User talk:JC the Builder

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Talked Archived

It was getting really long so created an archive page. - JC the Builder 19:37, 3 January 2008 (PST)

Magery Spells template

I happened across the Template:Magery Spells page and saw the note from when you made it, and I made a rough draft over in the Sandbox. Looking at the way Wikipedia does it, it looks like the collapsible part needs an actual class file of some sort. --Cogniac 06:20, 5 January 2008 (PST)

That is not what I had in mind. What I was thinking of is something like Template:SpellweavingSpells but it would have headings for each circle and all eight would be collapsible. The spell circle you are currently viewing would default to open while the rest are closed. - JC the Builder 10:25, 5 January 2008 (PST)
Now that I think about it a little more a box like that might be better. I was just thinking how to integrate the UOStuff menu without analyzing what could be improved. Will have to look into it more later. - JC the Builder 11:23, 5 January 2008 (PST)
Either way, that "collapsible" class file could be useful at some point.
In other news: I fixed up the template a little. Changed Clumsy and Create Food to conform to it so far, figured I'd get your thoughts before I edited all of the spell pages. --Cogniac 02:52, 6 January 2008 (PST)
It already looks better than what I did. But I think we should start using the "UO red" more than the "Wikipedia blue". It is color #9f3215. - JC the Builder 09:45, 6 January 2008 (PST)
Updated the color scheme, and put all of the spell links in the horizontal bottom area in black. Had to screw around with the Link template a little to get it to work. Also: I see the Magery spell flag picture getting replaced with a picture of the Magery spellbook at some point in the future. --Cogniac 14:02, 7 January 2008 (PST)

The Home Stretch

Under 200 pages to switch over! Unfortunately, almost all of them are the annoying Quest NPC and ML Craftable Artifact pages. --Cogniac 20:21, 16 January 2008 (PST)

There are four pages under "Uncategorized Pages". One is spam and can be deleted. The other three are Bushido moves that you protected due to vandalism, meaning I can't do anything with them. They have 0 information on them, though, so they can either be deleted or recategorized under the UOStuff category, which I set up for things that we're not bringing over but I can't delete. Then there are 35 recipe pages. After that, the entire kit and kaboodle will be done, as far as I can tell. --Cogniac 23:25, 26 January 2008 (PST)
Well the pages will be done. There are then ~900 images that need to be gone through. After that I am not exactly certain what will happen with the UOStuff site. I will have to discuss it with the owner. - JC the Builder 08:18, 27 January 2008 (PST)

Wadda ya Think

What do you think of the idea of a redirect for physical resist, fire resist, cold resist, poison resist, & energy resist to Resistances? None of them have a page, and they are high on wantedpages. Homepage is looking quite dynamic, I do say. --Ceruleus 19:04, 12 February 2008 (PST)

I suppose that would work best. There isn't really much on them. - JC the Builder 20:18, 12 February 2008 (PST)

Orphaned Pages

There are only 4 orphaned pages, all disambiguations and obviously nothing links to them. They are Ash Runic, Heartwood Runic, Oak Runic, and Yew Runic. My question is, as they are orphans, do we want to keep them? --Ceruleus 13:50, 14 February 2008 (PST)

I can't think of anything that would link to them. It isn't a big deal in my opinion. - JC the Builder 14:44, 14 February 2008 (PST)
Gone. Dead-ends are next. --Ceruleus 17:36, 14 February 2008 (PST)
I have been avoiding the Dead-end pages due to the fact that the best way to make them not dead-end is to put them in a page hierarchy, i.e. like the Client Patches pages. Each Client Patch page links back to the List pages that it is listed in, and those List pages in turn link back to the main Client Patches page, which is in turn linked sideways to the Publishes page because it is of equivalent value. So, beware: fixing the dead-end pages might be more work than it's worth right now, because there are some pretty disparate pages in there that would probably have to go into a bunch of different hierarchies. --Cogniac 23:24, 14 February 2008 (PST)
However, a lot of them are also text only pages for items, quests, quest givers, etc. I do my best to find the correct categories. --Ceruleus 04:43, 15 February 2008 (PST)

Skill of the Week

Don't know if the leap day did it or not, but your Skill of the Week is down. I took a look at the template, but it is far beyond my ken. :| --Ceruleus 18:11, 3 March 2008 (PST)

I am going to update it for today and try to get it done for the next month. - JC the Builder 05:57, 4 March 2008 (PST)

