User talk:Lotroadmin/Archive2

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Fix CAPTCHA so we can shut down the forums.lotro-wiki.com, ETA is before MW1.20 upgrade
Remove Liquid Threads, ETA after the MW1.20 update

Liquid threads

I was gonna post in the existing topic, but since we're using this page now:

Is the problem with them the formatting only? If it is, it is probably easy to fix. You mention there is no background or anything in it, but since I changed some stuff for the custom skin, here it at least has the background and reply icon.

Can't do anything about it if the way it looks is not the only issue, though... Gwenwyfar (talk) 02:34, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

I reviewed the changeset since the last update on LQT and both JavaScript and CSS changes took place. I reverted the CSS changes with no improvements so guessing the issue is with the JavaScript. I haven't had much time to dig down that path but from the changeset description it appears they are trying to remove outdated dependancies with LQT which makes me believe this is for upcoming MW1.20 release. My hunch is this wont be the last issue we will see here either, but for now we can migrate away and hope that some champions the LQT updates :). --Lotroadmin (talk) 03:53, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

unable to move old LQT discussions

In theory, I moved my old LQT information over to: User:Magill/talk-archive-3 -- except that it seems to have simply started a new "thread".

Is there some kind of page-naming issue?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 15:47, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

Curiouser and curiouser. Did you by chance use the "Move" tab at the top of the screen instead of in the body of the page/thread? I did the same (except with "Delete") when trying to clean up some of the public talk pages where LT is used, and now a bunch of them are bugged. Fortunately, your threads are still accessible so you can go back and copy out content manually if you want. I'm hoping all the artifacts get flushed once Lotroadmin pulls the plug on the extension, otherwise I'm going to be very annoyed at the undeleteable error pages floating around. Sethladan 16:55, 28 September 2012 (EDT)

I copied the text of my old, archived LT page, pasted it into a text editor, and applied wiki mark up to make it look somewhat like it had displayed on the LT page. When finished, I made a new version on the wiki. (You can skip the local editing, I did that 'cause I could not do it all in one sitting.)

If LT was still functional, I am sure there are easier ways to copy/paste the individual messages without having to redo the markup.

- RingTailCat (talk) 01:30, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

(You can also hit "Edit" on each individual post to copy the author's original wiki-text, but this is similarly a time-consuming and multistep process.) Sethladan 07:33, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Talk pages accessibility

Seth mentioned earlier that we discussed about wiki communication on IRC. One of the things I said would be good to have is some way to see all recent talk pages changes together, since its common for them to just get missed among other changes.

I tried looking for a way to add multi-select to recentchanges search, but I didn't find much on that except for the extension that adds multi-select search. And since I know nothing of PHP (hopefully just yet), can't really try to make one myself.

I found, however, something that might allow us to do something (though not as useful as multi-select), useful for the talk page purpose, or for any other kind of pre-made selection of namespaces we might find useful: The news extension.

It basically creates a list of recentchanges in any place you put the news tag. You can choose how many edits will show, if you hide minors or not, which namespaces appear, with multi-select option and many other things. So we could have a page that is basically a collection of all recent talk page changes, or anything else (possibly in the same page). We could also add this page to the navigation for easier access to it.

I'm really hoping this turn out as useful as it seems :P Gwenwyfar (talk) 18:01, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Checking further on the functionality of DynamicPageList, it would be possible to create something similar (although much less accurate/useful), by showing multiple lists in a table with each containing one talk namespace, ordered by lastedit. This would just be like a list of talkpages that were recently changed/created, though, you'd need to manually check them to see if there was any new change on them.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 18:27, 29 September 2012 (EDT)

Why do you need such a functionality on recentchanges? The only thing I think is useful there is the hide minor edits and hide patrolled edits. And for things you want to have an eye on you can add them to your watchlist. --EoD (talk) 06:56, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

The main purpose is to see multiple talk pages at once and remove everything else. They get missed easily because they are on middle of everything else. And I don't really know, but if I wanted to see any other kind of specific combination of namespaces I wouldn't be able to do it. The point here is not to see changes to pages you already saw and watchlisted, but to collect a set of pages you might not have seen, or you didn't see. The similar functionality of that which you can have with a watchlist is just a bonus.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 13:08, 30 September 2012 (EDT)

I interpret this section such as "it would be great to have all recent talk-page edits collected for a convenient at-a-glance view" and that is something I would like too. Extend "recent" to include "all since I last visited Lotro-wiki" and any editor at vacation would be happy as a baby.

It happens quite often that somebody, myself included, begin to post at some talk-page where we see fit. Unless editors pay close attention to talk-page edits, wherever they occur, s/he may miss some important or interesting information. Sometimes, when there is a flood of edits any "important" edit will just drown and disappear in the flood of those other edits, whereof many are minor, such as replacing duplicate icons at 50+ pages, and the alike. If an editor misses a talk for which her/his opinion matters, that is not a good thing.

Another question is, however, if we want user-talk-pages included, or not. First I thought not, but on the other hand we know for sure that sometimes a user-talk is interesting and/or something I/you can give a comment on. Having it optional would be nice.

All this assumes the technology is there and that it works. LQ-threads did not, they were buggy for some and stopped working with some updates of something else. Unofficial or not-officially acknowledged add-ons seems not to be the best choice, but what the suggested stuff is in this regard I do not know.
-- Zimoon 06:58, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

I don't know where it stands in support, but if it for some reason doesn't work out, dynamicpagelists2 can be a sort of last resort for a similar function. You can make the same as I mentioned earlier with DPL, but you can also add the last edit time, so that would help out in knowing if there is a new post you didn't see or not. I think its definitely worth testing if there aren't any problems with it, though.

As for having more options, I think we could only do that with something within the page (like a collapsible table for some option), or then just a separate page for that option, with a link on the top, since the list's options are fixed and can only be changed on editing, pretty much like DPL I believe.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 07:11, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

Apparently DPL2 went obsolete... Well, a DPL list is still better than nothing, I guess (If the news one doesn't work).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 07:51, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

I'm trying to make a list out of DPL while we don't decide if we'll try that news extension or not, but after looking again on the information about dpl2 and dpl, it seems dpl 2 is supported and stable. There must have been a 3rd page about something similar I saw that said it was obsolete... This is so confusing. The names are basically the same but different extensions. Is there a reason we are using DPL and not DPL2/Third-party DPL? Or just because there was no use for it? Gwenwyfar (talk) 12:27, 12 October 2012 (EDT)

The DPL version installed is the WM version, still supported and actively maintained. Is there a feature that is in the DPL 2.0 that you are missing? If I remember correctly, DPL2 wasn't stable when I installed it. If there's a feature missing, and if we aren't actively using DPL, i don't mind switching it out. It does seem like they had issues with 19.1 though, so we might be cautious with it. (Probably more stable than LQT though). BTW, you might look into SMW as I think some of the same features are there, just a different approach.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 17:49, 12 October 2012 (EDT)

Editdate and multiple namespaces entries. Those would allow to make a list much closer to recentchanges, a single big list with all most recent edits with date instead of the table with one list for each namespace. Might be possible to add the last editor in it too. I don't really know much about SMW or what it does, I'll give a look into it later.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 07:07, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Was looking around on some existing features and another possibility would be to use RecentChangesLinked to a page which list all talk pages. The sad part is that even though we could use DPL to create a list of all talk pages, that list would have to be then manually added to the page because it doesn't consider links in a DPL as links (it probably just checks the page content, not the result). Sounds like an interesting idea, though. here's a sample. We could still use a dpl list showing all most recently created pages to make it easy to just see new ones and add them to the list once in a while, though. Doesn't seem like it would be much effort, there aren't too many talk pages being created.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 08:43, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

I've looked into semantic mediawiki (and remembered I had already seen about it before :P), seems like something really useful, maybe we could even benefit from using it for other purposes, but I haven't found anything in particular that seemed to have any more use than a DPL for talk pages in specific. I've looked around some more and found out that wikipedia (and also found pages across mediawiki site talking about this) also uses this method with linkedchanges, they call it public watchlist. I haven't seen anyone mentioning any downsides from it, so I would believe there aren't much problems with server load because of the huge list, so I've gone ahead and started making a page for it. I organized it by namespaces and the list is organized by creation date, with the dpl showing the most recent ones to easily compare and add to the list when something is missing. I've found two small problems though: One is the dpl load limit (which, if we use this, it would be nice if we could temporarily increase just to take the full list of some namespaces), and I don't know how to make the collapsible table autocollapse... :P

If there are no objections, I'm going to add this to a page, and we could add it under recentchanges in the navigation menu (like recent discussions or something).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 19:55, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Sadly the extensions like LQT, DPL, DPL :) and SMW that they both come at a huge server load cost and going outside the norm of limits wold be at our own risk.. None of this seems to be documented but there is a setting for max categories and max results, set to 6 and 200.. I've doubled the categories, let me know if we want to go larger.

I'm curious if we should attempt this one as well : https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Semantic_Watchlist

--Lotroadmin (talk) 22:18, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, I imagined, I had seen a little about DPL before and there seemed to be a huge warning in using one of its options to ease server load and always having a small count number, that's why I said just temporarily, just to get the full list of pages to start, then we can go back to the normal limit to not have any problems :P I'll see if I can get everything with that once it starts being higher (its still 200 right now).

