User talk:Briess

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Version namespace links

It appears that the recent update has caused version pages to link back to mainspace, instead of linking within their own version namespace automatically. For example, 40d:Potash_maker links to Potash, while 40d:Potash is the expected link. --Loci (talk) 15:04, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Looks like you're correct. I'll have to investigate and see what the fix is. --Briess (talk) 20:17, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

This has been fixed. --Briess (talk) 03:16, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Double redirects to sections

Though the wiki software is supposed to handle double redirects, it appears to fail when the redirect is to a subsection of a page -- see calm, for instance. --Zzedar (talk) 03:40, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I will investigate, thanks for the report. --Briess (talk) 03:41, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Looking into it a bit more, it seems there are a lot of double redirects that don't work properly, even when they're not to subsections; fishing, for instance.--Zzedar (talk) 17:17, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, Loci pointed that out, but the original discussion was archived. It's probably a problem with the cv: alias (as this revision on Fishing redirects correctly). --Lethosor (talk) 17:25, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

That's been my hunch so far, but I haven't had enough time to fully flesh out the problem just yet. Please keep me posted if y'all find any other edge cases. --Briess (talk) 17:27, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

This manual page seems to be relevant. I just tested this scenario on another wiki (1.20.2) and ran into the exact same situation (with a double redirect from page -> foo:page -> foo:page2 failing). This may be a problem with MediaWiki as opposed to this specific namespace scheme (although MediaWiki seems to discourage double redirects, according to Special:DoubleRedirects). I'll try testing on 1.20.3 next, but it probably produces the same result. --Lethosor (talk) 17:41, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Actually, no double redirects seem to resolve, according to my tests, even in the same namespace. --Lethosor (talk) 17:43, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Double_redirects seems to state this clearly. I'm not sure if there is a workaround, or what it would be. --Lethosor (talk) 17:46, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

https://gist.github.com/locriani/e43abff805d5cdd6c4ac is the current settings we use (as well as the hack to allow in-namespace redirect) --Briess (talk) 17:49, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

There are a few that work; milking does, for instance. Actually, I did some testing: making a dummy edit to the first redirect seems to fix the problem -- I deleted a space from wrestler, and now it works where it didn't before. However, null edits do not work. Update: this change fixed the trigger redirect.--Zzedar (talk) 17:54, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Dang it, I bet I know what's causing it then. There are probably bad entries in the links table,and I may have to forcibly refresh the entire table. --Briess (talk) 18:25, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Completely late here, but I was wrong about the redirect limit, which you probably figured out ([1]). --Lethosor (talk) 01:43, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok, I've completely rebuilt the links and redirect tables, and thing should be working as expected now, although I still need to figure out the issue causing links to not stay within the namespace. If not, let me know! --Briess (talk) 19:17, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Nope, still not working -- see marksman, for instance. --Zzedar (talk) 19:44, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Well, dang it. Going to keep digging. --Briess (talk) 19:46, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Ok, looks like it's a bug in MediaWiki that broke max redirects behavior sometime in version 1.20.x and there is not yet a fix. I will continue to look for a way to resolve it on our end --Briess (talk) 19:55, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Rating script

A few problems with the rating script seem to have popped up with the new software (these are probably more related to User:Emi, but you seem to be more active at the moment):

• jsMsg() now fades out after a few seconds, preventing the automatic tests from completing in a few cases
• Clicking a checkbox propagates up to the message box, causing it to fade out and preventing any further action (and showing it again with $("#mw-notification-area").show() doesn't work, because the text is cleared when it disappears).

The easiest solution here is probably to display the interface somewhere else, instead of using the notification system.

For the time being, I can rate articles manually, but it would be nice if someone could look into this. --Lethosor (talk) 14:51, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I'll poke Emily when she gets back from vacation this weekend and we'll figure out a better way to do it. --Briess (talk) 18:37, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Parser Functions

A recent change seems to have caused them to stop working (but they're still listed at Special:Version). See DF2012:Giant lion --Lethosor (talk) 19:24, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Oops, I forgot to clone the repo into one of the servers. Doing that now. --Briess (talk) 19:27, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. Good catch! --Briess (talk) 19:29, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Categorization by template

The recent changes briefly made categorization by template work correctly. Then, another change broke it again. Category:DF2012:Flying now includes every creature page, instead of properly determining flying status from the raws. This new breakage seemed to happen about the time you resolved the parser function bug (above). --Loci (talk) 20:48, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

