released --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:00, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Other languages @Lotro-wiki?

Hi there,

Valamar and me talked about adding articles to lotro-wiki.com a little while ago. My english skill has some lacking in grammar, so i would not think about adding stuff here, but... I could add articles in german or translate existing ones into german. I am pretty sure i could inspire some other german LotrO players to contribute to this, too.

So, the question is - would you like me to? Very probably, i cannot manage to ever complete all the pages or even a high percentage of them, though.

yours, Suse

Hello Suse,
At the start we were open to other languages and even tried French since we got several requests, but after a few months the site was unmaintained and eventually dropped based on my fear of not knowing what was on there and not wanting to take on the risk or liability.
On a per month basis, the site averages about 130 active editors that maintain this wiki, which might shed some light on how many folk would be needed to maintain one in a different language. If you wanted to start a petition that would exceed that count, that would probably be enough to convince me to set up another wiki.
With that said, I have no problems if you or anyone else want to run a server to do the translation and maintain it. I will gladly enable the interwiki links to your URL and even offer to redirect de.lotro-wiki to it. I've made this offer a few years back for someone wanting to translate to Russian, but I realize that's a tall order to set up and configure a wiki.
By the way, how good are the translation sites for this wiki? I can see translate.google.com URLs in the logs all the time, but curious with unique spellings and I guess own gaming dialect might confuse it?
--Lotroadmin (talk) 01:22, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
Willkommen, Suse!
To add to Lotroadmin's comment: We have many editors for whom English is not a native language. If you have information that you would like to add, but are unsure about the grammar or the quality of the writing, I encourage you to share as much as you're comfortable doing. At the very worst-case scenario, you could write in German and work with someone (I can help a little, although I speak only a few words of your language) to translate.
Your English may be better than you suspect - your paragraph above is written almost flawlessly. :) Thanks for your interest and I hope you can figure out the best way to make your contributions. [ [User:Sethladan|Sethladan]] 02:05, 8 January 2014 (UTC)
Hi :)
No, i could never inspire 130 people to do this! I thought i might get 3-5 other users here.. but then i can never know how long they keep up their work. ;)
So your answer has a very reasonable point i totally appreciate.
The english pages you do are very good and i think most auto translation stuff is quite okay. Apart from the grammar (which is a nuiscance), most gaming terms are quite the same in german and english anyway (with the germans usually being too lazy to mint their own word for something new in this sector ;) ).

But with the new Lotro skill system, people were asking for a translation of the new skill trees into german. They cannot be translated 1:1 (they have other names in german than in english, so an automated translation will not help there). Same problem exists with the names of certain items.

I am not that much into Wiki stuff (although setting one up should not be a problem at all)... but thanks for the offer. I will ask for help in the community and get some other solution for them...eventually ;) Yours Suse

Query moved from User talk: zimoon

Hello I am Spanish and I play Lotro. I created a Spanish wiki about the game and want to know if you could let me export the pages of your wiki. In Spain we have no Wiki about the game and seems to have no expectations of it. We are a small community and the game is not even in our language. Our knowledge about Wikis are scarce and so we ask for help. If you leave us your pages we would be very grateful. Sorry, this is the link of the Spanish wiki:https://es.esdlao.wikia.com/wiki/Wiki_El_Se%C3%B1or_de_los_Anillos_Online —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Spantish (Contribs • User Talk) at 13:55, 21 January 2014‎.

Note: User: Spantish was created by User: Pepito el de los palotes
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:47, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
¡Gracias por añadir el enlace! Tal vez contribuiré a su wiki también, aunque español no sea mi idioma materno (y, además, el español que conozco es el de la américa latina...). Suerte con el desarrollo de una comunidad wiki para los hispanohablantes. (Thanks for adding the link! Maybe I'll contribute to your wiki too, even though Spanish isn't my native tongue (and the Spanish I do know is Latin American...). Good luck with developing a wiki community for Spanish-speakers.) Sethladan 00:22, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Should we consider the translate extension

With a lot of recent requests for other languages, maybe we can consider the translate extension and have a special group for folks doing the translation? This should be no overhead to the server, and hopefully easier to manage? It also seems like the translate extension offers a clever way to do the work. I'm sure we will have to work out a few issues, most notably searching and including/excluding languages on a per user level. --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:02, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

