User talk:JC the Builder

JC the Builder: You seem to be to have quite an extensive UO knowledge/history and drive to document the game. Please reconsider contributing your knowledge at UOStuff.com. I was honest about the timing of UOStuff.com updating and expanding. We (the UO Community) would be honored to have your contributions. -Quaz'r

Full Conversation : UOGuide vs UOStuff

talk

and you don't even have a user page yet? :P

So, how long is this wiki in progress so far.

what are your goals,
what kind of server,
how much wiki editing knowledge do you consider yourself capable of,
are you planning any google ads to keep it running,
and how many admins does the site have so far. ?

UOStuff doesn't see much activity in edits lately, i can agree on that... Though wouldn't it make sense to merge the efforts of the 2 projects somehow?

i must warn you i'm a chaotic editor / admin, but can get some interesting stuff done ;)

UO is not currently my main focus [1], though i can help in some areas.

- BBR talk / cont 06:17, 15 November 2006 (PST)

I have been focusing more on site content then anything else, that is the most important thing right now.

My goal is to build an enclopedia for UO. At present time, the focus has been to keep up with current publishes. Then to work backwards from there to fill out the site.
UOGuide is currently hosted on a shared server, but will upgrade to dedicated when needed. I already understand a lot about hosting after managing the HOT Guild Website and forum for a couple years now. Right now, the site is up all the time and the speed is adaquate.
I have learned a lot about Wiki editing, and am constantly reviewing the help pages on Wikipedia when I want to know more about something. Actually I just refreshed myself on the indentation syntax so I could reply to your comment in the proper way.
The plan is to run this site ad free. The hosting is already pre-paid until next June or July. If the costs increase, donations or other means will be looked into for funding.
Currently, I am the only administrator. The plan is make the most active contributors administrators of the site.

JC the Builder 10:14, 15 November 2006 (PST)

sig

You need to make yourself a proper sig ;) check my userpage for a how-to.

btw, as you can see, i'll start off with the Directory, and relevant categories and templates, it'll give you a base to expand upon.

The blue banner on the left, appears to be 2 lines of text too small currently - BBR talk / cont 01:51, 16 November 2006 (PST)

MD

btw, imo Markeedragon should be removed from the fansites..

i've been boycotting them myself for a long time now, as they are providing illegal third party software, and botting software for World of Warcraft, they probably won't care much about their legal activities in UO. - BBR talk / cont 02:20, 16 November 2006 (PST)

I want to keep the official fansite links the same as on the official fansite page on UO.com. You and I might not like it, but until his site is removed (if ever) it has to stay. I want UOGuide to be as objective as possible. -- JC the Builder 08:32, 16 November 2006 (PST)

i'll see if i can pass the word to some contacts then. ;) - BBR talk / cont 09:19, 16 November 2006 (PST)

ext

Plenty available [2], just depends what you want to expand. Maybe the googlesearch extension? - BBR talk / cont 23:46, 4 December 2006 (PST)

I don't want to add extensions for the sake of it. The current search seems to do a good job as is. -- JC the Builder 08:53, 5 December 2006 (PST)

i think the addon adds a bulletoption that allows you to search the site, or search google. i.e. someone wants to look for a uo specific subject. - BBR talk / cont 11:07, 5 December 2006 (PST)

Quest Characters

I'm thinking those don't belong under Monsters. Maybe under Quests? --Cogniac 21:40, 29 December 2006 (PST)

Yeah, they probably don't. If you can think of a better layout or something needs to be put on a new page, just do it at this point (with the exception of the main page). Later on when the site is more established, major changes will be discussed in depth. JC the Builder 22:25, 29 December 2006 (PST)

I figure I'll move it once I get out of the Animals section, which obviously might take a while. Hehe. --Cogniac 22:36, 29 December 2006 (PST)

