User talk:ShadowWolf

how do you delete a page that has no content? I've had to modify a title of a story page and removed it's content, but the title still appears on my author page.

Please sign with the ~~~~ - but generally you have to remove all content and then kill any links to it you've made. That'll "orphan" it and then an admin can go and do the actual delete. ShadowWolf 15:43, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

Page deleted, Oberon. (Recent Edits is a wonderful tool!) - in the future, though, please sign all entries on a talk page using the ~~~~ specifier - it's what gives the nifty user link and timestamp. (and in requests for deletion, could you please include the page name ?) ShadowWolf 15:48, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

Sitenotice text

Where did you put the text for the donation sitenotice? Normally it'd be at MediaWiki:Sitenotice, but I'm assuming since it's not there you've inserted it into the source code somewhere. Bryan 20:46, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Never mind, I found it - MonoBook.php, right? I should move it out of that and into sitenotice, it won't appear for anyone who's using a different skin otherwise. Bryan 21:01, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Didn't know about the Sitenotice bit, so yeah, I did a bit of hacking and dumped it straight into the code from the primary skin. I actually had thought about dumping it directly into the Skin driver, but decided not to. — ShadowWolf 21:08, 3 January 2008 (EST)

There, fixed up. I pulled the code from the source and added a version to the Mediawiki:Sitenotice. "A Version" because I had to use the same custom tag I created for Shifti:Site support to do the button. (PayPal kinda requires it be a form with a crapload of hidden fields) — ShadowWolf 21:16, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Heh. I was just working on that myself. Good to know I was on the right track. :) Bryan 21:20, 3 January 2008 (EST)

This is odd. It appears that integral.org is in the spam protection filter, I can't save Main Page now. Bryan 21:37, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Not in any of the spamfilters I installed. It's not in the central MediaWiki list or in the site-specific list. I'll look deeper. — ShadowWolf 22:00, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Special:Version doesn't have any spam-blockers besides SpamBlacklist and none of its lists have "integral" anywhere in them. So I don't know what the problem could be... Everything I've installed is hacked to not bug people that are in the Admin group about ANYTHING, so I'm at a loss as to what the problem could be. — ShadowWolf 22:04, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Well, whatever the problem was, it seems to have passed. I should have saved a copy of the error message but I suppose it's moot if it doesn't come back. BTW, I hope you don't mind the little tweaks I made to the sitenotice banner. Bryan 23:38, 3 January 2008 (EST)

Nah, it works. And I've reverted the changes I made, since it wasn't the cause of Felix's problem. He saw the Captcha, but apparently either 1) Didn't know what it was or 2) Couldn't read it. So I've just gone and given the "Author" permissions group a Captcha exception. — ShadowWolf 23:49, 3 January 2008 (EST)

What do you think of the notion of putting a progress bar in the donation request, as demonstrated in Shifti:Sandbox? Wikipedia does it that way, and it might give people more incentive to donate in order to get rid of the banner. :) Bryan 01:23, 4 January 2008 (EST)

That's pretty nifty. Maybe have the bar in red, though :) ShadowWolf 01:30, 4 January 2008 (EST)

There, added a color parameter. Red's a bit garish, though, maybe something a bit more pastel? Bryan 01:43, 4 January 2008 (EST)

I hate that banner!! It offends me, I must destroy it by donating! *snicker* :)

--Devin 23:59, 4 January 2008 (EST)

Broken Discussion pages and Captcha errors

Not sure what's going on. When I click on the Discussion link on a page that doesn't have a discussion, it takes me direct to that page's edit frame (NOT the Discussion page), and I seem to have full edit rights on it. Something seems to have gone wonky along the way.

Pre-existing Talk pages seem to work fine (as evidenced here), though when I was trying to post it gave me an "out of captcha" error (When I tried to post it on the Current Events page that is.).

Oh and for the TF Types, you may want to add "Plant" (for TF's that are not animal based, but not quite Dryad based for the mythical category), and "Inanimate" (and maybe even Robotization or however you want to classify it).

I'm not quite sure if inanimate would be good enough as a catchall for a "living material' type TF (think X-Men's Colossus, and Ice Man, who turn into living steel and living ice respectively), or if we might want another type for that as well.

--Jetfire 13:33, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm working on this, but apparently the 'title' parameter isn't being properly set. When it's a red-link PHP is getting a URL that looks like 'index.php?title=XXX?title=XXX_talk&action=edit&redlink=1' and it's seeing that first 'title=' and not the second one. I'm trying to figure out how to solve that.

--ShadowWolf 15:26, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Turned out to have several causes, all related to various problems with a code upgrade and several other problems that cropped up. Since I have yet to see this problem re-occur, I'm going to call it 'fixed'. -- ShadowWolf 20:38, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Story submission captcha?

I just went to post a new story and after I hit the 'save page' button, it took me to an edit screen that had:

    Your edit includes new external links. To help protect against automated spam, please enter the words that appear below in the box

at the top. I looked and looked again and couldn't find any external links in my story. In fact there was no markup at all once I removed all the tab-indention on the paragraphs.

