User:Magill/talk-archive-5

From Lotro-Wiki.com
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.


Magill/talk-archive-5

Previous Talk Page archives can be found at:
file name covers date range
Archive 1 May 2011 to August 2011
Archive 2 August 2011 - November 2011
Archive 3 Liquid Threads (LQT) stuff - no data
Archive 4 September 2012 - December 2012
Archive 5 January 2013 - December 2013
Archive 6 January 2014 - December 2014
Archive 7 January 2015 - December 2015
Archive 8 January 2016 - December 2016
Archive 9 January 2017 - December 2017
Archive 10 January 2018 - December 2018
  • Being the Archive of my Talk page - January 2013 to December 2013

Your signature

Your signature, with the reverse color text and superscripted talk link is a little over done. If this was a forum or chat, I would suggest you stop shouting. Personalizing your signature is all well and good, but this is too much. See, for instance User talk:Lotroadmin#Is this a bug or an intended change implemented by one of the recent Media Wiki updates? RingTailCat (talk) 04:27, 7 February 2013 (EST)

Changes to item drop display

Hi, I wanted to be sure you are involved in the discussion about the changes to mob drops that are proposed to happen hand in hand with the transition to using the Semantic MediaWiki to link drops to mobs. For some recent changes, see for instance Ice-shore Peikko, and some discussions at User talk:RingTailCat/Sandbox-8 and examples at User:RingTailCat/Sandbox-8. I think there was also some discussion at Lotro-Wiki Contributors' Corner which recently disappeared into an archive page.

I am hesitant to go ahead with the sweeping changes that my bot could make, should I let it loose, without hearing from many more of the current and recent editors. This change would modify every mob page with a [[:Template:Lootbox]] to use the Has Drop properties. It would attempt to modify the location information about every mob to add the Has Location property.

Later, every item page would be modified to use a {{#ask}} template call which uses these properties to list the mobs which drop the item, in place of the manual list we currently have.

Generating the item drop information might be a bit more troublesome (at first glance) than changing the drops due to the various wording and formats of drop information, and the fact that some dropped items are also rewards, quest starters, etc. The first part of the exercise, translating lootbox template calls to the new format could proceed immediately, as the existing drop constructs on the item pages would continue to work as they do today.

The biggest change is in the format of the item lists which replace the traditional lootbox format. At this point, I don't believe this style change has been applied to any of the raid reward pages. For those pages, one of the formats which uses the Lootbox template but adds in the Has Drop might work, although I'm a bit unclear about who or what drops the item: the raid instance, a reward box, a chest, a boss. (In my years playing LOTRO, I have been on exactly one non-creep raid.)

So, my intention here is to stir up some discussion. - RingTailCat (talk) 17:37, 28 May 2013 (EDT)

Please see Template talk:Lootbox#New version of template using Has Drop property for the latest developments. RingTailCat (talk) 08:37, 5 June 2013 (EDT)

Núrzum

I've noticed you linking several places to Núrzum, but that page is a rare warg in the North Downs, not the ice creature in Wildermore. Just wanted to draw your attention to this, before too many errant links are in place. -- Elinnea (talk) 16:41, 20 June 2013 (EDT)

Sigh... Thanks, I hadn't noticed... or looked ... Just assumed Turbine would not reuse a name for such an important NPC.... Will have to create a "new Nurzum"...
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:55, 20 June 2013 (EDT)
Ok. Fixed... we now have Núrzum (Wildermore)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:35, 20 June 2013 (EDT)