:psyduck: --Briess (talk) 20:49, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to try rebuilding ALL THE THINGS again, momentarily. --Briess (talk) 20:50, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

ALL THE THINGS rebuilt. --Briess (talk) 21:06, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Random pages

It looks like $wgExtraRandompageSQL was removed in 1.19 ([2]). The suggested option seems to be adding a hook, as shown here, but it's not clear if it can be defined outside of an extension (which might be easier). --Lethosor (talk) 01:37, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Yep, another thing on my list. Are you any good at php >.> I'm trying to figure out another issue and I usually avoid PHP at all costs --Briess (talk) 01:38, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

This looks like it works (at least for me in LocalSettings.php):

function randtitle(&$randstr, &$isRedir, &$namespaces, &$extra, &$title){
	$extra[]='page_title NOT LIKE \'%/raw\'';
	return true;
}

$wgHooks['SpecialRandomGetRandomTitle'][] = 'randtitle';

--Lethosor (talk) 01:51, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Perfect, I'll steal that. Right now I'm trying to figure out what hack we used to keep links within namespaces. :/ --Briess (talk) 01:52, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Implemented. --Briess (talk) 03:16, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

I just got Masterwork:Main Page... looks like that shows up too. Adding this line to the code above should prevent that (although it's not that common – I probably won't be able to reproduce it):

	$extra[]='page_title NOT LIKE \'%Main Page\'';

--Lethosor (talk) 20:45, 28 April 2013 (UTC)

Note

[2f2c73a7] 2013-04-14 10:08:41: Fatal exception of type MWException

[65465d61] 2013-04-14 10:10:19: Fatal exception of type MWException

Internal error

Jump to: navigation, search 

[14d33bba] 2013-04-14 10:09:59: Fatal exception of type MWException

Fixed --Briess (talk) 10:42, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Upload link error

This happens:

I'm unsure of the cause; it sometimes happens when I load a page and sometimes doesn't, and it even changes between loads of the same page. Something similar happens with tables of contents: where it should say "contents", it instead says "<toc>" (the table of contents for your talk page looks that way to me right now, though I suspect it'll fix itself after I submit this comment, since null edits to pages with this problem seem to fix it for that page).--Zzedar (talk) 18:07, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Hrm, I'll investigate. --Briess (talk) 18:11, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Should be fixed now. Thanks for the heads up. --Briess (talk) 18:14, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

It seems to be happening again (right now it's usually just <searchsuggest-search> in the search box). It seems to happen least often on dfweb3. --Lethosor (talk) 23:56, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

This looks like it's fixed now too. --Lethosor (talk) 20:59, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Anonymous editing

I noticed that attempting to edit pages anonymously produces the following error:

You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reason: 

You must confirm your e-mail address before editing pages. Please set and validate your e-mail address through your user preferences.

Special:ListGroupRights claims (all) users have the edit permission. Was this change intentional? --Loci (talk) 19:22, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

It was not. Let me fix. --Briess (talk) 19:22, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Fixed. --Briess (talk) 19:25, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Script reloading error

Was there a change made to the cloudflare settings recently? Because the cloudflare script is suddenly slowing things down a lot and tries to frequently reload the page or something.--Zzedar (talk) 02:11, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I'll turn it off. --Briess (talk) 02:25, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Rating script

It works! _{Somewhat -- it doesn't have any validation/suggestions, but it lets you rate articles}. --Lethosor (talk) 01:08, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Variable Extension

Sorry to bother you again, but could we have the Variables extension installed? I'm trying to cut down on expensive parser functions (notably #ifexists) by storing the results in variables instead. Thanks --Lethosor (talk) 23:06, 19 April 2013 (UTC)

Not a bother at all. I can't do it right now (maybe not for a few days), but I'll look into it. --Briess (talk) 18:50, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. It's one of the things I was trying out in my experimental version template (it reduced the calls to 5, from about 30), so being able to use it will definitely help. :) --Lethosor (talk) 18:53, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

The extension is now live. --Briess (talk) 01:53, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Great! I have the new av template ready, if you want to copy it over now. (It seems to work in previews, but feel free to test it some more) --Lethosor (talk) 02:10, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Cool. If you think it's ready, push it up, and I'll monitor the job queue. --Briess (talk) 02:20, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Complete set of tables of biome lifeforms

I have assembled a Word .doc containing a set of 5 tables for each of the 51 biomes (Creatures, Vermin, Grasses, Plants, Trees).