As a language-o-phile, I think this would be a lot of fun, but I do worry about the amount of additional work that would be involved in supporting more than one language. We're already pretty far behind in content and standards on just the English side. On the flip side, though, working in multiple languages might get us more editors and - if we have enough translators to keep up - actually let us get information from the game faster. From a quick skim of the extension page you linked, it looks like it's incredibly well-supported and successful, so - without seeing it in action - it seems like it'd be a good choice for this sort of thing should you decide to give it a shot. Sethladan 12:30, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
Don't know this feature, but one presumes it is two way. If so, It is always possible that it will expand the basic collection of materials.
I can easily contact Suse as well as others who might be interested via the Players Council at LOTRO.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:14, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
I will try to have this up and running on the testwiki for folks to test out while I resolve the special:search issue where results include all languages. I think since we use Sphinx there should be a clever way to use the user's default language to help filter the results --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:47, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
I'm still trying to work out one glaring issue i have with the translate extension. There really seems to be a lot of nice features to encourage translations, but the glaring issue is that all pages are included in the search results. Ideally the user should be able to pre-select which languages it wants in the search results, and it should only serve up the preferred language of a given page. I think these issues just lowers the quality of the search results but I think this is something that can be worked out with namespaces or even categories, if not a hidden category. I haven't given up yet. --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:51, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
I've lately spent a good bit of time over on Translatewiki.net (prompted in part by this discussion) and am even more curious as to how you're implementing - or trying to - this extension. It seems like an awful mess over there, and anything besides "system message"-like stuff is still translated on separate subpages, so navigating is kind of weird (but it does work super-slick for stuff that's actually been translated and, I guess, somehow encoded into the system). We haven't heard much enthusiasm here from any of the language requesters, though...kinda disheartening. Sethladan 08:01, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
I haven't looked at Translatewiki.net nor the extension, so I guess that needs to make it to my "to-do list" at some point. (Any recommended urls?)
However, let me offer what "I assume" is the way this would work. (I'm only touching on the most obvious situations here, and strictly off the top of my head!)
  • On user login, the user has a preference which designates their "default language."
  • The user logs in under their default Language A.
  • Situation one:
Page A exists only in language A. -- The page is displayed "normally" for users whose default Language is A.
  • Situation two:
Page A exists only in language B. -- The page is displayed "normally," but that display is in a language foreign to the user whose default language is A.
The user is advised of the fact the page is in Language B, and offered to pass the page through "Google Translate."
  • Situation three:
Page A exists in language A AND in Language B -- The page is displayed "normally" for users whose "default language" is A or B. Users whose default language is otherwise are given a choice of A, B, or Google Translate.
We as Administrators/Editors will obviously be confronted with many more and different scenarios. "Embedded language" -- Language B embedded in page A -- being only one possibility!
And "naturally," I have no idea what "language" the Markup will be in. Does "nowiki" become "neinwiki," for example.

What is the rational way to deal with this

I have reason to believe that the "new" "Item_level" parameter will be an important search term in the near future. I think it already is, just that nobody knows it yet. I believe the concept has always been present in the internal Turbine database, but until the Epic Battles of Helm's Deep and the "Character Upscaling" while maintaining "level differentials" it was NOT an issue for the player community.

However,   Lesser Resolute Mace of Fate makes one wonder. This was a drop my lvl 86 RK got in Wildermore! That is the largest delta I have seen so far while recording Item levels. And it's not even a "gold" item.

So, short of making new categories, as we have done for similar things in the past is there any other solution?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:29, 23 January 2014 (UTC)
Ok, I have been able to ascertain that up until Update 12 (i.e. HD) Item Level and Player Level WERE always the same. Beginning with Update 12, Items were given individual levels to allow Items to be differentiated. Going forward, "Item Level" is how one will be able to determine that a particular item available only to players of a certain level is "better" than any other item similarly available. We can expect to see more of this going forward, especially with "new" items.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 02:40, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
BTW: "Itemization" is the "Dev Phrase" for dealing with "stuff" (items) and their stats. For the "itemization" of all scalling instance loot posted by Verizal, see:
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 02:57, 25 January 2014 (UTC)

Bot Work

There's been a little flurry of activity lately with respect to bots - Magill, Matt Zellmer, and I have each been working independently on this, and I suppose it begs the question that may have been asked a while ago when Amphoras, EoD, and RingTailCat were running their bots: Do you have any general guidelines for rate restrictions, how many requests to make through the API at a time, etc etc? Not that any of us are going to go out of our way to hammer the server, but I, at least, would feel more comfortable knowing if I should throttle my scripts and/or do stuff in stages, or it's okay to let 'em rip. Thanks! Sethladan 14:50, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