Skill Documentation

I have one issue with the updates to documentation for the skill template: you've filled in the blank version of the template on the boilerplate. I use it often as copy-paste to create or update skills pages, and now I can't do that unless I manually remove the comments on every line. Do you still intend to have a blank version available? -- Elinnea (talk) 20:50, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Actually, I deleted in -- An attempt to coerce people to create skills using the Create new skill page. The pre-load now correctly installs the correct blank copy -- instead of one with wrong and missing parameters, and which differed from both the doc and boilerplate pages. :(
I suppose it is one of those topics open to debate -- we have the assorted "Create new" pages which people are expected to use. I don't have strong opinions either way. It's easy enough to add back in.... theoretically, I can just tranclude the preload... hmm, will have to try that.
Several of the boilerplates have been out of synch with both their preloads and the respective Template/doc page itself, so one of my long-term goals was to have the boilerplates transclude the respective template/doc pages.
On a related note, I started work on learning about bots... it seems that Amphoras is also a bot person according to Category:Bots.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:31, 29 June 2013 (EDT)
I don't like the idea of forcing people into one way. It's great to have the Create new skill option, but I use the template for many things other than just making a new skill. Turbine does major updates to skills pretty often, and I might want to redo the page afresh without actually creating a new skill page. Or I might find a skill page using an old version of the template, and I want to copy over a chunk of code to use some of the new parameters. Those are two examples of when I'd want to have the blank one available.
I do completely agree about transcluding the doc into the boilerplate though. It doesn't make any sense to have two separate ones to update. -- Elinnea (talk) 21:41, 29 June 2013 (EDT)
Ok, hows it look now. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:10, 29 June 2013 (EDT)

Skills

Nice work on the Minstrel and Guardian skills. From a brief glance they look all right to me. I'd like to do another thorough going-over with all the skills at some point, because I found quite a few in all the classes that need updating. But with major class revamps coming later this year I might just put that off. If I get a chance I'll help out with the other class skill indexes though. -- Elinnea (talk) 10:39, 9 July 2013 (EDT)


Use of align

Hi, what is the difference between using align="left" & style="text-align:left;"? I'm just curious why you prefer the longer version in tables of recent edits, that I'm not aware of? :) -- Goingbald (talk) 22:40, 17 July 2013 (EDT)

style="text-align:left;" is valid CSS, align="left" is old-type html table encoding.
As I recall, align="left" and align="center" work as expected, but align="right" does not... something like that. Got into a problem with some table alignment work a while back and the solution turned out to be ... use the css style parameter as the other is "depreciated" or some such issue. I think it kept shifting the whole table instead of the entry... it was quite strange.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:14, 17 July 2013 (EDT)

Notes on new forums

Current signature definitions -- may change in the future... from Sapience

It should allow a total 500 characters and a total of 4 lines with 1 image allowed. If that bloats and people have more words in their sigs than in their posts, it will be reduced.

Signature Guidelines 1 August 2013

  • You may link to one (1) image in your signature.
  • Images may not be larger than 350 pixels wide x 125 pixels high.
  • Images should be as small as possible (File size).
  • No animated images of any kind. Period. No exceptions.
  • No videos of any kind. Period. No exceptions.
  • Signatures must relate to LOTRO (no Xbox live gamer tags, etc).
  • Signatures must not be ‘billboards’ for your site. (You may add a simple link in the standard font size).
  • Must comply with the Community Guidelines.

Images should be no larger than 350 Wide x 125 High and try to keep the file size as small as possible.

Stylish plugin

Also available for Safari -- https://sobolev.us/stylish/
Stylish for Mac forum
home page for style inventory - userstyles.org

1- Download from: https://sobolev.us/stylish/

2. Double click on the download, to Install Stylish for Safari as an extension.

2a -- answer the OSX security question.

3- In Safari/Preferences - Extensions, verify that you have Extensions "On" and that Styllish is enabled.

4- On the left of the Browser bar is a box with an "S" in it -- click to open Stylish's control box, and click "Find More" in the window that pops up.

5- search for LOTRO

6- In the display page which opens, select "LotRO Forums 2013" -- this is the most current (2 August) version to display goldenrod colored text.

It's all CSS... so have fun.

Remember login info

People have been complaining that there's no "Remember me" checkbox on the login page any longer, so I thought I'd share how to get your browser to remember them for you...

First step for FireFox users only: bring up the Plug-ins page, search for "FireBug", and install it. You can disable or uninstall it later if you want.

