Nate The Great: Could we alter the launch process to make the launcher add the new trope to at least one index? At least a reminder tag or something. It's just that Orphaned Tropes make me sad. :(
Fast Eddie: The more general solution would be to add a nag of some sort to the recent changes list noting that the article just edited contains no index markup. A "____Discussion" entry would be exempt from that check, of course. //later: That is in. It will show "no index" for edits/creates made from now forward.
Dentaku: I wonder if it's possible to have the wiki convert two hyphens into an em-dash (entity &emdash;) while rendering. Of course it would get a bit tricky with the four hyphens used for page breaks, but I'm sure you can get quite far with some clever use of regular expressions.
Fast Eddie: that's in.
Discussion resurrected.fleb: This got lost when this page was blanked before. The blue-link/red-link logic is namespace-blind — if a Main/TropeName page exists, a Discontinuity/TropeName link will be blue even if it doesn't exist, and vice versa.
janitor: Since the vast majority of in-page links are to the Main namespace, it sort of makes sense to have Main the default namespace everywhere and to only require Namespace/TropeName markup for links not in Main. That way, the redlinker code would have the same job everywhere. Anyone see a problem with that?
fleb: We've done that namespace change now, but this bug is still here. Test: Relative Error.
Big T: Well, my interpretation was that actually fixing it was too taxing, so we'd just use main. The question is, does something that doesn't have a Main article turn red? Let's see: This Exists.
Fast Eddie: The change is in to make non-Main links show up red if they are not populated. This is for the issue where there are many items with the same title in different namespaces. It will always find Main/WhatEver but if you specify NotMain/Whatever, it will be redlinked.
Paul A: The most recent edit to Les Miserables (09/11/08 at 06:33 PM by Jordan) appears on Recent Changes (and my watchlist) as an edit to "Les Misérables", and all the links (to the article, the output history, and the markup history) redirect to the Main Page (because "Les Misérables" doesn't exist).
Fast Eddie: That's fixed
Paul A: The link-colouring algorithm is now marking links as red if the article exists but is capitalized differently, even though the link itself will still go to the right article. For instance: Webcomics, Web Comics, Most Common Super Power, Most Common Superpower, Calvin And Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes
(ETA: Okay, so using curly brackets seems to avoid the problem. Testing: Web Comics, Most Common Superpower. (ETA: Or not. Web Comics, Most Common SuperPower? Webcomics, MostCommonSuperpower?))
Adam850: Seems like all of the links are red. "Most Common Superpower". Nope. Edit: Nevermind.
Fast Eddie: I'm working on it. It'll be craxy for a few minutes.// later: Okay, that should be squared away.
Looney Toons: Cool. I hate it when things are craxy. <grin>
Bedinsis: It appears the search feature isn't working; whatever I write, it seems to believe I searched for Search Searchresults.
The Search Index appears to have been hijacked by ads. When I search for "Ass Pull," I -just- get the ad. Anyone know what's going on?
Ninjacrat: If you go 'page history' on that page, it looks like a certain individual b0rked it by accident.
Fast Eddie: Fixed. Also removed the edit button form search results so it won't happen — that way — again.
Big T: Could we put a non-breaking space ( ) between the word author and its text field on the edit page? That way, if the field linewraps (like it does on my system), it'll still make sense.
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Tangent 128: Some sort of [quote][/quote] markup would help with transfering the forum posts.
L: Punctuation problem - Ain't No Rule works but this... Conveyor Belt O' Doom ...does not!
Fast Eddie: Partial fix in. The fix causes red-linking not to work for ptitles. Fix for that later today.// later: all fixed
arromdee: ptitle or special character issue. Take Your Time used to have this link:
[[{{Console RPG Clichés 169 To 192}} Apocalypse Any Time Now]]
This isn't parsed correctly and shows up
[[{{Console RPG Clichés 169 To 192}} Apocalypse Any Time Now]]
If I replace the é with a regular e, it works:
Citizen: All of those subpages were moved from "é" to "e" because having a regular title with "é" randomly screws things up. Trust me. This isn't worth creating ptitles of all the subpages, so please just leave it as is and spell "cliche" without the accented character.
arromdee: The point is that using a link with an accented character breaks the potholing, while using an otherwise identical link without one works.
arromdee: Okay, that's strange. It's working now.
Fast Eddie: I did a thing to thing. Now the "é" thing should not be a thing.
fleb: Just a URL-consistency thing: The your edits
page links to Main.TropeName instead of the usual Main/TropeName.Fast Eddie: That's in.
fleb: Cool, thanks—but it doesn't work if there's a username parameter, like this.
Fast Eddie: Seconds try seems to have gotten it.;-)
Lord TNK: Links on the Darth Wiki pages are still blue, which is hard to see against black backgrounds. See the It Just Bugs Me page. They should be gray, to match the Wiki Words.
Fast Eddie: That's in.
whitetigah: small watchlist issue — pages that have been cutlisted using the new cutlist tool appear as "cutlisted" in the watchlist; if those pages are de-cutlisted, however, they are still listed as "cutlisted" and the watchlist doesn't show updates made to those pages. Re-adding the pages to the watchlist adds them again, without eliminating the "cutlisted" entries. For example, on my watchlist I have three instances of Unpleasable Fanbase, two listed as "cutlisted".
Fast Eddie: That should be cleared up, now.
Lord TNK: The picture caption text on the Darth Wiki needs to be gray. I noticed it when making the Not Safe for Work page (don't worry; it actually is safe for work).
Fast Eddie: That's in. Also ... much funnier than the first cut!
henke37: How about an system to rescue the oldest YKTTW entries from never being launched?
Fast Eddie: Like the search system? Like the flagging system? Like people launching their stuff if it seems like it is worth it?
henke37: Like a view of the 20 oldest entries, or maybe pagination of the YKTTW system. The goal is to find old entries that have been forgotten by everyone.
Fast Eddie: The YKTTW system relies on sponsorship. If no one remembers it, if it is not in any person's personal list (on the watchlist page), and no one has a watchlist set for it, or can even recall a keyword to recover it by, it dies of old age. That's the deal. YKTWW is not a permanent repository. That's the wiki.
henke37: Still, how about some pagination? I mean come on, I could even do the work for you if you are so inclined.
henke37: Can I pretty please get my pagination idea too?
Janitor: We're not going to do that one because of ... everything Fast Eddie already said about it. Launch it or lose it.
Khym Chanur: Multi-line [= =] has all of the lines condensed down into one; see the request below.
Fast Eddie: Hmm. I don't see that problem. Please say your browser and operating system.
Paul A: I see it in IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox 2, all under Windows XP. (And my professional diagnosis is that the wikicode is inappropriately converted to <code> instead of <pre>. <pre> preserves whitespace, including line breaks; <code> merely changes the font.)
Fast Eddie: Tried that change. You will see that 'pre' is now 'code' in the page source. Very solid suggestion, but there seems to be something else. (Can't change from Linux to Windows, at the moment. Not trying to be obtuse.)
//Later: Drat. I've got this whole thing ass over kettle. We want more'pre' and less 'code'. Standby for some jiggering.
// Later still: AHA! I think that has got it.
//After an OS change: Yup. We are now down to 9 lines of pmwiki code remaining. Nine to go.
Khym Chanur: How about a button/link to sort YKTTW page by the time each YKTTW was first added, rather than by latest response? That would make it easy to scan for brand new YKTTWs without having to look through the entire page.
Robert: Seconded. I suspect new YKTTWs are getting lost in the crowd, Being able to show only the new ones seems the easiest solution.
Janitor: That's in. It will be interesting to see what kind of effect it will have on launches -v- falling fallow.
Robert: You sure it's done? It looks like what you got is all the YKTTWs updated within the last day (or whichever period is selected) sorted by creation date, which can exclude pretty new YKTTWs while including one originating in June. What I was looking for was all the YKTTWs created within the last n days.
Janitor: You can increase the interval. There is a little form at the bottom of the page, or put an integer at the end of the URL. <penny drops> Oh. Yeah, it is still selecting items that have had replies. Rats.
//later: Okay. That's in.
Luc: Could we please, please, please, please, please prevent anything with punctuation in the title from being YKTTW launched? (I mean what happens when you hit the launch button, not the "add a YKTTW" button) Please? Pretty please?
Janitor: Well, since you asked so nicely, that's in.;-)
Citizen: Clear My Name shows up as "Clear Myname" on searches.
L: Suggestion! Since our wiki uses left-justified text, it results that right-justified images are objectively aesthetically better than left-justified images. Therefore, I propose that the sample code output by the Media Uploader be changed to this format:
[[quoteright:image width:image URL here Your caption here! ]]
So, what say you?
Janitor: Sounds cool. Probably better to start up with that markup presented as an option, for those people who share a different objectivity on the topic.;-)// later: That's in.
Lord TNK: Is there any way for the search function to only search for the word, and not words that happen to contain the letters? If I search for "krull", I want to only see articles mentioning that movie title, not any mention of the race of skrulls. And if I search for "ice", I don't want "Alice", "service", or "chaotic evil".
Janitor: Yes, that's possible. It is on hold for an upcoming hardware upgrade. The server that does search requests is currently running at 100% capacity all day long, even with results sorting turned off. We'll have to wait for the new hardware before adding any functionality to search.
Lord TNK: Well it's nice to know it's coming up, so thanks.
Henke 37: And that can not be fixed by using more indexes, right?
Janitor: It is the full-text (body) searches that are the issue. They don't employ indexes, are essentially full-table scans, and there are about 100 of them initiated per second, on (simple) average. That is, never than less than 50/second with peaks of ~250/second. The server that handles them does nothing but search, so My Sql has utter command of the physical resources (RAM, disk rotations, etc.), but it is a lowly single-processor dual-core with only 2GB of RAM. We're going to add a more robust machine (DQC, 8GB, faster platter) to do the job, as well as split the search requests so that the current box does the indexed searches and the new one does the body searches. Hopefully, that will free up enough processing power to return results ordering for body searches and to permit regular-expression searches (recognizing things like exact-word, phrases, etc.).
henke37: I am by no means an Mysql expert, but there was this fulltext indexes thingy. Maybe that is usable or something?
Citizen: There's garble in the searches and at the least Face Framed In Shadow Discussion. What's up?
Janitor: That should be cleared up.
Citizen: I already mentioned this on Ask The Tropers, but I'll list it here for completeness: Only allowing images hosted by TVTropes to display, and either hiding everything else or replacing it with a generic "no hotlinking images" image.
Cassius335: Yes, but some of those are being linked to from Photobucket and the like. Image hosting is kinda what they're for.
Tangent 128: They should probably be transferred; if the image is taken off the album, it breaks on our end with no explanation.
Cassius335: True, but the counter possibility is an eggs-in-one-basket situation: If TV Tropes has another crash, we could (in theory) lose the entire image library and everything in it. Thankfully, not a likely possibility, but still possible.
Tangent 128: Image files are easier to back up, though.