Hmm, isn't that just for semantic wikis and its properties though? I had found another watchlist extension called collaborative watchlist too, but it was still experimental, and had a different purpose than normal watchlists (although it did indeed work like a watchlist where multiple users could add something to it).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 11:39, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

Its done: Talk_Pages_Watchlist. Still missing much of Talk and User talk, though. The limit is still 200. (Some which had between 200 and 400 I got everything by getting the last ones and first ones altogether, but there are more than 400 talk pages, so I can't do that).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 16:54, 15 October 2012 (EDT)

Either I am blind or it was added while I was looking the other way, but, there is a "Recent Discussions" in the left column which seems to work well. I believe it does the same thing as "Recent Changes" and then switch name-spaces between the different Talk versions one by one. It seems like it picks up most recent talk though. And probably I am kicking in an open door, mentioning something I found just the other week. -- Zimoon 02:44, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

Yep, that's the result of all this :) It uses recentchangeslinked from the links into Talk Pages Watchlist.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 03:23, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

Chat Extension

Ever consider something like this as an alternative/supplement to IRC? Sethladan 20:13, 7 October 2012 (EDT)

I know at least one of the past webhosts didn't allow IRC or chat programs, so i've not really considered them. If this extension exits beta and is no longer has security concerns I would give it a consideration. I think for now we will just have to rely on our talk pages and IRC. --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:50, 8 October 2012 (EDT)

Strange server issues lately?

I suspect that both of these are server/host related, so this is mostly an FYI.

?Thursday Night? (or maybe it was Wednesday Night) shortly after midnight, and lasting for about 30 minutes -- nothing was displaying.

I had been editing pages and went to do a preview (which I tend to do fairly often) when things just "hung" -- ok not unusual, that happens pretty "normally" between 2359 and about 0005. One assumes classic "date roll" housekeeping schedules.

After "a time" Safari Informed me "server could not be found." -- A quick check of other sites revealed I was not having an internet issue. Finally, about 5-10 minutes later, the page "resolved." -- However, I would land on a page but there was nothing displayed! This problem continued until about 0030, when things began working normally again.

Then just a few minutes ago, when I first logged in this afternoon (around 1400), the main page displayed as "text only." Fairly certain it was not a cache issue as it had been working fine last evening (early this morning) when I logged off, and I usually clear the cache before I quit for the evening.

At any rate, I cleared the browser cache and refreshed the page -- and things appeared normally again.

One other thing I would mention... "show preview" and "save page" seem to be taking much longer than normal lately. Frequently requiring that I cancel the transaction and re-issue the command. This particular posting "hung" for over 2 minutes before I canceled it, added this sentence, and tried again.
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 14:23, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Yeah, i've noticed it this morning.. I'm looking into the issue now. I have notice it being slow lately as well, so with this downtime, I think i will go ahead and upgrade the webhost. --Lotroadmin (talk) 15:07, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

I've tweaked the webhost, let me know if things improve. --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:09, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Slower than ever. I took a traceroute just in case:

>tracert lotro-wiki.com
Spårar väg till lotro-wiki.com [173.255.221.23]
över högst 30 hopp:
 1    99 ms    99 ms    99 ms  192.168.1.254
 2    17 ms    18 ms    18 ms  ua-85-230-108-1.cust.bredbandsbolaget.se [85.230.108.1]
 3    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  ti3002d400-xe2-0-0.ti.telenor.net [146.172.107.205]
 4    18 ms    55 ms    74 ms  ti3002c310-ae13-0.ti.telenor.net [146.172.102.185]
 5    19 ms    18 ms    18 ms  ti3002b300-ae0-0.ti.telenor.net [146.172.105.78]
 6    18 ms    18 ms    18 ms  10gigabitethernet1-2.core1.sto1.he.net [194.68.123.187]
 7    49 ms    49 ms    76 ms  10gigabitethernet3-2.core1.ams1.he.net [72.52.92.45]
 8    56 ms    56 ms    62 ms  10gigabitethernet1-4.core1.lon1.he.net [72.52.92.81]
 9   126 ms   124 ms   124 ms  10gigabitethernet7-4.core1.nyc4.he.net [72.52.92.241]
10   201 ms   199 ms   199 ms  10gigabitethernet10-1.core1.sjc2.he.net [184.105.213.173]
11   214 ms   192 ms   196 ms  10gigabitethernet1-1.core1.fmt1.he.net [72.52.92.109]
12   190 ms   190 ms   375 ms  router1-fmt.linode.com [64.62.250.6]
13     *        *        *     Begäran gjorde timeout.
14     *        *        *     Begäran gjorde timeout.
:::

After that point everything eventually timed out, the web browser as well as traceroute, etc. It seems either the server or something in its vicinity grinds to a halt. -- Zimoon 16:11, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Server is not responding to http requests. traceroute to lotro-wiki.com is showing:

li231-23.members.linode.com (173.255.221.23) 104.825 ms 104.173 ms 105.070 ms

And ping no packet loss.

Interestingly, an HTTP request for: "https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php/Main_Page" simply "hangs" -- i.e. does not error out or time out.

1442 still no response.

1500 still no response. Safari now reporting unable to contact server; traceroute and ping still reporting connectivity.

1540 still no response.

1614 -- back up

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 16:14, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Zimoon try a ping vs traceroute. of course both can be blocked by firewalls.. --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:16, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Seems to me that the webhost is back to normal. Keep me posted on overall speed and downtime. Sorry for the issues.. --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:52, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Yes, I posted just after you had posted about the server tweaks. Sorry if that caused confusion. A comment, though it does not matter now, ping did not work either. It came back very much quicker about a no response. Yes, it seems OK now, from when you and I posted. -- Zimoon 18:34, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Something has made all patrolled edits pop again as un-patrolled. For the recent day I think. Weird. -- Zimoon 18:43, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

Change in Main Page for RoR Release on Monday.

This just struck me -- How about replacing Golum with a War-steed and a pointer to the War-steed, Mounted Combat and East Rohan entries?

I don't know if going forward, we would leave it that way, but I suspect that we might, as Mounted Combat is VERY CLOSE to Monster Play in the audience it will, and I suspect is intended to, attract.

And I also just noticed:

There are two "Warband" entries on the front page -- one under "Monster Play," and one under "Combat."
The Player Character section should have "Mounts" added to the line under "Equipment: Item Indexes • Legendary • Cosmetic"\
There is an entry under PvMP (Monster Play) called "Session Play" -- which is a term used to refer to many things OTHER than Troll and Ranger play. (Another one of those thing that was written that way long ago but usage has changed.) And another "Session Play" entry under "Middle-Earth/Instances."

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 21:21, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

I traditionally try to stay away from editing decisions :) .. So hopefully others will chime in, otherwise I'm okay with you making changes like that --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:02, 13 October 2012 (EDT)

I see were you are coming from and I am usually a fan of regular but small updates to any front page to indicate it is alive. In this case I am ambivalent though. Why? Because War-steeds and the Rohan expansion is high-end content only, unavailable for new players, because neither War-steed or Rohan has as strong a string to LotR as Gollum does. He is actually one of the pivotal characters in Middle-earth together with Gandalf, Bilbo, and Frodo, whether LotR, The Hobbit, or some other works by Tolkien. Not even Aragorn can out-place him from the top of the hill. If a LotR fan who comes by this site, a War-steed or Rohan image would not pull any string of association, none whatsoever, but Gollum and a few others would light up the bulb.

Secondly I always have a knee-jerk reaction when something rather risks us becoming a marketing puppet for Turbine, the wiki is a fan site and not an advertisement bulletin board, whether we like Lotro or love it. Yesterday I was even thinking whether we should have a disclaimer blurb over those "news" pages we have, because today they look exactly as Turbine promotion pages and nothing reads "we are a fan site that is fully independent and not affiliated with Turbine, Lotro.com, or any other commercial stakeholder in Lotro". I had a vague memory something such as that read somewhere at this site but now I cannot find it.

The two Warband entries at the front page should be corrected, it seems the one under combat should be gone in favour of the one under MP. The two entries links to the same page which is under MP. Possibly we could walk over the front page and reorder the links slightly, but your observation is correct.
Adding Mounts under Character. Perhaps. But if so we also need to move around the boxes to balance their height with each other; already today Characters is taller than its two same-row cousins. Or we could simply reorder and have more links per line, for those that make sense. The bigger question is, what should Mounts refer to? Is Mounts perhaps a better fit under Gameplay? As Mounts (if I interpret you correctly) is about a specific high-end game-play and not those you mount and ride over the fields (horse, pony, goat) it may be confusing for a newcomer and low-end player to find Mounts under Characters. Hence I think Mounts should have a better, a more indicative term.
Session Play. Definitely, replace it with appropriate terms. I am not into MP but Session Play is too wide to be used there, rather use more indicative term(s). (Exactly the same as for Mounts, it is a too broad term.) The one under Instances could possibly be retained, but only if it can justify its existence there, and I believe "not" because Session Play is not a major part of Lotro.

While at it, do we still promote the forum? Found in the box for Contributor's Corner, next to IRC. I have not been there in months I think, maybe not since we started with Liquid Threads (R.I.P.).

And another "while at it" ... do I hallucinate when remembering something like the disclaimer I mentioned above? Or have I just read too much into the "This site is for players by players!" ?

-- Zimoon 05:15, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

I don't really have an objection to that, but I agree that Gollum with the ring makes more sense with the "LotR" theme (although, personally, I would prefer a ring alone).

@ The player for players thing: Read the first div in the main page, Zimoon :)

Gwenwyfar (talk) 11:50, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

1- Sorry I should have made the reference to Mounts the link: Mounts. It actually refers to one of the biggest money-makers for Turbine -- I don't have stats, but I believe they make more on Mounts than on the other Cosmetic offerings... witness the constant flow of NEW Mounts in the LOTRO Store. (RoR has "War-steeds.) Mounts are clearly "collectables," and like "Lotro Fashions" -- [lotrofashion.blogspot.com] being the most well known, and which is apparently undertaking a fashion "coordination" effort between War-steeds and Armour :) -- have their own websites. [lotrosteeds.com]

2- Just for the record, "Session Play" actually DID start in the Moors with the Rangers and Trolls... long, long ago. Its use was then expanded to various other areas, I believe starting with Moria. The Chronicle of Events shows the oldest? Session Play as Volume I Book 14 Chapter 4 (which was the last update prior to the MoM release. What I have no idea about -- does it still exist with the RoR update? I haven't looked at the Moors at all during the Beta. JnK will have to answer that one, if he knows.