Then, read through these instructions once before starting just to speed things up when you do it. The login page "expires" after a few minutes, and you'll want to get these done before it does. You can Reload and try again if that happens:


  1. Bring up your browser, then press F12. This will bring up a developer tool window (IE, Chrome) or FireBug (FireFox).
  2. Leave that window up, then go to the LOTRO log in screen (logging out of the forums if you're currently logged in).
  3. In the developer window at the bottom, make sure you're looking at the HTML tab (IE, FireFox) or the Elements tab (Chrome).
  4. Search for the word "form" (no quotes) in the HTML. For IE and FireFox, there's a search box at the top right. For Chrome, type Ctrl-F and then see the search box at bottom left. Press "Next" a few times until you get to a line in the HTML which starts with '<form id="login"'.
  5. Note that the line you're on has 'autocomplete="off"' in it. You want to change this. Click or double-click on the "off", and change it to "on".
  6. Now you're ready to log in. Do so up above, and when your browser asks you if you want to remember your credentials, say yes.

This will only need to be done once as long as you never clear all of your remembered passwords.

Also for Crome

For Chrome you also want to make sure you have the browser setup to remember your credentials.


  • Select "Offer to save passwords I enter on the web" if you want Google Chrome to prompt you to save your password every time you sign in to a new website.

Re: Moblore template

Regarding your initial question, the purpose behind the new templates was due to several factors, the most important being consistency. Numerous pages such as NPC's and Item pages have a floating infobox and monster pages seemed lacking. It also seemed to be an excessive amount of scolling just to get past the original template. I actually have no issue with the term 'creature', I simply went with Mob as it seemed simpler than creature2. That had no impact whatsoever on my desire for these new templates.

I do realize the Moblore is from 'Knowledge of the Lore-master' as well as it being represented with the creature template. My goal was to reformat the page so it looked more consistent with many other pages on the wiki while retaining all the present information. The black background was, again, to try and be consistent within the wiki. Item tooltips, recipe templates, steed tooltips, etc etc are all of the black background variety. The information was split between the two templates for two main reasons. 1) Trying to fit it all in one box would result in an unnecessarily large infobox and 2)The lore-master inspections are not as utilized as when the game began. However, the info is still sometimes helpful for specific creatures. Therefore it needed to be present but not in-your-face, hence the collapsed table.

Regarding the templates Lootbox and Lootitems, they do serve more than a simple aesthetic difference. The lootbox has been around a long time and is still highly utilized. It is used over a large span of different types of pages, not just for monster/creature drops. The lootitems template was specifically created by RTC to provide a manageable list of drop items (some creatures have so many drops you would Never scroll through them all in lootbox form, as well as you can't exactly choose which drop you want, that is up to what the game gives you) If you are looking for a specific item you find that item page and see where you can acquire it, which is where the 2nd function of lootitems comes in - the HasDrop property. If the lootitems template is used on a page that is not for creature drops, that property is applied regardless. So for example...lets say I use that template on my sandbox page to display the Item Light Hide - if I do, then when that item is queried (which it is currently) on Item:Light Hide, then my sandbox would pop up as a possible drop location...which obviously would be unhelpful and confusing for people browsing.

When the property discussion was active...which I can't recall where its located off the top of my head...the idea of a bot making the changes was looked at. Nothing was decided for certain, but it was used for many other things beside just monster drops. So changing all occurrences would be unwise and unwanted. Trying to filter the occurrences for only creatures would be awesome, but really not sure if it can be done. For monster drops...you aren't given a choice what your reward is, that only happens with quests. So I'm afraid I am a little lost by your 'Do you take the armour or the Jewelry' question.--Savi (talk) 14:04, 22 August 2013 (EDT)