Green

Nice! I like it. I tested some players and not many noticed it in the red banner. Again, nice job! --Ceruleus 18:11, 9 April 2008 (PDT)

Thanks. I always intended to put the shoppe in its own section. However I can't figure out how to put it below the blue menu. - JC the Builder 18:14, 9 April 2008 (PDT)

Template Snafus

Something is up with templates. The problem appears to be affecting more than one, (e.g., {{Event}} template, Bushido, Ninjitsu). I'm not sure what is going on. --Ceruleus 04:56, 12 April 2008 (PDT)

Opps. I had turned off a bunch of extensions to try and speed up UOGuide until the move. I had accidentally turned off parser functions. It is back on now. - JC the Builder 08:22, 12 April 2008 (PDT)

Site is breaking

I'm getting "[[Extension:ImageLink]] requires [[Extension:StubManager]] version >= 1.2.0" in the extreme upper-left corner of all pages, the fonts have all gotten big, and the page tabs (discussion, edit, history, etc.) across the top are floating and disconnected from the content area. Not sure if you're still screwing with things or not and this will go away, but I thought you'd like to know. --Cogniac 11:42, 29 May 2008 (PDT)

Opps, I guess it was so small I didn't notice it. I forgot to enable some extensions when turning stuff back on like the poll. It should be fixed now. - JC the Builder 11:46, 29 May 2008 (PDT)
Yup. Fixed. --Cogniac 11:52, 29 May 2008 (PDT)

Update on Forums

I just wanted to let you know that I created a thread over at the forums that you'd likely be quite interested in. Here's a direct link.

http://www.uoforums.com/f1159/using-autowikibrowser-on-uoguide-com-53422/

Thadius856 10:46, 11 September 2008 (PDT)

Thanks for the update. I usually check the forum once per day. - JC the Builder 10:51, 11 September 2008 (PDT)

New Infobox for Items

Tonight, I've been working on a new infobox for items (weapons, armor, etc). I figure that a universal template would greatly benefit the cause of this website. To this end, I wanted to gather ideas about how effective this template works to disseminating information about particular items before I continue developing.

As an example, I've gone ahead and converted the page [[[Aegis of Grace]] on my own userpage using the template, which is still in development. So, honesty, which of the following pages looks better?

Aegis of Grace or User:Thadius856/Aegis of Grace

I'd like to continue developing this template for mass deployment, but would like to first get the nod from the site's administration. If you could please leave your thoughts regarding the template on my talk page, I'd greatly appreciate it. Thadius856 21:37, 13 September 2008 (PDT)

Alive

I'm alive, worry not. Just busy with many another thing. Aside that I've obviously not been playing UO in over 2 years, so I'm pretty much out of the loop. Good to see you finally ate up UOStuff, and most of my templates are still happily in use.  - BBR  talk / cont 07:10, 20 September 2008 (PDT)

It is good to see you are still around. Maybe you'll be playing again after the new expansion. - JC the Builder 09:53, 20 September 2008 (PDT)

IanStorm stuff

IanStorm has mysteriously reappeared on the Internet, so I'm taking this opportunity to swallow whole their Gimme 5 and StormChat archives. We'll still be missing the first StormChat because, for some reason, they have the transcript of StormChat #2 twice. --Cogniac 05:59, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

I had asked Silverfoot a few weeks ago about it and he said it should be okay to copy all Ianstorm content to UOGuide. If you really want that first chat log it probably can be found in the internet archive. - JC the Builder 06:29, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Just checked the Internet Archive. It would appear that the 2nd chat being copied into both the 1st and 2nd chat web pages has just always been that way, so no 1st chat. =/ --Cogniac 08:45, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
Oh well. It appears there were also some storm chats before the supposed first one, but those may never have been archived. As long as the rest are preserved that is fine. No need to go crazy looking for one chat. - JC the Builder 16:44, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Image Links

Howdy. I've been looking for a way to convert images into page links (as by default they lead to information on the images themselves, which is not always intuitive). I've found a few solutions listed around the web, but they are for the most part either impractical or inelegant.

The one I like best is here, as it could be wrapped up in a template (much like the ColoredLink one). Catch is it requires a PHP edit to enable remote image links. Any chance you could implement that?

