User talk:Sethladan

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I see you...

... go back to your Calculus now, shoo, shoo...
:P -- Zimoon (talk) 19:11, 29 October 2012 (EDT)

Hahahah, I am innocent! School closed for two days on account of the storm of the century. Safe and cosy in my third floor flat here. Sethladan 20:30, 29 October 2012 (EDT)
If anyone was following the hurricane situation here in the northeast US, the situation is pretty bad for a lot of people, but I am fortunately fine and staying with family now until power is restored to my town. Building was surrounded by about three feet of water throughout Tuesday, and some of my friends had their apartments flooded and things destroyed. The wonders of living on the coast... Sethladan 19:01, 1 November 2012 (EDT)
Good to hear you're all right out there, Seth. I hope everything is returned to normal there soon (although not good for the wiki, of course :P). --Ravanel (talk) 19:08, 1 November 2012 (EDT)
Glad to hear that you are safe and hope that anyone dealing with the aftermath is fine as well. (I will point out that there was a small spike in traffic on Monday :) ) --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:56, 1 November 2012 (EDT)
Have been watching the news but felt good to know you were "safe and cosy in <your> third floor flat" though wondered how long you would be able to stay up there until food & stuff were drained. I indeed hope the restoration work for those living lower will go quick and smoothly, ready long before the winter-cold freezes it all over. Take care mate! -- Zimoon (talk) 03:00, 2 November 2012 (EDT)
Thanks all for the concern. Now back at home with power and internet. Hot water heaters need to be replaced, but that should be taken care of in the next couple of days, and now I'm off to restock on groceries. Lots of people in the area still without power, but things are drudging their way back to normalcy as we continue to clean up all the crud the flood brought through our town, heh. Sethladan 15:22, 3 November 2012 (EDT)
Thanks for keeping us updated. Glad to read you are doing OK even though I now understand you got in more troubles than I first anticipated. Keep smiling, there will be a tomorrow! -- Zimoon (talk) 05:52, 4 November 2012 (EST)


He lives! Nice to see you poking around these parts again. :D -- Elinnea (talk) 22:37, 28 August 2013 (EDT)

Hah, I wondered how much mischief I could cause before getting caught. How've you been?! :) Flirting with coming out of retirement for various reasons, and figured I'd do some clean-up work while redownloading/updating the game client. Any areas in particular most in need of help? Sethladan 22:41, 28 August 2013 (EDT)
Pretty much anything at this point, heh. Our regular editors have dwindled down to very few in the last couple months, and it's been tough to keep up with everything. I've got more half-finished projects than you could shake a stick at!
We did finally convert the skill template to enable tooltip popups, which is very cool, even if it did briefly break every skill page on the wiki. The fallout is mostly cleaned up, but it's not being used to its full potential yet. Of course, with big class revamps coming up "soon", I'm very un-motivated to do much of anything with class/skill updates. Until I get to quit my job and have somebody pay me to write wiki pages.
I'd love to have you back editing with us, only if your time and energy permits of course. Retirement can be a pleasant thing as well. ;) -- Elinnea (talk) 22:53, 28 August 2013 (EDT)
Those major incoming updates constitute one of the reasons I wanted to come back; seeing that it was only you and Magill among my contemporaries still doing heavy lifting was another, heh. I'll see what strikes me, and check in with Bill and Lotroadmin as well. Thanks again for the welcome! Sethladan 23:02, 28 August 2013 (EDT)
/wave --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:17, 21 September 2013 (EDT)
/wave back! I had the dubious good sense to "return" just before getting absolutely buried in work. Short-lived spurt of activity indeed, heh. Still need to catch up with you sometime, though! ...and watching from the shadows when I can't get edits in. :P Sethladan 00:08, 22 September 2013 (EDT)
Been off "doing other things" on other servers :).... Now up to 3 pages of notes on things to catch-up on! It's that Ben Franklin problem -- somebody changed the clocks around and the days are shorter...

Altrows js

Hey, seth, when you have the time, could you give a look into this? Seems simple enough to just remove the code related to altrows, but I know nothing of js, so I'd better not try :P Gwenwyfar (talk) 20:06, 21 December 2012 (EST)

Are you back?

If you are, I have a number of questions about botting and templates... of course I have to remember what they were...:) Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 08:59, 30 August 2013 (EDT)

Yes sir! Although not yet sure to what capacity yet. Can't help much with botting as I never managed to get one set up (still thinking about trying, though), but I can definitely field any template questions you can remember and want to throw at me. I was planning to ask you what all needed doing around here (see exchange with Elin above), anyway... :) Sethladan 13:14, 30 August 2013 (EDT)

1- In general, I've been trying to document/standardize/cleanup assorted templates. (Category:Templates) ... at least all of the "/doc" files are now lower case and many templates actually have them, and they are transcluded into the Boilerplates so that there is only one place to update. :) -- I've tended to feel like a one-armed paper-hanger of late :)

2- One template issue that comes to mind is "Reward" vs "Barter" the two can/should probably be merged as they are almost identical.

3- There have been a couple of dialogs ... with Savi over Template: Moblore and related... see User_talk:Magill#Re:_Moblore_template and User_talk:Savitara#Moblore_template I was doing "something" over on the testwiki and got sidetracked by the new server-wide quest Bounder's Bounty -- trying to put the "Has...xxxx" into whatever it was I was working on... :)

4- And then see: User:Magill#Botting I've got User: magill-bot set-up and have emailed back and forth with RTC, and have most of it going. Again, I've gotten side-tracked from that... what started it in particular, was there under "Changes" -- the 4 templates which are now pop-up tool-tips, need to have bot-runs to clean them up... of course, the first thing I have to do there is figure out how to "do" such things with the bot. While I've got the bot running, I haven't been able to gain confidence that it does what I think it should be doing. The bot business is complicated by the fact that A) I don't speak Python, and B) the Pywikipedia folks just swirched form SVN to GIT, and still don't have all the kinks worked out. I barely used SVN as I go back even further than that - SCS :)... and GIT wasn't even a "project" when I retired... so I've got to learn that "first!"... and on top of everything else... invitations to the Closed Beta of Helm's Deep went out yesterday.

5- Lots of interesting changes to the Game-engine with regard to the up-coming expansion. Known... Classes and Traits will change dramatically ... Uknown what that means until the closed beta is over... :) Helm's deep will also introduce an entirely new game mechanic called (currently) Big Battles. I'm suspecting that Turbine is "transplanting" some of the Tech from their new release "IC" Infinate Chaos... err Crisis -- a MOBA. http://www.infinitecrisis.com/en -- it is just going beta. Under "News" see the interview ... from 1 July ... 15 of IC minutes with Annuvin some interesting insight into the "environment" of MOBA.

There is probably more, but that's enough of a brain-dump for now # 3 is probably the big question, It looked simple to do, but I don't know enough "template speak" to figure out what is happening/not-happening -- which reminds me... is there any kind of "set -x" command for the Wiki/template, so you can see what is actually being substituted? The Docs on templates seem "thin" i.e. I have not been able to find a single reference to "debugging!"

... Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:42, 30 August 2013 (EDT)

One other thing I should mention if you did not notice it. The LOTRO Forums were revised at the beginning of July, and at that time the Lorebook and data.lotro.com were retired. In particular, that means there are a lot of URL pointers to the Lorebook on the Wiki that I intended to "bot" out of existence... some day :)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:48, 30 August 2013 (EDT)
Whoo! Nice thought dump - I expected/agree with a lot of what you said.
1 - Template documentation is something I very much would like to see improved, as well, so major kudos to you for moving that forward.
2 - This has been bothering me for a while, too. They do have slightly different uses, but it does make very little sense to have both. (We also have Color and TextColor templates that could be collapsed.)
3 - I skimmed very quickly through bits of the Moblore discussion. My initial response was "Don't fix what ain't broke!" but the aesthetics of the current creature template leaves a lot to be desired. I'm going to have to read more into what Savi's actually trying to accomplish (hard to follow the conversation trail after the fact) and get back to you once I make sense of what you mean by "Has XXXX".
4 - I tried the Pywikibot once, long ago, had no success, and gave up on it, so it sounds like you're further ahead already. Python isn't a language I speak either, and isn't something I'm pressed to learn at the moment. I'm wondering if bot work can also be done using PHP, which I'm slowly working on getting into. Will report back if/when I make any progress there.
5 - Obviously you can't talk about anything behind an NDA if you're in the closed beta, but hopefully you'll take good notes for us to work on once that lifts. ;) Until then, there's not really much we can do to prepare for the "big changes" without knowing what to expect. Big Battles seem like they're going to be a hassle to document from the little I've read of it. Coming up with a mechanism/template for documenting skill/trait trees will be useful, though, if only for current Mounted Combat stuff.
(6) - Regarding debugging templates, what I've usually done is put the template itself in one sandbox page, and then use another to test it. For example, when I did all that work on the crafting template a while ago, I had that template in SandboxA, then created a sample recipe (using {{:SandboxA | parameter = value | parameter = value ... }} ) in SandboxB and fiddled around with the parameters there. That's what I've always referred to as "sandboxing a template." It's a lot of trial and error and adjusting SandboxA until you get the right output.
(7) - Yeah, losing the Lorebook was kind of a double-edged sword. I think I mostly used it for getting power costs when editing skills, but this does make us more of "the only game in town," so to speak. Regarding the links, you may already know of Special:LinkSearch for at least tracking down those external links. Doing something about them is another matter entirely, heh.
In sum - I'll see about working on documentation - both template and overall - first, and this'll pretty naturally lead me to doing polishing and cleaning up of Category:Templates. What are your feelings on the current state of the overall Category:Help section? I know you found that long-winded introduction I wrote a while back. That's more of my narrative wall-of-text style instead of bullet points, and I wonder if that's useful and fleshed-out or if we should just KISS. Sethladan 11:55, 31 August 2013 (EDT)

The Great Documentation Project

It's mostly a page of notes, (you may recognize some of them), but I've managed to do some stuff trying to capture the "oral history" of the WIKI.

In that vein, most recently I created: Help: Patrolling. The "Tools for editors" box is a start at indexing things.

One other sort-of-related thing I have done... For the Regions and their respective Categories:

I have been working to "standardize" them on the model of East Rohan. Basically the categories and page layouts. "Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:32, 1 September 2013 (EDT)

Hah, it always makes me smile and blush a little when I see someone using/reusing some of my notes. You have always been fantastic about collecting thoughts and ideas and writing them down, even if they're not "pretty" or "perfectly organized." Will do what I can. :) Sethladan 03:00, 1 September 2013 (EDT)

Documentation project.

Please see Help talk:Editing Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:55, 27 September 2013 (EDT)

If you get a chance

Can you take a look at Template:Kinships

I've recently "tried to sort out" the

"stuff."

  • Template: Kinship - is now the "correct" Article Management Tag - in use by "Create new kinship"
  • Template:Stub/Kinship is now obsolete... but not removed
I have not decided a reasonable solution to the business of Category: Stubs/Kinship. It still works, but I don't know if it makes sense to move that functionality to the other tag. I am inclined to simply "forget it" as it has not been used for some time. You being the only one to have "recently" (2011 in most cases) touched it. And I don't believe that any other Editor even knows it is there! See more below.
All uses of "Template:Stub/Kinship have been switched. I created a category Category: Kinships - unidentified to hold those kinships who have entries, but appear to have not been touched for several years, and which may or may not be "live" -- but which cannot be linked to any world. Many of the URLs are now dead.

It has been fun because of the "Kinship" and "Kinships" singular/plural issue. I "think" I have cleaned that up now. "Kinship" usage is now consistent, except for the names of the template parts -- much easier to change once they are working correctly.

  • Now then, as to "working correctly."
There are several lines at the head of Template:Kinships which make no sense to me, and appear to do nothing, or at least do not do what I think they should do.
<includeonly><!-- Categorization for /Preload only -->{{#ifeq: {{PAGENAME}}|Kinships/Preload|[[Category:Template Preloads]]|}} {{#if:{{{world}}}|[[Category:{{{world}}} Kinships|{{{name}}}]]}} </includeonly>
In Particular, the "if world" clause seems to insert the text "[[Category:{{{world}}} Kinships|{{{name}}}]]" on the preview page of "Create new kinship" but then does nothing.
Similarly, a "box" is created with assorted {{ }} parameters displayed, in addition to the actual box for the page.
In addition, the parameter {{name}} is reduced to a single ' -- and not picking up the pagename. Comparing with Amphoras and your previous edits. I see no change that might have caused that. The implication being that this template has never worked correctly.
  • If one uses the "Create new kinship' script and inserts a "world" parameter, then previews it... the text inserted at the top fills out correctly -- but it is apparently never used anywhere. i.e. the Category line is not created. Similarly, if one inserts a "Name" value as well, it appears as expected, and then the Category is displayed at the bottom of the page, and that excess box at the top is gone.
Thanks Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:58, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
I saw the work you did on kinships, and was surprised at how many were still floating around in the main namespace - good job tracking those down! My first question would be, though, do we need a new category (Kinships - unidentified) to replace Stub/Kinship? I know things are kinda funky with stubs, but the way I thought of it was that a kinship that wasn't attached to a server was obviously an incomplete kinship page => a stub. Either way...
I'm in total agreement that the Kinships/Kinship thing is a little silly. Sometimes the header/article tag is there, sometimes not. I mostly ignored the whole affair because - as you alluded - a lot of people just show up, create kin pages, and then the dust bunnies move in (same deal with character pages). With a lot of that "player-created" stuff, I'd love to set up some sort of activity-level standard - e.g., if your page hasn't been updated for three months, it's fair game for deletion. As you know, the work of maintaining legacy code (or other people's abandoned crap) sucks up xx% of all development effort, and I really can't be bothered keeping all these vanity pages up to snuff.
Now to your bullets -
  • Three different issues at work here:
    • The "if world" clause requires the {{{name}}} parameter to be filled, which is why you're seeing [[Category:{{{world}}} Kinships|{{{name}}}]] as plain text when a name isn't filled in. Whoever wrote that bit got carried away with the notion of category sort keys which you really almost never need.
    • The box with {{{ }}} parameters that you're seeing when you use Create new kinship comes from the editintro field on that same page - whatever is in Template:Kinships is going to get thrown into the space above the edit field once you click the "create new kinship" button. Ideally you want documentation to appear there, but since the /doc on Template:Kinships is "noinclude"ed, you get only the raw empty template. If you hit "Preview," even without changing anything in the edit field, you'll see that box go away because it only appears on the initial edit screen - this is a limitation of the extension that handles the "Create new..." scripts (last updated 2007! I need to go rewrite the darned thing or something).
    • I'm not sure where that single apostrophe is coming from, but there's no provision anywhere in the template code for {{{name}}} to default to {{PAGENAME}} - we could make that happen if you wanted, though.
  • Think I addressed this above.
  • Definitely doable, whether it's Stub/Kinship or Kinship - unidentified or Homeless Kinships.
I'll go ahead and do a little tweaking tonight to try and resolve these various issues, then we can see how it looks or what other questions pop up. Sethladan 20:39, 4 October 2013 (EDT)
Take a look at User:Sethladan/Sandbox and User:Sethladan/Sandbox2 when you get a moment and see if that's behaving as expected. (I put table-row background colors into the site-wide CSS to keep the thing a little cleaner.) Sethladan 03:42, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
I don't know/forgot what the lag time is for updates to the Common.css. I probably shouldn't have futzed with it, but - assuming I didn't do something wrong - it might take some time for the stylings there to actually show it. It worked fine when I had it in my own vector.css... Sethladan 03:50, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
Forgot about Create new kinship, but that should be pulling the right documentation page now. And hurrah - the CSS seems to have propagated and the styling shows up now. Sethladan 13:08, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
Looks good... a slightly "off track" question (i.e. my lack of template knowledge) --
If one supplies "world" alone, nothing happens (ignoring box contents).
if you supply "name" alone, nothing happens...
But if you supply BOTH Name and World, the page is put into the appropriate category ... kinship-world.
  • "Obviously" I would like this to default to -- Category: Kinship - unidentified; but I don't understand what is happening/not happening, to set a default.
LoL, I like "Kinships Homeless" ... but it's probably not PC.
The "Kinships - unidentified" was created to move the orphened (i.e. unidetified) pages out of the top-level category "Category: Kinships -- argh... missed that ... another plural. It also keeps all kinship pages under Category Kinships and out of "Uncategorized Pages." I don't mind them ALSO being in Category Stubs/Kinship, but I don't think that should be the parent category of pages.
I understand the "stubs/kinship tag and category, but it appeared that it was very little used, and that the problem was with the fact that the the boilerplate told people "the wrong way" to create the page. I have no objections to keeping it around, maybe somebody will use it. Just have to figure out how to document/explain its usage.
I have to finish going through all of the boiler plates and eliminate the "cut and paste" instruction and replace it with "Use create new." Neum just created the "last" one -- Title. So now all Boilerplates have matching Create New boxes... only Location "doesn't work right."
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:36, 5 October 2013 (EDT)
If you're using the "Create new kinship" tool, you'll still see the funky behavior that you were asking about in the first place - the only thing I changed there was the display part on the first edit (now you see useful information instead of that odd broken box).
The actual new code is on my sandboxes, so if you want to see the defaulting to "Kinships - unidentified" and name => PAGENAME, you'll need to play around on User:Sethladan/Sandbox2. Sorry for the confusion - two different processes going on here.
After further thought, I'm okay with dropping the Stub/Kinship template and category. As long as there's no redundancy, then I'm happy, and since (with this template revision) kinships will be either in "unidentified" or in a world category, there's no need to keep around the stub tag. Less work for us to do as editors, both to maintain the documentation and to monitor the category!
I've never been fond of the boilerplates myself, but if you've gotten them at least a little more organized, then that's a good thing. What I would eventually like to do is integrate those boilerplates with their respective Help:Xyz pages so the info is more centralized. That's a couple steps down the road in The Great Documentation Project, though, so the more important thing is that you've got it all "correct." And yeah, Locations are kinda funny; Zimoon tried hard to make it accessible and accurate, but that may have resulted in too many options or something. Sethladan 14:12, 5 October 2013 (EDT)