Page links

Yeah. I've been experimenting with the amount of links on certain pages. You should've seen it in earlier versions! I had totally linked up the italicized Lore sections in Races and the tables on such pages as Arms Lore and Item Id, until I realized that both looked terrible. I have so far thought up three linking conventions: no links in tables (still wondering about the links in Template:Creatures), no links in italicized text, and no links within quotations. Other than that, I'm still going back and forth on the number of links in some pages, so it's a work in progress. --Cogniac 19:24, 30 December 2006 (PST)

400 pages

Just posted Lava Snake, which happened to be page #400. --Cogniac 20:27, 31 December 2006 (PST)

Arg! I was going to post the 400th page =[ - JC the Builder 20:29, 31 December 2006 (PST)

Haha My bad. Just saw your creation description. Hehe. =P --Cogniac 20:33, 31 December 2006 (PST)

vandal

any way to edit / block that recent vandal's name and or ip?

because of the name he's somehow not showing up as a normal user. - BBR talk / cont 04:55, 16 January 2007 (PST)

Yeah, there is some bug in the privacy shield modification I did. SysOps are supposed to see the IP. I will look into it in the near future. If he does anything again I am just going to pull his IP from the database directly so he can be banned. - JC the Builder 18:11, 16 January 2007 (PST)

Could you deal with him somehow, so he at least has a "name", and not special:contributions - BBR talk / cont 11:42, 21 January 2007 (PST)

I am very busy working on some phpBB3 MODs at the moment and don't have the time to fix the bug causing the name display issue. I will probably be able to get to it later this week. In the meantime, I blocked the original vandal. - JC the Builder 12:54, 21 January 2007 (PST)

Well.. he [3] is still active. - BBR talk / cont 23:50, 21 January 2007 (PST)

I upgraded to Mediawiki version 1.9, so that reverted all the changes I made regarding the privacy shield. I will try again someday, but probably not in the near future. - JC the Builder 21:13, 22 January 2007 (PST)

protection

i dont think Atlantic should be protected. as protecting pages inhibits change. which is what a wiki is all about :P

Some, such as templates which affect a "lot" of pages should be protected, but even then not all of them. most conditional templates are and should be protected, navigational menus probably don't need to be, as there is always room for improvement. - BBR talk / cont 06:11, 1 February 2007 (PST)

The Atlantic page was protected because I was trying to create a sort of portal page. But it hasn't taken off, so I will remove the protection. - JC the Builder 10:34, 1 February 2007 (PST)

Byte markers

When did you add in the markers on the recent changes page to show how big our changes are? They are rather nifty. --Cogniac 20:58, 5 March 2007 (PST)

It was in the last MediaWiki update. There is probably going to be even more changes related to that in the next one. -- JC the Builder 10:05, 6 March 2007 (PST)

Bestiary Pictures

I'm going to go ahead and start leaving out the pictures for the Animals and Monsters. I figure we can start grabbing all of our pictures from the KR client when it comes out instead of using the outdated models from the 2d client. --Cogniac 17:43, 10 March 2007 (PST)

I don't think the 2D client will be discontinued for a long time. If you don't want to do the screenshots that is fine. In all likelihood there will be both 2D and KR screenshots of creatures. If and when the 2D client becomes less popular then that can be given up on and perhaps discussion will happen on removing 2D interface and creature images. - JC the Builder 20:25, 10 March 2007 (PST)

Hosting

Have a look at this one : [4] . we're currently talking with the site owners there to merge wowwiki.com into the wikia community, free host large community. worth taking a look at perhaps ? - BBR talk / cont 00:26, 15 May 2007 (PDT)

The biggest issue with this I see is the URL structure. Right now it is very simple, for example uoguide.com/Veteran_Rewards but hosting through them it would be uoguide.wikia.com/wiki/Veteran_Rewards. I also don't think they will allow such heavily customized styling on their site. -- JC the Builder 14:26, 15 May 2007 (PDT)

