Dwarf Fortress Wiki talk:Centralized Discussion

C++ Symbols

Hi, Im try using "windows debugging tools" to get some useful information about some crashs since windows 7 doesnt have the so called "dr watson" anymore (which creates a dump useful for toady). For the debug info to be more useful, there is an option to use symbols file (*.pdb) I found some c++ symbols in the wiki but is it possible to make a real pdb file out of that? copypasta into a new txt file and renaming the extension doesnt seem to work.

Clarification on "Verification" of content

The policy is that all content from 40d must be verified before making it to the 2010 namespace. Whould confirming with the changelog that something hasn't changed be good enough to meet this requirement? If not, does this means that each feature must be tested in game? bongotastic #11:05, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

In general the changelog is not sufficient. For example, the changelog doesn't say that the DF2010:Archery Target is now broken, but if you tried it out personally before moving it then you would know that simply copy-pasting this is a bad idea. Not a small task I know, but long-term this is far more valuable. Any article in particular you were thinking about? Mason ^(T-C) 12:45, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

Thoughts?

Any thoughts on this page? Any potentially useful organizing ideas? Mason ^(T-C) 16:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I think this is a great idea. --Briess 17:03, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Missing discussions?

Are there any important discussions I've missed, or anything you'd like to discussion that you'd like a location to discuss? Mason ^(T-C) 16:58, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Will any articles be pruned away or merged? In the jump from 40D to v31 a lot of articles that used to be served well by tables seem to have become their own articles, which really clutters the place up and scatters information all over unfindably. Stones, ores, and gems are the most obvious, they really only need three tables instead of hundreds of articles. --Corona688 19:53, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Might I suggest responses go to the just created Dwarf Fortress Wiki:Article Consolidation talk page. I think this is a big issue worth discussing, and so it deserves to be discussed there. Mason ^(T-C) 21:34, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I wonder, is there a place here for a Future Versions Ideas page? I have many ideas for things that could be used in future versions of Dwarf Fort, but there's no way to get the word to Toady that I'm aware of, aside from straight e-mailing him...--Aescula 20:55, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not really sure if the wiki is the right place for something like that. I mostly say that because I don't think that he will look at what we set up for the wiki either. There is a Suggestions Forum that seems to be the best place for that kind of thing. I imagine if he looks anywhere he looks there. Mason ^(T-C) 19:53, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Template madness

Okay I was looking at DF2010:Native platinum and wanted to make the changes but the arrangement of templates make editing the sidebar incredibly complicated even for the fairly good amount of knowledge I have of the wiki.

This really doesn't need to be this complicated. Could someone explain how it works and more importantly why it needs to be so complicated. Mason ^(T-C) 21:12, 24 April 2010 (UTC)

I agree, we need a short tutorial on templates. This is shutting out IPs (and probably the majority of editors) through the backdoor. --Birthright 00:32, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Here you go. VengefulDonut 14:20, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Right. You make it obvious that excessive use of templates will make the wiki unusable for all but a small aristocracy. Plus we would still need a central place frequently visited by editors that links to those pages. Maybe link to the -still missing- short tutorial next to every template in the articles? --Birthright 20:57, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

You seem confident that you will get what you want. VengefulDonut 23:52, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Magmawiki skin feedback

I just decided to try out the new skin. I am using it for ten minutes and I already can't imagine using anything different, it's great!--SanDiego 13:54, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

If not consolidation, then what?

I don't seem to have a lot of support for article consolidation, and have abruptly been relieved of the time I had to try and help. Fine. I still insist the clutter of pages remains troublesome. Whenever your search is slightly off, instead of returning few to no results, it returns hundreds of irrelevant results. When I search for BODY_SIZE I don't want creature_standard.txt, grimeling size, mud man size, olmman size, fire man size, insert-material-here-man size or anything else's tags, I'm looking for info on the tags themselves. Same when I search "raws", I don't mean those of beetles, whales, walruses, sturgeon, stingray, etc, etc, etc. Redirects won't fix this until we redirect every possible thing that needs to be redirected, at all, ever, but that seems an even more exhaustive task than tables.

Is it possible to prevent the search from indexing these stub articles, or at least giving them less priority? The 'whale' page is going to be irrelevant to anyone not searching for whales... --Corona688 17:02, 1 May 2010 (UTC)

I agree with you that there isn't the support for consolidation. I do understand what you're saying. It seems like there are two possible solutions to your problem.

• Better organization: This is entirely possible, but very complicated. I've been trying to improve this but it is very difficult. If you don't have the time to work on this and improve it you'll have to rely on my inconsistent free time to make some improvements. If you have some good ideas besides "make it better" I'm all ears.
• Better search: This is much more difficult, and probably not exactly possible given the extreme constraints that is the mediawiki software. You'd be pleased to know that we (User:Briess and User:Emi) are working on developing a new wiki software specifically for DF. Details can be found here and here. I can only assume that they will make sure to provide improved searching as one of their goals, but if you want to post in the forum thread your wishes that would probably be useful.

Mason ^(T-C) 20:10, 3 May 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not the wiki that sucks, the search function is limited. You are simply asking too much. --Birthright 00:29, 7 May 2010 (UTC)

Gamelog Template?