Working backwards... The only place I see the Lootbox format being preferred over the Lootitems is with Quests.
And even there, your choices are, quite literally, limited to "take the armour or the Jewelry" choices. The armour rewards are class restricted, and only occasionally the Jewelry and weaponry are applicable to multiple classes. There is really not much need for "advance planning" with such situations.
As for raids, instances, etc. I don't know that you are given a choice anymore since the Remote Looting changes. There might be one or two situations still around where "Master Looter" structure still applies, but the majority of them have been eliminated.
I also looked around for the previous discussions about the "Have Drop" "stuff" and couldn't find them. One of the problems in not using the Template's talk page for a discussion about it.
  • On a side note... I still don't understand how the "Properties" make things easier or useful. I haven't been able to find it documented anywhere on the MediaWiki website.
Using Angry Broadtooth as a start... for things like the "vendor trash" (aka task items), Item:Dirty Ear and Item: matted Skin the display is, at least so far, reasonable in length. However, Item: Light Hide, is an entirely different story: "so many droppers you would Never scroll through them all" :) Which begs the question ...
Should your "Ask" table be wrapped in a "box" -- called "Droppers" or something... ?
Amongst other things, it doesn't obscure the rest of the page :)
  • It is "theoretically" possible to restrict the bot to only "Category:Creatures" -- However, I'm still having issues getting it to work the way I think it should work, although others in the past have apparently had no problems. (I'm not a Python programmer ... I retired before the language was in wide usage, so I'm at the mercy of pywikimedabot-l ...)
  • I still am playing with getting the Lootbox template over on the testwiki to take the "Has Drops" parameter... it's a convoluted template. Assuming I get it to work, a lot of the question of "Lootbox" or "Lootitems" becomes moot. And I keep getting sidetracked by the deplorable state of templates in general, pathetic documentation if it exists at all, is just a start.
Now then to the "important stuff" -- the Black of the tool-tips are simply mimicking those in-game. All of the "Info Boxes" (except for the Moors) use a light purple color scheme. The KOLM display also mimics the in-game display, or it did until Turbine switched it to also have a black background (It used to be brown for Radagast the Brown). Similarly, the Lore-master is one of the "less-played" classes... especially among Wiki-Editors! That is the main reason why most (maybe over 60%) of the Creature pages have never had their KOLM stats filled out... that and the fact that up until very recently, the Lore-master was very-squishy! Meaning that to acquire those KOLM stats required the LM to work with another player who "pulled the agro" while the LM did their thing....
I just noticed you included a "Threat" evaluation -- That is either purely speculative or a toggle between Passive and Aggressive, as other than "Red" or "Yellow" for it's health bar, the information is not available. Nominally, no Creature is recorded if they are "passive" -- meaning that all creatures are Aggressive... i.e.
There is also a physic benefit to having the Creature page look different from an NPC page -- Creatures ARE aggressive, while NPCs are not. Making them look the same on the Wiki tends to trivialize that distinction.
A "floating infobox" does not exist for an Item... that is the Tooltip pop-up. It appears in a fixed location on the Item page.
I just realized that the NPC infobox is "grey" -- I guess it never was obvious because it was not a stark contrast with the rest of the page. It uses the "Darktable" format, as do the other Monster Play Templates, as a base whereas the normal infobox is built from "altrows." That is also one distinction which has been maintained -- the Ettenmoors PvMP templates are all black/orange, i.e the "darktable" mix. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Magill (Contribs • User Talk).
I was able to find some pieces to the property and drops discussions: Template talk:Lootbox#New version of template using Has Drop property and also User talk:RingTailCat/Sandbox-8.
I'm often terrible at explaining things, lol, but simply put, using properties means less manual editing. 1 theoretical example: I fight mob x and get drop yy. I add yy to creatures page under drops. Now with the assistance of properties, mob x will automatically pop up on yy item page with his location listed as well. I know I listed the links for you awhile ago but I can't find it for the life of me lol, so here it is again: [Properties] Properties are possible through the Semantic Mediawiki extension. The 'users manual' on the right is invaluable.
Your suggestion to put the list of who drops said item in a collapsed box is a very good idea! That list was already present before the query, but was typed manually before. The query itself has a form (which for Item:Light Hide is a bulleted form, or when the query for mounts was done at Mount Index, its a sortable table), but if it works as slick as it looks it sounds great.
As to adding the property to the original Lootbox template...There should be a lootbox type template available that does NOT apply the HasDrop property or queries will just be a mess, lol. Perhaps 'floating infobox' was the wrong word. Just was meaning a box, on the right side of the page, containing information. I'm actually really confused on why the black background is an issue as the original Template:Creature was already black...I was just trying to 'modernize' it.
As to 'Threat', as noted on the template page itself, it does indeed refer to the color of a creatures health bar. I was trying to note the distinction between a mob that will rush you or one that will continue grazing as you run past it. I did not realize that 'passive' creatures were not recorded...if that is the case then it is an unnecessary value.--Savi (talk) 16:49, 22 August 2013 (EDT)