I think there's a good bit possible for design, but anyway, they're making the move today. suposedly keeping the gray etc. ill post you a link when its done. - BBR talk / cont 23:56, 15 May 2007 (PDT)

[5], [6]. wowwiki moved, and is now "on" wikia.. i'm not fully sure how the process went trough it all, but it's faster than ever ! - BBR talk / cont 06:24, 1 June 2007 (PDT)

I just reviewed the policies and they force you to put advertisements on the site. Even worse, there would be no direct control over those advertisements. On the WOWWiki you can see the gold for sale and leveling services already. I know this site is a bit slow but that is the breaks with such cheap hosting. I will try and get some type of donation thing going soon because the year contract will be expiring in a couple months. - JC the Builder 15:48, 1 June 2007 (PDT)

spam

You might want to disable anonymous logins, and enable the option that requires all users to verify their email before allowing edits... check the recent change list why. - BBR talk / cont 00:36, 14 June 2007 (PDT)

Mainpage Poll

Just gave the main page a little edit to get it quasi-up-to-date for now. I figure we probably need a new poll. I'll leave what it is up to you, though. Also: the checkboxes and bars and such in the polls have always been broken. They just show up as the red x in a box, etc. Just checking to see if that's just me, or what. --Cogniac 01:02, 28 June 2007 (PDT)

Thanks so much for doing that. Feel free to update as much as you want. I just updated the poll as you requested. However I don't understand what is broken for you. If you could take a screenshot and post a link to it so I can see exactly what you are talking about. - JC the Builder 18:42, 28 June 2007 (PDT)

Just threw a pic together in Paint. Poll Problems.png Other random note: maybe you can look into Template:Testing and see if you can make it work. I'm trying to make it mimic the in-game item tool tips. It works perfectly except for the fact that you can't actually use it as a template because it's broken. Every unused property still displays as a 1px tall horizontal bar of black no matter what. So if you have an item that just has an "itemname" and a "weight," it will also have a 57px tall wall of black, as well. Can't seem to make it not do that. So far it's looking like I'll have to make one manually for every single item page, which would suck. --Cogniac 20:02, 28 June 2007 (PDT)

I will look into the template thing tomorrow. As for the poll images, can you right-click on one of the x boxes, go to properties, and give me the URL of the image it is trying to find? - JC the Builder 21:59, 28 June 2007 (PDT)

Wikis are weird. It kept just giving me "http://www.uoguide.com/Main_Page" when I right clicked, and then I had to trick it into letting me view the source. Went digging around in there and I found some urls. The markup for the check boxes is like this:

<input type="image" align=texttop src="/../optionb.png" name="Vote" alt="Vote" name="Vote" width=23 height=20>

All of them use that same setup. The bar graph bars are a little different:

<img src="/../leftb.gif" height=10 width=4>
<img src="/../middleb.gif" alt="1 votes" height=10 width=17>
<img src="/../rightb.gif" height=10 width=5>

The one in the middle being the one you can actually see the outline of. Both "It met them" and "It missed the broadside of the barn" use that due to them both having bars of equal value. "It fell a little short" has a longer bar so it uses "leftc.gif," "middlec.gif," and "rightc.gif". I don't know where the A's are supposed to be. --Cogniac 23:20, 28 June 2007 (PDT)

What browser are you using? - JC the Builder 08:01, 29 June 2007 (PDT)

IE6 --Cogniac 18:26, 29 June 2007 (PDT)

Random update: upgraded to IE7 a while back and the poll magically works. Must've been a bug in IE6. --Cogniac 18:59, 27 December 2007 (PST)

Text issue

Any idea why it doesn't seem possible to make small text (specifically 10px) bold? --Cogniac 17:23, 28 July 2007 (PDT)

Nope. There may be an explanation on Wikipedia, but I don't have time to search for it at the moment. - JC the Builder 23:13, 28 July 2007 (PDT)