Janitor: That's in for new images. Any remaining hotlinks will have to be zapped/replaced by hand.
fleb: The new muffin-icon for the Sugar Wiki namespace on Recent Changes doesn't show up at the top of pages with Sugar Wiki counterparts yet.
Janitor: There aren't any counterparts, as far as I can tell. The "crowning" items already have icons of their own.
fleb: No, there is: Complain About Shows You Dont Like should icon-link to Complain About Shows You Dont Like, which redirects to Gushing About Shows You Like.
Janitor: That's in.—-Lord TNK: The text for "edit reason" on the Darth Wiki pages is blue. Needs to be gray to stand out better.
fleb: Minor consistency thing (again): The 'view source' button up top links to "Main.WikiTechWishList?action=source", but the period is normally a slash in every other URL on the site. Same thing with Inbound links
' links to trope pages.Janitor: Those are fixed. Thanks for spotting them!
Paul A: According the search function, we have a page called What Kind Of Lame Poweris Heart Anyway. Can the capitalization on that get fixed?
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Richie Adler: Is it me, or the Story Generator doesn't show a Hero?
Fast Eddie: Fixed now. Thanks for the report!
henke37: How about one that I actually expect to be done for once? If someone searches for something and there is exactly one result and it's exactly what they searched for, go to that page directly instead of the search result listing.
Hydro Globus: Please don't. For example if I search "Fake difficulty", I get to still search for it in the text of the articles. If I need that (for example, this is the easiest way to get a good long list of games that have this), I no longer will be able to do it.
Cassius335: Having two search buttons on the search page (a "search title" one and a "search text" one) would solve that.
Fast Eddie: Pass. It's not worth the programming/testing time to save one mouse click.
Paul A: Links to Disposable Fiancé show up red, even though the article exists and the links link to it fine. (This may have something to do with the way it shows up in some places as "Disposable Fiancé".)
Fast Eddie: Now repaired. Thanks for the report.
fleb: Right now the "Related to" code doesn't seem to take namespace into account when counting wicks; like on the Cut List, under Laconic / Mary Sue Exemption it says "Creating red links in 23 articles." When that page, and the namespace itself, were only just created. Is this intentional?
Fast Eddie: Couple of problems there. First, yes, the redlink counter for the cutlist is namespace-blind. Not good. Secondly, the cutting mechanism doesn't delete items from the table of cross-links. Also not good. This is why the count is off. Mary Sue Exemption's crosslinks weren't cut, back when it was cut. We're on it.
//later: counts now correct on the namespace issue and cross-ref's also removed on a cut.
Freezair For A Limited Time: Two things concerning the Cut List:
1) Is it possible to keep a log of suggested cuts that didn't go through?
2) Is there any way (without hurting the poor database) to make the discussion pages of cutlisted pages available for some nonzero amount of time after they get cut? Many cuts have things like "see discussion page" listed in their reasons, and if a fairly large page gets cut, one tends to wonder what the discussion looked like, and how the cutlisting decision came about/what arguements for and against it there were. And is this feature even necessary, or is it just me being a nosy Nancy who likes to see what all gets cut and why?
Fast Eddie: Cracking that code open today. Keeping the discussion pages on a cut is pretty easy. Also, having an idea that something has been cutlisted but uncut would be useful. We'll see what can be done there.
Later: That's in.
Frank 75: I had an idea: Some pages have become pretty long, but we don't want to divide them all. Would it be possible to include a content table, at the top of the page, as in The Other Wiki, so that you can jump immediately to the Live-Action TV / Western Animation / whatever examples?
Fast Eddie: Take a look at, say, Crazy-Prepared. You click on the "close all", then select the area you are interested in. Have a look at the markup there to see how it is done.
Looney Toons: Eddie, I was just replacing an image lost in the Great Crash tonight, and I realized that in many such cases the page where the image was still has a dead link to it in place. Would it be possible to do a one-off utility to generate a list of such broken image links so we can identify and replace those lost images?
Fast Eddie: I don't think any images were lost in the Crash. Some links were lost, but the images remained. Do you have an example of one of these dead links?
Looney Toons: Yes. Check the history for Kingyo Chuihou, the page specific page I mention above. Until I edited it last night, it had a link to an image called "goldfish.jpg" which no longer seems to exist — at least, it doesn't show up in the image list. Now, I know that image did in fact exist at one time, because I'm the one who uploaded it and added it to the page.
It occurs to me that this might not be a direct result of the Great Crash, though. Very early on, when Gus first started implementing media upload and local storage of images, he gave me an individual directory to store my uploaded images — which, now that I check that page's history, is where goldfish.jpg was located: https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lt/ I presume I wasn't the only such recipient. Do these directories still exist at all?
Fast Eddie: Ah. It is the sizing markup that is hosing up the display. That markup was removed, lo, these many moons ago. You dir is still there. Here is an image of the listing, to help recall things
◊.
Looney Toons: Whew. I hadn't realized I'd uploaded that many. Thanks. As I get the chance I'll search for and fix any of these that are "broken" because of the size markup.
Earnest: Any chance we can get a "New Discussion Edits" button or search feature? It would be useful for knowing what's going on with a given trope when the discussions roll off the New Edits page.
Fast Eddie: Two ways exist now to track discussions you are interested in. The first: filter changes for discussions. Second: Add the discussion page to your watchlist.
Earnest: How do you filter for the discussions?
Fast Eddie: On the new edits/Recent Changes page, there is a drop-down list at the top of the list. It's labeled 'filter for:'. Select 'Discussions'.
Looney Toons: April 15, 8:15 AM EDT, attempts to get page histories return nothing but page title and ads.
(Moments later) Oh, interesting. Once I edited this page, I could get its history. But no others, still.
(Hours later) Even more interesting... It appears that any change history entry from before 3 PM on April 14th is gone. After that, they exist again. The cut off appears to be around the time Fun With Acronyms was last edited. That'll teach me to let the wiki go for a few days, confident that I can catch up with little trouble...
Cassius335: I just figured Fast Eddie did it, as per last time (to reduce strain on the server). Then again, last time he left a note...
Octal: Damn, of all the times to be busy IRL for a few days... I thought it was just the database hating me.
Tanto: The database seems to be hating me at a much higher rate than usual today. Is this anything, or am I just imagining things?
Big T: You aren't imagining things. I've been trying to edit this page itself for a while now, and it isn't quite working.
Fast Eddie: See: Inbound and Hitters. Massive influx sending concurrent usage above 6000.
Citizen: I wish I had a graph or something showing how fast Video Game Tropes managed to double over Home Page. =P
Big T: @FE Now that I can, :P. But is this a good thing? I mean, is this massive influx going to be normal? Do we have any plans to upgrade to help out? Did your YKTTW about hotlinked images have anything to do with it? The reason I got an upload account was to fix hotlinks anyways, so I'm already trying to help out there.
I also have a program that will limit my bandwidth usage. It seems unlikely that would help a database error, but I thought I'd mention it, just in case.
ETA: Sorry if I seem frantic, but I'm addicted to this site.
Fast Eddie: @Citizen — Videogames Tropes overtook Home Page in about six hours. Here's your chart: Cat startled off of a suddenly hot stovetop.
@Big T: We're working the upgrade right now. We probably wouldn't feel the hotlinked thing unless we were up against it like we are now. No reason to limit your bandwidth. This is about thousands of extra high-band users. Onesey-twosey changes won't make a difference.
Ninjacrat: Is there a way to have multiple images appear on the same line? If there isn't, can one be made, provided of course it wouldn't be too onerous to do so?
This is re. trying to capture the formatting of The Grand List Of Overused Science Fiction Cliches.
Big T: Would tables work for this purpose? That's how we used to do it in tho olden days of HTML. The table markup for Pmwiki can be found at Text-Formatting Rules.
Adam850: The documentation page on Wiki Words was blank for some reason. Can that be restored from the original documentation? I filled it in with temporary stuff, But I think the original was better.
Looney Toons: I'm not sure where the actual problem lies, whether it's in my browser or the wiki, but better safe than sorry: If I have my watch list up, and I've opened several "output change" pages in other tabs, and then hit a "drop" button on the watchlist while they're still loading, my browser freezes and locks up; I have to "end process" it to get rid of the window. I'm on Windows XP using IE 7.0.5730.11.
Fast Eddie: Yeah, if you try to do AJAX with the server (which is what the drop buttons does) while it is still sending, IE will have a conniption. The only fix I have for you on that is here. ;_)
Looney Toons: Well, given I can't change the authorized browser at work without untoward complications falling upon my head, I suppose I will just have to follow the advice of the doctor in the old punchline and "don't do that!"
Fast Eddie: There is always unemployment. Do not mock the virtues of unemployment. If I can ever shed this job, I shall never take another.
Looney Toons: I never seem to successfully keep a lack of job long. I apparently lack the proper qualifications.
Prfnoff: I had an idea about overhauling the "Related To..." function and splitting it from Search Wiki. What would be useful to have is a list of all the pages on TV Tropes Wiki that link to a given page, combined with the actual phrases linked. The actual phrases should be roughly as rendered (whether the links are Wiki Words, free links or pot holes), but in plaintext (in particular, none of the surrounding markup, and no inline images), and possibly truncated if too long. (Redirects are the only special case that I can think of; perhaps they should be included in a separate list or not at all.)
This would go with the ability to calculate the true number of Wicks for an entry, so that Related To searches for Final Fantasy VII won't include Final Fantasy VIII. It would miss references that haven't been Wiki Worded, but a Wick is supposed to be an inbound link, right?
Implementing this proposal would probably require significant technical work, so I ask: does anyone else think this would be worth it?
fleb: I actually already added that request to the list on Wiki Search Wish List.
Recon5: We need a 'New article' button. The current process of copy- pasting the address of the new trope is a bit too oblique for newbies. Then again, maybe there's a reason for that. Care to enlighten me? Also, why not allow the 'launch' feature to create the article directly as opposed to a blank page with 'Describe [Trope] here'?
Fast Eddie: Launching to article is something in the works. Not too sure what is meant by the "current process of copy- pasting the address of the new trope." You make a link, click on it, and write the article. That's worked 20,000 times.
Adam850: Another one: If a known user creates a new page that is the same as their handle, it can be assumed that they are creating a user page for themselves, right? So is there a way to automatically add the "The Contributors" index markup at the bottom? Or even better, automatically add the page to the index in the right spot (without duplicates)?
Adam850: Hey, is there a quick and easy way to have the page history highlight exactly what was changed? Sometimes it's hard to pick out differences between edits.
Fast Eddie: Change highlighting within a line... Gus built that, once, and had it on the backburner for the day when we were all-database rather than all-files. Guess it is time to find that code.
chubbyboy: I'd like to have something like Wikipedia's "Go" button: it would take you directly to a page by putting in it's Wiki Word.
Cassius335: Or it's Google cousin, "I Feel Lucky"
Mith: This is probably pretty unimportant, but would it be hard to get italics and bold inside potholes? I was making another edit to The Scottish Trope when I noticed someone had "no, the other Harry" potholed as three separate chunks like that. That's distracting when we usually use separate chunks in a sentence to link to different things all related to the sentence or something that's being expressed. (The linked articles in the last sentence are not relevant.)