Skirmish Items

Because you are so happy, that I add the missing Items, maybe you can help me. I play on a german loaclisation!!! This makes two problems for me. The First problem is the exact Item name (Lvl 80 and 85, also for the Light and Medium Armour) and the second is the exact reduces, increase threat for bows and javelins. Maybe you can add this missing Item names an check the bows and javelins for me? Barny (talk) 11:51, 7 October 2013 (EDT)

Hah, way to recruit me to your cause with a good persuasive argument. I'll see what I can do. :) (I sometimes play in German or French just for fun, but it never ocurred to me the barriers that using those localizations could pose for editing!) Sethladan 15:35, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
I don't want to recruit somebody, but I need help to finish this projekt. :) Barny (talk) 18:19, 7 October 2013 (EDT)
Double-checked everything except for Master Guardsman and Rohirric. Those bows/crossbows/javelins are super annoying - wish Turbine could make up their mind how to write them. Fixed a few small mistakes but otherwise it looks very good! Sethladan 18:07, 9 October 2013 (EDT)
Seth, if you are talking about spelling errors/inconsistencies, don't forget to bug them as Translation errors! Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 08:56, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
Re: the inconsistencies, my annoyance was at the English tooltip text; I don't know if there are issues with the translation as well since I haven't looked at them in French or German (and don't speak enough of either to confidently say that there's an error). Basically, some weapons have noun constructions "moderate increase to threat" and others are more verby "moderately increases threat." It all means the same thing, but keeping things updated when they're idiosyncratic is work, heh. Sethladan 09:44, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
Thank you. The Master Guardsman (lvl70 and 75) will be the next for me.
The other Skirmish Barters:
* Afterwards I want do update the Jewellery and Cloaks,
* Curiosities will be fast, maybe only a update of the Marks
* Crafting is up do date
* Cosmetics I never will touch. This other people have to do!!!
* Legendary Items will be fast, maybe only a update of the Marks
* Light Armour miss the Rohirric Items
* Medium Armour miss the Rohirric Items
* Heavy Armour is up to date
* Provisioner will be fast, maybe only a update of the Marks
* Currency Exchange is maybe up to date
* Classic: I don't like the design. Maybe somebody has a better idea?
Barny (talk) 07:54, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
An excellent summary! I agree that the Classic article is less than perfect, but we're not able to put everything all on one page like we do for Weapons - if we have more than 500 items together then we start getting errors. We'll have to see if someone comes up with a nicer-looking design for that. Sethladan 09:44, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
The Skirmish-Weapons also have to much calls now (514 + 18 missing Items)!!! Barny (talk) 13:13, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
Made a change to the Skirmish-Weapons page to get around the parser function issue. It looks a little sad and boring without the icons for Marks and Medallions, but at least it works now. Need some creativity to find a happy medium, I guess. Sethladan 23:09, 10 October 2013 (EDT)
Maybe we can show the icons in the top (in the line "Items to Trade")? Barny (talk) 07:20, 11 October 2013 (EDT)
I made a example inside lvl 20 Barny (talk) 07:40, 11 October 2013 (EDT)
I was considering something like that, so I'm glad we had the same idea. The right side columns might look a little better if they were narrower (too much empty space now) but I like the improvement. :) I bet we could do this for Skirmish-Classic, too, as long as there are less than 450 or so items to receive. Sethladan 11:47, 11 October 2013 (EDT)
Last comments before update 12 launch:
* Classic: Miss Barad Guldur
* Cosmetics: Miss some Items. I never will touch. This other people have to do!!!
* Crafting: Miss some Expertise Recipes
* Curiosities: maybe only need a update of the Marks
* Jewellery and Cloaks: is up to date
* Legendary Items: maybe only need a update of the Marks
* Light Armour: is up to date
* Medium Armour: is up to date
* Heavy Armour: is up to date
* Provisioner: maybe only need a update of the Marks
* Currency Exchange: is up to date
* Weapons: is up to date
Barny (talk) 13:51, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
Whoo! You've continued to work hard at this - hat's off to you. I copied over your summary to Project:Skirmishes in case anyone decides to look there (it's not very likely...) and finishes up the missing parts. I'll have my winter holiday in a couple of weeks and should be able to come back and help out some more at that time. Do you still want me/someone to review your work? I think you're very accurate anyway. ;) Sethladan 14:45, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
The work is not finished. Maybe we need a template for the Marks and Medallions. I am sure, they will change the Price. With a template it's easier to change them, instead of changing in every Item and in the Summary. I think you don't have to make a review, because there was no text to translate from german to english. Barny (talk) 15:21, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
That's an interesting thought about using a template because - you're right - there are way too many items to update individually if Turbine changes the price. But if some things change and others don't, then using a template makes even more trouble... And it's not always easy for new editors to understand how to deal with templates. It's worth a consideration, though. Sethladan 16:48, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
I just reviewed Skirmish-Weapons for Update 12, including updating all the mark/medallions costs. After all that work (and thinking about all the individual items that need to be updated now) I am 100% in favor of adding some auto-magic template thing to make this easier. Not sure of the best way forward, but it definitely needs to be done. Will bear in mind. Sethladan 23:08, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

learning the rules...

You rolled back some of my changes to Update 12, Helm's Deep - November 20, 2013 yesterday. Thanks for using the Talk, and taking ownership of your action, I will be happy to re-create the changes on the Discussion page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by matthew.zellmer (Contribs • User Talk) at 08:20, 27 November 2013.