I figured out the bolding thing. Instead of actually bolding the text, it just horizontally elongates it, which is weird, so I guess I'll just live without bold 10px text. --Cogniac 19:26, 30 July 2007 (PDT)

Deleting two images

There are two images that are no longer useful in any way, but I can't seem to delete them. They each have a '+' in their name, and the wiki can't handle that when it tries to bring up the description page for them, so there's no way to delete them normally, so whenever you get a chance, if you can delete them manually, it would save some space and stop them from sitting there taunting me. They're Trader_Map+.png and A_Trader_Map_+_2.png --Cogniac 19:25, 30 July 2007 (PDT)

You don't need to worry about saving space, there is something like 50GB of hard disk space available. I can't find the two images you are talking about anyway. - JC the Builder 19:06, 31 July 2007 (PDT)

They're in the Unused Files section under Special Pages. --Cogniac 22:19, 31 July 2007 (PDT)

I deleted the images manually but they still show up in the list. Oh well. - JC the Builder 19:45, 1 August 2007 (PDT)

Overriding the wiki

Trying to figure out how to override the colors of internal wiki links. Trying to take the statistics for Nox Ranger's Heavy Crossbow and make it look like the statistics for Arctic Death Dealer, i.e. make all of the text be white including links so that they don't look terrible in the tooltip format. Any ideas? --Cogniac 17:14, 5 August 2007 (PDT)

Posted fix on your talk page. - BBR talk / cont 06:34, 6 August 2007 (PDT)

Editors

On a side note, [7], seems to have 1 editor currently. Perhaps have a chat with her [8] and see whether she'd like to contribute to UOGuide, and assists in a merger of the 2 projects. It seems silly to continue having 2 wikis, while everyone could be working on 1. I havent seen or heard much from the other owner in some time, but he seemed interested in putting uostuff into different hands to either continue as it is, or have an external company work on it. Simply merging the 2, (as was done with inuwiki) into UOGuide seems the most logical option. - BBR talk / cont 06:34, 6 August 2007 (PDT)

I could try to talk to him again but I suspect the answer is going to be no. The same thing happened last time, the owner was not around for 10 months and I asked him, he said no and goes off on how he is going to improve the site. There really isn't that much information that isn't on UOGuide already. - JC the Builder 15:26, 7 August 2007 (PDT)

I spoke with Miss Echo and she is going to begin transfering her work over to UOGuide. Please help with any formatting or other integration issues that she faces when you can. - JC the Builder 18:55, 8 August 2007 (PDT)

Just added Kingdom Reborn Client User Guide under the Guides section in the directory for this. --Cogniac 19:14, 8 August 2007 (PDT)

Spam

[9] holy crap spam ! I recommend copying the data that can still benefit UOG, such as quests, items n all. There's no way i can keep up with the bots that are flooding that site atm. - BBR talk / cont 03:03, 1 October 2007 (PDT)

It would be inappropriate to just copy and paste stuff onto UOGuide without permission. Best to just let that ship sink and move forward. - JC the Builder 08:03, 1 October 2007 (PDT)

Awesome

I just noticed that UOGuide is listed under the "External Links" sections of several pages on Wikipedia:

Not sure if one of our's put that up or what, but I guess now we have added incentive to improve (keep improving) the site. --Cogniac 10:56, 10 October 2007 (PDT)

I have been adding the links over time where appropriate. If the previous expansions are ever done I will add a link to those pages as well. It is important to only add the link to relevant pages or they will be removed. UOGuide gets hundreds of visits each week from those links alone. - JC the Builder 15:12, 10 October 2007 (PDT)

Business is picking up

Is it just me, or are we getting way more page views all of a sudden? --Cogniac 16:33, 14 October 2007 (PDT)

Google Analytics says there hasn't been any spike in visitors or page views. - JC the Builder 16:50, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

Just seemed like the page views number on the stats page was starting to go up faster. Maybe it has always been that way and I just happened to be paying more attention to it. *shrugs* --Cogniac 17:04, 15 October 2007 (PDT)

