User talk:Bryan

Searching

After the chat we had about the limitations of the internal search system of MediaWiki I took a look at wikimedia for search extensions. "Lucene Search" seemed to be the best bet, but after fighting to get the backend for it built and installed I learned it wasn't any better than the built-in system. (In truth, its worse. No ability to select additional namespaces to search in, requires manual dumping of the database and importing into the backend for indexing, etc...) All the code is there to support it, though. However I've shut down the search daemon and disabled the extension. I'm going to go back to poking at the MediaWiki internals to see if I can change the default search to include the User namespace. ShadowWolf 21:22, 21 July 2007 (EDT)

When Wikipedia's under extreme load it shuts down the internal search engine to conserve resources and instead present a wrapper for a Google search limited to the wikipedia.org server, perhaps you could use something like that? Wouldn't work until Google started spidering us, which I don't know if they've done yet, but with MediaWiki's search as poor as it is it may be an improvement. Bryan 02:42, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

There are several extensions on MetaWiki for Google searches. As far as I can tell from the stats page Google has started the indexing process. (look down under the "bots" section). I'll get to work doing the reorg so Category:Author points to author homepages and Category:Stories By Author is the stories themselves. (It's better if we stay ahead of the curve, no?) ShadowWolf 13:13, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Sure, though staying behind the curve also has its advantages (we'll know more about what the organization of Shifti actually looks like :). I'd advise lowercase titles for pages and categories where possible, BTW, it makes them more natural to link to. Bryan 13:18, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Now you tell me. I've already gone and finished the reorg. How about I put together a few templates to somewhat automate the categorization and linking process? ShadowWolf 13:39, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

If you like, though I don't really see the point of turning [[Category:Author]] into {{Category author}} and such. I'll convert over the category to lower case, I'm used to doing that sort of thing over on Wikipedia. Bryan 13:49, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

I was thinking more along the lines of {{AuthorPage}} adding [[Category:(Author Name)]] to the {{Title}} template. No need to go crazy with stuff like that. ShadowWolf 14:04, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

A potential gotcha you might run into: If you put {{PAGENAME}} on a template, it resolves as the template's page name. So every author page could wind up categorized in Category:AuthorPage. You'd probably need to take the category name as a parameter, or ask that every user substitute the template rather than transclude it (if you use "{{subst:template name}}" instead of just "{{template name}}" the text of the template page is inserted directly into the article the moment you click "save"). Huh. I see now that you already use this in Template:Title and it works the other way. I'm going to have to double-check my Wikipedia experience on this one. :) Bryan 14:28, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

I'm also not a fan of categories in templates because it makes it impossible to use the template elsewhere (such as on a help page describing its usage) without incorrectly categorizing the other pages it appears in. I really think we're not a big enough wiki yet to be worrying much about this, I'm capable of cleaning everything up manually. It only took me two minutes to switch everything over from Stories By Author to stories by author. Bryan 14:21, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Not a problem. But look at the hoops I had to jump through for the {{part}} template, which refused to resolve inside the table on the help page. ShadowWolf 14:31, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Searching and redirects

I think we might be able to sidestep the whole "search upgrade" thing by adding redirects - put on at Companion (Bob Stein), have it redirect to User:Posti/Companion and it should work, no? ShadowWolf 14:48, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Yup. Wikipedia uses redirects of common misspellings in the same manner. No need for the parenthetical (Bob Stein) unless there's some other page already called "Companion", though. Bryan 15:06, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Actually, I guess the parenthetical might be useful for people who are searching for "Bob Stein". The category would be a more useful place to find that but I guess people might not know to look there initially. Bryan 15:47, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

That was my thought on it. It would allow for a search for Bob Stein to turn it up. Though you are correct, the category page would be the better spot. ShadowWolf 16:29, 22 July 2007 (EDT)