Thanks for understanding! I don't enjoy undoing others' effort, especially when I agree with their intention. The interesting thing about patch notes now is that - as far as I know - we're pretty much the only repository for the history of the original patch notes since Turbine took down the Lorebook. This is a reminder of why there's a good reason to stick with what they publish even when we know there's a lot to be added. Sethladan 19:33, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Arbitrary Note to Self

CSS and header styles. Some headlines look too similar; see Magill and Zimoon going off the rails on Talk:LOTRO Store#Capitalization Question. Sethladan 02:23, 1 December 2013 (UTC)

Some template questions

Would you take a look at: User_talk:Magill#A_template_question_session when you get a chance.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:11, 6 December 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks... I don't know if Eggolass is currently active or not. I ran into an issue that seems to relate to her -- User_talk:Eggolass#Contents_of_Template_Sandbox.3F -- do you know the answer?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:36, 6 December 2013 (UTC)
Looks like Elinnea got there first; she says essentially what I would have. I would also add the reminder that there's nothing magical about Template:Sandbox and Template Sandbox - you can test templates on any old page. I use User:Sethladan/Sandbox and its two siblings. Good luck with your testing! Sethladan 06:43, 7 December 2013 (UTC)

Sidebar change

Did you or I just manage to change the sidebar?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 18:33, 14 December 2013 (UTC)
Whoah. I don't see anything in Recent Changes that could have done it. Check with Lotroadmin - I think the same thing happened recently with respect to some sort of updating on the backend. Sethladan 18:36, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

Can you quickly look at Hardened Guardian's Jewelry of Helm's Deep

I don't know how long this will sit looking like this, however, there is something wrong with it. (Item set box should be at the right)

I don't know if it is distorted the way it is simply because the two items do not exist, of if there is a template problem.

I don't see anything obviously wrong with the basic page.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:23, 15 December 2013 (UTC)
Fixed - it was one of those cursed apostrophe problems. I did name = {{subst:PAGENAME}} and that seemed to straighten it. That reminds me that I actually had an idea for a general fix for those issues so we don't have to play the substitution game on those "disambig"ing parameters. Mental note. Sethladan 02:18, 15 December 2013 (UTC)

A css question

I don't know if I'm asking the right question here: Are there multiple CSS "defaults" -- MediaWiki:Common.css is the only one I know of.

However, I've seen a random assortment of class="<table>" parameters

  • Wikitables
  • TopTable
Documented at: Help:Advanced Editing III are:
  • wikitable
  • darktable
  • altRows
  • stocktable
  • mptable
  • altRowsMP
That page states that capitalization is important.
I don't know how much of that page is still valid, I think most all of it comes from 2008.

Looking at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Collapsible_tables I get the impression that much of this is javascript params, not css.

  • I think what I'm trying to find out is -- what "class=" options exist for making tables and where are they listed or documented.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:08, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
This (these?) is an absolutely good question, and the short answer is that MediaWiki:Common.css is indeed our main CSS file. Anything beyond that is hidden somewhere in the software out of our reach. (class=wikitable must be part of the latter, as it's available by default from MediaWiki.)
Unfortunately, it's not quite that straightforward because Common.css doesn't have everything. A lot of stuff is also used by the (many and widespread) Javascript files: you'll find for example that the second function in MediaWiki:Common.js asks (on the seventh line) "if table hasClass collapsible" even though a collapsible class for tables is never defined in Common.css.
When in doubt, head to MediaWiki:Common.css and do a quick Find on the class you're looking for. If it's not there, it's probably in the Javascript somewhere. If that ever gets consolidated and cleaned up (Lotroadmin has asked for this a couple of times...), we'll have to make sure there are comments in the code to make finding classes easy there, as well.
And, yes, the class names are case-sensitive, so capitalization is important. According to e.g. this StackOverflow question, it's not the CSS that's case-sensitive, but the HTML class names. So whenever we do class="xyz", it needs to match the definition exactly.
Finally, it's my hope that we can someday standardize, organize, and expand the classes that we have available to make formatting easier. For example, we have centerTable, which centers everything in the table, and I once added centerTableFirst, which only centers the first column. I'm not sure if having lots of little classes like these would be helpful or just confuse people more, though. (I envision, for example, making a table with class="centerFirst centerThird" and then just ignoring alignment for the rest of the day.)
Hope this helps! Like everything else around here, CSS/JS need work and documentation. :) Sethladan 19:07, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
Thanks... Time I guess, to "start yet another project" User:Magill/project-understanding-css
Which already morphed into -- finding all of the Tooltip javascript "stuff" - Any insight on Help:tooltips vs User talk:Eleazaros/Tooltips Help?
Feel free to move this conversation over to "project-understanding" :)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:13, 22 December 2013 (UTC)
Haha about Project:Understanding. Hopefully getting all this explained in various Help files will get that sorted out. I'm a little eaten up by questing through Helm's Deep this weekend, but we'll get there for sure.
Tooltips are an interesting can of worms. I am under the suspicion that, to a large part, all the Eleazaros stuff is actually not relevant anymore. EoD imported/wrote/rewrote pretty much the whole affair at MediaWiki:Lord of the tooltips.js. I know you don't speak JavaScript, but there are some comments in there to sort of point you towards what's going on. (Basically, Template:Tooltip encloses the content that we want to "pop-up" in some class tags, and then the JavaScript fetches that content whenever we create a link to it using another class.)
At the time that we switched over to EoD's code, we kept Eleazaros' stuff around for backwards compatibility but, as I said, I don't think/(know if) it's used anywhere. The only reason it's being included on pages is because it's attached to MediaWiki:Common.js - towards the bottom with all the other importScript directives. You can then follow the breadcrumbs from there (which it seems like you did in your understanding-css notes page).
Not sure what I can tell you beyond that. User talk:Eleazaros/Tooltips Help (your link) is conceptually relevant, but not necessarily accurate for 2013 since we don't use item infoboxes anymore and we've split out the "tooltip" function (Template:Tooltip) from what is now Template:Item Tooltip. Keep tossing out questions as you run into them and I'll try to elaborate as needed. :) Sethladan 21:55, 22 December 2013 (UTC)

documentation et.al.

Looking at the Main Help page -- top section: MediaWiki Markup.

Are those three Items still relevant?
  1. Help Images is a duplicate of -- Creating Images and Icons for upload
  2. I started to write a page for the Tables entry and realized that it already existed - Advanced Editing III: CSS and Tables
  3. and the basic Markup is provided by the other column's entries.

So, I would just get rid of them. ??

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:24, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
I've been doing a lot of only-part-finished edits on that page without really writing down my thoughts anywhere, sorry. I added those links with the vague plan of getting a layout together first and then dealing with adding the content.
  1. My thinking was to move "Help:Images" to "Help:Image Guidelines" and use Help:Images to go through the wiki syntax for images and galleries - trying to separate out the "how do I?" from the "how should I?" if that makes any sense.
  2. Help:Tables - I know we have that advanced editing page, but we don't really have anything that deals with basic table syntax: {|, |+, |-, ||, !!, etc.. Similar to above, I wanted to have a space for a syntax how-to since that's not covered elsewhere.
  3. Help:Basic Markup - You're right that markup is covered in the other pages. My thinking for this was to put together a cheat-sheet similar to the table on Help:Editing, but to make sure I cover everything at the basic level, instead of just a few examples. Maybe this should just be "Markup"? or "Markup Quick Reference"? I tend to dwell on details, so I'm trying to iterate quickly during those times that I can force myself to sit down to this Help section.
Do you think I'm going too overboard with this section? I keep thinking that we could tell people to just go to MediaWiki to learn markup, but at the same thing I like the idea of having everything all in one place and clearly laid out for our newbies. Sethladan 21:57, 1 January 2014 (UTC)
Hmmm... maybe -- Us v Them; Do vs Should do; interesting dilemmas.
I suspect that what we need here is a "Guide through the overwhelming"
-- This seems to me to be the kind of classic "education" question every educator faces when creating a syllabus -- maybe we need someone with some formal education training here to direct this discussion! I come from a family of teachers, but I never had any teacher training myself (except from the Army -- KISS). I just remember things they complained about. I have only presented "lectures" on topics, all technical and some fairly basic, but none where the attendees were not "self-selecting" -- i.e. where the attendees determined if they "knew enough" to attend and were therefore "highly motivated" (typical, ond-shot, one-hour, User Group presentations).  :)
Let's throw out some questions:
  1. What information/techniques do we want to cover?
  2. What information/techniques do we NEED to cover?
    • What information is unique to this Wiki?
    • What techniques are unique to this Wiki?
    • What techniques are prerequisites to our techniques
  3. What information/techniques are prerequisite?
  4. What information/techniques are "nice to have" but not necessary?
    • What prerequisite information can I expect new editors to reasonably have?
    • What do we do with/for those students who don't have that information?
    • Where can they get the necessary information/techniques quickly

One thing which I did when I started editing here. I had very little Wiki knowledge. I had done a couple of things on wikipedia long ago (when it first came on-line) but had not been back since. So I really had no idea what I was doing. So I created a section, morphing into a page into pages of "editing tricks/tips/places to remember.