See my comments on this over at User talk:Matthew.zellmer#Bot Work
Put another way Pybot DOES include "throttle" mechanisms, acknowledging that it is an issue.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:01, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
Your comments there prompted my comment here, since we have a couple of people doing a couple of different things. I don't remember any guidelines being set down in the BoD/AmphorasBot era, so that's why I'm checking now. Sethladan 04:02, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
I haven't notice any issues with botting and server performance, my only concern would be to be cautious of the peak hours (12-5pm PDT) and limit the number of concurrent connections at a time. I do see spikes in the server perfermance charts from time to time but nothing that has caused me concern. (I do get concerned when the performance charts are blank) I do prefer folks to use bot accounts for a number of reasons, but mostly so I know when someone is botting. If you get connection timed-out errors shoot me a private message detailing how you achieved it as i might be able to adjust the settings to ease any restrictions or maybe just learn how the server behaves during such an event.
We've had issues with high traffic and number of jobs spawning, which botting can influence, but i've throttle the jobs even further so hopefully this won't be an issue again. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:05, 26 January 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! Will keep any heavy work limited to the off-hours. Sethladan 02:22, 26 January 2014 (UTC)

Creation forms

Question on the possibility of forms to create new articles. If I understand correctly, the 'Create Article' options basically create a new page with the entered value and provide a blank template correct? Is it at all possible to define that form more? For example, rather than just enter the name of the page to be created, also have a few radio button or dropdown menu forms to select certain values to be applied within that template? These kind of options could limit some errors made within templates that otherwise have to manually edited down the road. Just wondering if that is at all possible? --Savi (talk) 15:15, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Sadly no, but you could create multiple variations for the same template. It has been a few years since I've reviewed the possible MW extensions for this category, so let me get back on a more complete answer. Also, it might be possible to include the templates as part of the wiki editor. I believe EoD was looking into that a while ago, but the wikieditor extension was just too new at the time. --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:44, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
To me, this appears to be an "attitude" issue --
  • Do you find it more convenient to "fill-in-the-blanks" AFTER you start the article; -- or --
  • Do you find it more convenient to "check-all-the-boxes" BEFORE you start the article?
I can see issues with both approaches.
I suspect that the answer lies in WHAT it is the editor is doing -- creating one unique page or creating many "similar" pages. Personally, I find that a 27 inch screen, multiple Browser windows and multiple tabs in each window make the Latter a pretty trivial event. I.E. basically, cutting and pasting from one to another and then changing "the differences."
  • One suspects that the assumption here is that, if one has check-boxes or drop-downs, "all" options are displayed without the need to "read" either the presented and Preloaded page or the Boilerplate instructions.
Again personally, since almost nobody else is involved in maintaing them (See what I call, "The Great Documentation Project" -- Lotro-Wiki.com:Documentation) , even the existing Boilerplate and Pre-loads as well as the Templates themselves do get horribly out of date and out of synch with each other. Similarly, the language of the explanations is frequently "clear as mud" and riddled with "assumptions of prior knowledge" and "idiomatic usage." I keep trying to record such assumptions and to clean up (or create in most cases) the documentation involved. Any such "create template" would suffer the same problem.
One of the most basic problems this Wiki has is "lack of resources." We barely have enough editors to supply new content to try to keep abreast of changes perpetrated on us by Turbine. (And 12.3 just went up on Bullroarer!). This basically means that there are very few editors who "have been around long enough" to understand how the Wiki is "laid out" and how various bits of technology, like the Create process and Templates themselves, work.
  • All of that said, please feel free to jump into the rats nest that is the "Templates" and "fix" those things which are broken (Template: Quests being one real mess I have been putting off fixing. As an example of the "parts and issues" see: User:Magill/Project-Documentation#Quest_documentation )
And needless to say, "Fix" includes updating them to include Turbine's Latest and Greatest! :)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:52, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
Your coining of Templates as "the rats nest" is something I completely agree with it, and I've only been working with a few of them, lol. I see your perspective of forms as an 'attitude', however, I envision that the options can simply be left blank (which would just do exactly what it does currently) but would be a convenient way to add a few parameters if you wanted to in the beginning. (Or later on if that is ever an option)...but I'll wait for lotroadmin's findings to see if such forms are even possible with current extension options. Something related to template organization...what is the difference between Boilerplate pages and /doc pages? For example, Boilerplate:Creature vs Template:Creature/doc - are boilerplates for the 'create article' and docs just for the template itself? --Savi (talk) 21:53, 5 February 2014 (UTC)
So i'm not finding anything that provides a drop-down menu options. There are extensions that hide the wiki code to create new pages, which can use a template underneath, there are other extensions that have the basic functionality of the extension:create article. There was one extension that sounded interesting as it would have provided a drop-down box in the editor window, but not exactly what we are after and it hasn't been updated in over two years(i.e. unmaintained). In my somewhat outdated view (in terms of what templates are being used with create article), I would probably suggest for a given template, offer multiple create articles options with a description located on the same page. You can provide a description that could link to a header/infobox, that provides alternate options for a given template, not a drop down menu, but mostly the same effect. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:43, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
Thanks for the information. The template that brought on my pondering already has a few lists documented for valid parameter values, so that is already present if people know where to find it. I've figured out how to create such forms using PHP and javascript on personal webpages, but was hopeful something similar could be produced here - maybe someday in the future. Thanks again for looking into this! --Savi (talk) 15:13, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
  • What is the difference between Boilerplate pages and /doc pages? For example, Boilerplate:Creature vs Template:Creature/doc - are boilerplates for the 'create article' and docs just for the template itself?
Basically yes, but this is one of those "it depends" answers! -- Much of the answer depends upon "the point in time". That is to say, not all templates have /doc pages. Boilerplates were apparently created BEFORE the idea of using /doc pages came into existence (or at least common usage)! I don't know the history of Wiki "stuff," so I can't say if "/doc" is a newfangled invention or what. (Or put another way ?Consistancy?we don't need no stinkin' Consistency!) Maybe Ravnell, LotroAdmin or Sethledan can shed more light on that subject, if it even matters anymore.
I have only worked on "a few" templates, and my approach has not been very consistent. I tend to work on one (or sometimes several) when I go to look-up some point that isn't documented, i.e. something doesn't work the way I think it should work, and no explanation (documentation) exists -- and then wind up trying to push the strings to find out which stick moves.
  • For example, right now I've gotten "side-tracked" on Template: Ambox -- which "seemed" to take the parameter "nocat=y", but then other usage implied "nocat=true" - and have noted that it was simply copied from Wikipedia (sometime) and is different from Mediawiki's version and while trying to reconcile those discovered that Mediawiki has something called "Template:Category handler"
In general, the goal is to ELIMINATE most of the "unique" template information on the Boilerplate pages and merge it into the /doc pages, many of which still need to be created, leaving the Boilerplate page to contain the page-specific hints.
This is coupled with the fact that "Create" also uses "/preload". So, component wise you have:
  • Template
  • Template/doc
  • Template/preload
  • Boilerplate
So you wind up with a boilerplate layout like:
  • transclude of template/doc
  • Listing of recommended sections (hints) for a specific page
Creatures does follow that pattern. The Boilerplate transcludes the /doc file at the top, and then includes the "page specific" hints at the bottom.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:38, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Is the "categorytree" extension broken?