Epic Quests text

Is all that text on the Epic Quests page really necessary? I frequently use that page as an index to get to the epic quests, and a huge screenful of quotes from the official forums really breaks that up. If you have to mention something there, surely a single line would be enough: "Prior to Vol. III, Book 11 all epic quests are free to all players. Book 11 requires the purchase of the Helm's Deep expansion." There could even be a link to MoL's comment on the official forums if you think it's that important. Personally I don't find it necessary to document every dev or community manager comment here on the wiki. It's also kind of ugly, with the big boxes and the [QUOTE] tags.

Do you have a particular reason to include that information there, or can I clean it up a little? -- Elinnea (talk) 18:01, 1 October 2013 (EDT)

I thought I had started that same thread somewhere else when the statement was first made... but I could not find it.
That seemed to be the only place where we made mention of the Epic quest line when I stumbled across MoL's comment ...
What needs to be "found" is where (if anywhere) we comment that the Epic Quest line is Free to all players.
Linking to things on the official forums is always dangerous. Many times in the past those links simply have stopped working. Maybe that will change now with these new forums, I don't know. (I'm not referring to all the broken references which exist now BECAUSE of the shift in Forums.)... and personally, I've never managed to get a link to point to the actual post. For me, they only ever point to the page the post is on.
Other than that... no I don't really care.
BTW. any comments on the "Documentation Project" changes? I've tried to point people to them, but either nobody cares, or I did such an amazing job that everybody is just too stunned to comment!
:) Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:55, 1 October 2013 (EDT)
How's that... btw, the link to MoL's post at the bottom of the page suffers from "too many redirects." Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:41, 1 October 2013 (EDT)

Update 12 Class changes

I'm not entirely comfortable with the changes you're making on the class pages. For one thing, the NDA is still in effect so putting a list of specific skill names seems a little premature, even if they have listed some of them in their press releases. I also don't think that each class page is the best place to put an explanation of how to choose a specialization. The details of "What's new with this update" should go on that update page, not on every page of the wiki that it affects. As a comparison, the current (old) class pages don't include explanations of how to learn skills, what trait sets are, how to find a bard, etc. Instead they give one-line descriptions of each skill and trait, and link out to pages that contain supplementary information. I'm thinking a single Specialization page could explain what it is and how to choose one, with helpful screenshots, so that it doesn't have to be repeated all across the wiki.

Lastly, we do have a month left before the class changes hit. I often use the class pages as a handy index to all the skills and traits for that class, and at the moment I have to scroll halfway down the page to get to any kind of useful information. Could your new verbiage perhaps go in a sandbox while you work it out, to leave the current information as is on the page? -- Elinnea (talk) 20:25, 21 October 2013 (EDT)