3- The main page has the phrase you are describing, but I don't recall anything more in-depth.

"Welcome to the LOTRO-Wiki!

" We are a dedicated Wiki Fan-site for Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO) and pride ourselves in supplying information and guides to enhance your gaming experience. This site is for players by players!"

A similar statement is made on the "Lotro-Wiki.com:About" page:

"Welcome to LOTRO-Wiki, a dedicated Wiki Fan-site for Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO). We pride ourselves in supplying information and guides to help you with your game experience. This site is for players by players!"

(The policies in that category Category:Lotro-Wiki are notoriously empty -- which can be good or bad, depending upon your point of view.)

While the various top-level pages Category: Lord of the Rings Online are in fact copies of Turbine Press Releases, it is pretty obvious that is what they are.

4- We definitely need to either eliminate the Forums or better integrate them into the WIKI. Their current "hanger-on" status is a real nuisance. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Magill (Contribs • User Talk) at 14 October 2012.

OK, my misunderstanding then. I guess Mount counts as "equipment" or alike, we really need to begin using more items per line, not making the boxes taller than they are. History is nice, but the game has evolved, thus I think not many today we need to skip the MP entry, but I got your point ;) For me that is enough at the main page, perhaps expanding at some less intrusive location, such at the About page, and we can add a line topmost each news-page such as "Copied from LINK" and it would be absolutely clear that it is a copy, not an advertisement as such. I believe we kept the forum as a workaround for the CAPTCHA thing that does not work for some users.
-- Zimoon 16:52, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

I personally don't see a problem with the way we present the news and updates part of the main page. It is merely a list with information. Its not like we're saying "See all the most recent updates turbine made!!" or anything like it.

Edit: Uh, forget it, thought it was still about the main page, not the pages with news themselves, well, then I agree with a line or maybe a infobox at the top saying its copied :P

Gwenwyfar (talk) 18:34, 14 October 2012 (EDT)

Icons

Just a question about icons around the wiki (General icons, like the irc one, or the ones from edit panel, etc): Can you change their files for all skins like you can with the recent changes arrows? If so, could you upload some new ones? I won't change anything, just remove white borders most of them have, so there won't be any effect whatsoever for the current skins. This would be much better than replacing them with css (and maybe they even load twice if you change in css only). Gwenwyfar (talk) 21:23, 19 October 2012 (EDT)

There's two locations for icons.. the /skins/Common/images and /skins/custom. We can easily change any icon in the custom area, just upload the image and shoot me a pointer to it and I can swap it out. If it's in the common area then as we noted with the directional arrow icons, the skin either didn't call out a new icon or it wasn't an icon skins were allowed to override, so it might be best to use CSS on those. --Lotroadmin (talk) 15:55, 20 October 2012 (EDT)

Ah, no, I'm not making anything custom this time, so its ok if you can't override it with skin-specific files. I'm just removing white borders from any that has it, nothing more, they'll still look the same. I'll edit all of them and when I'm done I'll point them out for you :)

Gwenwyfar (talk) 16:44, 20 October 2012 (EDT)

I've finished some, but I didn't manage to get the link directly to the files to save it in the same size (although it seems they are using sprites?) Could you check what is the size for the edit icons? (or upload the sprite so I can save in the same size/place if it really uses one).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 05:09, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

Oh, nevermind, got it by getting the code from the css and placing it somewhere I could grab the image from :P I'll upload it once its done.

Gwenwyfar (talk) 06:44, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

Seems like you were too fast for me.. :) --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:27, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

Here are the edit ones and irc file: File:Editbuttons_sprite.png, File:Arrow-right.png, File:Arrow-down.png, File:Irc_link_icon.gif. You can delete them after you get the files.

For now just those, maybe there are some others so if I find any more I'll pass them to you :)

Gwenwyfar (talk) 04:54, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

IRC icon updated for the custom skin. Most of the IRC images appear to be inline (MW optimization), so hopefully the update worked, make sure you clear your browser cache if you have issues

Which arrow icons were you attempting to replace? Can you give full url or snippet of html for the ones you are replacing. Here's the list of all the arrow icons:

./common/images/arrow_disabled_right_25.png
./common/images/arrow_disabled_left_25.png
./common/images/arrow_right_25.png
./common/images/arrow_disabled_last_25.png
./common/images/arrow_last_25.png
./common/images/arrow_first_25.png
./common/images/arrow_disabled_first_25.png
./common/images/arrow_left_25.png

If you can override these common images with css, that would be preferred for these files. I rely on "git" to help keep the mediawiki files updated and since these files are part of the MW repository, it's best not to override them. --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:31, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

The editbuttons sprite is part of the repository too? As far as I noticed, overriding something with css makes them load behind it, although I'm not completely sure on this, would have to look further to see how it works. But if its a problem, I can switch them on css. And the arrow icons are the ones which appear in the editing interface, although since you said its probably better to change them in css:

data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQAgMAAABinRfyAAAADFBMVEX///95eXnd3d2dnZ3aAo3QAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAADFJREFUeF5dyzEKACAMA0CXolNe2Id09Kl5igZahWY4AiGjZwmIuS9GEcJfY63Ix88Bol4EYP1O7JMAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQAgMAAABinRfyAAAADFBMVEX///95eXnd3d2dnZ3aAo3QAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAADFJREFUeF5dyzEKACAMA0CXolNe2Id09Kl5igZahWY4AiGjZwmIuS9GEcJfY63Ix88Bol4EYP1O7JMAAAAASUVORK5CYII=

And the irc icon is still loading this:

data:image/gif;base64,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

--Gwenwyfar (talk) 00:46, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

Those aren't sprites, but 'inline' images Example of a sprite (at least my definition): file:Mainpage-icons.png which is selected based on the css defination.

The MW resource loader since MW18 will take certain common images, css and js and include them in the generated html. Now the question is where is it getting the data from... the php, mysql entry, or an actual image file? I've replaced the IRC image for the custom skin, so if the cache was properly cleared, then,hrm... At this point, I would go ahead and have the CSS replace it.

BTW, I've reset the server side cache, but images have either a 4 week or 4 month cache expiration setting, so hopefully between us, all the cache was cleared for your browser session.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 01:00, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

That sounds like the definition of a sprite for me, multiple images in one file, the wiki does the same thing with edit buttons as we do with the main page icons :P

I've cleared all the cache and it still loads the wrong images, so I'll just use css to replace them then. (And I think it won't load both, I checked around and images not set to display (like display:hidden, or anything else not showing but still somehow there) do indeed load behind, but a direct image replacement doesn't, as the value of the other image will be ignored until it is called for, so that won't be a problem :) )

Gwenwyfar (talk) 21:29, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

Forums

I've conceded defeat to the spam bots and pretty tired of cleaning up the spam for the forums.lotro-wiki.com, it's been close to 100 spam posts a day now. I will be taking it down later today and looking for guidance on how we should handle the captcha here on lotro-wiki.com. We can leave it as is, and just request folks to use a non-IE browser for account creation, or we could change to the Questy CAPTCHA, but won't be as strong as the cats and dogs. "Questy" will require us to create questions for folks to answer, it should be successful for a short while but might also require us to rotate through questions. --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:27, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

I would personally vote to ask to use another browser, more because it doesn't seem like a whole lot of people have problems and not that many use IE too. (Looking at the forums, we had 4 topics about it in the last 4 months?). The problem seems to be with this are the people who did try another browser, however... So I guess in the end we still need to fix the capcha :/ A shame, I liked that one.

Couldn't we use another captcha for the forum account creation too so the spam doesn't go through? (One that comes to mind is that common one you need to type two distorted words, I believe it shouldn't have browser issues).

Gwenwyfar (talk) 17:34, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

The standalone version of bbpress is no longer maintained and the captcha version use to work but until about two months ago. We could just try renaming it.. i.e. forums2 until the spam folks find it again.

forums.lotro-wiki.com is now officially offline. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:37, 23 October 2012 (EDT)

Thanks, I guess nobody have missed them but now they will ;) -- Zimoon 02:27, 24 October 2012 (EDT)

I think the spammers will miss them... I did a google search for handbags and forums lotor-wiki and wow... they use other sites to form a complex web of links to help increase their rankings and then cross link to all the sites the spammed to even further manipulate the google search rankings. At this point, we are out of that loop and can safely thank the cats and dogs for this victory. For folks using IE, i haven't forgotten about ya, just use FireFox to create your account. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:05, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

What is this for kind of thing?

I was browsing Special:WantedCategories and came across this one https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php?title=Category:That_was_easy&action=edit&redlink=1

Following that link, the missing category contains Item:User:Adelas/Testing-Javascript-inFF7-wNoScript but clicking that gives a 404. What is that for link?? -- Zimoon 16:53, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

That is interesting.. I will look into it, guessing someone was using Firefox with the noscript addon enabled when creating a page using the WikiEditor which requires javascript.. Hopefully if i just rebuild the categories that might be solve this.

It dawned on me the other day that since Firefox encourage the HTTPS protocol over the HTTP, there's could be issues with javascript that hard-coded the URL within. We had that issue for a while with and without the www prefix on the URL, and ended up resolving that by forcing the webserver to drop the www from the URL.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 17:37, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

Interesting, huh? I meddled with networking and protocols long ago, and yes, browsers live a life on their own causing much trouble. When Netscape was crapped, literally they throw away all old code believing starting from scratch would be better (morons!!), many veterans of the team left, one mentioning that just the FTP module has spaghetti code within that supported all 50+ anomalies that different FTP servers happened to provide. 50+!!! And FTP ain't a hard protocol to implement!!! Gees. So I can imagine what you struggle with without knowing the details :P

At least wanted categories are now < 70 but most of remaining are for wanted images and Lore-master readings needed, so they will be there and go away magically when that stuff is fixed.
-- Zimoon 17:53, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

I saved the that was easy category and managed to find and delete the offending page along with unneeded category. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:00, 26 October 2012 (EDT)

Issue with Item Names containing...