User purge

Any chance of a user purge: i.e. deleting all of those gibberish spammer names in the user list? They don't seem to be coming back; they seem to be focusing on UOStuff. And if they do come back, I can just ban them again. --Cogniac 18:51, 11 November 2007 (PST)

I don't think there is any easy method for deleting users. Unless there are thousands, it really isn't worth the effort of deleting them all. - JC the Builder 17:27, 12 November 2007 (PST)

Mmkay, nevermind, then. I was just thinking that as it looks like UOGuide is continuing to grow, space will someday be an issue. And I don't see us as having the prerogative that something like Wikipedia does, where absolutely every edit to every page for all eternity is kept in the interests of archiving, so someday we could free up space by purging users and getting rid of old edits, etc. For instance: "List of 2D Client Patches" has 139 edits, when it's rather obvious we only need the latest version. But for now, I guess it's not a big thing, since I doubt we're approaching the 50GB or whatever we have at the moment. --Cogniac 18:55, 12 November 2007 (PST)

The database size is around 35MB. And since the spammer names are gibberish, I doubt that anyone will miss out on the name they desire. - JC the Builder 19:53, 12 November 2007 (PST)

Reply

Your offer re front page edit ability sounds great. I am, however, unfamiliar with the site's message features and hope that this is the appropriate place for a reply. Thanks. - Ceruleus 3 December 2007

It is fine. - JC the Builder 13:59, 3 December 2007 (PST)

My next pet project

I'm as done as I'm going to get on Publishes and the sections under Client Patches without talking to Raph Koster or Richard Garriott or someone. I'm only missing the number for the first KR patch from the original limited beta (I have the patch notes, I just lack the patch number). I'm going to try to keep them up to date with the latest stuff, but other than that, I'm moving on to a new pet project. I just made up the equipment subpages in the Directory, and Britannia News Network caught my eye, so I think I'm going to take aim at that. --Cogniac 03:17, 23 December 2007 (PST)

You have done a lot of good work there. But you should not delete the redirects created from moving a page so people who many have hyper-links on various other websites can easily locate the new page. Unless a page is less than a day old, it should always redirect to the new one. Also when those new pages are finally up, there should probably be a note about finding the talismans instead of the book. - JC the Builder 14:04, 23 December 2007 (PST)

I'm planning on doing some disambiguation pages when it comes time for that. --Cogniac 17:23, 23 December 2007 (PST)

Renaming pictures

You know of any way to rename an uploaded picture without downloading it, deleting the uploaded copy, and reloading the picture under a new name? --Cogniac 21:07, 25 December 2007 (PST)

Nope. - JC the Builder 10:20, 26 December 2007 (PST)

Damn. In that case, expect to see some deletions coming up. =/ --Cogniac 18:26, 26 December 2007 (PST)

Number of articles

The NUMBEROFARTICLES constant displayed on the Main Page and on the Statistics page says 1663 at the time I write this. But when I go to any of the list pages in the Special pages section such as Long pages, Short pages, Oldest pages, or Popular pages, they all show 1674, which is obviously a difference of 11 from the NUMBEROFARTICLES constant. I found one in the lists that need to be changed to a redirect, so I changed it thinking that it would change the difference to 10, but it decremented both numbers by 1, so the difference is still at 11. Just curious if you have any idea what these mythical 11 pages are that aren't being counted and/or why they aren't being counted. --Cogniac 18:55, 27 December 2007 (PST)

That number is not 100% accurate so I wouldn't be concerned with it being off by 11 pages. It may be a bug in the software itself. I will be upgrading the the latest wiki version sometime soon and it might be fixed in that. - JC the Builder 09:37, 28 December 2007 (PST)

Non-breaking Space

Is there a wiki equivalent of the html code, &nbsp? --Ceruleus 15:20, 28 December 2007 (PST)