Earnest: I too would be appreciative of such a change. It's just... well, I've done it myself more than once now and I realize how disruptive it can be.
Fast Eddie: This seems to be a multi-parter, if I'm reading it right. The first bit, about applying text styles to a pothole ... Looks doable. The second part, about people lining up separate potholes so that it looks like it is all one link when it isn't ... That looks to be just a "Don't do that!" situation.
Looney Toons: What is happening to append extra index markups — often irrelevant or duplicates of existing ones — on so many pages? If this is something the wiki is doing, it needs to be hunted down and executed.
Tanto: I think new users are doing it. They see "Add index markup" and think they have to add it every time they make a new edit. It's never just popped up spontaneously, as near as I can tell.
J Bridge: URL shortcuts. For example, "https://tvtropes.org/HypeBacklash
" links to "https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HypeBacklash". That way it will be easier to get to an article quickly.arromdee: This may be a long shot since it might be hard to code, but here's an idea: change the behavior of WikiWords so that if the WikiWord contains words like "and" and "the" they aren't capitalized, unless the user specifies it. For instance, [[LordOfTheRings]] would produce a linked "Lord of the Rings", but [[LordOfTheRings Lord Of The Rings]] would still produce a linked "Lord Of The Rings". It would make things formatted much better than forcing the user to manually format it each time.
Specialist290: I think you can do that with the {{ }} tags already. Let me test that...
arromdee: Hmm, okay, never mind then.
arromdee: Though now that I think of it it's still useful. Yeah, we have the {{ to get around that, but something that works without the user doing anything special will be used a lot more often than something that doesn't. There are a lot of poorly capitalized titles out there that would instantly turn good if the behavior of [[ was changed to work this way.
Khym Chanur: The wiki doesn't work properly with URLs which end in a period. For instance, http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Convenient_Ramps_Inc
. doesn't work, you have to do http://transformers.wikia.com/wiki/Convenient_Ramps_Inc%2E instead.fleb:I think it's better the way it is. It's easier ending sentences with URLs that way, and even though escaping periods and commas is inconvenient, not that many links end in them.
Khym Chanur: What about making a special case for URLs inside of a double-bracket, like [[http://foo.com/Blah_Inc. Blah Inc.]]?
fleb: Good point. I think I read the site runs an effectively forked Pm Wiki, so that's probably a legacy parser thing. Fast Eddie, is that kind of change doable?
Micah: How hard would it be to add some kind of "show markup" feature to YKTTW? I feel like I often end up manually reproducing a lot of it when I launch things...
Fast Eddie: Go to the discussion link on the launched's discussion page. Click the pencil on the YKTTW or reply you are interested in. Voila! markup. Copy-n-paste into the new page... yer off. When I do it, I keep the discussion open in one tab and the new page edit open in another so I can bop back and forth.
fleb: The problem is the edit-pencil is missing for the original description on discussion.php/launcher.php pages. Plus, it might be useful to avoid going back-and-forth by adding a button that shows/combines all the markup from a YKTTW into a single copyable textarea.
Fast Eddie: Yup, I broke that with the formatter change. I'll see about just going ahead and copying the whole thread's markup into the new wiki entry. That would save a step. Of course, it will make editing the new entry pretty mandatory. A lot of stuff goes on in YKTTW that we don't want in entries.
Ununnilium: Red links are showing as blue links in page history.
Fast Eddie: On the list, but way down the list.
Shay Guy: What happened to the mass-open button on YKTTW? If it's too cycle-costly, I'd still appreciate just an "open-all-with-new-replies" button.
Fast Eddie: Any flavor of open-many for YKTTW is still very, very "expensive". There is a likelihood that there may be a SQL join that will do the trick without having to scan the entire database. I just haven't figured it out.
Khym Chanur: Just for fun it would be cool to have a "most popular pages" page which ranks the pages by number of times visited.
Fast Eddie: Writing something every time a page is read makes our I/O unmanageable. The only thing we even log on read are inbound referrals. There is a possibility that we can get a count of those. Defining "most popular" as "brings the most traffic", then.
fleb: Not sure if this would be too costly, but it'd be good if a thread on YKTTW weren't marked as "new replies" if the only new replies were made by you.
Fast Eddie: Hmm. Might be doable.// later: Step one of that is in. New Edits no longer flags the edit you just made.// Still later: Step 2, not flagging YKTTW's you just replied to, is in. Step the Third (final step), not flagging the reply itself that you just made, still enroute.
Citizen: Problem. If you give an image a wiki link (like [[WikiWordX (image URL)]]) but WikiWordX hasn't been created yet, the image does not display. It's there in the source and the history, but it won't display on the regular page...
fleb: I just noticed this on Most Common Superpower. It looks like the href attribute is closed with a single-quote, so it eats the <img> tag as part of the URL.
Fast Eddie: Yup. Bug in the redlinker. Will pursue.
fleb: (updated) Red links don't seem to work for all the links, just the ones pointing to the Main/ namespace. I made the page FridayNightLights, and whenever I accidentally linked to a trope without the Main/ prefix, it still showed up blue, despite Series/TruthInTelevision not existing.
Fast Eddie: Yikes. Gonna have to come up with a solution that doesn't slow Main down.
Khym Chanur: How about a way to pluralize a WikiWord without having to do [[FooBarBaz Foo Bar Bazzes]]?
Looney Toons: How about "{{Wiki Word}}s", which produces Wiki Words?
Fast Eddie: Please participate in Wiki Search Wish List, kthxbye.
UnknownTroper: Will the Story Generator be coming back, or was it lost in the Great Crash?
Fast Eddie: On the list. It just needs to set up for new categories after the recent index re-org.
Citizen: Would it be possible to automatically remove invalid characters like apostrophes from links surrounded by brackets when the links are being built, so that {{Godwin's Law}} would display as "Godwin's Law" but link to Godwins Law?
PaulRobinson: Note: You can do that now, as ||Godwin's Law Godwin's Law]] (you would use the [ in place of | in this example, I'm doing it this way to make it visible instead of a link like this: Godwin's Law
Citizen: You're missing my point. Of course I know about that, I just want to be able to use {{Godwin's Law}} instead of having to type [[GodwinsLaw Godwin's Law]].
Fast Eddie: Apostrophes in wikiwords is on the list, as it is no longer necessary to have a wikiword also serve as a file name.
fleb: Really? Aw. I always found that technical limitation charming.
Shay Guy: Are the body hits supposed to be case-sensitive?
Fast Eddie: No. Item is on the list.
Tangent128: More an announcement than a request, but I made a bookmarklet to help with linking Youtube links on YKTTW:
javascript:(function(){var upperCaseEscaper = function(char){return "%" + char.charCodeAt(0).toString(16);};var linkFixer = function(link){return link.replace(/[A-Z]/g, upperCaseEscaper);};var textareas = document.getElementsByTagName("textarea");for (var i in textareas) {textareas[i].value = textareas[i].value.replace(/http:\/\/\S*/g, linkFixer);}})()
It searches every text box on the page, escaping caps in http: addresses. May have Unpredictable Results...
Adam850: Would it be difficult to do this: under "recent launches" in the working title column, have the working title link to the archived YKTTW of that trope?
Fast Eddie: That's in. It will work for launches after 4pm board time on OCT 6, forward.
Shay Guy: How hard would it be to have a server-side search engine for YKTTW? Including stuff like the ability to search for stuff specific people said - you know, the sort of thing most message boards have.
Fast Eddie: Yow! A query for ykttw's and replies to ykttw's for a specific person? Not sure I get that. Are some people's ykttw activity not interesting?
Shay Guy: I was thinking along the lines of "I know so-and-so said something along the lines of blah blah blah regarding AATAFOVS..." Like I said, the same reason message boards have that functionality. It'd use less bandwidth and time than opening up lots of threads at once and then using Ctrl-F.
Fast Eddie: Hmm. May be able to whip up something for "Show YKTTW Replies For: <troper>". May have to wait for a weekend to occur...
Ununnilium: Shouldn't the sidebar have a Live-Action TV bit?
Fast Eddie: There actually should be a general redesign of the sidebars to reflect all the work Sci Vo and Micah have been doing to whip the indexes into shape. The concept of "Universal" is coming into better focus as the apex, then we have the story-type areas (action/adventure, horror, comedy, etc.), then the things that only apply in certain specific mediums. I'll put a whack-up together, for discussion in New Side Bar Whack Up.
Travis Wells: I think there's been an odd bug with numbers. I've seen several tropes where something like "$1000000" turned into 0. It's currently visible in Worthless Yellow Rocks and I just fixed one in Easy Come, Easy Go.Another bug I've seen recently is where the new Tropes A To E type navbars have // before them for no obvious reason. An example is Artists Are Not Architects
Donomni: After The Great Crash, all things added to my watchlist after the cutoff date have been removed, and near-impossible to add. Is there a way to fix this?
Fast Eddie: Not quite sure I understand the question. Adding items to the watchlist seems to be working. Of course, the article to add has to have been scavenged up.
Donomni: Well, the problem was that items that were once on my watchlist couldn't be added again... at least, that was the problem. Now it just seems to have fixed itself... odd. Anywho, no problems now, sorry for the alarm.
Shay Guy: What are the most wanted pages - i.e., the ones that have the most red links?
Fast Eddie: Tricky report to write, but very valuable. Right at the top of the to-do's. //Later: Wow. Oddly enough, collecting every wikiword on the site and testing each one to see if it would be red is kinda tough. Gonna table this one until we get the data into a database, rather than files.
Shay Guy: It occurs to me that It Just Bugs Me! could use a table of contents or something.
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Medinoc: Would it be possible to have a shortcut from the Inbound Links to Weirdest Inbound Link Of The Day ?
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Travis Wells: The shiny new WMG coloring causes problems with spoilers. If here's a spoiler in the entry title, the spoiled text will be white, but since the background is no longer white it's clearly visible.
F Ast Eddie: That's fixed.
Adam850: A suggestion for the search. If one types in the full name of a trope and it is letter for letter the same as a page name, then have that link show up first, then the alphabetical list below. So if I type in "BFS" (without quotes) then BFS will be the number one link, then the regular list after that.
Sniffnoy: I second this. This would be very useful. Another possibility (which I think would be a bit better) would be just to put title matches on top, then body matches. Ideally, I suppose it would go exact title match, then title matches, then body matches.
Fast Eddie: Compromise solution installed. Hits in the title are shown first, followed by hits in the body (inclusive). This gives a smaller list of title hits to scan, anyway. Getting a exact hit in a title is a bit more fiddly than it seems like it should be. Let's see if this compromise hits most of the issue.
arromdee: Minor suggestion: If you look at the history of a discussion page, there's a link which says "back to article". I know, it's not hard to figure out, but still, I think calling it "back to discussion" would be less confusing.