User:Magill#Reference

A lot of that is what you are talking about -- pointers to the main MediaWiki/Wikipedia documentation.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:07, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
I remember seeing a similar sort of question framework on one of your notes pages, and it smacks of teacher education, hahah. I think we do have quite a variety of people to whom a Help section would need to cater, from the wiki warhorse software developer to the stay-at-home grandmother for whom LOTRO is the main use of the computer. Because of this, I really wanted to have a "from-scratch" approach to easing people in. Those who know what's what can skip ahead to the guidelines (that would be techniques that are unique to our wiki, I suppose).
At the same time, not everyone cares about writing slickly marked-up code, and just wants to know how to edit, rollback, and be reassured that they're not going to break anything should they try something. Me being me, I tend to think of editing in terms of style and wiki-magic, which is why I think those pages like Help:Introduction and Help:Editing and Help:FAQ are so important because they get to the "procedural" side of things, more of a bird's-eye view than the nuts and bolts I prefer, heh.
Regarding your tips'n'tricks section, that's the sort of thing that's useful in developing a Help section! If there are things that you didn't know, or that you find yourself constantly needing to look up, then there are doubtlessly other people who need the same references - that information is definitely game for inclusion in the documentation. (I pretty much write nothing down for my own reference, so I'm party to the "oral history" problem here, I guess.) I suppose the difference is that you have your notes organized in a way that's most readable to you, while if I were to go write a Help article about it, the particular detail that you might be looking for could get lost/buried... Sethladan 20:21, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

A total digression

I got side tracked by Template:clr

In looking up one thing I find another, good old Serendipity at work -- On the subject of Tables ...

"At the beginning, perhaps you used table elements to structure your layout, and even if tables are very intuitive, the table purpose is to list tabular data. You also tried the CSS display values like: table, table-cell or table-row to build structures, but shortly you gave up as there wasn’t enough support for that."

I've been noticing that a great deal of the, especially, Template "stuff:" was all written back in the "dark ages" -- i.e. when LOTRO was first out, i.e. in 2007 and 2008 -- and when HTML 3 was barely proposed.

"To some extent… we could say floats are the Tables of CSS, being used like we used tables a few years ago to create layouts because we had no other alternative."

So, today we are pushing HTML5 and one wonders how many "better"/different ways of doing things are now available.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:07, 2 January 2014 (UTC)
I've definitely noticed the same, and have done my best to try and update styles when I come across them. I'm tentatively in the anti-tables camp of the CSS debate, but the fact is that for achieving a display like on the main page, tables just do the job in a way nothing else can (while working across all browsers). There are, fortunately, current and upcoming options that I'm looking forward to using on my own site when I'm not really as concerned about supporting older browsers (Flexbox being the main one).
That said, though, there's nothing - at this point - necessarily wrong with floats and tables if they're doing the job they need to do. I would, however, keep an eye out for deprecated HTML codes, the most egregious of which would probably be <font> and <center> - have seen a few of these around. They still work and probably will for perpetuity, but it's just bad practice that we as software/system engineers should work to stamp out, right? :)
(I should qualify the above with the disclaimer that I have not yet looked deeply into HTML5 and really just spend all my time digging through CSS3 stuff. Two different legs of the tripod.) Sethladan 20:00, 2 January 2014 (UTC)

Template loop detected: Template Trait

Please see Template_talk: Trait - Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 20:37, 4 January 2014 (UTC)

I presume you saw the new bot activity...

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:23, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
In passing, yeah. I'm slowly building mine from the ground up in PHP instead of Python because just because, haha. It's very much an incremental work in progress. Are you having any luck with yours? Sethladan 21:25, 21 January 2014 (UTC)
You beautiful nerds (yes, that's a compliment)! ^^ --Ravanel (talk) 10:24, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

I am doing the same thing maybe we can help each other. I am not to the API edits just yet. I am using AJAX to send the API queries so I can format the returned xml/json data before displaying it on a webpage, much like Pywikipediabot does using its python functions. Is this how your doing it too? Matthew.zellmer (talk) 15:12, 24 January 2014 (UTC)

Hey there! I'm actually using straight-up PHP, no JavaScript yet (although I may end up needing it eventually). So far I've gotten down logging in, getting an edit token, and listing pages or dumping them into a text file. Next step is to do what it sounds like you're working on - displaying the content and making edits. We can definitely compare notes and see what techniques we're using in common or what improvements we can make. (I don't know how Pywikibot does its thing as I only looked at it briefly a couple years ago and gave up.) Are you able to get into the IRC channel so we could discuss sometime? Sethladan 15:20, 24 January 2014 (UTC)
WOW I think I should watch your page! Sorry for the delay. I would like to get on IRC sometime with you but I get pretty busy. So here is my update. I moved all my notes to User:Matthew.zellmer/bots, I went with a PHP only solution that takes advantage of cURL for the required POST requests. I have the POWER of the BOT! I have been testing API query and edits all week on the test server! I can execute find/replace edits for any page I want. My edits are man-in-the-middle so you have to do a key word search first, then specifically select (checkbox) each page to want to make changes too after a quick review. Im pretty happy with it. No testing yet on the lotro-wiki site yet. Matthew.zellmer (talk) 23:07, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
Congrats on the progress! As I said on your talk, I've had to shelve this for a while, but it sounds like you're getting there and doing so very responsibly ("With great power, Peter..."). Keep up the good work. And, yes, you should watch pages that you work on, but especially talk pages, otherwise you'll miss every conversation until long after the fact. :P Sethladan 04:33, 7 February 2014 (UTC)
Update first test case, changed 1 page by removing the "Has Location::" until there is a way to implement it quicker then manually. Matthew.zellmer (talk) 17:30, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

Off-wiki

Hi fellow completionist. I'm not sure how much of the areas you own in LotRO right now, but in the odd chance that you haven't completed all the deeds for the Survivors of Wildermore yet, maybe we can team up? The dailies include the completion of warbands (also for deeds), but some are tough. The area is almost deserted these days, so it's hard to find people for them. With the two of us, we should easily be able to do at least small fellowship ones. Just an idea! --Ravanel (talk) 10:32, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

The launcher didn't say anything yesterday, but today - surprise! - the server is going down one hour before our warband date, only to be opened (an estimate of) four hours later. Great timing, Turbine, great timing. >.< --Ravanel (talk) 11:52, 23 January 2014 (UTC)

Can you explain

In "recent changes" I periodically see entries like:

  • (Upload log); 20:49 . . (username removed) uploaded "File:Lorg.pdf" ‎
  • (User creation log); 20:46 . . (username removed) (log action removed) ‎

which are then replicated in those two logs.

Do entries like this imply that the server has been hacked, i.e. the Log Files are being directly edited -- Or are they the result of some other action?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:19, 3 February 2014 (UTC)
Good question. The only thing I can think of immediately that would cause this is Lotroadmin doing some magic with the log. He has the ability to fully strike stuff from the record, as it were, and I guess does this in cases where he sees things that are hugely sensitive or inappropriate or whatnot. Sethladan 04:19, 3 February 2014 (UTC)

Another one I can't figure out

In patrolling, there are 4 pages which show up as New...

Talk:Polished Brass Necklace of the Rider
Polished Brass Necklace of the Rider‎
Talk:Polished Iron Bracelet of the Rider
Polished Iron Bracelet of the Rider

All 4 have been "moved" (deleted). Usually with such pages, one can follow the redirect to get the "mark as patrolled" page. However, there is no redirect with these 4.