As I've been working on the Hunter page tonight, your point is much more "obvious!" I did not have enough information before the consider "common" information. That clearly applies to all classes, and I will pull that out to a separate page later this evening. I suspect that as more information is available, something more along the lines of what was done for Mounted Combat makes sense.
However, this goes back to my original question some time ago... how to re-organize the class/skills/traits pages to deal with the new structure. The Trait Tree system is more organized than the previous collection of Skills and Traits. And while the "simple table" structure is not completely out of scope, it "doesn't flow" from the trait Trees.
At least at the moment, I don't have any better ideas. :)
What I did for the Rune-keeper is probably information that needs to be retained with the class, in some way shape or form as it does describe the basic capabilities of the specific RK specializations. The current "Role" description is no longer accurate in the HD context. There are other issues with the Rune-stones and
Looking at the list of skills, there is only one that is "new" that I probably should have left out. Break the Bonds -- I intended to look to see if it matched anything else, like the "Armour of the Elements" which was a name change made some time ago that we apparently did not capture. (I.e. the 3 versions were consolidated into one whose effects changed depending upon the most recently used skill, I believe back in Update 8 or 9 in August of last year when the affinity business was changed.
... that Dev Diary is no longer available since they moved the forums. We list it as "Armour of the [Affinity]"
(Hmmm... I just noticed the use of the link via the Wayback machine for the Dev Diary in Update 6. Didn't think of that -- I'll have to see about using it to "fix" the other references I have.)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:38, 21 October 2013 (EDT)
Thanks for splitting them out. I like new projects to be neat and tidy. :)
I've been trying to think too about how to structure the class skills and traits. With the War-steed traits I sort of hacked up a tree using tables - very inelegant and difficult to read in wiki-code. I would think that somebody would have figured out a good solution with the number of games out there using tree structures, but I haven't been able to find anything in wiki-land.
The sections that I see as needed on a class page:
  • A general description of the class, flavor as well as role
  • The general skills that are acquired by levelling (including passives)
  • Traits, skills, and the three specializations, all presented somehow to be determined
  • War-steed skills
  • The War-steed's Riddermark trait line, which is class-specific. I've been meaning to do this for ages but haven't gotten around to it yet.
Is there anything I'm missing there? -- Elinnea (talk) 00:39, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
Not that immediately comes to mind... There are more "mechanics" that are not yet defined (or stable) like the business of skills in the quickslots in particular.
I don't know if it is worth "recommending" a layout or not. I still don't have a feeling for which skills come and go... Sapience's comments ?Friday? about the "General" or "core skills" was quite enlightening. Of course, they will need to be identified separately for each class.
One thing which I don't think we do, which is likely to be needed in the future -- splitting out out "class Skills." I.e. the way we do "Wayfaring" for the Hunter and Warden.
They are likely to be more of interest as they are evidently the way that folks get additional Trait Points. LOL I don't even know what they really are ... we've always called them "Class Quests" lvl 45 and something... but I don't know if they are the only ones. "Obviously" they are the ones which show up on the "Class/Race/Epic tab -- I guess. But I don't know that those are "all" the ones referred to -- of if the Lvl 45 quests are part of that group or not.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:00, 22 October 2013 (EDT)
Hi Magill, I found Elinnea's Guardian sandbox, so I copied it down and I'm replacing stuff for the new Champion traits and all...Are we archiving old skills/traits or just writing over them? If archiving, how would you like them changed? add "(Old)" to them? Thanks for your help! Garabrand (talk) 18:34, 2 December 2013 (UTC)
Well, I can tell you my philosophy. The wiki should represent the current state of the game. If someone comes here looking for information that is most likely what he is looking for. If some new skill or trait uses the same name as an old one, I have no compunction about writing over it. It's not actually gone, after all - the old information is still there in the page history. If an old trait or skill has been retired and not replaced, it's nice to leave it there with the Obsolete tag, so that if someone comes back to the game after a long break and can't figure out where his favorite skill went, he can find it and see when it stopped being part of the game. But then I also try to remove it from categories if I can, to keep the categories from being cluttered with old stuff that's not around any more. I don't go out of my way to keep archives of every stage of Lotro's development. It's changing all the time, after all. -- Elinnea (talk) 15:13, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
I agree with Elinnea. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:25, 3 December 2013 (UTC)
I've started the Sandbox-Champion to work on the wiki instead of just Word...helps with seeing how they turn out. The tree at the bottom will look beyond messed up until I get up to those traits. Let me know what I cna improve please. Garabrand (talk) 21:35, 5 December 2013 (UTC)