Fast Eddie: Huh. Discussions and articles are two distinctly different things in my wee brain. "Back to discussion" when I am looking at an article history would confuse me.
arromdee: Go to a discussion page, go to the history. There are two links; a bigger link which says "Back to <name>" and really does go back to the article, and a smaller one at the end of "Hide minor edits - Show changes to markup - back to article". This one goes back to the discussion, not back to the article.
Fast Eddie: Mini-announcement. One of our many, many performance issues is related to article locking. Article locking has been extended to 20 minutes, to improve the odds of avoiding a cross-lock.
arromdee: YKTWW still has a format problem. If you show replies on one of them, it will often affect the next one down the list such that the "show replies" button is missing. (Not just invisible, it isn't there, you can't click it.) If I resize the browser window by even a tiny bit, the button suddenly reappears.
Fast Eddie: Please say what browser you are using.
arromdee: IE 6, in Display Properties my DPI setting is large size (120% DPI).
I use Seamonkey on Linux at home and it's given me even stranger results.
arromdee: It's still doing this on IE 6.
Fast Eddie: A fix is now in that seems to work for me with IE 6. Hopefully it took for you. (The version of IE 6 and a windows operating operating system I use is so "virtual" and simulated it is hard to be sure.)
arromdee: Still doing it. Load page, click on "show replies". It seems to work, but go down a couple of items and click on a second "show replies". Go down to the item after that and the button is missing. Also, if you click "reply" after showing replies on the second item, the reply box is cut off too.
Fast Eddie: Got curious and did some counts. Just for giggles, sharing them here: We have 7686 main entries today. 3936 of those have a discussion page. We have considered 3215 new-style YKTTW's. 278 of those are still active. There have been 11587 replies made to YKTTW's either launched or active. (Some number were deleted when the YKTTW died of old age.)
Nothing at is intended by this post. Just thought some folks might be interested.
Looney Toons: The WMG markup doesn't apply the blue background color to the first entry if it's directly under the grey page title text. Having the "Unlock" button and the "this page is locked by" notice displayed changes something and makes the background appear again.
Citizen: Can watchlist items be dropped from inside the watchlist, too? Or is this still a work in progress...
Fast Eddie: Everything around here is always a work in progress. Yes, that should be doable. // later: That's In.
Fast Eddie: Open All Replies button is installed for YKTTW. Tip of the hat to Tangent for the notion on how to make it work without slaughtering the server.
Fast Eddie: There is now a "launches" button at the top of the list pages. It shows recent launches dating from early 27 AUG forward. It makes up half of Jonny D's suggestions for tracking YKTTW items. The second half will be to show items in danger of dying of old age. Coming soon.
Tangent128: Starts tomorrow? I'll look at it then, then.Is there supposed to be something wrong with the launcher? It works fine for me.
Fast Eddie: Yup. Any earlier on the 27th and it would have been the 25th. I changed a thing in the YKTTW launcher that may make it work better for the poor, benighted souls who are trying to have a fulfilling life in spite of using IE.
Jonny D: I like the speed at which the new YKTTW page loads up, don't really mind having to open each thread if it helps ease the load on the server... but is it just me or does the markup for new items appear to be missing from all but the initial post of each thread?
Is it possible to fix that so each new post has the new icon... and maybe add a new icon to the initial post to indicate that while the initial post isn't new, there are new replies below.
// that's in
Edit: Also just realized that doing a search on the new style YKTTW only returns finds from the visible parts of the page, so to do a proper search I would need to go through and open the replies on every thread.
Fast Eddie: Will look into a search facility for YKTTW replies.
Ununnilium: A "Show All Replies" button on YKTTW, onegai shimasu.
Fast Eddie: The query to gather all the replies at once was the thing bogging down the server. So ... sorry, no.
Tangent128: What if you set it up to fetch one reply/second or so?
Fast Eddie: Hmm. On a timeout, with a "sleep" between each batch per YKTTW ... could work.
Tangent128: If you do do it, though, please leave it as ` b�Zton... I personally like the initially collapsed style.
Fast Eddie: Yeah, definitely a button.
Fast Eddie: Watchlist now hooked up to act like "Changes".
Pro-Mole: I've noticed a little flaw on the "references" button. Bacially, it's a Wiki Search, ain't it? Well, when you are on a Wiki Word page, everything goes well, as the search engine joins the words together. But, when you want to know the references on a page with only on word on its title(take, for example, Bone), it goes just as it is, generating an incorrect number of references(as in the given example, 195 vs. 7). Is there anyway to render this search with the curly brackets when on a one-word entry?
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Seth: The number of Bleach examples just nosedived. Yay for a more accurate Trope Overdosed
Jonny D: It might be more complicated than it's worth, but would it be possible to implement some kind of personal 'flagging' system for tropes of interest on YKTTW. Some way so that you would know if a trope you were interested in had been launched or more importantly, was about to be lost into the eather. (I have a bodged solution for launched tropes by having a list of ones I'm interested in on my contributor page, the ren the red link goes blue, they've been launched. Doesn't help if they use a different name or if the trope gets lost though.)
Fast Eddie: On the list, now.
Looney Toons: Cool. I think a watchlist kind of feature would be very useful. In fact, I think I'll go back in time and suggest it several days ago right now! </TONGUE-IN-CHEEK> Seriously... is this info stored locally or on the wiki server? With my bilocation habit, that's an important point for me.
Fast Eddie: I see LT will have been reading Time Travel Tropes sometime this Fall and will have come unstuck in time. You get used to that sort of thing around here. Actually, Jonny D was referring to items in YKTTW, which are a different species of fish from the proper entries the present watchlist is about. The issue there is tracking something nameless into its named-state or recording its demise, etc.. May have to put down my beer to solve that one.
Yes, the watchlist is kept on the server. I guess we're going to have to just buck up and establish regular accounts for multi-machine people. Until that day, there is the Get Known/Get Unknown workaround.
Looney Toons: Okay, my eye skipped right over the "YKTTW" above. I've got an excuse — I only got like 3 hours of sleep last night. <sigh>
Jonny D: Don't worry about it Looney Toons, its happened to all of us. Oh, and good job Fast Eddie on the new watchlist functionality, it's fantastic. That's just the kind of thing I was thinking of for YKTTW, maybe some kind of checkbox on each thread, and the checked ones will appear on a list like the watchlist, that tells you when it was last posted to, if it's been launched and what as and if it's about to be lost through lack of use.
Citizen:
- If you upload a file with an apostrophe, the part of the filename that precedes it gets cut off.
- Images with parentheses aren't properly recognized as links or images, though I got it to show by replacing them with %28 and %29 respectively.
Fast Eddie: On the list. Obvious workaround: Don't do that.
Tangent128:
Fast Eddie: Recently.
Mhoram: I think it would be good to have the "This entry has discussion" link near the bottom of the page, either instead of or in addition to the link at the top. Here's why: When I finish reading a trope page, naturally I'm at the bottom. So to read the discussion I have to scroll back to the top and click the link. When I come back, I'm now at the top, and have to scroll back down to the bottom to use the links to related tropes. Having a link to the discussion page somewhere at the bottom would eliminate a lot of scrolling.
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Seth: I disagree. Most the people looking for a discussion would search for the page and then go into the discussion making it easier for them if it were at the top. Plus i think it would disrupt the page if it were at the bottom. As it is, bellow the nav bar but above the title it is fairly innocuous, and looks like part of the hub. Putting it at the bottom would just look odd when you get down there and is much easier to miss. Then there are entries like Five-Man Band or Indexes where the length of the entry makes putting it at the top a much better idea (More so for indexes since people rarely read them from start to finish).
Later: Ah, i see what you've done. Having there be two links makes sense.
Seth: Weirdest glitch ever, i just loaded Recent Changes and got a message "Nothing to see here troper, move along" it was gone when i reloaded but weird.
Looney Toons: Is a "watchlist" function technically feasible? As I've whined about several times over the past few months, the wiki has gotten way too big for me to even page through Recent Changes and pick-and-choose what I want to look at. I'd really appreciate a way to tag pages or sections (as defined by an index page) and then just call up a list of changes to my tagged pages.
Fast Eddie: Feasible. Actually, simpler than some other things on the wish list. Coming soon.
Ununnilium: I would bake an apple pie out of my own blood for such a feature.
Fast Eddie: See Contributor Announcements
Citizen
- For searches, have the Google search link at the bottom go straight to a search using site:tvtropes.org instead of a blank page for choosing to search web or site.
- Automatically put the width in the [[caption-width:number:some text]] in the Media Uploader.
- ETA on rename tool's return?
- We can do that. We lose the Google revenue, but that Google was small.(That one's in.)
- Smokin' idea. Since the Media Uploader knows that number, we can do that.( That one's in.)
- Most renames are BS, is the opinion of some. A case for renames other than for misspellings needs to be made.
Morgan Wick: The thing I'm picking up is that we can make redirects from better names. But the "official" name is the only one that will show up on RC and is the name that will appear at the top of the page. There's a sense of inferiority, that this name is the king, and bleep all the other possible names. If there's a better name than what one momentary despot decided was the best name when launching a trope, simply saying "create a redirect!" isn't going to cut it.
As for links coming in from other sites... well, first of all, that's not a problem for very new tropes. Second of all, if we do rename a trope over a year after it was created, we can create a redirect unless we're clearing out the space for a different trope that could use the name more.
Tangent128: Would a Get Unknown page/button be worth it? When using a public computer for an extended time, it's nice to be known, but at least some public computers don't let you delete cookies. For now, I just login with getUnknown/iamnobody.
Fast Eddie: Can do, as soon as a some work gets done for me Lords and Masters.
//Later: That's in.
Tangent128: Ah, there it is. (Had to refresh the page.) Thanks!
Tangent128: Has collapsing YKTTW entries come up yet? 6+ page discussions are getting more common...
Fast Eddie: Actually, YKTTW started out collapse-able, with the default being collapsed. Nobody got it. We might try it with the default being "open" with a "close" button for replies, which is where the bulk of the length is.// later: That's in. Doesn't seem to help much, unless we go back to the replies showing up initially closed. // a little later. Duh. Putting the close button at the top of the reply stack does seem to help.
Tangent128: That's nice. Two suggestions:
- Change "Close Replies" to "Hide Replies"- my first thought was that the "Close Replies" button locked the entry.
- Maybe a "Hide All" button?
Fast Eddie: Show/Hide terms are in. The Hide All ... good idea. I'll look into it.
Zeke: Does TV Tropes have anything analogous to Wikipedia's "My Contributions"? That's a really unfortunate thing to be lacking.
Seth No, some editors keep track of big stuff on their user pages but there is no automated feature built into PM Wiki for that, we don't really have accounts so it makes it difficult. I don't mind that though, i like the way things work, and a lot of other people don't mind either but this does comes up a lot.
Looney Toons: A wild thought. If a page has had a given name for a long time — say a year or more — it's almost guaranteed that there are going to be a lot of inbound links to it from elsewhere on the web. Changing that name because someone comes along and complains will break all those referral links, and screw up people who are trying to come here for the first time. When the rename tool comes back, would it be possible to implement a "timeout" on casual renaming after some arbitrary but long time, to prevent this kind of thing? Any rename after that timeout would require admin action instead of user action, and probably require a clear consensus.