I did this for my own purposes, but thought it might be useful to the wiki biome pages. I have *zero* experience with wiki editing.

I wanted the tables to fit within a small vertical space for 'at a glance' viewing of what is native to a biome. The tables are are set up as 4 columns with alpha sorted names. Since in some biomes the list can become long, I used a '<name> (3)' format to collapse '<name>, '<name Man', and 'Giant <name>' into a single line.

The resulting set of 5 tables for each biome are all smaller than a single printed page.

The tables also include surrounding notes where they exist.

If you think this would be useful, I'd be happy to send the Word .doc file.

--- Grumalg ---

Load time

I've been having some major issues with response time lately - some pages don't load at all, sending me to the Cloudflare page (see the gaps in my recent edits). I haven't seen a lot of visible traffic, though, so I'm not exactly sure what the cause is (although the load times recently seem to have dropped to about 1-2 minutes). There are still around 300 jobs in the job queue (and according to the settings you posted on Gist, the run rate is set at 0, so I don't know how it would affect performance). --Lethosor (talk) 19:34, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I got the Cloudflare message again right after posting this (right now I'm on dfweb1, which seems to work, but I'm not logged in). --108.84.202.115 19:39, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Memcached barfed recently and that's why performance is awful. I've been working on fixing it all day today with no luck so far :( --99.35.186.141 19:44, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

That would explain why the API load time is about normal [3] (except it didn't work as often on dfweb2). Thanks for looking into this again, by the way. --Lethosor (talk) 19:51, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

I think memcached was just being slow to repopulate. Should get better within a few hours. Emi [T] 20:23, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

Looks like you're right - the load times for most pages have improved since I last tried. Thanks! --Lethosor (talk) 20:33, 24 April 2013 (UTC)

PHP backtraces

Hi, About 10 days ago I started seeing error's like this when accessing any page on dwarffortresswiki.org:

[46d7c07f] 2013-04-17 00:33:32: Fatal exception of type MWException

However on friday it started spitting out PHP backtraces that included database user/password and private IP details like this (I've masked the real details): URL: http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Civilian_alert (happened on any URL though).

 
Unable to determine IP
 
Backtrace:
 
#0 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/User.php(1723): WebRequest->getIP()
#1 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/Database.php(844): User->getName()
#2 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/DatabasePostgres.php(385): DatabaseBase->query('SET client_enco...', 'DatabasePostgre...')
#3 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/Database.php(644): DatabasePostgres->open('192.168.X.X', 'XXXX', 'XXXX', 'dfwikidb')
#4 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/Database.php(694): DatabaseBase->__construct('192.168.X.X', 'XXXX', 'XXXX', 'dfwikidb', 16, 'get from global')
#5 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/LoadBalancer.php(711): DatabaseBase::factory('postgres', Array)
#6 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/LoadBalancer.php(586): LoadBalancer->reallyOpenConnection(Array, false)
#7 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/db/LoadBalancer.php(507): LoadBalancer->openConnection(0, false)
#8 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/GlobalFunctions.php(3429): LoadBalancer->getConnection(-1, Array, false)
#9 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php(1002): wfGetDB(-1)
#10 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php(380): LCStore_DB->get('en', 'deps')
#11 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php(422): LocalisationCache->isExpired('en')
#12 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php(309): LocalisationCache->initLanguage('en')
#13 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/LocalisationCache.php(244): LocalisationCache->loadItem('en', 'namespaceNames')
#14 /var/www/dfwiki/languages/Language.php(386): LocalisationCache->getItem('en', 'namespaceNames')
#15 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/search/SearchEngine.php(345): Language->getNamespaces()
#16 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/User.php(1233): SearchEngine::searchableNamespaces()
#17 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/User.php(2230): User::getDefaultOptions()
#18 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/context/RequestContext.php(287): User->getOption('language')
#19 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/cache/HTMLFileCache.php(116): RequestContext->getLanguage()
#20 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/Wiki.php(515): HTMLFileCache::useFileCache(Object(RequestContext))
#21 /var/www/dfwiki/includes/Wiki.php(446): MediaWiki->main()
#22 /var/www/dfwiki/index.php(59): MediaWiki->run()
#23 {main}

At work I have two different Internet connectiosn I can use. One for our R&D lab and one for Corporate users. Using our Corporate connection renders the DF wiki pages fine but using the lab connection causes this error.

A remote user should not be able to trigger your server to reveal this info no matter what kind of Internet connection they use.

tweet me a direct message @mattimustang to get in touch and I can help you troubleshoot it if you need it.