I found an issue with item names containing certain characters. I am not sure exactly which characters though but at a guess it is the + sign, but could also be %, or both. See for example

+25% Mark Acquisition (60 min)
+25% Legendary Item XP Tome (60 min)

None of them provides a mouse-over tooltip. None of them shows up in quick search if you begin enter "Item:+25% Mark" (or Legendary). Hence I believe + or % or both breaks some regexp somewhere. How that has an impact on the mouse-over tooltip is beyond me, but perhaps we need to replace + and % with their HTML codes?
-- Zimoon 08:51, 31 October 2012 (EDT)

There are the difficulties with special characters and interaction with certain things, and we've hit 2 of the four defined in this single title. Since the links of the titles actually work, I don't believe problem is with MW/webhost side but more of a tooltip javascript issue of not properly handling certain special characters.

Before I offer advice of trying to say +25 Percent instead of +25%, can the Javascript Gurus take a look here. If "+" or "%" is used to build or parse URLs, then perhaps an alternate approach would resolve this problem. I will try to review the logs to see what the actual URL request is which might indicate if it's the + or the % that is causing issues here.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 14:09, 31 October 2012 (EDT)

I've reviewed the logs and noticed that there wasn't a tooltip request for either of those. I also noticed that the + doesn't need to be converted to the %2B, but the % needs to be %25 and guessing that is the problem and at this time would recommend not using % in title names. --Lotroadmin (talk) 19:52, 1 November 2012 (EDT)

Thanks for looking into this. Yes, that % clashes with their URL encoding (RFC 1738) is of course bad, why did I not think of that right away that early morning? ;)

However, either we consider this such an unusual case we won't bother (because the % is indeed part of the real item name, and there is no good character that gets the replacement across intuitively), or we must move some pages. I will, however, try to dig up pages using % and replace % for %25 for the template disambiguepage parameters ... over time. I mean, nothing is destroyed, it is just harder to find via search. Thanks again.

PS: Replacing % for  in disambigue did not work. Don't know why. Hmm. I guess we just let it be then. For now. DS.
-- Zimoon 03:13, 2 November 2012 (EDT)

My suggestion would be keep the item as +25 Percent and for the +25% version either do a redirect or create a second page to include it. This should solve both of those problems i think. If this grows beyond just two items, it might also deserve a notice/category that can identify and explain the limitations with the % symbol and chalk this up as a rare but not uncommon computer quirk. (i.e. usernames normally have to start with a letter and have a limited set of characters one can use.)

I also think a JS Guru could parse the titles (with a regex) and just convert the % to the %25 without changing the title of these items. --Lotroadmin (talk) 13:59, 2 November 2012 (EDT)

I will experiment a little bit, but feel it unfortunate if pages cannot be named as the items. Right now it seems I must wait for the search-indexer, but no worries, I will come up with something. I am not certain I understood exactly what you meant, but ... move the pages to "Item:+25 Percent..." or maybe even have to move to "Item:Plus 25 Percent..."; then having redirects with the proper name pointing to the pages, right?

Looking at the URL for "Item:+25% Mark Acquisition Tome (60 min)" I see that "+" is replaced by "%2B" in the URL but I do not yet know if that matters in any way. And "%" is replaced by "%25". Perhaps both will break the search and/or hover-over-tooltip. So, I think we are facing two issues (at least), right? By allowing + and/or % in title names, I mean.

1) Tooltip does not work but just displays the link as-is. That is probably something in the JS code that fails. If we have control over that code (so that it is not within MediaWiki) I guess we could replace whatever characters/encoding for whatever characters/encoding that works, we just need to figure our in which end that should be done.

2) The quick-search (upper right corner) does not work. I do not know what control we have over that part but remember you have meddled with the indexer in the past. Perhaps it could be taught to treat + and/or % in some way so that typing + and/or % in the search box indeed works for finding the proper string in the index.

I just list the thoughts without any suggestion to fix our code rather than the page names. But if some code could be amended in a simple way that is perhaps (?) better. After having experiment a bit with silly test pages I will come back.
-- Zimoon 06:37, 3 November 2012 (EDT)

Let me look into the search sphinx engine more, so far all i've researched is the tooltip aspect of this issue. I should know today if that is something I can fix the search engine on the host side. --Lotroadmin (talk) 13:24, 3 November 2012 (EDT)

I noticed one interesting variant here. If you search for +25%, the results allows the tooltips to appear. (I added + and % to the sphinx charset table, so not sure if this is new) If you hover over the link. you will notice that %3A%2B25%25 converts to :+25%, so all is well for that results. Interesting point here is that Sphinx generates this page. Now if you attempt this: Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) , note that that %3A is converted to a : by MW, and this appears to break the tooltips.

At this point I think we have at least 2 if not 3 issues here. 1) Autocomplete not working on the +25%, 2) Tooltips not working on the +25% (excluding search results) 3) maybe.... MW and the :+25% and the conversion not complete on the combinations.... --Lotroadmin (talk) 15:11, 3 November 2012 (EDT)

Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Item:+25%_Legendary_Item_XP_Tome_(60_min) Hrm.... seems to be broken on talk pages but not on my user page. --Lotroadmin (talk) 15:18, 3 November 2012 (EDT)

Looking at your user page it looks good to see the transclusions go through (using Reward) with both "+25%" and "25%", though hover-over is broken. For all "Item:"-links the hover over indeed works, great, and I notice that all of those "working" links also display as properly decoded URLs in my browser's bottom-most log-bar. I don't know what to say more though.

Quick-search: Just now I notice something: I added three test-samples yesterday. None of them show up in quick-search whatever I type. So...I tested some older items I know contain numbers ... none of those show up, when within the "Item:" name-space. Try to type for example "Item: Level" (just that) ... I am pretty sure it a few days ago would list several items ending with "...(Level 22)" or any arbitrary number.

However, try typing "Angmarim (Level" and you will see a few hits. Odd, does name-spaces have an impact on the indexer?

I would not say this is critical as it does not really break anything -- a few pages will not have good use of the Reward template but will at least show a working link. The quick-search is not a deal-breaker but is a very efficient way to find things, at least they show up at the fall-back search page. Right now I feel quite lost but am confident you will find something in due time ;)
-- Zimoon 05:49, 4 November 2012 (EST)

One assumes this is all "special characters as delimiters" in one or more of the languages in use -- Java, Media Wiki, Sphinx ... ???

I.e. this is the same problem as with the "apostrophies" where you need to change the apostrophe to ' Eorl's Hallow -- interesting... the ampersand sharp39 semicolon on this line is being interpreted/replaced ... but  does not replace? -- is that also a browser interaction?

and for "single quotes" "disambigpage = Item:'Battle of the Hornburg' Tapestry" Item:'Battle of the Hornburg' Tapestry or Item:Erebrandir's Horseshoe

Note that the Disambigpage parameter REQUIRES the html character ' but that the "Name" and "Icon" parameters do not. This particular "quirk" has been true for the past 2 years that I have been involved with the WIKI. Note also that this "failure" when it happens on a Recipe page, will result in the Infobox appearing on the Left of the page instead of on the right, because the disambigpage parameter does not match the pagename parameter. I have an editing note to myself: "Best to use |disambigpage = {{Subst:PAGENAME}}"

Now I'm getting lost... too many googles:)

The ASCII code for the percent character is 37, or 0x25 in hexadecimal. i.e. in HTML: % not 2B or  As best I can tell, 19 is not a displayable character. (I.e. 0-31 are not displayable in HTML.) Annoying, but you have to read this whole message in "edit" mode to avoid having the special characters be interpreted by "somebody" in the path. :(

My head hurts -- I'm going back to documenting the Mac Client. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 19:24, 5 November 2012 (EST)

My head hurts as well.. We are faced with multiple issues here from MW issues with parsing on a normal page vs talk page, apache constraints, JS constraints, with some special characters exposing some real issues here. Even if we made note that on this site all % will be known as "percent" as the title, I don't think we are out of the woods on this. The special characters: ":" "+" and "%" in a title name (not to mention the "(" and ")" ), really makes it an interesting problem. We have bugs with sphinx, MW19.2 and our javascript tooltips on these two pages.... Even a quality pint of beer or partial pie won't resolve this issue and I can do almost anything after one slice of pumpkin pie :) I would like to resolve the sphinx/autocomplete issue before I file a bug with MW on the difference of a user page vs talk page. As for the tooltip and template:reward, that might be something we can fix upfront but my attempts have failed. I do hope MW20 will resolve a few of these, but nothing in the releases hints it will. --Lotroadmin (talk) 03:25, 6 November 2012 (EST)

A buddy of mine noticed that not all of the JS is loading for the talk pages and that seems to be killing the tool tips here. Probably the best solution is to migrate the JS to the common.js or at least a subpage of it. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:25, 17 November 2012 (EST)

I have not bothered with the background mechanics of this Wiki, it is about 15 years since I did html/web-site coding and since then I have only done some stuff when being forced to ;) I rest assured you or Gwen will have a look at it. Regarding the + and % in names I think we still have not come to an idea of a more final solution, right? Hence I am "sitting still in the boat" for now (Swedish saying, meaning 'don't move == don't roll-over or make worse'). At least, it works, just without some fancy features ;)
-- Zimoon 07:30, 17 November 2012 (EST)

Testwiki

Just wondering if you could give me some rights over in the testwiki, I wanted to test something on the sidebar, definitely not doing it here :P Gwenwyfar (talk) 07:23, 10 November 2012 (EST)

Done --Lotroadmin (talk) 18:37, 10 November 2012 (EST)

Thank you :)

Gwenwyfar (talk) 07:51, 11 November 2012 (EST)

How to patrol when...

