Talk:Main Page

If you have suggestions, comments, concerns, bug reports or anything about the main page post them here. A special page has been setup for main page change testing at UOGuide:Main Page.

Featured Establishments

Great site! I did not find a link to the list of Featured Establishments. Where is it hidden? Maybe it would deserve a link in the Directory. Also, the main page could be updated a little more often.

Great work

I like what you're doing here. The wiki system has a lot of promise here and can be kept up to date more easily than Stratics. I'll make a few contributions here and there as I see something I know a lot about. :)

No Category

The only page on UOGuide which will not be into a category is the main page. This is done intentionally in case anyone asks why it isn't done. The reason is sort of difficult to explain, but simply it does not need to be categorized. - JC the Builder 16:00, 22 February 2007 (PST)

Requiring Registration for Changes

Unfortunately it looks like that bots have finally made their way to UOGuide and are posting all their spam links. At this moment it appears the only option is to require registration in order to edit or add new pages. I will look into making this change tomorrow. -- JC the Builder 21:06, 29 April 2007 (PDT)

Update: The change has been made. All users must now login to create or edit pages. - JC the Builder 20:39, 30 April 2007 (PDT)

If anyone wants to update front page let me know

I don't have enough time to keep the Main Page up to date lately. Most of it is out of date by a couple weeks. If you want to help keep it updated just reply here or on my user page or whatever and I will give you the access needed. Any current OPs can feel free to update it if they wish. - JC the Builder 19:02, 23 May 2007 (PDT)

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Wouldn't mind the option, should I ever need it. Right now I reckon the emanate ending of the spring cleaning event should be listed somewhere more prominent.

- Bomb Bloke 09:03, 15 August 2008 (PDT)

Making UOGuide more

Branching off from the old UO.com way of adding quips to the top of some monster pages, I thought it would be a nice way to extend that to UOGuide. So on major pages like the one for Houses, a quick joke or saying is added in italics. I think it adds a interesting little feature.

Anyway, people can feel free to add their own to any page which does not have one. Only one per page. If you have any suggestions for stuff like this or anything to make the site more interesting or fun, please make them. - JC the Builder 07:41, 17 September 2007 (PDT)

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After spending far too long waiting for KR to patch today, it occurred to me that the patcher's notes page sucks. Badly. It's out of date and lacks important information relating to current events, how to find out about current events, game features, yadda yadda yadda. You name it, it's not there.

A quick search through and I see that the file "vercfg.cfg" holds the URL to the patch page. Very easy to tweak, it's all plain text, you just replace the address and you're done.

So what I'm thinking is this. How about we host our own patch page, and advertise around forums or whatever with details as to how to switch to it?

It'd need to be a page apart from the wiki (as the patch program only supports very basic web pages), but it wouldn't be that hard to keep up to date. All it really needs to do is provide links to other pages (eg, the most up to date patch/publish notes, currently the spring cleaning/royal massacre events, maybe a few links to uoherald/uogamecodes/uosignup/stratics etc for good measure).

That plus there's the factor that people would be loading the page every time they started UO. Bandwidth issues for both them and us.

No idea why the official patch page got so bad. One day we had a great big patch page with lots of info on it (important bugs, up to date patch notes, etc) and the next it changes to a black page with no info on it and no updates.

- Bomb Bloke 22:05, 31 July 2008 (PDT)

Nevermind, seems to have since been locked down to "force" the use of the patch page. - Bomb Bloke 07:12, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

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As it stands, the wiki software adds random keywords to pages based on what links to them. The idea is that search engines pick up on these things and so realise that a given page is a good result for a given search.

Catch is, the odds of something like "Ultima Online" turning up in any of our page keywords are very low. As a result, we're much less likely to turn up on a given search then, say, Stratics. Or any number of other websites.

We could force the relevant terms to appear on every page and so make UOGuide look like a UO site to the search engines...

- Bomb Bloke 00:51, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Changing Upcoming Event Section

The upcoming events section is almost never updated. I think it would be better to turn that box into a section where important information can be located such as the latest patch version, latest expansions, etc. Basically information that someone might want to know. It would also help free up space in the UO news section which gets a lot of updating. If anyone has suggestions for information to place there, either add a comment here or UOGuide administrators can feel free to add their ideas directly. - JC the Builder 13:19, 27 November 2007 (PST)

Note to updaters

Instead of editing the main page directly it is now all done through templates. If you want to edit a specific section such as the UO News, click the main page edit button and then scroll all the way down to the "Templates used on this page" section. Find the appropriate template, click that link and edit that template.