The backtraces are an intentional troubleshooting step on our part for a user. I'm not concerned about the passwords - the nodes actually only connect to the database using SSL and the password is there to prevent mediawiki from complaining. These exceptions will probably be shut off shortly. Part of the reason I enabled these is because of the specific error you show here: the information you had is helpful in figuring it out. Thanks for the heads up, either way!--Briess (talk) 01:52, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Permission error

For some reason, the NR link (in the av template) on 40d:Laptop keyboard takes me to the correct page, but seems to think I'm logged out. This doesn't appear to happen on any other pages in Category:Missing Redirect, even on 40d:new plants. This isn't really a problem, since I have no desire to create this page (I was just testing template preloading). Still, any ideas? --Lethosor (talk) 22:58, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Ah, it's linking to dfweb3. I have no idea why it's doing that, but it definitely explains why I'm not logged in on that specific page. --Lethosor (talk) 22:59, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Never mind, purging seemed to solve the problem. That was interesting, though. --Lethosor (talk) 23:00, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

System Messages

I posted a suggestion here. Mind taking a look? --Lethosor (talk) 01:34, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't work... :( I'm not sure why, but it worked fine for me on 1.20.2. --Lethosor (talk) 01:08, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Another suggestion --Lethosor (talk) 20:34, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

German wiki links

79.206.195.135 (Gerugon?) set up a German wiki and was wondering if you could add an interwiki link for it. --Lethosor (talk) 18:42, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for misleading that is't gerugons IP that mine (Kupferdrache in german wiki, i have no account here yet, may be I should add one), but the german wiki is started by gerugon. Great that your replied so quick. I have another request could we get a full list of used namespaces so we don't have to break the layout, which will help us to keep articles up to date, also ist easier to link between the different language versions if the sorting is comparable, also ther is a DF translation project in progress to help this great game to get more attention (at the moment only as mod, but may be we cann get enough support to make it choosable in init.txt wich language should be used. I hope I didn#t forgot anything important. 79.206.195.135 08:08, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

File upload rights

Hi Briess. I'm currently trying to upload a couple of my images so I can add my new graphics set to the Graphics set repository. I'm an experienced Wikipedian (the real Wikipedia, that is, heh), so I was wondering if I should just wait for a few days for file upload permissions (like in Wikipedia) or is it exclusively granted by admins such as yourself?

Also I think the Jolly Bastion graphics set should be added there as well. --Obsidian Soul (talk) 03:00, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

I believe it's 4 days and 3 edits, although I might be wrong about the days. Briess should be able to confirm you, but it's probably easier just to make a couple more edits. In the meantime I can upload them for you, but I'd need to know which ones and where to put them. --Lethosor (talk) 20:10, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Hm, I forgot about the edit count to article space also contributing to the autoconfirmed rights. It's been so long since I had to do this in a wiki, heh. I'll just take a look around and see what I can fix in other articles, then upload them. I'll also take care of the Jolly Bastion set. If you know of any other graphics sets not in the wiki, it would be nice to add them as well for exposure. This is the primary resource when searching for graphics set and I found my first one here. Anyway, thanks. :) --Obsidian Soul (talk) 22:07, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Ok done. I've added the Jolly Bastion set as well and removed the empty sections.--Obsidian Soul (talk) 23:03, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

Awesome. Sorry I've been away - just to confirm, it is 3 edits to get autoconfirmed (I removed the 4 day requirement a couple of months ago). --Briess (talk) 05:21, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Offline HTML Dump

Hi Briess. I was wondering if it was possible for an HTML dump of the wiki to be created. That way the wiki can be viewed by DwarfForters like myself with limited/no internet access. I google'd around for mediawiki ways to do this and come up with this method using the DumpHTML extension. It would be greatly appreciated if this could happen. – unsigned comment by Bsilvereagle

From what I remember, size is a major issue with this wiki (due to the multiple namespaces). There used to be a dump of the DF2012 namespace listed in the announcements box ([4]). The link was removed, but apparently it's still accessible. I just downloaded it – it's about 10 MB, and appears to contain the latest revisions of all DF2012 articles (from yesterday, July 7) that I checked (it doesn't include articles from older namespaces, however). It's an XML dump, though, so I don't know how to make it work with various wiki-viewing tools. --Lethosor (talk) 01:36, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Also: daD generated a basic HTML dump (which may be slightly outdated): [5]. --Lethosor (talk) 01:40, 8 July 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't know those existed. It's looking like daD's dump is what I'm after, it's downloading now. I guess I should have used Google instead of the wiki search bar for searching for offline.... Thanks Lethosor.