Is it possible to mark pages patrolled by force even when there is no "mark patrolled" link?

https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=30&from=&hidepatrolled=1 will show one page, but since I stupidly moved it before marking it patrolled it is no longer possible to patrol. The same is true for some older liquid threads. Etc.

Why? There was an incident at the Social pages a while ago and I thought I could use some idle time patrolling much longer back, and then the number of "unpatrollable" pages slowly grows and shadows the list of patrollable stuff. On the other hand, I guess it does not matter much now whether something was patrolled or not several months ago ;)
-- Zimoon 05:58, 18 November 2012 (EST)

Usually, doing an edit clears the patrol flag, but in the case of the first of those pages, that did not happen for me! You broke the wiki, Z. ;-( RingTailCat (talk) 06:47, 18 November 2012 (EST)

I clearly did. However, doing an edit does not clear anything, you must always click the marked patrol link. I believe you think it is cleared because at next page you won't see it anymore, but it is still there at previous ;)
-- Zimoon 07:42, 18 November 2012 (EST)

This irked me to no end a while ago; deleting unpatrolled pages is fine, but moving them without leaving a redirect makes it impossible to patrol in the normal fashion. My first solution was to move the page back, patrol, and then move the page out again. Obviously that's more trouble than it's worth. Then I had a stroke of brilliance and realized that it doesn't matter what page you're on as long as you have the RCID part of the URL. In the case of the dangling War-steeds from the Wold page, this would be: https://lotro-wiki.com/index.php?title=Quest:Volume_3:_Book_8,_Chapter_1:_War-steeds_from_the_Wold&rcid=615157.

Now here's the trick: Cut/copy that bit, then navigate to any wiki page at all (I use my User page for no good reason) and hit "Edit." In the address bar, you'll now see a URL ending with &action=edit - replace this with the &rcid=... bit, hit enter, then scroll to the bottom of the page. Presto! A "mark patrolled" link. Even though you're on random_page_001, it will mark patrolled the change whose ID you copied, i.e. the dangling unpatrolled edit. This will only work if you're using an index.php?title=Suchandsuch form of the URL, not the everyday index.php/Suchandsuch (this is why you hit "Edit" instead of dropping the rcid right into you address bar).

And now you know how deeply runs my fixation with properly cleaning and patrolling. ;) Sethladan 01:52, 21 November 2012 (EST)

Heh, that worked, thanks a lot. Now I will just lay sleepless for ages wondering how on Middle-earth you figured that out ;)

Regarding unpatrolled liquid threads, I avoid them by using "Namespace = Thread" and tick the "Invert selection" ... I guess there is no reason to patrol them as they were just talk and not real pages :P But the War-steed page is now patrolled hehe. Maybe we have more freakiness in common than we dare admit :-)
-- Zimoon 02:10, 21 November 2012 (EST)

Hurrah, Seth to the rescue! I can't tell you how many times those lingering unpatrolled pages have bugged me... -- Elinnea (talk) 11:15, 21 November 2012 (EST)

Upgraded to MediaWiki 1.20 let me know of any issues

I'm still checking things out, let me know if you notice any issues --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:37, 19 November 2012 (EST)

Except for the much changed "diff" view it seems OK so far. And I notice the Quick-Search now works for + and % signs in names, meaning that part of the previous discussion is resolved. So also hover-over tooltip (except for talk-pages then). Great! -- Zimoon 02:39, 19 November 2012 (EST)

They revamped the diff results for some reason, but good news about the + and %. Gwen's custom skin needs some updating now. Still looking for more issues, but so far so good --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:54, 19 November 2012 (EST)

The new diff appearance puzzled me for a bit, but I'm growing to like it much better. The Summary box for new edits also moved, not a big deal. I haven't tried anything extravagant, but in the course of normal editing I haven't noticed any other issues. -- Elinnea (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2012 (EST)

I have noticed that when doing a "preview" the "current text section" is not retained in the text area any more. I mean, previously if I was editing a section in the middle of a long page, do preview, the text area still showed that section of text I was editing. Now I have to scroll down to find it again. Having ticked "Preferences -> Editing -> Enable side-by-side preview" of course remedies this, I just need to grow accustomed to using that then ;)

Otherwise I have not found anything bad during my usual edits and reading and patrolling. -- Zimoon 03:19, 20 November 2012 (EST)

If i preview just this section it seems to work as expected, even the show-changes-preview also just shows this section --Lotroadmin (talk) 03:41, 20 November 2012 (EST)

I am posting this note at about 02:03 Mountain Standard Time (America/Edmonton in the preferences)

When I preview the change it shows "04:03, 20 November 2012 (EST) "

-- RingTailCat (talk) 04:04, 20 November 2012 (EST)

That's correct right? 2 hours difference from mountain to east coast? --Lotroadmin (talk) 04:15, 20 November 2012 (EST)

Yes. But, I thought that setting the timezone in the preferences caused all times to be displayed in my preferred timezone. I vaguely remember that it used to work that way, for at least some timestamps. RingTailCat (talk) 04:47, 20 November 2012 (EST)

My bad. That sig gets dropped into the page as text. RTC whacks his head. RingTailCat (talk) 04:50, 20 November 2012 (EST)

Don't know if this is a Media Wiki issue or a template change someplace. I haven't looked at this page for a bit: User:Magill/Toons-Valamar so I can't say "when" it first happened, but the changes in presentation appear to be independent of any changes I've made. Basically look at the first entry under Crafting, then compare that to the entries under Slotted traits and those below for reputation. Note the thickness difference. They all used to be "narrow" like the entries under Slotted traits. Related is the "indentation" of the first of the "Virtue Traits" line. I seen nothing which could cause it. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 18:32, 28 November 2012 (EST)

Magill, I did a few tweaks but the height issue is probably related to the progress template. Perhaps there needs to be a version of the template that avoids formatting. --Lotroadmin (talk) 01:01, 29 November 2012 (EST)

Progress template should be fixed now - a bit of extra spacing crept in when Elinnea noinclude'd the category tag. Sethladan 16:10, 29 November 2012 (EST)

Argh, white space is always my downfall. I just can't get used to code that doesn't ignore extra white space. Glad somebody caught that one. :) -- Elinnea (talk) 21:40, 29 November 2012 (EST)

I'm finding that the "expansion triangles" in the left frame (column) are not working in either Safari Version 6.0.2 (8536.26.17) or Firefox 17.0.1.

Relatedly, the links for "Tasks" and "Create Article" do nothing... quests and above all work correctly.

OSX 10.8.2

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 23:45, 9 December 2012 (EST)

There was a server side issue that I addressed with 1.20.0 and the upgrade to 1.20.2 introduced this issue. Shocked i haven't noticed that by now either. MW has a patch in the works so hopefully I can get this updated soon.

I've disabled the collapsiblenav until MW released the patch --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:33, 10 December 2012 (EST)

I did not notice anything with the sidebar, but I have also been busy elsewhere with the less time for editing.

However, I notice that there is an error with unfolding subcategories when browsing categories. Click the plus-sign and you face the message "Problem loading data. Please wait a moment and try again." I first noticed this yesterday but cannot tell which day it first popped up, but I think it was within the last week.
-- Zimoon 03:19, 10 December 2012 (EST)

Continuing on the previous bug report: it seems that "<categorytree mode=all onlyroot=off>XXX</..>" is broken. Probably that explains why unfolding subcategories within categories does not work. This mean that currently some pages are dysfunctional, mainly instances and some other where we have used this feature to display quests and creatures. -- Zimoon 16:41, 13 December 2012 (EST)

See my page: User:RingTailCat/Sandbox-2 which tests some categorytree usage. It is now broken. RingTailCat (talk) 18:03, 13 December 2012 (EST)

Categorytree extension appears to be busted in recent revisions. Hopefully this is related to the bug Lotroadmin mentioned on 10 December and there'll be a fix for it soon. Sethladan 20:29, 13 December 2012 (EST)

CategoryTree was updated today, categorytree seems to be back online, still waiting on MW to release the fixes for the collapsable sidebar issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:47, 13 December 2012 (EST)

The bug with categoryTree seems fixed, the few categories with subcategories I looked at now work, and it seems RTC sample page work too. Thanks a lot. -- Zimoon 02:51, 14 December 2012 (EST)

The collapsible stuff seems to be working again so I enabled it. Let me know if there are any quirkiness here. Thanks --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:14, 8 January 2013 (EST)

This is not because of the MW upgrade. I was reading stuff over at the MediaWiki site and noted one of their admins had a distinctive sig: Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 01:02, 9 January 2013 (EST)

Does Media Wiki have an equivalent of "Template Sidebars"

See the discussion: Template talk:Mounted Combat Related Information -- the idea being to use one of the sidebar templates mentioned. I started to play with the two examples mentioned this or this, and quickly discovered that the Template Sidebar contains many OTHER templates.... a real rats-nest of 'em!

Naturally, the parallel question becomes are Sidebars a "feature" we should make (more) use of?

I was intending to try it out with the Mounted Combat and Mac Client pages where I've used the "drop-down" quest-box structure, rather than simply transcluding "an index" section, not thinking that the "classic" footer was an appropriate solution. The primary issue I see with the Sidebar idea is that it impacts the TOC. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 17:12, 6 December 2012 (EST)

"mailing lists" in Media Wiki ?

As I'm writing some notes on the Bree Revisions in Update 9, Talk:Bree#Update_9 it occurred to me that there should be some way of identifying/notifying folks who are involved in various topics -- thinking of Crafting in particular, but Projects in general. I.e. :

Major Lotro-Wiki Projects
Categorization • Character • Crafting • Creatures • Deeds • Documentation • Effects • Game Guides • Images • Instances • Lore • LOTRO Store • Monster Play • NPCs • Quests • Skirmishes • System Tools • World Expansion projects: Mordor

Clearly, Project Contributors is not A) well known B) not even close to current! -- despite claiming to be "an up-to-date list of contributors"

Does some mechanism exist that I am unaware of?