Best wishes

I saw your status update about moving soon. I hope all your preparations and the move itself will go well. And that you'll be able to get the Internet sorted out so you can keep up with things you enjoy. :D -- Elinnea (talk) 18:30, 28 October 2013 (EDT)

Old Patch Notes

Hi, Bill. Seconding Elinnea above with good-luck wishes for the relocation - didn't you just move house recently? Hopefully the new neighborhood will stick. :) I happened to be looking at patch notes tonight and wondered - asking this of you because you watch Turbine and the forums like a hawk - if there were any sources for old notes now that the Lorebook and the original forums are toast. I know LotROInterface and other sites have some notes saved, but are we now without an official source for the history? (Internet Archive doesn't seem to be helping here. Dynamic pages, grr.) Sethladan 01:19, 3 November 2013 (EDT)

Earlier move(s) was temporary... hopefully this move will be permanent. I should have final details Monday afternoon.
Hmm... I haven't tried lately, but some of the old release notes WERE available via the Wayback Machine. Might just be the older ones -- before their content was made dynamic like it is now.
Other than that, we have a fairly complete collection I believe. I haven't really examined them in detail, but my list here: User:Magill/Reference-Releases lists all of the releases and their release notes. We have "copies" of all of them. And, at least from the past 2 years of so, they are copies, not "re-writes."
I've also toyed with the idea of trying to sort out the actual URL issue for the old release notes. Most of them "don't fail" with 404s, but rather with multiple re-direct failures -- which implies that it might be possible to access them.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:13, 3 November 2013 (EST)
Thanks for the thorough response. The specific issue I was looking at was an edit made to one of the old patch notes (for no particular reason that I can see) and I wanted to go find the original source before reverting. Not a big deal since it's a trivial edit, just the overcautious researcher in me wanting bases covered. Sethladan 16:58, 3 November 2013 (EST)
I rolled that back after looking at this copy from CSTM. I also vaguely remember reading that line when those notes came out. Neum (talk) 17:28, 3 November 2013 (EST)

Helm's Deep Release Notes

I filled in the update 12 release notes (still a bit rough, but the info is there) but I'm not sure what you intended with the collected information you had transcluded there. Some of it is duplicated in the official patch notes, some of it isn't. For now I left it at the bottom of that page. -- Elinnea (talk) 15:12, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Update 12 Crafting

The additional page for Update 12 is awesome! Thanks for adding the links. So how to I find/access; where is the link on the homepage to, The_Lord_of_the_Rings_Online:_Helm's_Deep Matthew.zellmer (talk)

It used to be there... now it points to Turbine's website.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:21, 2 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi, I've done rollbacks on Item:Copper Ingot Recipe (Obsolete Item Conversion) & Item:Khazâd-copper Ingot Recipe (Obsolete Item Conversion), they were renamed from tin recipes instead of deleting these & recreate new pages, they are only referred from prospector index & copper ingot pages, being now an alternate way to produce copper ingots from chunks of tin ore also renamed, does it make sense? :) -- Goingbald (talk) 21:50, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

This is weird... What I was doing was fixing the disambig entry so that the page displayed properly. View history shows a huge number of other changes that I never made.
When a recipe page gets moved, if it doesn't get the disambig entry also changed, the page does not display correctly -- the "recipe" entry displays on the left instead of the right. This is true of most pages when they get moved.
The matching of the page name is not required, but is nice as it makes why they were moved more obvious.
It's a toss-up as to which "name" gets used. I just assumed that the "obsolete Item Conversion" tag was what is currently showing in-gmae... never looked.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:58, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

A template question session

While adding and fixing a couple of parameters in various templates, I noted several things:

  1. Why does Quests/Preload wind up in Category Solo Quests?
  2. Why does Quests/Preload wind up in Category Preloads?
  3. Why does Item Tooltip/Preload NOT?
  4. Why does Item Tooltip/preload wind up in category Stubs/icon --
    Problem(s) with Template IN is discussed on Template_talk:Icon#Transclusion category leakage -- but it looks like it was never resolved
  5. Why does Template: Icon show as protected by Template: Skill/Preload?
  6. I notice a number of "new" templates which have no "Name" value filled in when you use the "Create xxx" proc.
    Template: Skill
    Template: Trait
    Template: Effect
    Template: Infobox Titles
    I.e. they all simply have "| name =" rather than (as in Item Tooltip/Preload)
    | name = {{s<includeonly></includeonly>ubst:PAGENAME}}
    | icon = {{s<includeonly></includeonly>ubst:PAGENAME}}-icon <!-- preferably a GENERIC icon -->
    | disambigpage = {{s<includeonly></includeonly>ubst:FULLPAGENAME}}

Anyone with any insight, please chime in...

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:05, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Whew! Some good catches and questions here.
  1. Quest preload should be fixed; the categorization segment now checks first for {{{nocat}}} and then compares the page name to "Preload" before adding any categories. Previously it only checked for "Preload" to add the "Template Preloads" category, but went ahead and categorized it as normal (which became a problem because the | fellowshiptype = parameter defaulted to categorizing in Solo Quests. (I found out after making this change that we could just put <noinclude>[[Category:Template Preloads]]</noinclude> right into the preload and possibly simplify things a little. Mental note.)
  2. I suspect a similar change will need to be made to Template:IN, but I'm not really keen on generating a gazillion jobs just to re-categorize one page. IN is the template that's adding those category stubs, and is called through Item Tooltip -> Tooltip -> Icon -> IN. Ugh.
  3. Neum's suggestion about Template:IN in the discussion that you linked probably won't work, for the reason that Elinnea mentioned, but I can't think of a comparable solution off the top of my head. Closest I can get would be to move the #ifexist check from IN to an earlier template in the chain. Or just scrap that check entirely. (This is something we touched on in that IRC chat a few weeks ago with respect to "too many expensive parser function calls.")
  4. Template:Icon was protected because Template:Skill/Preload was set with cascading protections. I disabled the cascading part because there's not really much point to it, so this should be fixed. Recall (or be informed for the first time!) that there's nothing magical about Preload pages - they are essentially empty calls of the template they're associated with, so any categories and subtemplates are still being called and used. Mental note to self to see if there's a way to clean that up a little... (Tangentially, I have an older mental-note-to-self to try and improve the code for the "create new article" extension; this extension is the only reason we even have the preloads, and it seems like there's a lot that could be done in a better way with it.)
  5. You can go ahead and add those lines from Template:Item Tooltip/Preload right into the other preloads if you like - all they do is substitute the PAGENAME values once you save/preview the new skill/trait/title you're creating.
Sorry for the endless paragraphs and lack of indentation, but hopefully this is enough information to at least point a direction. Sethladan 19:29, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

The GDP (Great Documentation Project)

Hey there - I've repurposed the former Guidelines project into Project:Documentation (since documentation includes guidelines and it seemed like a natural fit) for us to throw our plans and thoughts on instead of scattering them over talk and sandbox pages. I'll try to post to it regularly, but I know you're busy with several balls in the air, so just letting you know it's there to use. Sethladan 17:54, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

L95 loot table

I had seen those pages previously. I'm just a huge fan of tabling & I'm using the main list to make the by class lists at the bottom.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jaymz6 (Contribs • User Talk) at 00:06, 20 December 2013‎.

Ty. I've always prefered to table things when possible. After I get the rest of the 'by class' data done, I'm gonna mess with the look. It looks very bulky to me right now, it will end up a lot smoother & not so clunky. Still have to add the last 5 class' to it, should have that by tomorrow. Jaymz6 (talk) 02:46, 21 December 2013 (UTC)