- Bomb Bloke 02:26, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

There is an imagelink extension already installed. {{#imagelink:{{{image}}}|{{{skill}}}|{{{skill}}}|125|80|0}}
See here for usage: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ImageLink - JC the Builder 02:49, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Awesome. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Thanks.  :) - Bomb Bloke 02:59, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Maybe not. Just had the (dis)pleasure of viewing the results under IE7.
The extension is incorrectly adding the width/height tags to the page code regardless of whether you set them to anything. Don't put a value in and IE7 assumes you meant "1" (the images turn into dots).
I took a look at the current SVN version, and it looks like updating to that should fix the problem. - Bomb Bloke 10:55, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Imagelink extension is now updated to latest version. - JC the Builder 22:31, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

Guess that didn't work... Figures.

I read through the code a bit more, it looks like replacing this (in ImageLink.body.php): 

// sanitize the input
$alt    = htmlspecialchars( $alt );
$width  = htmlspecialchars( $width );
$height = htmlspecialchars( $height );
$border = htmlspecialchars( $border );
$title = htmlspecialchars( $title );		

// Optional parameters
if ($alt    !== null)	$alt    = "alt='${alt}'"; 		else $alt=;
if ($width  !== null)	$width  = "width='${width}'"; 	else $width=;
if ($height !== null)	$height = "height='${height}'";	else $height=;
if ($border !== null)	$border = "border='${border}'";	else $border=;
if ($title  !== null)	$title =  "title='${title}'";	else $title=;

With this: 

// Optional parameters
if ($alt    !== null)	{
$alt    = htmlspecialchars( $alt );
$alt    = "alt='${alt}'";} else {$alt=;}
if ($width  !== null)	{
$width  = htmlspecialchars( $width );
$width  = "width='${width}'";} else {$width=;}
if ($height !== null)	{
$height = htmlspecialchars( $height );
$height = "height='${height}'";} else {$height=;}
if ($border !== null)	{
$border = htmlspecialchars( $border );
$border = "border='${border}'";} else {$border=;}
if ($title  !== null)	{
$title = htmlspecialchars( $title );
$title =  "title='${title}'";} else {$title=;}

Would work a bit better. (The extension discussion page points out that "sanitising" nulls via htmlspecialchars results in them no longer being nulls). Could likely be condensed a little more but I don't trust my PHP enough to try it.

- Bomb Bloke 00:25, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

I might look into this later but I don't want to spend much time working on a plugin which is eventually going to be updated by the author anyway. - JC the Builder 03:47, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Official UOGuide Colors

After finishing the IanStorm archives, I realized how abrasive their color scheme was, so I switched one color for the Official UOGuide Red (#9F3215), and came up with an Official UOGuide Blue as a counterpoint: #0010BF, which you can see in action in any of the IanStorm pages. Admittedly, we don't have much use for an Official UOGuide Blue outside of IRC chat log pages, but I figured we could use something on the opposite side of the color wheel, just in case. If you don't like it/have a better blue, it's easily and quickly changeable.
--Cogniac 08:01, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

It is good to see someone thinking about design a bit. I haven't put any thought into it because there is so much other stuff which I need to handle. - JC the Builder 20:38, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

The Sitenotice

It is curiously broken. I say "curiously" because when one goes into the actual page, the link is an actual link and nothing is wrong, but when one looks at it being displayed at the top of all pages, it is merely bolded, with no link to be found. Maybe it's just broken to me for some reason?
--Cogniac 09:29, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

And now, for whatever the hell reason, it has managed to fix itself in the time it took to make that comment. Bizarre.
--Cogniac 09:32, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

It has happened to me as well, and I also noticed the same effect when we had the Spring Cleaning link up there. Links usually turn bolded like that when you're viewing the page they link to. - Bomb Bloke 11:05, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

True, but I was not on that page when it happened, and I just now went to that page and it didn't go bold. So who knows.
--Cogniac 11:51, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Probably a bug in the Mediawiki software. I have seen it happen too. - JC the Builder 17:53, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Spawn Artifacts

I was wondering if you'd take a look at this format for the Champion Spawn Artifact page. I edited Test Area #2 on the sandbox page with a slightly new look. I think the page looks a little smashed together and a with a good bit of mistyped names. There's things like "Embroidered Oak Leaf Cloak" named "Embroidered Oak Leaf Shroud", not a big deal but still not "correct". Do you think we should put what the item is in parenthesis? Such as: Calm (Halberd), Embroidered Oak Leaf Cloak (Shroud), Fang of Ractus (Kryss)? The regular page does have the advantage of being smaller and you can see all the spawns without scrolling. If you like it the way it is, that's fine, just wondering what's the best layout in your opinion so I can get to work on finishing that page.