So far, I have been unable to find a way to get them out of the patrolling list.
I realize they will eventually "falloff the list, but it just irks me that I can't find the pages that "obviously" the Special Pages can.
Any guesses?
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:38, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
There used to be a workaround for when this happened, but it seems like the new Ajax way of patrolling scrubbed that. The brute force way seems to be to recreate and then delete the page, which will get rid of the entry in the unpatrolled list (I did this for one of the pages in question). There's also a Patrol action through the API, will have to look more into this later. Lesson of the day (for Barny) - patrol before you move! Sethladan 23:56, 4 February 2014 (UTC)
Interestingly, they seem to have disappeared today. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:30, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
I don't have check if this Items are existing, nor if they have the correct attributes, ... I only moved them to the correckt naming. So there was no reason for me to paroll his work. The items and their Talk pages are in Item:Polished Brass Necklace of the Rider‎ and Item:Polished Iron Bracelet of the Rider. Barny (talk) 23:30, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
@Magill: The pages disappeared because I got tired of seeing them in the patrol list and executed the brute-force fix I described above (recreate and then delete). I figured you had seen (or would eventually see) my comment here and it didn't make sense to leave them laying about.
@Barny: No problem - you were just doing your job. :) The fault really lies with MediaWiki for this silliness, but if you do move pages in the future, please consider hitting the patrol button before doing so (or leave a redirect so we don't have this issue). I understand that "patrol" is not a big concern for everyone, so it's not a big deal either way. Thanks for helping out the new editor! Sethladan 04:17, 7 February 2014 (UTC)

New map - HD Epic Battles - coordinate issues

Can you look at: Quest Talk:Chapter 3: Night Deepens, then at: User:Eleazaros/coords.js, the last entry "Epic Battles" and the comments at the beginning.
I believe those changes need to be applied also to this map as it has translated the map "North."
I have the test coordinates set-up in User_talk:Eleazaros/coords.js#Helm.27s_Deep
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 04:12, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
Quick reply now, will look into it later if possible: This isn't a new phenomenon - it seems like Turbine uses maps "off the edges" for all kinds of instanced stuff. I suspect if we were to plot out various skirmishes and quest instances, we'd find a whole 'nother Middle-earth north of Forochel. I'd recommend a more specific name for the secondary map - "Helm's Deep B" or something - because we almost certainly will someday end up with more epic battles that aren't in Helm's Deep. Other than that, shouldn't be any problem with using a new map (if needed) or a new coordinate offset. But, yes, the onus is on the editor to notice and use the correct geography. Sethladan 13:52, 17 February 2014 (UTC)
Trying to set this up... must have some strange typo... (tab-vs space? the apostrophe?) that I can't see. On the test page User_talk:Eleazaros/coords.js#Helm.27s_Deep the tooltip is popping up the correct map, but generating the error, "EB-Helm's Deep (page does not exist)". It is clearly getting the correct map file -- the aspect ratio is different.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:33, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Oh, damn, okay. I forgot about that - the template creates a link to whatever page you put in Tooltip Coords, so when I suggested you use a specific name, I kind of botched that one. If you go back to using "Epic Battles map" as the file name, then you should get a blue link (to Epic Battles) and no error. Really, any page will do as long as it exists; you might know of a more appropriate target for that link.
Eventually need to think of a more elegant solution down the road, perhaps as part of Neum's thought of getting multiple locations appearing on a single map pop-up. Sethladan 14:55, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Actually, as another solution, I just redirected EB-Helm's Deep to Helm's Deep. It's not pretty, so you might still want to change the map name or something, but at least it works as is now. Sethladan 14:58, 18 February 2014 (UTC)
Aha... that is good to know. Now I just need to find someplace in the "rats nest" to stick the instructions.
That discussion is prompting me to consider one which relates to computer discussions where I am now living -- namely the "end" of XP, and the resulting "confusion" over Windows 7's transition to Windows 8! One wonders how many of these "old problems" are still fixed, i.e. thoughts about regression testing. The discussions about colors being one of the more interesting ones. -- Yet another "side track" :)
  • Yet another side-track -- This WIKI does not recognize the concept of Zones! (But uses the term liberally on various pages.) Areas are defined with sub-aress limited to Settlements and Landmarks. The question is -- is the distinction (Between Area and Zone) real or simply another situation where Turbine changed their nomenclature and usage over time?


Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:12, 19 February 2014 (UTC)
Very quickly, because my brain is fried from calculating 18 sets of accelerations, velocities, and times (the joys of undergraduate physics lab reports): Land -> Region -> Area. Are "regions" what you're thinking of with respect to "zones"? I don't know what Turbine calls them internally, but we've been using those three terms for as long as I can remember. And as far as I know, "sub areas" only exist in Moria.
And I haven't thought about colors in a while. I would hope that operating systems don't impact the way colors are displayed compared to versions of web browsers. If it's something you want to look into (I advise against it; there are way too many chainsaws in the air right now, heh), you could ask Lotroadmin for the latest browser/OS stats and start working from there. Sethladan 04:53, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

HD Sets Question

Hey, hope I'm doing this right. Just wanted to ask a quick question about the jewelry reward sets introduced in HD. As you may or may not be aware, the Necklace and Earrings are in one set, and the rest in another. The problem is, both sets share the same name, for example "Forceful Rune-keeper's Jewellery of Helm's Deep". How could I create two separate sets with the same name? Is it possible?
Calhalam (talk) 21:46, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

Unless we are talking about apples and oranges, there is only one set of 5 pieces. The Quartermaster (Veterans of Helm's Deep) only offers one set of RK jewellery that I see. It may look like 2 sets if you first look at the "All" listing, and then at the "Rune-keeper's Jewellery of Helm's Deep" listing.
That said, the in-game Tool-tip for the set is clearly wrong. It looks like Turbine changed the name of the pieces at some time.
-- Unless you have some idea where he "Forceful Rune-keepers Pristine necklace of Helm's Deep comes from. Similarly, the "3 equipped" bonus is wrong. Just prior to HD, all bonuses were changed from 3/5 to 2/4 equipped pieces. I also note that they are "only" Item level 176, which I believe is wrong, for some reason, I'm thinking they should be level 190.
The two types of item "regular and pristine" imply a crafting recipe output. I'll have to go check my Jeweler on that.
So to me, this looks like /bug material!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:13, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Are you sure you meant to post this here, Magill? I appreciate your keeping me in the loop, but it sounds like you've covered the question pretty clearly. Sethladan 00:18, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
One of those toss-up things. Where to answer a question? -- where the question is posted or on the asking user's talk page. You never know where the asker is going to look for the answer, and then there is the issue of trying to keep the whole conversation together. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:24, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Oh, geez. Foot in mouth, my apologies. I saw your name at the end and assumed you moved the conversation here from somewhere else. You did absolutely the right thing answering here and I'm a numbskull for jumping on you. Cal, if/when you see this, hopefully Magill addressed your question and - between the two of you - you can figure out the best way to deal with this. Feel free to carry on here if you like; I have only briefly glanced at the Quartermaster jewelry sets. Time for dinner and bed, hahah. Sethladan 00:38, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
I don't know about the other stuff, but I'm sure that the Pristine items exist. I've seen people with them equipped, I'll ask where they got them. Calhalam (talk) 00:40, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
I asked some people in unite, they say that the Platinum rewards have a chance to give the Pristine versions instead of the regular. Calhalam (talk) 01:01, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
This appears to be more confused than it appeared at first. Are the "platinum" etc rewards "Reward selections" or is there a vendor someplace? The truly interesting thing about Item:Forceful Rune-keeper's Ring of Helm's Deep is that it is only "Item Level 95" while the items from the Quartermaster (Veterans of Helm's Deep) are Item Level 176. That is a SIGNFICANT difference. Especially when you consider that upon entering an Epic Battle a Level 95 item is (should be) scaled up to Level 176. Note also that the QM listing is completely redundant. Either by design or because "editing got interrupted." i.e. the same way I just created that page -- lots of cut and paste with little changed/corrected between items or classes. (Ever item is exactly the same price -- highly unusual!)
BTW, this implies that we might need to change our tracking system -- i.e. recording things by Item Level, not just the old "player level". I suspect we may see more of this "straightened out" as Update 13 progresses as there is significant "fixing" being done to things like Moors armour and Jewellery. see; Telemnar for much of the current status, and the way in which she is currently organized. I haven't gotten around to creating the various items to fill in the tables.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:45, 20 February 2014 (UTC)
Oh yeah... the specs on the Forceful Ring are identical -- only the Item Level is different!!
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:48, 20 February 2014 (UTC)


Epic Battle Rewards

Yeah, we need to show that they are different from other Helm's Deep Rewards. So all teal BB rewards are "gold", and all gold BB rewards are "platinum"? Just want to make sure.