I'm all for automated systems blocking automated systems, but this sort of struck me as odd. -- Leasara 08:01, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

The regular expressions might have triggered on a non-link URL. But I cannot be certain, as this is the first report I've seen of it. (and sorry for the lag in the response) -- ShadowWolf 20:33, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Also, as long as I'm bugging you guys, any chance of getting an inverted color scheme skin? Dark text on a light background seems to be more difficult for me to read for any length of time than light text on a dark background. -- Leasara 08:10, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

The new 'shiftimin' skin took a while to get fully functional, but you could, likely, use "user CSS" to get the same result. Give me a bit of time and I'll see if I can get a "map" together for the CSS behind the "monobook" skin so you can override it easily. Alternatively you could poke at the CSS yourself, but...

There is a page giving a minimal explanation of CSS at Help:Custom css and we have a page open to user additions about CSS hacks at Custom CSS Hacks. I've been planning to do up a page explaining the various classes of the primary 'MonoBook' skin for a while. Guess it's about time to actually get to work on that. (and again, sorry for the lag in the response) -- ShadowWolf 20:33, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Question

...from a nubcake guy. Just asking, is a story allowed to be set in a video game universe (Halo: w00t!)? 'Cos I wanna write a TF story set in there, but I'm not too sure if this is allowed on Shifti. Hope it's yes, 'cos it's already in progress. Thanks! --Drake

We have no restrictions on fan-fiction, but if we receive a take-down notice it will be removed. (I run the server and would be the one facing the legal actions - so I will not fight a DMCA notice unless I am certain it is invalid) -- ShadowWolf 13:54, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

Great! Well, I'm pretty sure Bungie, the copyright holder, encourages fan fic, so I think it's ok...Note "I think". I'm not sure how they'd react to TF fan fic. Thanks for confirming (and once again for the fave I can't tell you how much that means to me)! :) --Drake

Most companies are open to fan-fic, because it helps with the popularity of their product. And you got the "fav" because I saw real promise in the original and in your willingness to take constructive criticism. Every other author in my "new authors to watch" section has shown the same promise, though they haven't all been available to take the constructive criticism that could be offered. -- ShadowWolf 20:24, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

RSS Feed?

Not sure if there's much you can do about this or if I'm using it wrong or expecting the wrong things. But I've signed up for the RSS feed on Shifti, and I'm not only getting the new changes soon after they occur, but I also get a bunch of changes that were already reported to me, often multiple times. --Jetfire 11:46, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

That's the way the RSS feed works. It works similar to how the 'Recent Changes' page works by default. -- ShadowWolf 16:25, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

True but it seems to be picking up changes it has already reported that haven't had any actual new changes done. For example, when Bryan was adding/updating the separator graphics, the RSS feed repeated it twice for each change he did, and that seems to happen a lot.

--Jetfire 17:54, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd look closer - there were, in most cases, two files uploaded/updated - and yes, there is a bug somewhere in the system that is double-logging some events. I haven't been able to track that one down, though. It's about time to take a look and see if there is a new version of the code available, however, so I can see if an upgrade fixes the problem. (Most notably it is the new-user stuff that gets double-logged, but I have no idea how this is impacting the RSS feed) -- ShadowWolf 18:37, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

I meant that as a general example thouhg; not that in particular.

Another example, I just got an RSS update now. I've been watching the feeds and had no recent updates from Shifti since this morning whence I'd gotten Jon's latest update and a few hours. The update I JUST got says there are 8 new changes, including Jon's After Hours addition again, Wolfy's New world addition and 4 entries for the RSS Feed discussion. (Despite this being the 4th entry now). All of the entries have a time of 4:03PM ADT. --Jetfire 19:21, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Odd... And I'm not really that knowledgeable about the MediaWiki code-base (yes, I can hack on it, but...) I have a feeling that the problem lies in how the system works. I think that it might be compiling a list of all changes within a certain period and sending it out. And if it isn't keeping a proper time-stamp on the items, that is a violation of the RSS spec, IIRC - since it is then pushing out duplicates without a way for readers to determine that with any degree of certainty. I'll sign up to the RSS feed myself and see if I can track the problem. -- ShadowWolf 19:39, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay - I've got my client signed up to the RSS feed for the Recent changes page. Let's see what this edit does... -- ShadowWolf 22:33, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Now I've seen the problem and it sucks. That one previous edit led to a major flood of '31 new edits' in my feed reader. Looks like I was right - it isn't properly date-tagging the entries. -- ShadowWolf 22:35, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Looked at the raw XML of the feed and it doesn't look like there is an error in it - though there might be. Let me go take a look at the RSS specs to see if I can figure out what is missing and/or not being set properly. -- ShadowWolf 22:39, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Ooooh... I think I just found the cause. Apparently the feed is claiming to be RSS 2.0 but it isn't putting a stable <guid/> tag on any of the entries. This tag is the method by which most RSS readers decide whether an item is new or not. The feed here does not have them. This is probably an oversight on the part of the person that wrote the code, but I cannot say. I'm going to go check Wikipedia to see if they have it there - because if they don't then the only reason that feeds of Wikipedia aren't getting overwhelmed is because of the volume of edits there. -- ShadowWolf 22:48, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Changed it to include the link-url as a guid - it should be genuinely unique to a specific page revision. Lets see if this fixes the problem... -- ShadowWolf 23:16, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Okay - I give up (for now) - because that last edit showed up with a massive number of others and the added <guid> tag doesn't seem to have helped any. Unless, of course, those <guid/> tags need a bit to start showing up... I really don't know. Might be time for me to look into cleaning out the cache table of the database. -- ShadowWolf 23:20, 29 May 2009 (UTC)