Citizen: It's me, isn't it? =/
Fast Eddie, Yes, Citizen, everything is your fault and we are all out to get you. ;-)
@LT: Interesting point. Maybe the thing to do is to always generate a redirect from the old name. Where the name has been reused for another purpose ... Well, at least the incoming person lands somewhere other than the Home Page.
Morgan Wick: Didn't the Entry Name Changer used to be able to change inbound links as well?
Looney Toons: Not on other people's websites, it didn't!
Citizen: Image links show up as the full URL instead of the image if the file extension is in CAPS...
Fast Eddie: That's fixed.
Seth: Do we have an ETA on when the inbound links will be back?
Fast Eddie: The thing that showed referrals from others sites and search terms from search engines? Wasn't aware anyone cared. Soon, I guess. Needs a little tweak because the log file it reads has changed format.
Seth: I used it to find blogs and sites of a troper nature. Ive actualy found some great sites by watching the inbound links.
Fast Eddie: OK, cool. Shouldn't take much to put it back together.
Looney Toons: Great! I was wondering where that had gone to — I went looking for it for a couple times, and figured I had just forgotten what inobvious page it lived on.
Fast Eddie: It's back, in a new flavor, on the Tools menu.
Seth: Sweet, though I'm still disturbed how many searches for Lolicon Fanservice and Brother–Sister Incest we get.
Citizen: Do you know why the Name Changer seems to skip over a lot of links? I thought maybe it was when it was [[UsedIn a link]] or if it had punctuation after it, but it misses stuff in lists, too. Or am I misunderstanding the tool's operation? Automatically moving discussion would be nice.
Fast Eddie: Next time you run across a specific case of a missed replacement, grab the formatting of the skipped item(s). Renaming discussions should be an easy do. (The renamer is older than the ______Discussion idea.)
Citizen: How about adding an automatic redirect from the old page to the new? And here are the instances of no change from a rename I just did:
- *TheDramaticGunCock
- TheDramaticGunCock,
- [[TheDramaticGunCock dramatic gun cock]]
Fast Eddie: We should be picking up those special cases, now. The automatic redirect would be tougher to do than it sounds. Also, it would turn renaming into something close to a sort of back-door "delete" ... open to abuse, methinks.
Citizen: Err... It got worse.
- TheChewToy.
- TheChewToy,
- * TheChewToy
- *TheChewToy
- [[TheChewToy very much]],
- ''[[TheChewToy "Nyuk nyuk!"]]''
- [[TheChewToy it's sad]].
Fast Eddie: <sigh> Thanks, I'll get into it...
Citizen: The altered pages don't take more time to change after the tool takes you to the finished page listing the changed pages... right?
Fast Eddie: Not sure I completely get the question ... the newly created/altered pages will be dumped out of the server cache, which means they will load slightly slower than ordinarily, until re-cached. Was that it?
Citizen: I was just wondering if there was some way I could have been editing old versions (pre-rename) after using the tool, but that was just a long shot.
Ununnilium: So, everything on Recent Changes is marked Created Today. >>
Citizen: I blame Suzumiya. =P
Being X: could you back a "back to [page]" button on page histories?
Fast Eddie: That's been here for a long time. Look for "back to article" at the top.
Being X: oh... awkward
Seth: Would it be possible to use two different colours for internal and external links? Like a slightly darker blue for external ones, just thinking it would be useful on pages like Notable Webcomics to see which ones have articles and other pages (plus a warning for when you leave the site). Another option would be to automatically bold external links.
Mister Six: Or you could put one of those little images after the link, like you get on wikipedia. The TV Tropes wiki already does this for links to images
◊...
Fast Eddie: That's in, using the icon approach.
Citizen: Most Recent Changes... by editor?
Fast Eddie: I don't get this one. You mean like "Show changes by Citizen?". Not sure I see the utility. There could have been three or four editors on a given entry since the last time a given person had checked changes.
Citizen: I meant covering the entire wiki, a list of the recent x changes done by a given editor. To keep track of what you've been doing, ongoing stuff in discussion pages, etc...
Fast Eddie: Oh. The issue with this is that change history is not kept in one place. It is (very unwisely) kept with the article. This means that we'd have to scan every article to see which ones you'd touched. Not just the current version, either, but also the history. That's about 40 megs of data that would have to be parsed per query. If we can ever get converted over to all-SQL for the data, this sort of thing will be possible. For now, though, it's off the table.
Aya: Would it be possible to make a "Work in Progress" that would tropers who started articles, but are for whatever reason unable to finish them,a day or two to come back and pick up where they left off?
Fast Eddie: Hmm. Essentially, the capability to mark something as 'draft', keeping it off recent changes until it is 'published'? That might be kinda cool. I'll see what I can whip up.
Red Shoe: Don't suppose we could make the length of the New Edits list setting persistant-by-user? I generally only get to check this page twice a day, and there's usually more than 100 recent edits when I do — and increasing it by hand clears them.
Fast Eddie: Simplest method: Change your bookmark to something like https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/changes.php?daNumber=250. The number on the end controls the number of items on the list.
Looney Toons: Something is wrong with whatever mechanism adds the new [[animated]] tag to pages — at least two pages I've edited today have had long long strings of them, at least a dozen in a row. See the page history
for One Froggy Evening.Ununnilium: I've been running into this for the past month or so.
Khym Chanur: Change "Created Today" into "Created in the past 24 hours" (but with a better name). As things work right now, the list blanks out when midnight is reached, which isn't very useful.
Fast Eddie: The quick fix on that was to make it "created today or yesterday". That's in.
Citizen: Two minor suggestions about the media uploader... Could some mechanism be added to replace the whitespace in the name of an uploaded file to underscores? And adding "http://
" to the beginning of the URL it gives you back? Both are fixed easily enough by hand (%20 and http://), but...Fast Eddie: Easy fix. That's in.
Citizen: Parentheses cause the same problem, as I found out when I was editing the Shotacon entry... Also, something a little odd's been coming up recently. When I click the edit button for a page, very often the page will come up already locked by me, and I have to click the unlock button to start editing.
Fast Eddie: The double-lock thing should be cleared up.
Travis Wells: Two things:1: When you're viewing discussion or editing a page, there's a title link which leads no where useful (It does a search on the page name, which'll give you a (often long) list of similarly matched stuff, or it'll give you nothing (like if you click from discussions)Since this link is basically useless, it'd be nice if it lead back to the article (God knows I've hit it dozens of times, gotten confused by the results, hit back and hit the smaller "back to article page" (Which isn't there when you're editing. If you're editing and need to check something in the regular page, there's no easy way to it))
2: The "links" for new edits, page history, edit page, discuss, etc, aren't. That is, they're not links. They're div elements with an onclick handler. I have no idea why this is, but it's really annoying. At least three times a day I try to open new edits or discussion in a new tab (middle click) and get nothing. Is there some reason these can't be standard links?
Fast Eddie: A lot of people find the quick-search useful. Hmm. I suppose we could put links in for those 'nav' buttons. Need to think about the ramifications of the 30+ spiders that visit every page on the site multiple times a day, though. They follow links. Could be a performance hit.
Travis Wells: Whoops, forgot to stick my name in. As for the quick searck, I don't see how it'd be useful. It's taking you to a search for the page you were already looking at, and often (like when you're on a discussion page) it's a search that doesn't actually find it.Example: Go to Villainous Crossdresser. Click Discussion. Click the page header (Villainous Crossdresser Discussion). Notice that you get no matches.
As for spiders, they're already hitting new edits (thanks to the navigation link), discussion (thanks to to "This entry has discussion" link), and page history (thanks to the new edits page again). The only new thing would be spiders hitting edit page (and they'd promptly hit the username/password prompt and give up). Would spiders hitting the page (and not downloading it, thanks to the 401 error) be that big a hit?
Fast Eddie: Yeah, people do use the quick search to look up where a trope/series title is referred to. Not saying that couldn't be done another way. The only two 'nav' buttons that have significant processor-impact are "New Edits' and 'Page History'. The history hits on the new edits listing are maxed out at 100, for a given spider, versus one per 9000(or so) pages time the number of spiders. That's a lot of calls to "diff" for no good reason. Ditto that number for calls to the "new edits" query. Thinking about this also makes me realize that the quick-search is getting called a lot more than it need be. Yeah ... it needs looking at. There might be a way to get the convenience of multi-tabbing for those. To bad rel="nofollow" doesn't do what it sounds like it does.
//later: "edit page" and "discuss" are now links, which means you can open those in a separate tab. That seems to address least part of it.Travis Wells: Thanks. Since New Edits is a specific URL (not just another pmwiki.php URL) you could put it in robots.txt. Putting the following in should do it perfectly:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /pmwiki/changes.php
All well-behaved spiders (all the major ones) should stop hitting that URL, no matter how they get to it.
Khym Chanur: Putting quotes around a search term returns nothing, rather than forcing the search to match whole words like the search page says.
Fast Eddie: Actually, it doesn't say that. I'll clarify the message. // later: Actually, it 'did'' say that. The message now reflects reality.
Morgan Wick: Don't mind me locking this page several times, I would have made comments to existing items inexplicably placed at the bottom, but my $(%!)@#&* internet connection keeps dropping... and then when I click the unlock button from the edit URL I'm sent right back to the exact same page with the unlock button. Whassup with that?
Fast Eddie: Examine the message. Is someone else getting a lock in the meanwhile? In other words... it says it is locked for you, you unlock, and it then says it is locked for someone else?
Morgan Wick: Back when I posted that, it said it was locked for me.
Morgan Wick: Now I'm having to hit the unlock button the first time I click edit. It does not say it's locked before I click and it says it's locked for me after. Clicking unlock does take me to the edit page. Usually.
Fast Eddie: What browser version and operating system?
Morgan Wick: This was the same problem Citizen mentioned above. For future reference, though, I'm always Windows XP and IE 7 unless I say otherwise.
Khym Chanur: If you make several consecutive changes to a single entry and the last change is marked as minor, then "new edits" will list it as a minor edit, hiding the fact that some of the other edits lumped into that line were non-minor; this is especially common (for me, at least) when you do a non-minor edit, notice a formatting or spelling mistake, and then fix it.
Of course, you could just not check "minor edit" for the second edit, so as not to hide the previous non-minor edit, but that doesn't sit quite right with me.
Seth: That is just as designed, if you don't want it to appear as a minor edit then you will have to get past the not marking minor edits as so thing.
Morgan Wick: If you set the Recent Changes to hide minor edits, does it still show the entry, only now as a major edit for the last major edit you made?
Fast Eddie: That's something that bothers me a bit, as well. The fact that there has recently been a major edit is a fact of interest. Scenario: I make a major change, then Khym shortly thereafter zaps a typo. Kyhm was the last to see it as a major change, due to rightly marking the typo as minor.
I'll look into something analogous to "created today", along the lines of "major revision today".
Paul A: The thing that's supposed to make YKKTWs vanish five days after people stop replying is actually making them vanish five days after the thread is started, even when the conversation is still in full swing.