- GregStaats 17:22, 26 January 2009 (EST)

Your table looks better with the bullets. If an item is named incorrectly in the table then it should be fixed. I don't have access to every item so I approximated the names as best I could. - JC the Builder 00:08, 27 January 2009 (UTC)
Figure I'll reply here to keep things coherent.
Don't see much point in including base item types. In most cases I doubt users would be able to determine anything from them other then weapon skills, and all the relevant data will end up on each artifact's own page anyway. It'll also look a bit messy in that some of the items (such as the tiles) simply don't have a base type, and there's already a lot of text in the table...
- Bomb Bloke 06:56, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Imagelink

That {{#imagelink:|}} template thing seems to be broken. I can't imagine that everyone has been using it wrong 100% of the time, so I'm thinking something got set wrong on the back-end.
--Cogniac 23:59, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so I just read up a little and saw the previous Imagelink comment topic, and it looks like it really is that everyone has been using it wrong 100% of the time. But that can apparently be fixed by updating to a newer version of MediaWiki...or something.
--Cogniac 00:04, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm the only one using it, at least as far as I know. ;)
I'm using it as per the instructions I was linked to. However, those instructions (specifically the bit about height/width tags being optional) apply to a later version of the extension then the one we have. When the extension gets updated, all the broken images around the place will be fixed at the same time.
There's just no way I'm gonna go around and hard-code the height/width of every imagelink I've used when changing one single PHP file will sort the lot of them at once. This is also why I keep using the things, even though I know they're broken under IE (though I haven't been putting in as many as I was planning on). Meanwhile, everything renders fine under Mozilla.
- Bomb Bloke 01:51, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
I can only imagine the kind of shenanigans that are going to result when IE8 and Firefox 4 hit.
--Cogniac 02:41, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Math

There are these <math></math> tags that use LaTeX to display fancy mathematical equations on Wikis. I have long known that these don't work on UOGuide, but I just found a use for them when working on Luck. I can only imagine that they'll probably be wanted elsewhere, especially when people starting writing up the various formulas for other item properties, so is there any chance we can get those things working?
--Cogniac 02:47, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

There are but there is quite a few software requirements to get them to work. I will see if we have all the necessary programs. - JC the Builder 20:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

10m views

Any way to figure out what exact day this happened? I had known that it was close, but had forgotten all about it. Just now looked and it's 255k+ over 10m. Wanted to make a note in the UOGuide News area, but need the day.
--Cogniac 19:59, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Not really. Would have happened about 2 weeks ago. - JC the Builder 00:31, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm going with August 8.
--Cogniac 20:00, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

UOGuide CSS Files

Just wandered across this page: Silent Rose Library books. I noticed that they're using the "wikitable sortable" CSS file for formatting, and it made me realize that a.) that stylesheet needs to be rewritten to display in the UOGuide style and b.) there's probably a standard "wikitable" CSS file that could stand the same treatment so that it can be used all over the site, thus saving us considerable size-on-disk. Unfortunately, it's looking like those sorts of things are server-side and inaccessible. So I'm wondering if I could perchance get a hold of a dump of our CSS stylesheets so I can start picking out ones to rewrite and send to you to upload back on to the server?
--Cogniac 20:56, 27 September 2009 (UTC)

I am sort of aware that special styles can be built and then accessed. But I have never done so because there is so much else to take care of. You can see all the files by downloading a copy of Mediawiki. This is the Monobook skin with a couple colors modified by me. - JC the Builder 21:27, 27 September 2009 (UTC)
So after a little bit of researching, it turns out that I can edit the site-wide CSS from the front-side. So I'm going to start working on some stuff in MediaWiki:Common.css.
--Cogniac 01:50, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
Is there any way to set pages like this to Protected? Since changes on this page literally affect every single page on UOGuide, it should probably be Protected, but it's not giving me any way to do so.
--Cogniac 13:50, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
Pages in the MediaWiki namespace are protected by default I think. - JC the Builder 17:29, 1 October 2009 (UTC)
If you go that page without logging in and click the "View Source" tab, it informs you that it can only be edited by members of the "Users" group, which seems to indicate that any registered/logged-in user can edit it. However, this may be a boilerplate warning. When I'm logged in and edit a Protected page, I get the message "WARNING: This page has been locked so that only users with sysop privileges can edit it." at the top of the page. I get an entirely different warning at MediaWiki:Common.css that makes no mention of it being Protected and/or only Sysops can edit it; it only warns me that my changes will be felt site-wide. It could be that when a normal user logs in and tries to edit that page it won't let them. However, I don't have a non-Sysop account, so I can't directly test that theory.
--Cogniac 19:31, 1 October 2009 (UTC)