The reason for this change in editing method is that a lot of code now appears in each section and it will be easy to accidentally remove it. - JC the Builder 16:34, 30 January 2008 (PST)

Looks Great! Nice job and I promise not to mess it up. --Ceruleus 19:29, 30 January 2008 (PST)

Just updated it a little. Cleaned up the code, and polished the display a little. Only problem I'm having is with that damn Featured Screenshots thing. I can't figure out how to make it identify the cell that it's in as the containing element, so no matter where I put style="width:100%;", in the Template or on the Main Page itself, it always reads the entire page as the containing element. This leads to the third screenshot almost slamming into the Skill of the Week. I figure I'll come back to that later if no one else finds a fix. --Cogniac 23:04, 30 January 2008 (PST)

The way you have it now is fine. When I had them stretching across the page I created a 4th empty column with a percentage width to keep the right screenshot away from the SOW section. - JC the Builder 04:49, 31 January 2008 (PST)

I am going to make an executive decision and say that we are not going to support 800x600 resolution on the main page. I was messing around with looking at the site in various resolutions, and the main page was breaking out of its table and flowing out the right side of the screen for anything under 1280x1024, and it was the only page doing it. I figured out that it was the Featured Screenshot template doing it, and I messed around with it and managed to get the resolution it works in down to 1024x768 and above (technically, 960x600, too, but that resolution nearly gave my monitor a hemorrhage in and of itself). The only way to get 800x600 to also work involves having the screenshots nearly stacked on top of each other, and that rather defeats the purpose. So no 800x600. --Cogniac 20:21, 31 January 2008 (PST)

Site Speed

How has the speed and responsiveness been for you today on UOGuide? Is it better, the same or worse? - JC the Builder 12:56, 18 May 2008 (PDT)

Seemed a little faster at first but it might've just been my imagination. Sometimes the thing still lags a little, while at other times pages load straight up.

Though in the past I've had problems where for five minutes or so I just couldn't get a page to load... Once every few days.

One thing I've noticed - Links to images that don't exist are showing up blue at the moment, whereas before they were coming up red.

- Bomb Bloke 03:45, 19 May 2008 (PDT)

Much faster for me. Even the main page, which usually takes forever to load, is moving faster. Ditto on the weird image link thing, though. --Cogniac 23:04, 24 May 2008 (PDT)

The blue image link thing has turned up again. Oh, and it seems I can no longer upload files.

- Bomb Bloke 08:23, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

You were singled out for uploading too many pics - j/k, I can't seem to upload files either!

--Tancred RedStar 15:34, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I forgot to enable uploads during the recent upgrade. You can now upload files again. - JC the Builder 16:50, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, was a little worried at first.

--Tancred RedStar 20:15, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Ta. - Bomb Bloke 23:38, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Tagging articles for large updates

I was thinking for doing the Publish 56 page today but I saw the notes 2 hours later and was worried another of our active contributors (of which there are several) would be making it already. Thus, it would be a good idea to tag a page with a sentence at the top saying you are in the process of making a large update for the page. Just saying "updating this page right now" would be good. This is mostly useful when a new publish comes out. If the page isn't made yet, just make it with a note you are creating it right now. - JC the Builder 20:56, 21 October 2008 (PDT)

Latest Main Page Update

There is now more space around the category headings which seems wasteful. - JC the Builder 02:48, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Well, some of the borders were kind of broken in some browsers, which I just fixed, so that may have contributed somewhat to the impression of wasted space. If it seems slightly wasteful even with the borders back, I contend that the headings seemed overly smashed before. I'll mess around with the padding a little and see what I can come up with.
My entire goal on the Main Page was to redo it so that if/when we want to do redesigns of it we can control its style and configuration from Common.css and do it much faster and cleaner. I'm about halfway there so far.
--Cogniac 15:05, 28 October 2009 (UTC)

Collaboration Requests section on Front Page

Can you add a section called "Collaboration Requests" on the main page? I've seen such on other wikis, and helps people go to talk pages that are actively seeking collaborators and writers. I have a Template talk:Player town boilerplate page now that could use some help from the community. What do you think? --Winfield 04:44, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Of course. If you could provide examples, we can figure out a way to integrate it into UOGuide. - JC the Builder 07:02, 23 March 2010 (UTC)

Search Box Location

In the next version of MediaWiki the search bar location is changed from the left menu to the top-right of the page. I have done some reading about the changes in the upcoming version and here is what one Wikipedia developer had to say.