For instance: the "Back to Kansas" discussion:
added: 2007-05-26 00:46:28
last reply: 2007-06-01 00:00:26
...and it doesn't appear on YKTTW unless you extend the keep date back.
Tangent128: I've encountered this too. It's getting annoying fast.
Janitor: Thanks for the report. Fix underway. // later: That's in.
(moved)Citizen: Why is it that when a trope is launched from the YKTTW, the link to the former discussion appears twice in the new trope's discussion page?
Morgan Wick: Bring that up at Wiki Tech Wish List.
Seth: I brought this up before (Copy pastes old discussion from below)
Seth: Launching a trope in YKTTW makes two entries appear in the topic you launched it to.
Morgan Wick: On discussion boards, "double-posts" of this sort can occur (to paraphrase and appropriate Wikipedia) if the wiki is moving slowly, causing the user to repeatedly click the "launch" button and launching their YKTTW several times. If you're sure you're clicking the launch button on the launch screen only once, then that's something for Fast Eddie to look into.
Seth: Yup that's the case. It's only happened a few times but i never double clicked.
Paul A: Backing Seth up... I've just launched a bunch of tropes, and they all came out double, even though I made sure to only click once.
Seth: A few people have noticed this then.
Fast Eddie: Well, it is a bug, but it seems to be pretty benign one. If one of the links to the discussion is really just making you nuts, I mean, if it is keeping you up at night, messing with your sex life and ruining your appetite for life, you can take solace in the fact that it is within your power to delete it. ^-^
Colin: Is there a way to force something to not be a Wiki Word?
Fast Eddie: Yes. Like this: ThisIsNotAWikiWord (view source — edit this — to see how.)
Colin: Thanks.
FallenAngelEyes: Could we get the sidebar on the YKTTW page? I keep going to navigate away from it when I'm done catching up and finding nothing to click on.
Fast Eddie: Just hit "New Edits".
Ununnilium: If you have text next to a picture, if a line is formatted somehow (bulleted with *, or pushed over with ->, or whatnot), that line will "fall" underneath the picture.
Fast Eddie: Yikes! We're running through 500 recent changes in a single day, now. I'll boost the number again, but maybe we need more partitioning — Discussions as a separate button, like Created Today? Open to other notions...
Ununnilium: I was thinking about this. Maybe separate into categories? Not sure how you'd do that, though. Making Just Discussions and Just Entries buttons might help, as would making Just Major Changes.
Seth: When i'm here for a quick visit i tend just to look at the discussions and run some clean up work, so that sounds good to me.
Tangent 128: I'd also like to see a "sort by creation date" button. I like to keep up on the newest entries, but can't check "Created Today" every day.
Morgan Wick: The RSS feed (Subscribing in Troperville) only runs through a puny 28 edits.
Ununnilium: Not necessarily a wish, but something I noticed - it's impossible to make an entry that begins with a number; the code doesn't parse it. But if the number's anywhere else in the entry name, it works. Look at these:
{{8-Bit Theater}}
Tanto: I notice numbers tend to get spelled out when this comes up — thus, Eight Bit Theater.
Ununnilium: In Search Wiki, when you click on a result that isn't in Main, it takes you to The Catalogue.
Morgan Wick: I think that also happens when the random item button hits something that isn't in Main.
Fast Eddie: Those are fixed.
Ununnilium: The 400 newest changes doesn't seem to be enough anymore. I didn't check up for a couple days, and when I finally looked in it was totally full.
Fast Eddie: Boosted to 500.
Ununnilium: Much better!
Seth: Damn on that note i had to be offline for a few days (Holidays) and there are hundreds of pages to read through. This site is getting big.
Tanto: Yeah, that happened to me last weekend, since my parents' computer is currently on the fritz. I went home on Friday, and when I got back Sunday night the backlog was completely full.
Morgan Wick: Launch function in YKTTW isn't working for me, though it seems to be working for Seth and Fast Eddie. I click launch on the launch page and nothing happens. I'm running IE 7 on a laptop running XP.
Paul A: FWIW, the Launch function has never worked for me in IE7/XP. Whenever I need to launch something I have to use a different computer.
Fast Eddie: That's fixed now.
Paul A: The separate Created Today page is nice, in theory. But I notice that if I look at it first, and then move on to the full Recent Changes page, only the changes since I looked at the Created Today page are marked as new.
(A suggested fix: Looking at the Created Today page doesn't reset the last-read marker. This means that if someone looks at the Created Today page again, there might be edits still marked as new that they've seen already, but I think that's a much smaller problem than going to Recent Changes and finding a swathe of new edits marked as old.)
Fast Eddie: Fixed as suggested. "Created Today" does not mark anything as "read."
Ununnilium: Speaking of Firefox plugins. I don't suppose it's possible to get one that'll basically let me mark new edits read and unread?
Random832: If I make a cleaner css stylesheet (to get the same basic visual effect, but with cleaner code and maybe a few tweaks and more generally maintainable) would that be accepted? I want to know whether this is worth spending time on.
(ps): If I do this, do you think you could enlighten me as to the reasoning behind some of your design decisions? (the fairly light color #778899 for some headers, the incomplete border boxes around some things e.g. left-top-right for the header, bottom-and-right for list items, etc)
Seth: I really like the design here, its like reading a book more than a website.
Fast Eddie: That would be very welcome, Random 832. I think the css styles are more like "accumulated" than "designed." It is high time it was neatened up. Send the css to Fast Eddie (at) tvtropes.org. We'll run it in on the Beta environment. We can also talk about those design decisions in a few email-swaps.
From Search Wiki Discussion
Blink Dawg: any hope for a Firefox search plugin for tvtropes?
Seth: I'm not sure howLuc: I'd like the screwball YKTTW parser that views Foo Bar and Foo Bar Baz as the same link to be fixed. Please?
Adam850: It would be nice to have red links for YKTTW. Whenever. It's hard to tell a proposed name from an existing page.
Fast Eddie: All the changes for the YKTTW parser are now passing test. It now uses exactly the same markup in exactly the same way as the main wiki. Installation will require a shutdown, a database change, and data conversion, so it is being held for install late Saturday/Early AM Sunday (9/10FEB08). The installation will also change the way YKTTW looks, as a white background is a basic assumption for the parser/CSS. Like this:
Po8: More of an offer than a wish, really. I'd like to help out with setting up various kinds of off-site permanent backup, so that the catastrophic loss of data we just experienced (including my nym...[sobs quietly]) doesn't happen again. I've got some experience in this area, and access to some resources. Would those in charge drop me a note via http://fob.po8.org if they want some help? I don't see a better way to get in touch, I'm afraid.
Fast Eddie: Thanks for the offer. However, we now have two offsite copies of the backup, and multiple backup methods (binary and SQL) in place.
Citizen: It seems like every page has "This entry has discussion" at the top whether it actually does or not.
Adam850: (Feb. 16) I've noticed this too.
Fast Eddie: That's cleared up.
Citizen: The master list of uploaded images in Images We Miss was handy. Is that thing kept up-to-date?
Fast Eddie: A tool that prints out the image upload log is here. It'll be on the tools menu, after a bit.
Adam850: Is is feasible to have numbered Unknown Tropers? Some way to tell them apart if there are a bunch replying to a YKTTW and we need to respond to one?
Fast Eddie: Working on assigning IP addresses to UT's even as we speak. Coming soon to a YKTTW near you. //later: That's in.
Shay Guy: Okay, this is really weird. All the links in Die for Our Ship are pointing to the semi-nonexistent "MAin" namespace. Huh? (EDIT: Ditto Lying Creator - judging from the search that led me to examine it, it seems it was created under the MAin namespace. Checking DFOS now...no, not the case for that one.) (EDIT 2: Secret Identity, on the other hand, comes up under the MAin namespace on searches, but doesn't link to it in the article. Za?) (EDIT 3: Gah! Another one! Classify Super Grape with Die for Our Ship.) (EDIT 4: Erk...jik...throw in The Cape with those two too. I need to go to bed now.)
fleb: I think that problem is caused by someone visiting the page at a MAin/Foo URL, then editing it, because the problem went away when I did a do-nothing edit of Lying Creator.
Shay Guy: Okay...okay, yeah. Worked on The Cape, too. So I guess the search index is creation and the internal links are editing. Well, I guess I'm still curious about why, but eh.
Fast Eddie: I'll put in something that will flip that 'MAin' typo to the correct case. Soon as I get a minute. // later: That's in.
Citizen: I wonder if it might be useful to add to the Media Uploader a way to see all media that you uploaded. Like, someone removes a picture you posted, and you don't notice until the old version is already gone from history...
Fast Eddie: Yikes... actually, the media uploader does know file names and uploader names ... should be doable. // Later: implemented, after a fashion, here
Citizen: And an embarrassing truth is uncovered. I feel like I should be apologizing for something. =P
Willy Four Eyes: The "Checked out until" time when you click on an edit link only shows that there's ten minutes before a page becomes unlocked and all changes are lost. However, when viewing it outside a page, it shows that there's 20 minutes left. Is this intentional?
Fast Eddie: Nah. The 20 minutes is intentional. The message didn't get updated when we expanded the lock time from 10 to 20. //later: fixed.
Adam850: Latest Media seems to be not updating.
Fast Eddie: Fixed. Thanks for the report!
Ellen Hayes: This isn't really tech, but how about adding some examples of how to add a link (internal or external) right below where I'm typing now, wherein it says "TV Tropes markup extensions"?
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Citizen: It looks like launches to the Discarded YKTTW aren't being added to the discussion page...
Fast Eddie: Fixed that the easy way. Changed the message in Discarded YKTTW.
arromdee: I hope I won't get anyone mad this time, but I wish for a way to specify numbered list starting the number at some point the user specifies instead of 1; this is needed for Evil Overlord List Cellblock A and Evil Overlord List Cellblock B. Last time a feature was added that sort of does it but the lists you get aren't formatted the same as normal numbered lists.
Fast Eddie. We're as close as we're going to get on that.
That Other 1 Dude: Would the ability to add comments to edits be possible/practical?
Fast Eddie: Not sure I get this. You can certainly make a comment on a discussion page about the edit you did to an entry... Maybe you were thinking of something else?
Ununnilium: I think he's thinking of Wikipedia-style edit history, where there's a little thing that summarizes what the edit was about.
That Other 1 Dude: It's partly so when you remove an example that doesn't fit, it's doesn't produce a hit for the thing that series isn't.
Fast Eddie: So ... filtering out discussions from a search would do it. That's on the Wiki Search Wish List.
Cassius335: What about a "Cancel" button on the "edit page" screen (on the same row as "Add Media Categories Template", maybe)? I've lost count of the number of times I've opened up an edit page by accident.
Big T: (moved to top) That would be nice. It is so annoying to have to go back and reopen the page, and then unlock it. I've noticed a lot of people don't even bother doing that, keeping people locked out, leaving them waiting a full twenty minutes to find out they didn't even change anything. A "Cancel" button (or an unlock button on the initial checked out notice) would help alleviate this problem.