Admins

I was wandering around the templates and while looking at the Admins template I came to the following conclusions:

  • Ceruleus might need to be downgraded to User, or at least downgraded to regular Sysop, because he hasn't been seen since May. I suppose if he comes back, he can be un-retired.
  • Bomb Bloke should probably be upgraded to Admin, as he does a lot for the site, and has been active recently.
  • Meridus should probably be downgraded to User, because he hasn't been seen since December, 2008.
  • Salmar should probably be downgraded to User, because he hasn't been seen since January.
  • Tancred RedStar should probably be upgraded to Admin as he does a lot for the site, and has been active recently.

Figured I'd give my input, as I finally came to the realization that you giving me Admin status probably indicates that I am supposed to have a part in decisions like this.
--Cogniac 15:35, 2 October 2009 (UTC)
P.S. You should probably make a second Archive page, as you've passed 20 subjects on here again.

Page Count

I've noticed that when I change one of the client patch pages to use the Client Patch template, the site-wide page count goes down by one. I'm not sure if it only temporarily doesn't count it, or if it's permanent. And if it is permanent, what criteria it's using to not count it as a full page. I tested out Clumsy (which is just a template and its data) by putting a bunch of non-template based text in it, and it didn't add it to the count, so I'm not sure what to think. I just noticed that the job queue seems to be stuck sitting at 2 as I write this, so that may have some bearing on it. I'll give it about half an hour or so, check it again, and report back if it fixes itself.
--Cogniac 22:52, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

Okay, so I gave it 2 days instead, and the job queue is now 0 with no change to the number of articles, and the number is still slowly getting smaller as I convert more pages. I'm thinking that the page count script needs some config tweaks so it will count the client patch pages properly.
--Cogniac 14:38, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
So after some research, I have discovered that, apparently, the PHP scripts only count pages that have an external link directly in the text; I.e. links transcluded from a template don't count. It does this by literally just looking for the string "[[". So I'm going to look at some code here at some point and see if I can make it also look for the string "{{", which would make it count pages comprised only of a template.
--Cogniac 19:35, 17 October 2009 (UTC)

In Article.php, find this: 

public function isCountable( $text ) {
	global $wgUseCommaCount;
	$token = $wgUseCommaCount ? ',' : '[[';
	return $this->mTitle->isContentPage() && !$this->isRedirect($text) && in_string($token,$text);
}

and replace it with this: 

public function isCountable( $text ) {
	return $this->mTitle->isContentPage() && !$this->isRedirect($text) && (in_string('[[', $text) || in_string('{{', $text));
}

That will make it count pages normally and also count pages that are comprised only of a template.
--Cogniac 21:41, 21 October 2009 (UTC)

Where did that code come from? Is it in the next version? I don't really want to start modifying wiki-source because it could break updating. - JC the Builder 05:31, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
Well, the first one is directly from the MediaWiki repositories here: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/Article.php?view=markup. The function itself has existed at least since November, 2003, as that's the oldest reference to page counting that I can come up with in the revision logs. The second one was modified by me personally.
If you're worried about updating, I was reading about the update process and it seems rather involved. So copy+pasting that function back after each upgrade is not exactly a monumental task in comparison to everything else you have to do anyway. Furthermore, I would recommend updating to 1.14+ (or 1.15+), as it solves the imagelink problem above and allows you to get rid of that extension.
--Cogniac 16:29, 22 October 2009 (UTC)
P.S. I have a long-term goal of covering almost every page with a corresponding template to a.) better facilitate ease-of-use for users who have little or no skill in or desire to learn about wiki coding and b.) to make it easier to ensure consistent formatting and to modify formatting consistently. It would be kind of dumb to one day have 10,000 articles, but only have a count of a few hundred because most of them are covered by templates and thus aren't counted.
I'll look into making this change when I update Mediawiki, which may be very soon. - JC the Builder 05:56, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

Event Calandar

I submitted about 4 events for 14th yesterday, none of them reached you so far? Nimuaq 15:57, 13 October 2010 (PDT)

Sorry, I was just looking at it now after submitting the upcoming Atlantic event. They are all approved. - JC the Builder 15:59, 13 October 2010 (PDT)

Pen of Wisdom

The link on the article Pen of Wisdom doesn't work at the moment. Nimuaq 18:41, 1 May 2012 (PDT)

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