SjsharksBoy (talk) 01:06, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

I thought there were some platinum rewards that were teal - my mistake! Thanks for the response. Sethladan 02:30, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Do you know WHERE the Epic Battle rewards "appear" -- are they from a vendor someplace, are they simply "one shot availability, like typical quest rewards? There is an issue with them using the same names as items available from the Quartermaster in Helm's Deep, but I can't find a "source" to compare them with. And, yes, I have not run any of the EB quests yet.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 04:36, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
The Helm's Deep rewards work a lot like instance chest drops - when you complete the battle, you get your rewards dropped directly into your inventory if you've earned enough bronze/silver/gold/platinum points. There's no bartering and - as far as I know - no master list to compare against. Thus, the only way to independently verify the in-game drops is to actually play through the battles and see what you get. (I don't think the rewards even show up in chat, so groupmates may need to link rewards to one another manually, too.)
Note here that the Helmingas and Eorlingas quartermasters are totally separate from the Epic Battles and associated rewards. I highly doubt there's any overlap in the items, although maybe some of the names are the same/similar? Sethladan 13:47, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Also: They're definitely not "one-shot" as any time you get a reward - just like instances - you can get any of a pool of rewards specific to your level, class type (might-based, agility-based, will-based)(?), and reward type (bronze/silver/gold/platinum). I've gotten repeats of the same item, so you just play the craps each time. Sethladan 13:49, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
I started sorting the Epic Battle Rewards in Category:Helm's Deep Reward Jewelry yesterday. It's not my best idea, maybe somebody has a better one. Barny (talk) 14:14, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
That looks super! Way to go. Sethladan 18:56, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
I've been checking a bunch of stuff in the forums directly relating to this issue. There are two things which have immediately popped up.
  1. The HD loot system is broken. And the Scaling loot system (for raids/instances, etc.) is only a in a bit better shape.
  2. The Dev, Verizal, who was working on all of the "Scaling Loot" and the HD Loot issues, was one of those laid off! It is unclear what, if any changes he was able to make for 12.3.
  • The main complaints appear to be -- routinely seeing duplicate item drops and failure to drop "gold" items. Both of which are (or were) attributed to the RNG "problem" by Verizal before 12.3.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:57, 21 February 2014 (UTC)
Verizal was one of the people they laid off? There goes any hope of fixing things, ugh. Sethladan 20:35, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

On Spam

Sethladan! When you delete a spam page, mind deleting the content so that the message content doesn't show up on the deletion log? For example, this shows up "(Spam: content was: "[http:/ blah blah blah.)" If you don't delete it, part of the spam still appears on the site. It would be easy to verify what was deleted through the history logs anyways. Some of the deletion logs still have a lot of links to spam sites because of it. Starbursty (talk) 15:13, 21 February 2014 (UTC)

Will do! I hadn't thought to do this until Lotroadmin mentioned it last week or whenever it was, but have tried to bear it in mind since then. By the time I get around to wiki-ing, though, most of the overnight spam pages have already been taken care of - usually by you. Go champ! :) Sethladan 18:55, 21 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 19:50, 27 February 2014 (UTC)

New Title

Congrats on the new title! Starbursty (talk) 13:57, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks! I still haven't figured out what to do with it yet, heh. I already yelled at Lotroadmin for giving me more work to do, though. Sethladan 19:08, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Well deserved! Hope you stick around a long time! Matthew.zellmer (talk) 21:28, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, Matt! I've sunk way too many hours into this site to walk away for good anytime soon. Plus Lotroadmin knows where to find me. >.> Don't worry, I've still got big plans for this place - plans that you might be able to help with since you've started learning PHP! But first, ugh, full-time studenthood. Back to work, back to work. Sethladan 00:31, 5 March 2014 (UTC)

What else do I need to do?

Looking at Template: Deed/doc -- trying to get rid of the Categorization from SXP and IXP. I thought it was going to be easy, but I'm not really certain how "inherited" values work in the Wiki template language.

Do they need to have "nocat" passed explicitly to them?

It looked simple enough -- wrap the category statement: (in this case)

  • <includeonly>{{#if:{{{nocat|}}}|<!--no actions-->|[[Category:Steed Experience Quests|{{PAGENAME}}]] }}</includeonly><noinclude>

Clearly, those two templates are not taking the instruction from the Deed template.

I presume that changing the syntax from
{{ SXP | amount }}
to be
{{ SXP | amount|<nocat> }}
will work, but is that the right way to do it?

My eventual goal here is to get "nocat" working on all templates using something like this:

  • <includeonly>{{#if:{{{nocat|}}}|<!--no actions-->|<categories> }}</includeonly><noinclude>

Ultimately using the following as "standard documentation" for all templates --

Meaning Behind the Parameters

Note: Regarding "blank or 'Yes'" for many parameters -- blank will not enable the feature of that parameter, but "Yes" or any other text will enable it, as will a single character, digit, or anything other than a space. Hence, blank means "off" (which is default), while any text means "on".

| mode={{{mode|}}}
Leave as is
| arg={{{arg|}}}
Leave as is
| amount={{{amount|}}}
Leave as is
| nocat =
Blank or Yes. If yes, then do NOT perform automatic characterization for this article.

Name:

| name =
The Deed name, as it appears in game. Exact page name is required here to avoid issues with names containing diacritics and apostrophes (do not use {{PAGENAME}}). {{subst:PAGENAME}} usually works correctly, but if the item name does not equal the page name, replace the code with the item name spelled exactly as in-game. Example: the page is named "Chainsaw (Level 33)" but the item is simply named "Chainsaw" in-game (and assumingly other Chainsaw pages for other levels exist on the wiki).
| disambigpage =
name of Lotro-Wiki page for this item. Please retain {{subst:FULLPAGENAME}} in the disambigpage field. Otherwise you must use &#39; instead of any apostrophe ( ' ).
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:36, 4 March 2014 (UTC)
You're on the right track here. Re: inherited values, think of templates as C functions --
void Deed(char *param1[], char *param2[], int param3, ...) {
   ...
   SXP(param1, param2)
   ...
}

void SXP(int amount, int nocat) {
   if (nocat) { // if not null or zero
      // nocat
   } else {
      // categorize
   }
}
I've only just started C'ing (as opposed to C++) so pardon any silliness that might be present. The point here is that, yes, you do need to pass a value for any parameters that you want checked, otherwise they default to nothing. It looks like you have the correct nocat code in Template:SXP, so now you just need to add nocat=y (or any other nonempy value -- note that #if only cares about text, so even "0" evaluates to true) to the appropriate template (function) calls in Template:Deed. Hope that (and the C analogy) makes sense.
An unrelated observation on your code (which isn't your fault, since I imagine you copied it from one of the other templates): You don't need that PAGENAME in the category link. I'm not sure if this was something that changed at some point, or if someone started it through a misunderstanding and it continued through impetus, but pages are now sorted in categories by their pagename, so telling them to do so (which is what the part after the pipe in [[Category:Steed Experience Quests|{{PAGENAME}}]] does) is unnecessary.
Also, thumbs up for spreading nocat around! The less extraneous categorization, the easier to keep track of things. Way to go. Sethladan 00:20, 5 March 2014 (UTC)
Ok, let me try again -- database errors since around 11 have been loosing my updates...
Yes, I've noticed this [[Category:Steed Experience Quests|{{PAGENAME}}]] and it's cousin: [[Category:Steed Experience Quests|*]] in various places. Clearly "artifacts" from early editors efforts. Interestingly, while the "*" will place a page of its own name in alpha order under a leading bullet in the category listing, replacing * with an arbitrary name does not always seem to work. i.e. wile "PAGENAME" may be redundant, "arbitrary-name" doesn't work consistently. That's another of those WIKIFICATIONs that I would love to find the explanation of. (Does anybody do BNF anymore?)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:36, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
Pages are actually (or shoudl be) sorted properly with whatever you provide in [[Category:Soandso|...]] but, like a dictionary, the category page only has headers for the first character of the sort key. So if I categorized your user page as [[Category:Users|Sethladanb]], it should show up in Category:Users right under my name (indexed under "S"), but it would still read as "User:Magill". That's the theory, at least - I don't know if I've ever tested it.
The use of "*" to force something to the top of the list is an artifact, but remains a useful one. Eirik has changed a few of these to [[Category:Soandso| PAGENAME]], which makes for a cleaner look (it's sorted under a space instead of a bullet) and might be how they do it in e.g. Wowpedia. It's a neat idea, but it's some additional typing and more work if/when pages get moved/copied.
And MediaWiki is supposed to be a markup, not a full grammar, so BNF doesn't really apply...does it? Sethladan 12:27, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Whatever happened to the Template for Resource Spawns or Nodes