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Octal: [Edited after realizing the url changes when the keep date does.] I'd like the "keep date" for ykttw to be able to handle non-integer numbers of days (it looks like right now it just rounds up). I mean... I usually check it a few times a day, so it would be nice to be able to just check for things that are new in the past hour or so, if I checked it an hour ago. It'd be less to load, and it would make the "Haha, ykttw only partially loaded, so now when you reload it all the 'this is new' checks will be gone" thing a little less annoying.
Fast Eddie: I'll take a look at how tough it is to do fractions of day, but it sounds like a fix for what is bugging you would be to the "daNumber=" in the url to something real small — like 10 — and bookmarking that URL for check-backs. Cancel that. You were talking about YKTTW, not Changes. Getting punchy, here.
//later: New url command for YKTTW https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/ykttw.php?interval=1&interval_type=day_hourwill give you only things updated in the last hour. I'll fancy it up later so the messages all agree and you don't have to write a url command to get at it.
Octal: Cool, thanks! *tries the link* It seems to be getting the last... 14-15 hours' worth, though. ETA: ohboyohboyohboyohboy *rearranges bookmarks page to link to various lengths of time* ETA 2: Wait... now it's back to not-quite-working.
Fast Eddie: Yeah, there is a beetle in there. MYSQL date arithmetic is trickier than I wanted it to be. I'll shout when I think the code is right. //later: Okay, the https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/ykttw.php?interval=1&interval_type=day_hour <sigh> Still messing with it. style should be accurate, now.
//later still: I think that is done, finally. You can change the keep days to ".5" or ".1", etc. and get only things updated in the last fraction of a day. It rounds up to hours for those fractions, so both ".2" and ".21325" would look at the last five hours. It also handles 1.5 days and the like.
Octal: Sweeeeeeeet. *sets up bookmarks*
Citizen: Why does the behavior of --> keep changing? I'd rather it not increasingly shrink the text like it's doing now again... =/
Fast Eddie: Haven't done anything to it. Hmm.
- Test
Test
Looks okay to me. Could you demonstrate the problem?
Citizen: Check the Wiki Sandbox. It's shrinking there, at least. Or was when last edited.
Zephid: I don't know, I find that useful for quotes occasionally.
Ununnilium: The shrinking is annoying, IMHO. What I'd like to do to quotes is have it be like so:
...but shrinking like that messes it up; plus, the next level isn't indented.
Fast Eddie: Ish-kabob! It is acting differently for three different people. Must be a browser thing.
Citizen: Huh? I don't see any differences between what me, Z, and U are saying. Yours is just different because you have the greater indent above the smaller indent, as opposed to the other way around as with the other two tests... >_>?
Morgan Wick: "A browser thing" would only explain if all three people saw all three things differently. Z doesn't really describe WHAT they're seeing, and U MIGHT be seeing something different from Citizen but only says there's shrinking. And there's no real difference between Citizen's and Un's tests.
For the record, —> does shrink for me, in IE 7. I think the shrinking is desired for the first -> but not for each subsequent one...?
Citizen: It's just not parsing them correctly, instead nesting the indents inside each other...
Fast Eddie: That parsing/nesting issue gives different results in Firefox. Hmm. Well, one thing that can be done quickly is to take off the "smaller" font sizing for indents, while trying to figure out what shenanigans the parser is up to.
Ununnilium: For the record, what I saw was:
->Something
shrinks Something but doesn't push it forward;
-->Something Else
shrinks Something Else and pushes it forward a level;
->Something
-->Something Else
shrinks Something Else even smaller but doesn't push it forward.
Zephid: I was seeing exactly what Citizen was seeing.
Citizen: And I saw the same thing in IE... I think. I checked when Eddie mentioned browsers...
Fast Eddie: Okay, I think I've got it whupped. More dashes on an arrow head pushes the text further right, without progressively making the text smaller. Indented text is smaller than the regular text, but not progressively so.
Shay Guy: A lot of uses of the check mark on YKTTW are still check.gif instead of check.png.
Fast Eddie: Fixed. Thanks.
Citizen: What just happened? Suddenly the left-hand menu is collapsed, and all the pages have that darn horizontal scroll bar.
Fast Eddie: The menus were folded down into fewer items 'cuz we're trying to make screen real estate available for the ads 'cuz we're trying to improve ad revenue 'cuz we need to spend money to solve the "database hates you" problem. The horizontal scroll should be gone. That was a quick attempt on a layout that didn't work.
Shhalahr: While I'm sympathetic to the situation that brings the ads, the implementation leaves a metric crapload to be desired. (I'm beeing exceedingly polite in that description.) It's falling victim to the most important rule of web design: easy navigation. You've got an important navigational menu that's hard to find. Sandwiched between two ads. In some cases, it actually blends in and is nearly indistinguishable from those ads (depending on if they have "Ads by Google notes"). And in my case at least, it's not even above the fold—that is, I have to scroll to find it. If I were a new visitor, I would have given up on the site after ten seconds.
Fast Eddie: Moved it to the top. It was hard to find in the middle.
Tanto: Much better.
Shhalahr: Definitely. I wouldn't call it optimal, but it's workable.
Citizen: Is keeping track of all the images uploaded by each person still on the to-do list? I recall asking about this before, but Kizor's query on Seth Discussion about an image link that was lost to time reminded me.
Fast Eddie: Still on the list. //later: done.
fleb: On second thought, this isn't a wishlist type thing, more like a bug, so I brought it here. Apostrophes apparently have a fatal effect on search strings—search doesn't even indicate that there are 0 results. Clive Barker versus [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SearchWiki?text=Clive+Barker's Clive Barker's]].
Fast Eddie: That's in.
Big T: It's not that big a deal, but do you think it might be possible to get the Cut List on the upper-left menu? Typing it out might not take very long, but it would seem to make logical sense to be there
Fast Eddie: That's in. Under Troperville.
Citizen: Whenever I try adding Ask The Tropers to my watchlist, it appears twice: once with the proper last-revised-time, and once with "revision: [470] 07/18/07 at 01:54 AM by Mister Six"
Fast Eddie: That's fixed.
Tanto: Can we move the watchlist buttons back to the right? They look really bad on top of the text like that.
Fast Eddie: Just refresh your browser (hit reload or refresh). You likely have a garbled copy of the style document in your cache.
Tanto: Ah, much better. Thanks.
Fast Eddie: The Big Hitters
thing-y is accumulating displayable data as of today (27 MAR 08). This is a list of entries that attract hits to the wiki from the rest of the Web. As far as the Web is concerned, these are the real wicks. It's on the Tools menu.Tangent 128: Neat! But... what is this "Home Page" and why be it so popular?
Fast Eddie: The Home Page gets all the hits from people who are referring folks to the whole site using a link like www.tvtropes.org.
//later: Had to reset the Big Hitters list. It was missing some references and calling some things references when they weren't. So ... other than being completely wrong, it was working great!
Adam850: Seems like the launch list was truncated.
Fast Eddie: Someone restored everything they could. The restore button now only shows up for known tropers and if it is a discarded trope. I also zapped all the ancient items and made it so that the launch button only shows up for Known Tropers.
Fast Eddie: Thinking about putting tools in to automatically size images down to no wider than 250px. Better put it up for discussion first.
Carnildo: Some of us have huge, high-resolution monitors, and 250px images tend to get lost.
Fast Eddie: 83% of the pages are presented to 1024x768 screen. 5% go to larger/tighter. The remaining 12% are 800 or 640 wide.
// later: Wait. That is old data. Today's snapshot is here
◊. So ... ~85% are 1280 or less wide.
Citizen: A simple way to force text to appear below a picture without resorting to a "——" would be nice—that or a change to how "->" carries over. For instance, if you have a long picture and soon after a sentence followed by a bulleted list, the sentence will be next to the picture but the bullets that follow from it will be shoved below. Normally, I just use a "—>\\" and a blank line to shove the sentence below the picture as well, but that doesn't work if there's a "->" above it, like used with a quote at the top.
Fast Eddie: I think the issue you are referring to has to do with list items appearing next to images. I've made it so those items can now appear next to a picture. You may have to refresh your browser for it to work.
Citizen: Well, that's one case, and it's good to have that fix, but an optional way to have a picture, a quote (shrunk with ->), and then forcing all text below the quote to appear on the next line after the picture would still be nice...
Fast Eddie: Push the actual article further down the page? I'm against that. I wish there was some way to pull the "opening quotes" over to one side or the other so a reader could to get to what is actually being said more easily.
I feel like I'm not seeing what you are after. You can put text (captions) under a picture.
Cassius35: On a related note, is there a way to get the text wrap to work by paragraph instead of by line? It's a pet peeve of mine when text wraps underneath a picture in mid-paragraph. Looks untidy, especially when there's only a word or two left in the paragraph.
Citizen: What I want is an invisible version of "——", and without the double spacing. I guess that does mean pushing the entire article below the picture. There has to be a use for something like that somewhere. Like, if there are too many bullets, so that some are next to the image and some are below it. Like is currently the case with my contributor page.
Fast Eddie: @Citizen: You can split a list by putting in a blank line. By the way... Images don't have to be on the top line. Especially since width at the top is at a premium. After the first paragraph can work really well. Better, in a lot of cases, than at the top. @Cassius: Actually, that last bit can work for your issue, too. See: Alien Sky
Citizen: I'm not talking about splitting a list, I want to shove the whole thing down so that one part isn't at a different indentation (due to the image) than the other. Like my contributor page. Alien Sky isn't a good solution for what I'm looking for, because what if you didn't want the text to wrap to the right of the image?
Fast Eddie: Outlook difference, I guess. I think the words are more important than the pictures and want to get to them as quickly as possible. You want to shove 'em out of the way. Yikes. What would do with the white space around a picture in your scenario?
I'm also a little confused about the lists. Before we started this little round of changes, the list would always skip down to flush left, if they would have flowed in beside the picture. You'd like it back that way?
/later: I guess I'll need to see what you're thinking. Try [[hardline]], it will give you an invisible ---- wherever you use it — middle of a line, even. Let me know where you use it, so I can get a better idea of what you're thinkin'.
Big T: I don't know about Citizen, but I don't particularly like it when a picture is wide enough that only one or two words can be seen beside it. I personally would like to be able to center said image and have the text just skip over it. The Pmwiki we use was supposed to have that functionality, but I don't think it ever quite worked right.
If you're not quite sure what I'm saying, I'll include an html tag that would do the same thing:
<img align="center" imagename>
Citizen: Yes, [[hardline]] is exactly what I was looking for. I apologize for not being more clear. I used hardline for Citizen, Invincible Minor Minion, and a Cut List'ed page for demonstration.
Fast Eddie: Well, it's awful. Encourages wide-assed pictures that push the article right off the page. I'll yank out that hardline thing right away, before it spreads.
Cassius335: Would have been nice if the rest of us got a chance to play with it first. Might give us a chance to remove a few unneeded grey lines from places.
Fast Eddie: Okay, it's back on. I plan to dig my heels in about pushing the article off the page, though.