I'm thinking of some way of sending "messages" to various Editors -- either who have "subscribed" to the "Contributors" list or who have made recent ?past 3 months? edits to "some page".

Sigh: I guess this goes back again to my long-term project "Redefining and revitalizing Help" User:Magill/Sandbox-Help-reformat
Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC (talk) 15:25, 24 December 2012 (EST)

Isn't it really the responsibility of the individual contributor to check their watchlist or the recent changes, if they are interested in following changes to particular articles? Even if they are on a mailing list, you never know if they are still active in the game, let alone on the wiki, or on holiday or otherwise unavailable. People don't own pages, even when they have been a major contributor, or even the sole author, unless the page is in their user space. We should all strive to make ego-less contributions.

RingTailCat (talk) 18:26, 24 December 2012 (EST)

Echoing and agreeing with RTC. Because we have quite a well defined structure and format it is always possible to look at what some "major contributor" have done, that is why I sometimes ask questions at individual talk-pages of such persons. -- Zimoon 05:28, 25 December 2012 (EST)

Hi again

Thanks for you message, if possible please reset my old account :) --Tiberivs2 (talk) 18:19, 11 January 2013 (EST)

Reset worked, nice to have my old account back :) thnx again Tiberivs (talk) 17:47, 17 January 2013 (EST)

Is this a bug or an intended change implemented by one of the recent Media Wiki updates?

I was just looking at a page I haven't touched for ages: Comparison: Level 75 Light Armour (Tailor's Guild) (Since July 2012).

I don't believe that I would have created the table to be "right aligned" the way it displays ...

{| class="altRowsMed" table width="725" align="right"

Removing the align="right" causes the entire table to be aligned to the left... (I did this on the first table.) However the column values are "aligned right" -- which I believe is what was intended -- that the Align value would propagate to all of the lower lines.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:06, 6 February 2013 (EST)

I don't think this is a wiki bug, but probably a situation where the CSS should be used for better control on the formatting. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:24, 6 February 2013 (EST)

However, it is a change from the way "align=right" worked in the past. Also, in experiementing, trying to use: "style="text-align: right;" does nothing at all... even on a single line.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:34, 6 February 2013 (EST)

I just noticed another "change" User:Magill/Sandbox-6 -- the two tables used to appear one on top of the other, with the phrase "Colors I'm always using" in the appropriate place.

Could that be browser size? I can expand the width and the two tables are side-by-side. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:25, 6 February 2013 (EST)

The key is the pharase: "Colors I'm always Using." Unless you drag the browser window so that it is ONLY as wide as the upper table, that line stays at the upper right of the upper table. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:34, 6 February 2013 (EST)

I see it now :).. i wrapped the two tables with another table. I think the collision with the phrase and the other table is indeed an issue.. it might just be a CSS bug or a WM bug, both can change during an update. I personally prefer to use a table when creating a "column" style layout to avoid the any wrapping issues. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:41, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Aha, but that was my original intent -- the two tables were one on top of the other, with the comment between them. I don't know why they wound up side by side! And with a 27 inch screen, I always run with wide browser windows. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:47, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Just noticed another "strangeness" -- it may have always been there and I just noticed it -- if you look at the left edge of the table, the border is continuous, but the right edge is not. It also seems unduly wide. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:49, 6 February 2013 (EST)

Found another page with the "align=right" issue: The_Great_River_(Anduin)_Jewellery_Set_Comparisons -- the Tables are getting stuck BESIDE the text.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:55, 6 February 2013 (EST)

I tweaked the page to use CSS and added a colon at the start of the table --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:07, 6 February 2013 (EST)

?? Which page? I don't see the changes you refer to. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 23:28, 6 February 2013 (EST)

The_Great_River_(Anduin)_Jewellery_Set_Comparisons .. i think we had a edit conflict that i didn't notice. lol. You can replace the formatting to use the css text with class="altRowsMed" width="400px". --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:46, 9 February 2013 (EST)

Ok, but that brings us back to the first question did "align="right" change?

{| class="altRowsMed" table width="725" '''align="right"'''

Now causes the TABLE to right justify on the page... but it does not effect the values IN the table. This is the opposite of how it worked previously. However,

{| class="altRowsMed" style="text-align:right; width:725px;"

Does fix the cells in the table to be right-aligned.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 22:48, 11 February 2013 (EST)

There was a bug fix, something interesting to read MW Bug 36495 Looks like we need to stop using align/valign and switch to CSS --Lotroadmin (talk) 02:28, 12 February 2013 (EST)

Fascinating reading!!! (One tends to miss out on such things unless it is part of one's daily life!)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 11:54, 12 February 2013 (EST)

Another "broken" issue ?

While working on some crafting updates, I noticed another item which apparently has broken recently. | recipe-cooldown = {{Recipe-cooldown|large}}

No longer seems to work. Of course, I'm assuming that it worked correctly back in July of 2012. :)

See: Item:Cloak of Théodred Recipe

I haven't looked yet, but one assumes this will apply to all Guild recipes. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 12:40, 19 February 2013 (EST)

The item looks ok to me. The cooldown appears on the recipe item (both tooltip and page), displaying "6 days 18 hours". What do you expect to see? RingTailCat (talk) 14:13, 19 February 2013 (EST)

The Tooltip is OK. The crafting page (left side) does not display the Cool down information. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 17:22, 19 February 2013 (EST)

Checking again, there appears to be to be two problems: 1- the cooldown parameter was missing from the original "Crafting" section. 2- However, when I just added it, (copied it from the ToolTip section, it only displays the word (cooldown). Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 17:29, 19 February 2013 (EST)

Comparing the code for Cooldown in Template:Recipe and Template:Crafting -- they are very different. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 17:38, 19 February 2013 (EST)

I'm not sure that the left hand panel should display the cooldown. The cooldown shown on the recipe item tool is a static attribute of the recipe. The cooldown remaining displayed when you are crafting is unique to you and your previous use of the recipe. It is something like the difference between the cooldown for a skill vs the cooldown (or rather count down) for an effect that resulted from some skill usage.

I don't recall that we ever used the cooldown parameter in the left hand (crafting) panel; only on the right hand (recipe item) panel. In any case, having it on both sides is redundant. It needs to be on the recipe item, just like in-game tooltips. To avoid mistakes, if anything goes into the left hand panel, it should be an automatic copy from the recipe item to avoid errors.

RingTailCat (talk) 17:41, 19 February 2013 (EST)

In game, the Recipe which appears in your crafting panel, contains the cooldown information.

I finally figured out what happened. When the original Recipe page was created, instead of putting the "Value" on the "Cooldown" line, the Template was placed there. As it turns out, all of the extra verbiage in the Recipe section Template:Recipe compensates for that syntax. However, the Crafting section Template:Crafting expects only the single parameter value. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 17:53, 19 February 2013 (EST)

I've updated the Help section: Boilerplate:Recipe and the respective doc pages for Template:Recipe/doc and Template:Crafting/doc to reflect the actual syntax needed. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 18:00, 19 February 2013 (EST)

I just re-read your comment about the countdown part... agreed, the question then becomes ... why is there a "Cooldown" parameter in the Crafting section? Which, was the only place where the template:recipe-cooldown was documented. ... nothing like consistancy. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC ^talk 18:08, 19 February 2013 (EST)

It's the usual thing with volunteer labour: you take what you get, and don't complain too much, else you get nothing in the future. That comes from riding herd on community association volunteers! RingTailCat (talk) 18:35, 19 February 2013 (EST)

Cooldown is in the Crafting template because it's on the crafting panel in-game, or at least still was when I did that major update last year (see third sub-heading here). And heh for volunteer labor. Sethladan 18:57, 19 February 2013 (EST)

Thanks for the pointer -- I knew we had discussed it someplace, but did not know where. This particular recipe is one which was created at the time of the template change discussion. Hence the inclusion of the cool-down template, rather than the value. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:17, 20 February 2013 (EST) (I got annoyed myself with my glaring sig.)

The default settings on "Recent Discussions" do not show Categories correctly

I just noticed that if you select Recent discussions from the left column, it does NOT display all comments on Category talk pages. Yet the "namespace" claims "all".

Category talk:Moria: Zelem-melek Quests and Category talk:Moria Central Halls Quests are in my contribution log, but don't show in the Recent Discussions list -- however, Talk:Stable-master does.

Further, if you select Namespace -- Category, or Category Talk, they do not show up either.

However, if you look at Recent CHanges, they are there ??? Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:20, 28 February 2013 (EST)

This is a page that Gwenwyfar made, you can edit the watch list here: Talk_Pages_Watchlist. I don't think it's meant to capture every discussion, but ones the active folks are interested in. There's a good chance that minor edits won't appear in that list which is probably fine. --Lotroadmin (talk) 21:17, 28 February 2013 (EST)

Interesting. I guess I don't really comprehend what is being shown.

One thing which immediately doesn't make sense... at the top of the page:

"The column to the right contains a list of links that are in the page. If both lists do not match it should be updated."

Needless to say the main question here is -- what is the antecedent of "it"?

The only two pages of Gwenwyfar's page that actually match are the two at the bottom -- Help Talk and MediaWiki Talk.

Others "almost match" like the one immediately above those two -- Lotro-Wiki.com talk.

I note that the page has not been modified since December of 2012.

Is this meant to be a boilerplate to be used to create a list of pages I"m interested in?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 19:13, 1 March 2013 (EST)

Me again. Sorry to keep showing up and sticking my nose in random conversations: The way the Recent Discussions page works (I had no hand in creating it, but I think I managed to eavesdrop on some conversations when Gwen was putting it together) is that it shows updates to pages to which Talk Pages Watchlist links. In order for the Recent Discussions link to be fully helpful, that - the "Watchlist" page - needs to be manually updated as new talk pages are created. Since no one's maintained it, the Recent Discussions link isn't capturing all updates to talk pages.