Bot

I'm thinking of trying out a bot (not immediately, as it's still experimental), and was wondering if there are any policies regarding their creation here (would I be allowed to create a new account, do you need to test it first, etc.). --Lethosor (talk) 18:55, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Only policies are bots are for people I trust. I trust you. If you create a new account, I'll set it up with the appropriate flags (just poke me here as you know how wonderful the recent changes list is for new accounts >.>) --Briess (talk) 18:57, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks :) It does show up on the recent changes differently (at least the way I created it), but just to confirm it's User:LethosorBot. --Lethosor (talk) 19:32, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Done! I also made you (and the bot) an administrator. No reason not to at this point. --Briess (talk) 19:58, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks! :) It'll be nice to be able to do some admin-related things when I need to. --Lethosor (talk) 20:25, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Extension update

You might want to update Extension:RegexFunctions to 1.4.3 — the current version has some type of security vulnerability, which looks like it might allow running arbitrary code. --Lethosor (talk) 21:00, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the heads up. I've updated the extension. --Briess (talk) 08:49, 26 July 2013 (UTC)

A Chinese Version WIKI?

Hi Briess, I just a new player of DF. This WIKI site is awesome! It is pretty cool to do some translation when I am free. Is it a possible to make a Chinese version site of this? --Qianbb2004 (talk) 15:10, 02 August 2013 (UTC)

Polish Dwarf Fortress wiki

Hello there!

I would like to add a link to Polish Dwarf Fortress wiki, so that it will be possible to connect every article from this page with [[pl:Article name]] template.

Here is a website: http://pl.dwarffortress.wikia.com/ and here is a main page: http://pl.dwarffortress.wikia.com/wiki/Dwarf_Fortress_Wiki

Thank you in advance, --Marzecki (talk) 14:23, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

Spambot activity

Hi, I was wondering whether you could add a filter option to the "recent changes" pages so it could hide user registrations: whenever I want to review the most recent changes it seems that the only things going on are a hundred or so spambot registrations. While I know you're doing the best you can about that, it'd be cool to be able to hide these useless events from view. Thanks! 78.250.226.221 14:05, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

Alternative captchas

It seems, from the ConfirmEdit page, that ReCaptcha might not be as secure as other types of captchas. This wiki seems to have solved this problem by using FancyCaptcha. While it might not be as secure (according to the page on mediawiki.org), its code is part of the extension, which means it can be easily modified to prevent automated scripts from succeeding, even if they guess the captcha correctly (check the source of the account creation page). It seems to be reasonably effective - the change was made near the end of July, and only 3 accounts have been created since then. --Lethosor (talk) 14:45, 7 September 2013 (UTC)

I'll take a look when I'm over this nasty flu. --Briess (talk) 08:28, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I am no longer dying sick, but I do have a business trip and a bunch of work to catch up on. If I haven't gotten to this in a week or so, feel free to yell at me to look at this. Thanks :) --Briess (talk) 02:50, 18 September 2013 (UTC)

Italian main

Hi, I'm an user of the italian community, I'm here for ask to you if will be possible to create a main page with italian language, and after (subpages) the others page in italian.

In this moment the wiki use this link http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page but for the italian page we can use http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page/italia or http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page/italy or http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Main_Page_Italy

I'm here only for ask and for information, if it is possible.

I'll wait answer.

Thanks a lot for your time.

NB sorry for my english

(Comment:) mediawiki.org does something similar to this - I'm not sure how well it would work for some pages on this wiki, especially for pages that check the /raw subpage (they'd have to be rewritten to use the base raw page), but it's worth looking into.