Quite a few of you have mentioned frustration with the new location of the new search box. Based on our usability testing, the upper right corner was a more intuitive location for search for many users. In our first round of usability testing (conducted prior to any changes), users did not use the search box in the left nav. Rather, they repeatedly went to the search box in the upper right hand corner of the browser. In the second round of testing (which included the search change), none of the users had problems finding the search box in the new location (details here). As an example, there was one user who, when asked to search for something, instinctively found the search box in the upper right corner. When we asked this user if he'd noticed a change in the site, it took him a moment before he realized that the search box had changed locations -- he found the new location before consciously realizing it had changed. Nevertheless, we know this is a significant change for many users. We'd ask people to try out the new location for a bit before switching back.

Before reading this I was investigating how to move the search box back to our current location. But if it truly is better for the general user experience, maybe we should go with what Wikipedia researched. There is current a lot of debate on Wikipedia about where the search box should go. The latest version of the search bar auto-expands when activated to give more room to see what you type. That would not be possible if the search bar is on the left.

I would like more input from our contributors on this issue. - JC the Builder 00:43, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

I actually have a MediaWiki account, so I made a comment at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Usability/Search_box_poll_2010#Top_header_.28Top.29 (vote #10) explaining my take and my solution, which hopefully we can implement here even if Wikipedia doesn't do it.
--Cogniac 17:40, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Modifying the Header

See UOGuide:Main_Page for testing changes

I think it is time to modify the header a bit. The new logo image will cause the UOGuide test graphic to become redundant. Also, I think that the current welcome message has been seen by the vast majority of UOGuide visitors and no longer serves a useful purpose. Wikipedia fills the space by linking to important sections of the site. I just copied what they have. If you have another idea please suggest it. - JC the Builder 20:41, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

NOTITLE Attribute Added

You can now add __NOTITLE__ to an article which will prevent the title from being displayed. This should only be used when there is a good reason why the title should not be displayed, such as it is replaced with a graphic. - JC the Builder 21:13, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

Titles Appearing

I don't know why titles are appearing even though the NOTITLE attribute is working. I will have to figure it out. - JC the Builder 19:18, 24 October 2010 (PDT)

Top Contributors Module

It may not be pretty, but I added the top contributors module in with the Important Info section. If someone wants to modify it or move it somewhere else I don't mind. If you want the format of list changed I can do that also. - JC the Builder 17:36, 16 September 2010 (PDT)

My thought: We should change the "Featured Screenshots" section to "Featured Screenshot," singular. Then we can move it into the spot currently occupied by "UOGuide News," move "UOGuide News" down one, and place "Top Contributors" in the right column beneath "Important Info." "Featured Screenshots" has never quite fit properly down there, and with this change we could finally have two columns all the way down.
--Cogniac 19:14, 18 September 2010 (PDT)

As I suspected, the top contributors module was not updating. I manually run the update and will investigate why it is not working. - JC the Builder 12:05, 21 September 2010 (PDT)

The updater works now. It runs once per day at server midnight time. Whenever that is. - JC the Builder 21:00, 21 September 2010 (PDT)

New Editor Issues

Is anyone else having problems with the updated editor interface? Sometimes it will completely freeze for me. When I go to paste something it will move my cursor to a random spot in the text. It is making editing a real pain for me. I am using the latest version of Firefox. - JC the Builder 18:09, 28 September 2010 (PDT)

Nimuaq said he also experiences problems with it. So I went ahead and disabled the new interface. There is no point in having a couple extra features if it makes editing so much more difficult and frustrating. - JC the Builder 16:27, 29 September 2010 (PDT)

Attacked in Tramel - Britania

Hello, sory for my bad english. I want relate something that happened yesterday 12/12, in the game play; I found odd become I was attacked in Britain (Tramel), I and not find any posts about it was this: I was finishing the quest cloack of humility and saw a humanoid, and attacking the npc Miribel as I approached I was immediately attacked, they looked loke members of the brigade, but were named guardian agents, he was extremaly strong and fast with my two attacks my char died. But they not run away from my corpse and puts tee times I was shot down , being necessary to abandoned the game and lose everything I had woth me, not do mentions of couse that lost fame, karma, etc. I wonder anyone ever encontered any of than? farewell

Hello. The npcs with the Guardian tag spawns usually from the treasure map chests. However, the same tag appears when an Event Moderator put a box with guard lock. You need to kill these guardians to be able to open the chest. If you're playing in Europa, there are currently guardian npcs around as a part of the EM story arc. That waitress is known (for some reason) to attack low karma creatures. You can find more info about the event moderator story arc of Europa at: Europa EM Website. Nimuaq 03:22, 15 December 2010 (PST)