If you look at Talk Pages Watchlist and scroll down to, say, the Quest Talk table, you'll notice the column on the left (which is automatically generated by the DynamicPageList extension to show the 10 most recently created pages in that namespace) has three quest talk pages that aren't reflected on the right - those pages would need to be manually added to the right-hand column, bumping down any overflow (seems like Gwen arbitrarily has 8 lines in the right column) into the older pages collapse box.

From this, you can follow to Magill's original question: Under the Category talk table, you'll notice that Category talk:Moria: Zelem-melek Quests and Category talk:Moria Central Halls Quests were both created after the last update to the Watchlist and are thus not linked to by the Watchlist (DynamicPageList links do not actually count when dealing with "What Links Here" and "Related Changes"). Adding those pages (and Category talk:Weapon Icons) to the right column in that table - I'll go ahead and do this as a demonstration - should cause them (and any subsequent updates to them) to show up in Recent Discussions.

Hope this helps somewhat, heh. It's quite a clever trick in lieu of a real "discussion tracker" as an alternative to e.g. LiquidThreads but unfortunately requires pretty much constant maintenance. Gotta be a better solution somewhere... Sethladan 03:52, 2 March 2013 (EST)

Glad for your comments... especially those that represent "continuity." The number of "old-timers" active on the wiki are few and far between lately. Heck, I won't even hit my second anniversary until May of 2013! And, needless to say, there is still a great deal about this wiki that I don't understand.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 10:43, 4 March 2013 (EST)

Seriously?! It feels like you've been around almost as long as I have. Actually, you have, hah - I started in October of 2010, I think, so I'm about six months ahead. But, yeah; that's definitely an ongoing issue with people coming and going and (partly) why I try to stick around even though I'm not doing much anymore. The other reasons are sheer habit and inertia and investment in the project, I suppose. Glad I could help a little, at least. Carry on, soldier. :) Sethladan 12:02, 4 March 2013 (EST)

I edited the Talk_Pages_Watchlist to expand a couple of the categories to 20 items from 10 and matched their left and right lists. One thing which I don't really understand about that page... is there any point to the "Older Pages" sections, other than as a "reminder" to whoever is editing the page?

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 10:54, 6 March 2013 (EST)

I had to stop and think about the "Older Pages" bit myself the other day when I looked through this and explained it, but - believe it or not - the "older pages" is the most important part. If you recall, the way the Recent Discussions rigamarole works is by detecting any changes in pages linked to by the page in question (in this case, anything that Talk Pages Watchlist links to). So removing a link from any of the lists means that it would no longer be "tracked," as it were. It's really the table at the top that's there as a reminder/convenience factor, to let whoever's checking that page see if "hard-coded" links need to be added. Thus, Gwen just set up the Older Links collapse tables to keep the page at a manageable visual length. (Recall also that DynamicPageList links don't count as links for "WhatLinksHere" and similar functions.) Hope that helps! Sethladan 16:28, 6 March 2013 (EST)

How to add line numbers to edit window?

Is there a way (as in an option I haven't been able to find) which will display line numbers when editing?

The "compare" function of history or the "changes" button, for example, display line numbers with the changes. Theoretically, the intent is to make editing easier. However, I have been unable to find a way to turn on the display of those line numbers.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 10:33, 6 March 2013 (EST)

I will see what I can find out. I do like the "show changes" though.. really helps narrow down any unexpected edit..

This looks interesting, https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:WikiEditor#Table_of_Contents_Module, still not line numbers but being able to jump with the table of contents will be some improvement. --Lotroadmin (talk) 23:11, 7 March 2013 (EST)

You might also want to look into https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:External_editors - not something I've played with at all, but the thought of being able to do editing in (e.g.) Notepad++ with template folding and syntax highlighting (and, yes, line numbers) is intriguing. Not sure if that's actually what such an option would do, but... Sethladan 23:50, 7 March 2013 (EST)

I've been avoiding that technique, but using Emacs would make a lot of things easier. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 12:06, 8 March 2013 (EST)

Now that I've read those pages again, I remember WHY i've been avoiding using an external editor...!

I note that the "Table of contents" thing is (has been for a while, as I recall) an option in preferences/editing. So I've checked it and we'll see what it does. (Besides putting up a sidebar pane ... and now I see why they call it experimental. It works, sort of... You load this whole page, then it takes 4 clicks before the edit window gets around to "jump scrolling" down to where that heading is located. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:58, 8 March 2013 (EST)

Well, found one "?bug?" with the Table of Contents thingie... it mucks up your ability to cut and paste headings. Apparently converting the paste option into pasting Rich Text instead of plain text. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:16, 8 March 2013 (EST)

security update

You might have noticed there was short downtime, sorry, these normally don't impact us. --Lotroadmin (talk) 00:09, 7 March 2013 (EST)

Linking Inquiry

I would like to create a separate webpage that will allow a customizable search of image content from Cosmetics and its subpages. Before I pursued the idea further though I wanted to ensure that linking to those files would be allowed? (I plan on only using/linking to the files that I myself uploaded) Savi (talk) 16:01, 29 March 2013 (EDT)

Hello Savi,

I will let other Admins/Editors pipe in here, but I would probably suggest that you just add a category to all of the Images assuming it's useful for all. Is there any reason why you want to single out the images you've uploaded? How many images? (perhaps an active editor with a bot account could help you if you are talking hundreds.)

Adding a category to each image, enables a useful search syntax called "incategory:". So a search of all things leather in category Items type "incategory:Items leather" in the search bar. There's also "intitle" and other advance search syntax. I should note this can seem flaky if there are spaces in the category name, so keep the name simple and if you have a problem let me know.

Also with a common category this will provide you an additional way to browse the images in a slightly different way than the Cosmetics and subpages.

Otherwise I would probably have to see an example of the results of a separate webpage. In the past I've blocked hotlinking for various (mostly abuse type) reasons, but typically hotlinking from a forum, blog or a user's page on another site I don't mind.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 17:43, 29 March 2013 (EDT)

I hadn't thought about additional categories, I shall certainly consider that idea. Though the cosmetics pages are just starting, I was trailing my thought process to the end stages and figured it would be much easier to add any other details on the way there instead of waiting till the image load was much heavier. It seems that everyone likes to find their outfits differently; you can group them by slot, but it may be more helpful for another to group them by location (ie all crafting). I have browsed around on several different cosmetic blogs on Wordpress and was intrigued by their tag option. Say for example that the image of a cosmetic style could have several tags associated with it (items that share it's style, the slot its equipped in, its subtype, where its obtained from, if its dyeable); then the user could search in the way that is most effective for them (cross tag search in a way). One may want to see only masks in the head slot, another may want to see all cloaks that can be crafted, etc. Doing all this may be just as possible by having some category options, so I will definitely mull that over in my head as well as check into the intitle option you mentioned. Also, the only reason I specified the images that only I had uploaded was because I was unsure on the legality of screenshots, etc - just didn't want to step on anyone's toes. Hopefully that clarified a bit where my thought process is at...Savi (talk) 19:12, 29 March 2013 (EDT)

Keep in mind that you can use "Contributions" (upper right corner of every page) to find things you have added. You can search specific Namespaces, like File -- but not Categories, like Images
Not certain what you have in mind when you say "separate webpage", but I have created Category: User Magill Images under Category: User Images as well as Category: Magill's Corner as a way to keep all of my crap together so that I can find it... especially by using:

<categorytree depth=0>Magill's Corner</categorytree>

Off hand, I can't think of any specific "stuff" on the Wiki which is organized in a similar fashion. Armour Sets (Level 1-84) Index is probably the closest (but it is not dynamic), and Darzil's crafting guide https://lotro.northshield.co.uk/ -- however neither is "searchable" or "sortable"
What I would suggest doing would be to simply put together a "sandbox" page so you can experiment. Call it something like Savi/project-cosmetic so you can find it again. :)
As for a "default view" I would tend to favor using "Armour Sets" simply because that is how most folks will first encounter such things -- "Oh that's the Orthanc raid set;" and then work into the pieces from there.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:18, 30 March 2013 (EDT)

At least for this wiki anything you add is considered public domain and will be placed under the GNU FDL licenses (as noted on edit page) if not already covered by Turbine's copyrights (as noted in the disclaimers). To some this might be weird, you create a page, you are the original author but anyone can come in and update, rewrite, etc as they see fit just as long as it's good for the community. From time to time, folks will step on other toes, but if there's no pain then there's no gain right?

As for categories, this has been a debated topic in the past where it's really a huge deal to maintain all the categories one could put on an item, so folks do tend to keep them simpler. If you do come up with an idea, it might be best to create an example then request feedback from the other editors.

If you are a guru of wiki's or programming then you might take a gander at Semantic MediaWiki extensions (link bottom right icon) which will be much more powerful than the categories. This extension has been requested in the past, but I don't believe it's been fully utilized yet.

You might also look at the other extensions for this wiki that can use categories in unique ways.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 17:28, 30 March 2013 (EDT)

Is this true today? After one of the recent MW updates, I see all spaces converted to undersores when displayed... and you can search for either underscore or space.