Cassius335: Thanks.
LATER: Ok, have a look at Transformation Sequence and Tsundere. I think hardline will work fine as long as it's used responsibly.
Fast Eddie: Here is what I see
◊ for the Transformation Sequence usage. I was able to visually skip the opening quote and spot the beginning of the article above the fold. The Tsundere usage pushes the actual article below the fold, which is exactly the bad thing that worries me.
Cassius335: *blinks at screen capture* Wow, your screen is a lot smaller than mine. As for Tsundere, the article is pushed down only slightly. On my screen, at least, the quote takes up most of the space next to the picture.
Fast Eddie: Yup. I've got this machine set to the most common screen resolution. If it looks like crap on this screen, it looks like crap for around 120 thousand other people today. See the resolution breakdown at the top of the discussion.
Cassius335: You're on 1200x768? Cause I'm on 1280x800 and I get this
◊ and that
◊ (not the whole screen, but should give you an idea).
...what's your Text Size set to?
Fast Eddie: Text size is (Verdana) 16, the most common setting among the viewing public. The res is 1024x768 that 264px of width is real important.
Cassius335: *shakes head* Browser text size. Should be under "View".
Fast Eddie: That is the browser text size. This is Firefox. I guess it would be "medium" if it was IE.
Ninjacrat: A bit of technology oddness... is there a reason why:
A) Bullet points seem to have stopped indenting consistently?
B) If you type into the search box on the new edits page and press enter, nothing happens? (Clicking 'search' still works).
C) The menu sidebar has turned blue and lost a bit of functionality?
Fast Eddie: The "indentation" you are talking about is probably the * thing, which as been restricted to two levels. Two reasons for that. The star has always made a list-item, not an indent, and a nested list 6 deep for no reason is a processing hassle. The second reason: It looks dumb.
The "B" item ... looks like an IE problem. Will investigate. The "C" item. The menu was made smaller.
Ninacrat: Hm! I'm using Opera, but same diff (to clarify: clicking 'search' works everywhere, hitting enter works everywhere BUT New Edits. I actually just thought the search was broken for a while.)
Regarding "A"... if it's a technical issue that's one thing, but I'd ask you to reconsider 'it looks dumb'. The change has made more than one formerly well-organised page turn rambling and hard to follow.
Fast Eddie: Would you provide an example page which now looks rambling?
Ninjacrat: The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard comes to mind. Because the indentation was lost, some of the longer examples now look like weird noodly screeds. (Do I suddenly expect a hedge-trimmer edit of the page from our esteemed administrator?)
Fast Eddie: No, I won't chop them up. The entry's noodly screed bits seem that way to me because they are noodly screeds. ;-) I'm biased toward thinking that an outline level represents a change from one topic to another topic which is dependent in some way on the previous topic. People started using an additional star to represent a reply to a previous statement. My present theory: if we are less accommodating to natter where we don't want it, we shall have less of it.
Citizen: Sometimes, the extra indents are needed. The It Just Bugs Me! pages, for instance, have a lot of the kinds of discussion-forms discouraged elsewhere. (Though one might say they aren't needed there, either.) Forcing everything to two levels just jumbles up a lot of existing pages and makes unneeded discussion harder to spot anyway.
Snake712: Also, you realize that limiting it to only two levels doesn't stop people from just adding their response as a second level anyway? And also I second Citizen, every single WMG looks weird now. EDIT: Actually, judging from some of the WMGs, you changed it to three levels already. Thanks.
Shay Guy: See also Crowning Moment Of Awesome Western Animation - the Transformers and Avatar sections in particular are messed up. Lists are nestable for a reason. 9_9 Personally, I think it was a mistake to remove the display functionality at all.
Citizen: See also Where Are You From... =/
Ununnilium: Yes. Indents please. Arbitrarily-nestable indents are needed. Believe me, I'm as big a proponent of clearing away Conversation In The Main Page as anyone, but getting rid of indents because of that is sort of like throwing out your pots and pans because you burned an omelet.
Fast Eddie: Up to three stars are serviced as indentation.
arromdee: It seems that pages with three stars don't show it until you edit the page and save it again.
Medinoc: We need to revert the YKTTW font immediately! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
Fast Eddie: YKTTW use exactly the same font/text size as the main wiki. Not sure what you're talking about.
Medinoc: On my machine at least, the YKTTW font has recently mutated from this
◊ to this
◊(particularly hurting when displaying italic text). And in fact, I think it was even worse at the time I posted.
Fast Eddie: Try refreshing when in YKTTW. I removed a thing that might be causing that issue.
Medinoc: Ctrl-F5 does nothing in Firefox. However, I opened YKTTW in IE 7 and it works fine there.
Fast Eddie: I tried another thing. Refresh again. BTW, it is working okay here in Firefox.
Medinoc: Ah, found the problem, and it was on my machine. Firefox mistakenly detected the encoding as "Shift-JIS" because of the japanese characters in the Samurai are Ninja YKTTW, and as a result it stopped using the normal font. I manuelly shifted to ISO 8859-1 and got the normal font again. Sorry for wasting your time.
BTW, which encoding does YKTTW "officially" uses ?
Fast Eddie: Ah! It is undeclared. Which is bad. Thanks! Will fix.
Tanto: The index bar has vanished from Dronejam, even though it's still in the markup. It displays in the history, but not the actual entry.
Fast Eddie: That's fixed. In case somebody runs into that again: It was a markup issue. Somebody had put a perfectly good wiki word inside double-curlies, with a space between the words, in the trail markup. That doesn't work, in trail markup.
Citizen: Trail markup? Anyway, Acceptable Cultural Targets isn't showing its index bar, either, and I can't see anything wrong with that or its parent. Acceptable Targets isn't showing one of its indexes, either, but maybe there's a curly-problem elsewhere?
Fast Eddie: That's fixed. Programming error related to first item in list.
Tanto: I have to admit, I don't get how the new markup works at all. I've been fiddling around with Most Common Superpower and its indexes and I can't get all three index bars to show up at once.
Fast Eddie: Working on it. There is some weirdness afoot. That particular problem is related to finding the entry for the page on the index when that entry is indented. A fix is on the way.
Citizen: When bullet points display to the right of a picture, they lose their indent, so it doesn't look right. Case in point: Do Not Want. With numbered lists, this is even worse, as the numbers are mostly hidden behind the picture.
Fast Eddie: Should be better, now. You may have to refresh your browser to see the difference.
Citizen: Bullets are fine (I notice you seemed to have increased the indent for everything), but numbered lists are still off. See The Game. Granted, it's better than them ending up behind the picture... And now it's back again.
Fast Eddie: Yup. I'm workin' on it. // Later: Lists just won't float left correctly. So, the answer is to not do that. I've added two markups to put a picture and caption on a float right. See: Do Not Want markup and The Game markup for the how-to.
Citizen: Did you overcompensate? Regular text is too close to the picture now, and caption boxes are longer than they're supposed to be. Rule of Cool, The One Guy, etc...
Fast Eddie: Tweaked it. Looks okay to me now.(refresh browser)
Citizen: Hmm... was there always that much vertical distance between caption and picture?
Fast Eddie: No, but the additional margination on the caption provides a more uniform edge for the text that floats in beside the picture/caption combo.
Big T: Neither one of those are appearing right on my end. The box for the picture is too small. I don't want to fix the markup unless other people are having a problem. Here's a small screenclip
◊. I'm using Firefox 2.0.0.14 in Windows XP, fonts at 16pt, min font at 12pt.
fleb: Page history has always seemed kinda weird and Black Box-y. What determines when an older edit falls over into the Eternal Bit Bucket? I've seen freshly-launched tropes without a beginning edit in the history, so it can't just be age.
Can we make it keep a minimum number of past edits? I just noticed that when I added a history-less page to my Watchlist, it still listed the time and perpetrator of the last edit, and I thought that the same information could get reused if it's already being preserved for Watchlists.
Fast Eddie: History is displayed for up to the last ten edits. It keeps more than that — all of it, in fact, now that history lives on a separate machine. The black box-y-ness you've seen lately has to do with dumping history just prior to the move to the new rig.
Ununnilium: Perhaps there should be a "See all edits" button.
Fast Eddie: Changed it so that the last 20 show up, if it has them. An option to show all is possible, but will require a little more hackitation.
fleb: Just wondering — I entered PmWiki in the search box because PmWiki was blue, but the Main/ namespace PmWiki was empty. I got 20,000 hits, so it quite rightly didn't let me make that search again. Does the search search the URL's for some reason?
Fast Eddie: The text of every article contains the words "pmwiki version:x".
Morgan Wick: Related: Does that mean we have 20k total pages across all namespaces? I'm wondering if we could whip up a tool for counting total pages as well as just standard pages (combine Main namespace with those namespaces used solely for disambiguation, and find a way to automatically subtract purely-index, Trope Talk, Just for Fun, contentless [ie, nothing other than Describe Topic Here], and other similar pages) and see where we rank on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki's List of largest (non-MediaWiki) wikis.
Fast Eddie; The Master List on the New Edits Tools menu gives a count of 20,858 today. There are 13,444 titles that don't have the word 'Discussion' in the title. This would exclude 'Describe Topic Here', as those pages don't actually exist in the database, but are generated on the fly. Many of our indexes are content, not just metadata, so would qualify for inclusion in an article count. There is no reason to exclude Just for Fun items, either. Whether an article is fun or not does not alter its article-ness. Call it 13K articles, roughly.
Morgan Wick: In order of how I put them, not necessarily in the order you responded: 1. That's why I said purely index. Video Game Tropes is purely an index. Applied Phlebotinum has actual content. The former would be excluded, the latter would not. 2. I believe there may have been some pages that actually existed but with little other than Describe Topic Here, as a result of the Great Crash recovery method. However, I now see a case for including WMG and Just Bugs Me pages.
fleb: Wondering about page history again— Is there a way to look back further than twenty revisions? And could there be a handy way to view a whole past revision of a page? (So that you can see the context of removed lines, etc.)
Fast Eddie: That's in, with a compromise. The default is now the last 10 changes. If you carea bout more, you can click 'all'' and get the whole magilla. Be prepared to wait, if you do so.
fleb: I just tried that on a few high-traffic pages, and it didn't give 'all' changes; just twenty edits instead of ten.
Fast Eddie: Yeah, the limit went back in, while we chase this performance thing-y.
//later: Okay, unrestricted history is back on the 'all' link. Still painfully slow. I'll have to rig a method of viewing history in blocks of say 20 or changes at a time. Until then, really deep, active histories may time-out and give you a white page.
arromdee: "my edits" has been seldom working for me. I've had several edits a day on most days, but it shows one edit on the 24th, one on the 21st, and then nothing until the 13th.
Janitor: Interestingly enough, it didn't record the very edit you just made to this page. The edit itself obviously made it in, recent-changes picked it up, and history has it ... but it didn't record it in the tracking list. Under research. I suspect rabbits are behind it. It is always rabbits.
Looney Toons: Oh, hi, Anya. I thought you were dead.