See: Category:Help#Help_System_Category_Tree

This: '''<categorytree mode=all,depth=2>Help</categorytree>''', like the Category page itself does NOT display the pages which are indicated. See especially Sub category: Guidelines.

As best I can tell, it is the current version, but it doesn't seem to work as described. Neither "mode=pages" nor "mode=all" nor "depth" seems to get those pages to display.

Similarly, the output of "Special Pages Category Tree" page is "strange."

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:47, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
Magill, you asked about this before, on Project talk:Documentation. Did you see my response there? This seems to be a limitation of the extension, although whether intended or not I can't say. Sethladan 04:20, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
I didn't see the response.. i have tunnel vision to my talk page mostly :( .. I've been playing around with it tonight.. (but i didn't cause the crash.. looking into that ) --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:35, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
Hahah, your name isn't Magill, boss. The issue is that the category tree only looks at main and Category namespaces by default. And don't worry about tunnel vision - you get enough thrown at you through this page as it is! Fixing templates and crap like that is for those of us with more time and less responsibility. :) Sethladan 04:45, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
I think Magill might be right though.. the depth never really worked as named.. it only includes pages with the direct category in the list.. i did make a change related to this, but no real change.. and then we crashed lol --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:54, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
I might have jumped the gun here; thought you were talking about a different issue. Categorytree does seem to be listing in all namespaces now - is this the change you made? As for listing pages below the direct category, try <categorytree mode=all depth=2>Help</categorytree>. Note the space between key-value pairs. Seems like you don't even need "mode=all" anymore, either. Sethladan 16:14, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

An interesting "extension": Template:Category handler

While looking for other things, I ran across an interesting "extension" over at MediaWiki -- Template:Category handler

Since I'm anything but a Template-maven, I'm not completely certain how this could be used, or if it makes sense to try to retro-fit our existing templates to use it. --- But it sure sounds good ;).

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:53, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
At one point we used to have categories defined in templates, I assume that effort is still there, or morphed into something more useful. Having one template to define all categories seems would offer both plusses and minus. One minus being the number of pages we have might become troublesome with all the jobs if it was included for all pages. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:40, 6 February 2014 (UTC)

Spam on the rise...