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 16:18, 30 March 2013 (EDT)

My comment is only for the search prefix like "incategory" it seems to be a bit too picky for how I think one would use it. --Lotroadmin (talk) 17:28, 30 March 2013 (EDT)

Been thinking about my options, and I think for what I want to do, the most convenient way for both maintaining and browsing the images is to create a database with the relevant information. To that end I've been learning php and mysql and have so far been pleased with the results. As far as I know I'm unable to connect to mysql on the wiki ... correct? If that is indeed the case I'm not sure I will be adding any new screenies I take to the cosmetics pages; With that train of thought...is it better to keep the framework for others to add to if they so desire; or better to just scratch them? Savi (talk) 10:14, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

For lotro-wiki, the mysql port is behind a firewall, so probably the closest way to have your own tables is with the semantic wiki extension. If you are creating a DB from scratch it might be worth keeping it open and files on github or something like that.. You can also keep it closed and [pinky next to mounth] sell it for one million dollars like wowhead :) If you are creating a MW extension (probably the best), definitely keep it open for others MW sites to use and mediawiki.org will have guidelines on how to write the extension. I currently don't have a public development host available otherwise I would offer you a spot to develop with read access to what ever you needed. However, we do have a testwiki_skunark_net (currently offline) to experiment on, but normally it's with released extensions and minimal amount of data and articles, perhaps it can be a showing ground of what you are doing vs development location. I'm eager to see what you come up with or even the ideas, maybe that will spark an idea with semantic wiki extension. --Lotroadmin (talk) 13:06, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

-facepalm- hit the back button rather than wikitext after previewing...anyway...I hadn't heard of wowhead before reading your message but after checking it out my head was a whirlwind of ideas to do something similiar with lotro, until I spiraled down remembering I've not a clue on how to program anything, lol. Having the database open is something I have considered but keep shying away from. Though some type of information input form could be benefical once I figure out how to code such a thing. To give you a visual on the beginning stages you can visit lotroflair.x10.bz -- I'm currently attempting to make the search better but its tricky with my limited knowledge. It would be amazing to have similiar databases housing info on item stats, quests, recipes, etc, but until I can figure out a different way to update that info, other than manually, its just not something I'm ready to attack yet. The image styles of items seem to change significantly less often than the other information does. I keep learning a little bit more in my free time so I figure I can start small and build onto it when I'm able. Savi (talk) 15:14, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

Wowhead has aways been in the back of my mind for lotro-wiki too. Almost all the data is here to be harvested, searching works but agree can be challenging, but having something integrated into the wiki with the fancy html5/ajax menus would probably take an extensions and there's always something else on my place. SMW seems to be the best compromise but also there's concerns with performance and it's also a difficult thing to wrap one's head around. I think by just adding the SMW features to the item template might actually provide the same functionality as your website but in the more traditional simplistic lotro-wiki i-like-white background style :) --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:35, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

I was able to code all the search features I wanted for the moment at the above listed site, so unless a future problem pops up I will put my SMW learning on hold for now. Not really wishing to upload the same screenie in two locations, but if anyone so desires they are welcome to make a file copy for reference on the wiki. Savi (talk) 13:07, 17 April 2013 (EDT)

Main Page styling issue

Heya, boss - hope you've been well. Not around much anymore, sadly, but I happened to drop by the wiki from school (Win 7, Chrome up-to-date) and the styling on the main page was all wonky until I signed into the wiki. Other pages looked fine, and when I checked in IE, it displayed a security certificate warning, but rendered without problems when I hit "Show content." Don't know if you've changed anything lately, but figured I'd give you a heads-up in case you can replicate and squash. Cheers! Sethladan 15:44, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

Hello Seth, i noticed weirdness the other day as well with Firefox but not with IE, chrome or safari. I can't decide if it's an SSL issue, adblock or new features in FF, but now that you've experienced it in chrome, i will delete the cache tonight. Also, several of the browsers are migrating to the https (vs http), which is probably a good thing overall, but the costs of the SSL certificates have gone up and decided to generate a self-signed certificate. I will dig into that again so that warning won't appear. Also this is the year that I need to upgrade the OS to the webhost, so that might be a good time to do the switch. --Lotroadmin (talk) 16:26, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

I deleted the cache and the weirdness went away for FF and I'm not seeing issues with any other browser, let me know if you (or anyone) still see formatting issues.

--Lotroadmin (talk) 22:14, 9 April 2013 (EDT)

Seems fixed here - you're the champ as always. :) Sethladan 00:52, 10 April 2013 (EDT)

Error in Createarticle

I don't know where to look for info on this one...

Using Create new quest as the example... this apparently uses a Media Wiki Extension "CreateArticle" ?? -- I have no idea where to look for this to find out what is happening, let alone guessing how to fix the issue.

The problem is "simple" -- if you enter then name of an already existing quest -- "Sparking an Interest" (Quest:Sparking an Interest) for example, "nothing happens" -- sort of...

A blank page is displayed. No error message, no text fills, nothing, just blank. As I recall, this happens with Create new item as well, and probably all of the other "Create Article" entries.

There is an indication at www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CreateArticle sourcecode -- that a fix for PhP4.3 exists.

Special:Version indicates we are using 0.9 beta, Current version appears to be 0.91 beta

Do either of those fixes apply to us? Have they been applied?

If not can the extension be updated and the fixes applied -- I see no "installation instructions" ... then it appears that we need a series of error message pages:

$wgOut->errorpage( 'badtitle', 'badtitletext');

$wgOut->errorpage( 'error', 'articleexists' );

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 22:03, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

I had to do a custom tweak to that extension to allow for the player-character subpages, but i've migrate the updates over and seems to provide the right error message now. Let me know if it worked for you. --Lotroadmin (talk) 22:15, 11 May 2013 (EDT)

Yes. Works like a charm... thank you.

This is one of those thing which I noticed quite some time ago, but never remembered to ask about it ... just "learned" that a blank page meant "you screwed up idiot." :)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 01:01, 12 May 2013 (EDT)

Can anyone explain this...

I've begun working up a revision for the Create new quest process: User:Magill/Project-Infobox Quest cleanup

In setting things up, I notice that the current Template:Infobox Quests/Preload contains the following line:

| name = {{s<includeonly></includeonly>ubst:PAGENAME}}

It was added by User:Amphoras back in August of 2011.

As best I can tell, it somehow causes the contents within the {{ }} to NOT be evaluated.

With:

 | name              = {{subst:PAGENAME}}

without

| name              = Infobox Quests/Preload

So, I guess the question is -- Is this a "defined effect" (i.e. but undocumeted) or simply a useful "exploit," i.e. an error which does something useful.

Is there a "more correct" way to "insert" such text.

(BTW I haven't noticed User:Amphoras or User:EoD on-line for some time now.)

Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 13:36, 15 May 2013 (EDT)

Seems like a valid and clever way to force something to be evaluated only on include. That approach can be common in macros for languages like c/c++, but I'm guessing you can use the noinclude and includeonly tags to essentially do that same thing but would be a lot more text. I'm guessing there is more of a reason behind this though, my ears are perked. --Lotroadmin (talk) 20:18, 15 May 2013 (EDT)

With those preload pages, you want to drop some text into the text edit box, i.e. preload the text box, with content that will be interpreted in the context of the page you are creating. Without this trick, you would drop the name of the preload page (as you saw above) into the text box, while you want to drop the macro text itself into the text box so that it will be evaluated when you preview or save the quest page you are creating, e.g. "Name of New Quest" when you are creating a page called "Quest:Name of New Quest".

You will notice that there is a set of template calls, and other edits, which get processed when you save a page, unlike most template calls which get processed when the page is rendered. "subst" is one of them. Translating "[[Quest:name|]]" into "[[Quest:name|name]]" is another. I am sure there are lists of such immediate templates and edits somewhere. It would be nice to know about all of them.

- RingTailCat (talk) 22:10, 15 May 2013 (EDT)

what to do about this

I have no idea how to deal with this problem:

I received an email:

"login error incorrect or missing confirmation code."

From: <lotro@tdc.name>
Sender: "Taylor Cleghorn" <taylor@tdc.name>
To: <xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: LOTRO Wiki Create Account Problem
Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 15:07:12 -0500

I cannot create a new account on the Wiki.  I’ve clicked on the cats and tried numerous different users and emails and ALWAYS get the same error.  “Login error
Incorrect or missing confirmation code.”  What should I do?

Taylor

Accompanying a screenshot of the captcha page.

Looks like some version of Windows using IE.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Magill (Contribs • User Talk) at 2013-05-20T07:38:42.

Unfortunately, we sometimes have problems with the cats and dogs catchpa thing on this wiki. One of the most common problems is when the site that serves up the images and validates your selection is down. The error messages that result, in my experience, are not very helpful. Other times, it can be a problem with restrictions or errors in rendering the page. So browsers that are not standard compliant, or ones with browser add-ons which intercept inbound and/or outbound content fail.

Clearly, there are folks who are able to create new user accounts, as three were created today (2013.05.20), and three, yesterday (2013.05.19), suggesting that account creation problems are an individual matter, or a transient problem. The catchpa is a necessary evil, as it has reduced the amount of spam and vandalism to almost zero.

There are several things they use can try. Try using a different browser, or running the browser with all add-ons disabled. Also, be careful to use a user name which does not include any substring which might trigger the profanity filter. If you follow the links on the error page, and do not arrive at a page which describes that catchpa, this may indicate that the web site which hosts the feature is down. In that case, all you can do is wait until it is up.

- RingTailCat (talk) 13:58, 20 May 2013 (EDT)

Thanks for the info... I haven't encountered such a request before. Wm Magill - Valamar - OTG/OTC - talk 15:41, 20 May 2013 (EDT)

We've had a few requests through the forums a while back, and also a while back i've updated the text to register with a different browser, but looks like that text is no longer displayed. Sadly IE has never worked with this extension for registration and any IE users that do manage to register should request a promotion to ninja status to avoid the captcha. On a positive note, i haven't noticed any spam for a very very long time where before it was a daily struggle to fend off the spam.

I will send an email to Taylor with to help him set up his account.

I will also take this time to review the captcha options, perhaps one that isn't IE challenged (funny thing microsoft serves the cat images) -Lotroadmin (talk) 17:03, 20 May 2013 (EDT)

Looks like it does work with IE now, perhaps I can lower the number of images review. -Lotroadmin (talk) 17:13, 20 May 2013 (EDT)