We should add a "gamelog" template, so that bored players (like me) can easily locate other player's gamelogs about the fun adventures they are getting up to. I'd do it myself, but I have no idea how to. -Romeofalling 21:25, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

I don't know about a template, but I have been wanting a way to find other users who are "logging" their games on the wiki for weeks. Can we have a page listing such things, and feature a link to that page on the Main page? -- Maunder 21:49, 18 November 2010 (UTC) (now heading to look at Romeofalling's page)

Okay I added a new section to Stories. Anyone who is chronicling their fortress on the wiki, please add a link to your story here! -- Maunder 22:27, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Bloodline

Currently there is a bloodline page, a bloodline category and a bloodline namespace. I understand that community stuff is currently lower priority than getting the other content ready for players, but this should all be consolidated and made easily accessible. I'd be willing to do it, but should we go with the category or namespace? Calite 00:36, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Community Portal

Why was the Community Portal link dropped from the sidebar? We kind of need to have a reachable list of editing guidelines, especially given the "dwarfs/dwarves" conflict that's going on (where said page states that the proper term would be "dwarves" due to being used in-game). --Quietust 17:16, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

crayon art rewards-donation drive to illustrate the wiki

I found this topic on forums and as experiment added image to DF2010:Gorlak. Is it a great/good/acceptable idea? Is it possible that there is certain licence problem? Maybe it should go to infobox? I prefer to ask before uploading 30+ images. Kogut 17:14, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Adding pictures from commons

Hello, I am trying to add a picture of a Kiwiman I draw and put on Wikimedia Commons but I dont seem to be having any luck in being able to put that image on the Kiwiman article page using Wikimedia syntax. How can I add this picture from Wikimedia Commons? I am not authorised to create new articles on this Wiki so uploading the image directly here is not an option for me right now. --Discott (talk) 12:12, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

It shows up for me below the column on the right. (You should be able to create new pages now, since Briess changed the requirement to 3 edits, but it doesn't matter in this case since this wiki can pull images from Commons.) —Lethosor (talk) 02:00, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

It is showing up for me as well now, I suspect I just needed to refresh my browser or it was due to some sort of lag between the DFwiki server and Commons... or some thing like that. --Discott (talk) 20:22, 14 October 2015 (UTC)

Randomly deleted files?

I had uploaded sheet music for the two ingame tracks, and displayed them here. Mysteriously, almost all of them disappeared. For instance, if you try going to File:Song title2.png, and checking the history you can see I did upload it on Feb 17, so I'm not crazy. Is this as server problem or something? Brightgalrs (talk)

And actually something similar happened with File:Intro_movie_1.gif as well. Brightgalrs (talk) 04:41, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

Nevermind, a quick ?action=purge and everything is fine. Brightgalrs (talk) 04:43, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

.SVG problems?

File:Translation Icon.svg Does anyone else see the errors in this file page? Brightgalrs (talk) 03:54, 15 November 2015 (UTC)

I do.CLA (talk) 17:06, 16 November 2015 (UTC)

Briess says this is fixed: https://github.com/DF-Wiki/DF-Wiki/issues/6. That's probably a good place to report issues in the future since all of us should notice (and email notifications aren't broken). —Lethosor (talk) 00:04, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Multiple redirects leads to incorrect namespace

There appears to be an issue wherein navigating to a page by means of multiple redirects puts you on the wrong namespace. For example, when going to Herbalist this correctly automatically redirects to DF2014:Herbalist. Whereas if you go to Herbalism, that page appears to be a manual redirect to Herbalist (which should take you to the DF2014 namespace) but instead you end up being taken to v0.34:Herbalist. The behaviour of the automatic redirect is not consistent when reached via an intermediate manual redirect page. The same problem affects Sweet_Pod and probably many other pages. --Morlark (talk) 22:43, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Yes; the wiki software (and the internet in general) handles moved resources...poorly. My suggested fix is to avoid moving resources.--Loci (talk) 04:28, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Wait, are you thinking this applies to pages that were moved at some point with Special:MovePage, or just pages that were copied over by a bot? All of the DF2014 pages fall into the latter category, and should behave pretty normally, but it's entirely possible that there's some weirdness with moved pages (the former category) that I'm not aware of. It could just be issues with double redirects, though, since those seem to be the only pages I've noticed issues on. —Lethosor (talk) 21:56, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

By "moved" I meant "no longer at the same URL". All the external links, the Google indexes, and even the wiki software itself don't handle resources that are at a different URL gracefully.--Loci (talk) 03:19, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

As far as the wiki software is concerned, DF2014:Cat and DF2014:Dog are equally different from v0.34:Cat, at least internally, because we effectively created brand-new DF2014 pages and just copied over the contents from v0.34 articles. The Google issues are annoying, and I think Briess was looking into a way to weight current pages more heavily, but I don't know if that ended up being possible or not. As far as I can tell, the chief issue within the wiki is the one Morlark pointed out, with redirect chains not ending up in the right namespace (it's probably due to the auto-redirect extension, but none of us have been able to figure out why - as far as we can tell, we changed everything that was necessary to change, and editing the problematic redirects tends to fix them, but there's absolutely no reason why they should be cached for this long or anything). —Lethosor (talk) 17:40, 6 March 2016 (UTC)

Creating, copying, wiki-moving, etc. are all equivalent as far as nearly everything is concerned. So you copied v0.34:Cat to DF2014:Cat. Meanwhile Main:Kitty, which used to redirect to Main:Cat then to v0.34:Cat... still redirects to v0.34:Cat. Even though it's now nearly 4 years out of date. And will continue to do so until someone goes in and manually fixes it. Unfortunately, Google is even less forgiving--you can't go in and manually tell Google "Hey, we want you to point to these new pages now". No matter how you did it, you're still changing the URL that you want things to link to by default, and that still doesn't work well.--Loci (talk) 18:20, 6 March 2016 (UTC)