I've noticed that a few URLs have sneaked into the description that appear in the comments of the recent page history. As the robots.txt file prohibits search engines to scan this, it just a guideline and not anymore enforceable than telling a kid who really wants that candy, "no"....the candy will still be consumed, unless you consume it first :) If you block someone/delete a page feel free to blank the page description to remove the URLs.

I did review the confirm edit extension, appears someone left a patch that will block all accounts from adding a URL until after X number of edits. I will look at applying this patch to help with the rise of spam. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:20, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Interesting. Clearly an attack specifically aimed at Wikis, and involving specific knowledge of the "history" concept, as opposed to the "page of data."
As for the Patch, I thought the patch prohibited URLs until Ninja status was granted?, where "prohibited" meant -- complete this Catcha then go ahead.
  • Which also brings up the question -- are you responsible for entries like this in the User Creation Log? (There is a similar entry that appears in at least one other log.)
(username removed) (log action removed)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:38, 12 February 2014 (UTC)
The ninja status thing was me taking full advantage of an actual bug in the MW/Confirmedit versions. Sadly the bug was fixed in the next MW release, so that's really why we see more spam now. The patch basically brings back the bug as a feature, with an option to set the number of edits needed before URLs will be allowed. I would tweak the patch to make sure you are at least ninja status, or a whitelisted URL.
Rogue and I have one more power (singular) than the normal admins.. Those powers can't be named as she might hide my edits, then i would have to block her then she would just hide more of my edits because i can't really block her... just not good.  ;) It's rarely needed, i just practice using the feature on the spam attacks. (Sadly the power kinda violates the GNU FDL license if it was used on an actual page or historical edit of a page, so it's not enabled by default) --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:31, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Linking Inquiry 2

Am wondering again about the ability to use the images here on a complimentary site that allows diff searching/etc. I brought this up earlier (See User_talk:Lotroadmin/Archive2#Linking Inquiry) but figured it wasn't the best idea to continue as that thread has been archived. I coded the site at https://lotro.x10host.com/ . Similar to what the Cosmetics pages do here but with extensively more searching options if you want to find a specific type of equipable styles. I plan on changing the format there a bit to link here for specific item details/stats. I would like to do a simple img src in the pages' html to display the images housed here. That functionality is currently not possible and I was wondering if that could be allowed? At present when trying to update styles I've been saving them both there and here, and figure its silly to have them in 2 locations. Thoughts? --Savi (talk) 21:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

I'm okay with you linking the images. As it stands now with the web webhost we have much more network bandwidth than we need but are close to the memory limits. I don't remember off hand if i still have a generic block enabled for images, if i do let me know and I can whitelist your site. I believe EoD did enable tooltips to link to the specs if that helps, we might have to hunt down the instructions though. Also as images get updated the paths can change, do you have an idea how to deal with that? I'm guessing there is an MW API call to request images by name or perhaps even a method via curl, but I haven't looked into that. Feel free to shoot me a personal message via the email link for any issues you have (or perhaps i might have) --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:17, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
Was going to send you an email but I'm afraid I cannot find it referenced anywhere...sorry for my blindness >.< I believe there is indeed a generic block enabled on images, so if you could whitelist https://lotro.x10host.com/ that would be great. (Probably https://lotroflair.x10.bz as well...the webhost occasionally has server issues so I'm possibly going to create a backup there for downtimes). I hadn't even thought about tooltips but will definitely keep that in mind as the visual would be nice, I was simply thinking to add a text link to an item page. Unfortunately both that and the image links I do not have a convenient way to auto check for path changes...I should be able to create a list of used links to highlight any that no longer work and then manually change them...once the site is whitelisted I can see if there is a way to find the image from the name rather than the image path itself...will just have to do some trial and error tests. --Savi (talk) 15:25, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
Savi, you'll need to add an email address to your account before you can send mail through the wiki. Once you've done that (very bottom of Preferences page), you should see the link under the Tools section of the left nav bar, same place as "What links here" and "Upload file," etc. Or you can do Special:EmailUser/Lotroadmin. Sethladan 16:17, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
Thanks so much for the info Seth! I set my address up so discussion can continue wherever you'd prefer Lotroadmin. I cannot believe I never stumbled across that feature until now, lol *facepalm* --Savi (talk) 16:37, 13 February 2014 (UTC)
I would add -- the left hand link will only show up when on the users page or Talk page and THEY have added an email address to their preferences.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:17, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Bot questions

Can you check in over at: User talk:Matthew.ZellmerBot and see if anything I have said is correct and/or makes sense?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:51, 27 February 2014 (UTC)