(Regarding the Italian wiki:) There's a Polish wiki set up on Wikia - maybe this could be used as an alternative, and we could link to that (like the Russian/French links on the Main Page). --Lethosor (talk) 00:43, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

(comment): i see this www.wikidot.com, is a good site? (User talk:Jostino) 19:47, 20 September 2013 (GMT+200)

Wikidot is a pretty good site, as well as Wikia (which may be better, since it uses the same software as this site). Unfortunately, this site uses a lot of extensions and modifications, which would be difficult, or even impossible, to set up on a large hosting site. I'll look more into the possibilities of hosting pages in different languages here, which would be much easier to set up. --Lethosor (talk) 21:04, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Additional languages

It may be considerably easier to set up non-English wikis on this site than on other wikis (as I mentioned above, the extensions and patches we use here would be hard to set up, even on a MediaWiki hosting site). Using this site would allow complex things (mainly templates and functions) to be used without being copied over to other wikis. Also, foreign-language wikis would tend to be a lot smaller than the main English wiki (due to fewer contributors), so size shouldn't be a problem. A few things I've found that could assist with this:

• Some templates exist that could probably be ported to this wiki: Wikipedia:mw:Template:Languages uses a lot of #ifexist checks (which could be deleted for languages we won't use at all). Wikipedia:meta:Template:Languages is similar, but adds uselang= to change the interface language for foreign-language pages (which could also be specified in the preferences, so I'm not sure how useful this is).
• Extension:Translate seems promising (it's used on some WMF wikis) - I haven't looked into it much, but I'll test it out when I get a chance.

--Lethosor (talk) 21:31, 20 September 2013 (UTC)

Update: Extension:Translate is working very well - all that's required is adding <translate> tags around the page content. It lets any (logged-in) user edit translations by default, but pages need to be marked before they can be translated, which needs to be done by an admin by default (I'd recommend allowing at least autoconfirmed users to do this with something like $wgGroupPermissions['autoconfirmed']['pagetranslation'] = true;). MLEB is the bundle I'm using - it includes a few useful multilingual extensions, including Translate, Babel, and a language selector (which allows you to change the interface language without messing around with your preferences.) --Lethosor (talk) 17:26, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I like the idea, but I can't do anything about it until I get back from my business trip. It's probably about time to update the mediawiki software too - I'll look into both at that time. Thanks for doing the research on this! --Briess (talk) 17:56, 21 September 2013 (UTC)

Templates have been harder to work out than content pages - the best method I've found so far is using {{int:}} to change the displayed text based on the interface language (which I suppose is more useful to end users anyway). Unfortunately, this would require editing MediaWiki: messages, which normal users can't do... :(
Anyway, MediaWiki 1.22 should be released soon, so it may be worth waiting to upgrade (the only useful thing I've found in 1.21 is Ajax patrolling, which I've already implemented). Also, if you end up doing software upgrades, Extension:WikiEditor and Extension:CodeEditor (and maybe even Extension:Scribunto) could be useful (WikiEditor is extensible, so it would be easy to set up DFWiki-specific editing customizations - maybe adding a CP437 palette, for example). --Lethosor (talk) 01:49, 22 September 2013 (UTC)

Database error when editing an IP talk page

A database query syntax error has occurred.

This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "User::updateNewtalk". Database returned error "23502: ERROR: null value in column "user_id" violates not-null constraint

".

I'm not having this issue with 1.21, with a nearly-identical installation (except for the namespace-link patch, and I'm not sure how that could cause it). --Lethosor (talk) 20:37, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Can you make a branch for me with your code as is on the dfwiki github? --Briess (talk) 21:00, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

I meant that the error is occurring on this wiki - I haven't seen this issue on my own wiki, which uses pretty much the same extensions and settings (except it's using MW 1.21, which would make it hard to merge on GitHub). Fortunately, the problem isn't as severe as I thought - messages still get posted (see User talk:127.0.0.1), but it's still confusing to editors. I'm wondering if there are other patches you know of (besides the link patch) that have been installed on this wiki since the 1.20 upgrade, or if the database settings were recently changed. --Lethosor (talk) 21:55, 24 September 2013 (UTC)

Not that I'm aware of. The code on github is what the wiki is using, minus the extensions, I believe (I may turn them into submodules at some point) --Briess (talk) 05:52, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Pull requests

Do you need to do anything special to merge in changes I made on the dfwiki repo, or are changes I make to master automatically merged? --Lethosor (talk) 20:41, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

I merged them in, but deploys are manual. For some reason, I didn't get a notification of the pull request, I just fixed that so I do get them again. I'll deploy the change shortly. Also, I'm back from the business trip, yay! --Briess (talk) 05:51, 4 October 2013 (UTC)

Email Contact

Hey there! I'm trying to get ahold of the administration team to talk about a partnership proposal, but I cannot find the proper channel to pursue. If you get the chance, can you drop an email at kristophermsandoval@gmail.com and let me know the proper channel to go through? Thank you so much! I look forward to hearing from you! 24.10.3.183 19:24, 7 October 2013 (UTC)