Dragons of Histh organization

About the "Dragons of Histh" stuff... I'm not to comfortable with "Book the One", "Book the Two" and such being main namespace entries. I'm asking before I do anything, but I'd feel better if they were moved to, say, "Dragons of Histh: Book the One" or "Book the One (Dragons of Histh)". As well, does this "Kinglake Film Partnership" actually exist or is it just some fluff name that 'Loathesome Dragon' created to make the setting seem more important/famous than it really is? (And if it is just a fluff name then I think it should be moved to User:Loathesomedragon/Kinglake_Film_Partnership. If it isn't it seems like rampant advertisement and I will delete it with that being the reason.) -- ShadowWolf 00:03, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

I was thinking of moving those stories myself, actually. The names seemed overly generic and could be confusing. But as for the Kinglake thing, I don't see any reason not to leave it be; it's not likely that anyone's going to name a story that and it's not going to be in any story categories, so nobody will see it unless they're actively searching for it. So there's no clutter. Bryan 00:30, 5 August 2007 (EDT)

New Templates

I've noticed that you've been adding some new templates lately. However, the Help:Templates page still needs updating with the howtos and examples. Or are they still in the rough? --Buck 19:38, 2 September 2007 (EDT)

Not really, I just haven't got to updating it yet (and the external image template is covered in the image help page, which IMO is a more approriate place for it). I'll update tonight after I've done more work on Against Type, my creativity is tied up at the moment. :) Bryan 19:50, 2 September 2007 (EDT)

Against Type

Your ISP is blocking my emails again. I can't send you the current file. It's almost done, too. :P --Buck 22:39, 7 September 2007 (EDT)

Blacklists

In addition to the Captcha there are now two blacklists, one for certain username patterns and one for certain URL's. Username Blacklist can be found at MediaWiki:usernameblacklist and the URL blacklist is at MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist -- ShadowWolf 21:00, 12 October 2007 (EDT)

Code Update

You asked for it, you got it. A list of random pages is available via <randompages/> – it currently understands "style" and "class" as standard HTML parameters and can take a "count" parameter, which determines the length of the list generated. It is currently completely undecorated, so I think I'll set it up so it you can do <randompages>title text</randompages>

I also fixed up Special:Random to search NS_MAIN and NS_USER by default while not interfering with the operation of Special:Random/<namespace> —ShadowWolf 23:40, 20 October 2007 (EDT)

Update — added the title bar stuff. Two new paramters to go with it, "titlestyle" and "titleclass" – these control the look of the displayed title text. — ShadowWolf 00:00, 21 October 2007 (EDT)

More news. I've added the requested "Total Number Of Articles" bit to the categories page. Unfortunately it only covers articles and not subcategories. Doing subcategories is going to take another chunk of patching. — ShadowWolf 19:57, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

Unfortunately it's borked at this point and combining sub-categories and articles in one lump. I'm going to disable it for now and go back to the poking. — ShadowWolf 20:00, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

And I've fixed it. Problem is that this would never fly for MediaWiki - it's making a massive database query and iterating over the results to count the articles. On Wikipedia, for example, this would require getting millions of results and iterating over them - quite intensive. — ShadowWolf 20:35, 23 October 2007 (EDT)

другие языки / International

How to correctly add to the Shifti pages on Russian? I have some translation of your stories and some my own stories. 217.21.43.222 04:00, 20 December 2007 (EST)

Neat! Shifti runs on MediaWiki software, which is fully Unicode-compliant. It should be possible to just copy and paste Cyrillic text straight into the edit window and save it as-is, and you should be able to use Cyrillic in page titles and user names and such as well. Give it a try and let me know if any specific problems crop up.

Also, I'd be happy to see Russian translations of my stories posted here. It's something I'd never have imagined would ever happen :) Just make sure you ask other authors for permission before posting translations of any of theirs, though - copyright remains with the original authors and if they don't want translations posted they get the final say on that. Bryan 04:13, 20 December 2007 (EST)

Same here. BD's stories are excellent and if they have been translated into another language, it'd be nice to see them here so his international fans can read them.

As a side note, it's wonderful that the non-english-speaking furs and TF fans have found Shifti and are interested in participating. This is the kind of thing I was hoping for when I decided to host the site. ShadowWolf 04:24, 20 December 2007 (EST)