3 years ago (2011) there was a discussion to build a template for the Resource Spawns/Nodes when the Template:Infobox Item was replaced. I see that User:Neum built a replacement Template:Object but it was never used. Do you remember where this project was left? I want to pickup the pieces and finish putting it together. Matthew.zellmer (talk) 19:45, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

Hijacking this to morph it into a philosophical discussion :) (And will also point Neum to this discussion as (s)he is actively adding stuff in West Rohan
And moving it over to Category talk:Templates
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 21:19, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

SXP

I still don't understand how this template stuff works...

I have been able (apparently successfully) to add nocat to a number of Article Management Tags.
(Talk about tedious work. Adding that, fixing doc files, etc. First 3 or 4 are done.)
However, when I tried to do a similar thing to {{SXP}} I discovered it wasn't so simple.

I tried adding {{#if:{{{nocat=|}}}|({{{nocat=}}}) }} both inside and outside the double brackets of the first #if. This "almost worked" in that if the basic template was used with a value {{SXP|1234}}, the "nocat=" did NOT display, but if I left out the amount, then it displayed as "Steed Experience nocat=y"

I believe I understand why (It's a one line template that simply outputs everything it sees) but I don't know enough "template" to circumvent that.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 23:26, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
Everything you did is right except for the actual template call: {{SXP|1234|y}}. What you're doing here is setting the second, unnamed parameter to y, and this is ignored by the template because it hasn't been told to do anything with that parameter (which would be identified as {{{2}}} in Template:SXP). nocat has to be defined by name, so it will work (I tested this) if you do {{SXP|1234|nocat=y}}.
You'll notice in the code for SXP it says {{#if:{{{1|}}}|...blah blah...}} - this is reading the first unnamed parameter, which is the amount (since you don't say {{SXP|amount=1234}}.
I sympathize with your frustration with this whole template thing! It took a lot of trial and error for me to make any sense of it way back when, and I agree on how badly we need a guide for all this. This is just another one of those little "gotchas" whereby parameters can be used by number or by name (or sometimes both if they're coded that way!). If it's any consolation, your "philosophical discussion" over on Category talk:Templates convinced me that I really need to apply my abilities where they're most needed, and that means not restricting myself to banal intro-level help articles and formatting. I'll try to take a more active hand in updating and documenting templates when I can. Sethladan 00:08, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

MIssing airliners and other Javascript woes

Ok... I can't find this one. When you get a chance can you look at the User:Eleazaros/coords.js

While adding Entwood to User_talk:Eleazaros/coords.js#Helm.27s_Deep test page for Tooltip Coords, I noticed that "EB-Helm's Deep" above it -- was not working.

It is getting the correct map (the two Hem's Deep maps are different shapes) -- but none of the coordinates are working.

Entwood is working fine and it is in the JS page AFTER EB-Helm's Deep, so whatever the problem is it's not gross. I'm guessing there must be a punctuation mark or tab instead of a space or vice versa, that I am simply not seeing/finding.

I re-checked the coordinates in the comments, and on the test page, and they are correct.
All of the other maps work correctly.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 17:24, 21 March 2014 (UTC)
Sorry I never answered here: I looked really quickly, but the coords code is not something I ever spent much time with, so I don't have a very good idea of what could be going wrong. Will have to look again when I get some more time. It worked when you first set that map up, though? Sethladan 13:58, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
That is the $64 question -- I "think" it worked! But, quite frankly, I do not recall. I think it worked before I changed it's name. --- which got changed twice; from "Epic Battles" to "Helm's Deep EB" to "EB-Helm's Deep"
See also "New map - HD Epic Battles - coordinate issues" above.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:07, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
I think I fixed it. Swapped the xMin and xMax and added a "100 -" to xPos since they're north coordinates. The Gleowine after Midnight coordinate on the coords talk page isn't showing up because the west coordinate is out of bounds. Is it supposed to be 49 instead of 89? Neum (talk) 16:11, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Seems to be good! I fixed Gleowine (47.5W) don't know where the bogus value came from:) 89.9W is Gleowine BEFORE Midnight! LoL.
Thanks! There are times when you just keep doing the same thing over and over again and can't see any thing wrong. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 00:53, 25 March 2014 (UTC)

Any idea what "news" is - was...

While patrolling the page Quests, I noted your comment on the talk page concerning:
<news limit="5" namespaces="Quest" onlynew notalk nobot>• [[{{{pagename}}}]] <br/></news>
  • "<news>" is apparently an extension we no longer use:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:News


  • I'm guessing that the "modern day" equivalent is "DynamicPageList".
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Intersection
The version I set-up on Quests appears to list the 10 newest quests, which I think is what was intended by "News," but I don't know what the original intent was.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:44, 24 May 2014 (UTC)
Egads - that was almost four years ago. As best I can recall, it did do what you've now accomplished with DPL, although it broke the page for users who weren't logged in. Someone commented about it on the contributor's corner or somesuch, I confirmed, commented it out, and then forgot about it. Can definitely go ahead and delete that part, especially since you've reproduced the functionality with a working extension now. Way to clean out the muck! :) Sethladan 20:05, 24 May 2014 (UTC)

Broken template?

Can you look at Quest:Skittering Shadows and tell me WHERE the category: Western Gondor Quests is coming from?
There is no reference to Gondor anywhere in the quest page.
Category: Western Gondor Quests IS the parent category of Category: Blackroot Vale Quests -- but that causes a double categorization, and none of the quests from a lower category belong in the upper one!
I hope this hasn't been going on "forever" (since Zmoon's fiddling), and I just never noticed the double categorization before. :)
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 03:08, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
The extra category is coming from the quest chain transclusion. You'll need to put some <noinclude> tags on that category page to avoid the double categorization. Neum (talk) 04:29, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
So that's why I was finding random noincludes in some categories when I was cleaning up those Ã-pages. Oof. Good call, Neum. Sethladan 07:50, 14 June 2014 (UTC)
ARGH! -- I'm usually fairly conscientious about doing just that. I seem to have managed to have one of those "senior moment."
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 14:28, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

Categorization

I added a comment to our discussion User talk:Matthew.zellmer#Categorization Matthew.zellmer (talk) 01:06, 17 June 2014 (UTC)

JS / Map problem again

Here's another one I can't figure out. User_talk:Eleazaros/coords.js#West_Gondor_-_Update_14_-_July_2014

Everything works EXCEPT "Paths of the Dead." It keeps claiming "Paths of Dead map" not found -- which is true. What I can't find is WHERE it is getting that bogus name from. Any guesses?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:12, 24 June 2014 (UTC)
Looks like EoD added some code a while back to strip out any "the" via regex. At the time it made sense because everyone was fighting over "Shire" vs. "The Shire," etc., and I guess he didn't think we'd have "the"s in the middle of the map name. I added an exception so it'll recognize "Paths of the Dead" properly, but the code'll need to be looked at again at some point to make sure this doesn't happen again. Sethladan 21:58, 24 June 2014 (UTC)