User talk:Daveh/Archive 2006

Archive of 2006 and older discussion topics.

Images

I have been working on Morrowind quests. I wonder if you are planning to database image files on the wiki, or leave them as links? I have been just linking them using external hyperlinks....

Thanks,

Steve

With the upload file tool disabled, is there another way to add images to the wiki? --Sstasino 12:23, 23 Feb 2005 (EST)

I've been dying to upload some images for the good of the site

Nevermind, this is great. --Rethenmiir Hlao

Upload away :D, just remember to tag images with their appropriate license and give them an appropriate name. --Aristeo 17:15, 10 August 2006 (EDT)

How would one go about doing that?--Ys 2:26 AM

Question has been answered on User talk:Ys --Nephele 03:01, 14 August 2006 (EDT)

Style Sheet

Check out the problem with style sheets: UESPWiki talk:Configuration#Style_and_Main_Template

Wrye 14:26, 3 Nov 2005 (EST)

There's a pretty importaint discussion going on at UESPWiki_talk:Style_Guide#Quest.2FPlace_Page_Standardisation that you might want to get involved in. (Edit: Look for the "Oblivion Look vs. Morrowind Look" discussion.) --Aristeo 23:40, 8 May 2006 (EDT) ^{(Edit on 02:32, 9 May 2006 (EDT))}

Delete category

Hi Dave, this category should be deleted, are you able to delete pages? Semolo75 15:26, 13 February 2006 (EST)

Done...all Sysops can delete and undelete pages. DaveH 00:41, 14 February 2006 (EST)

Hosting

If you are having problems with your server, we can host for free. More than fast enough, and bandwidth... will not be a problem (heh). I was intending TESwiki originally to be all TES lore, then peopel suggested I switch to oblivion stuff exclusively, so I did. Then I found this site, which is exactly what I was intending for TESwiki to be. Almost. Not quite enough plain game info on oblivion - anyway, we can host and merge if you like. There would be a single ad bar (see current http://teswiki.ws/ ) - but it is removable by anybody who clicks the [^] button, and the removal lasts through the browser session or one day, whichever is shorter (well it WILL last as soon as I get some time to fiddle with it lol). We're running mediawiki also (even though it may not look like it) but we are making at least one major improvement/change to the system every week, and are constantly improving things in general. In other words, we would take the MONEY aspect and TECHNICAL aspects off of you, and let you take care of the wiki itself - as you do today, just more time for that instead of fiddling with backend stuff (which is what we do well). All monetary profit is turned back into new equipment, however - so if you are personally making advertising profit right now, that would end )-: Peerless 03:31, 17 March 2006 (EST)

Thanks for the offer but the new server seems to be working well now and I have it for a year at any rate. We haven't really got a good linking system in place yet. There should at least be a page of links for each game which you are free to add to (or create it if it doesn't exist). Links are generally a major time sink to manage as sites go up and down and move all the time (I'd guess 90% of the links on the old link page are probably no good any more). DaveH 10:37, 18 March 2006 (EST)

I'm a bit confused - linking system? Peerless 15:45, 18 March 2006 (EST)

Back for a sec after seeing your edit on the oblivion page - why not split up a bit? You have all kinds of lore and stuff, which we were originally intending to have in addition to oblivion content; and we have all sorts of oblivion game info and are expanding it constantly. If you set up an interwiki link to use (you know, oblivion:Pagename links to our Pagename) then I'd be more than happy to set up an interwiki link to you (probably uesp:Pagename), then we could do oblivion game info and you could continue to do lore. I hate competition between wikis, it's against the spirit of things )-: Peerless 15:48, 18 March 2006 (EST)

One more thing to ask. I am absolutely enamored of your Special:ActiveUsers page - could I get a copy? Peerless 15:55, 18 March 2006 (EST)

The relevant files that were modified can be found in activeusers.zip. If you're running 1.5.7 and haven't made any changes to these files you should be able to just copy them over and the active users page will show up in your special page list. I'm no Wiki expert so while it seems to work fine there's no guaruntee it will continue to work in previous or future versions. Backup your versions of the modified files to be safe.

I'll think about your collaboration idea but for now I'm fine with leaving them seperate. There's always a certain amount of 'competition' between ES sites and that's a good thing. -- DaveH 16:36, 19 March 2006 (EST)

I really like that special page. I've actually done my own by now lol - I'll throw it up with the next slew of new stuff (watch the bottom of DDOwiki home I update it most often with new features) - anyway, I really think competition between wikis is, well, absurd. Its not the wiki spirit - and I like what you've done here! I just think for a new game it would be better to have a seperate wiki for GAME INFO for and one for lore - see what I mean? Because of the non-linearity of Oblivion, a straight walkthrough would be hard - we are working on a kind of non-linear walkthrough to match the non-linear game lol - explaining how to do given quests and get given things, then saying where you can go from here with links to the relevant pages and what not - all wiki style. Seems the perfect system for oblivion - also hoping to have info on the various in-game items and their stats and what not. Does that make sense? Then, at the bottom of relevant pages, a link to [[uesp:Pagename|Pagename lore]] or some such. Either way, I'm always open to helping with what I do best - if you need help with anything technical on the wiki end of things, feel free to ask - we're constantly modding mediawiki (actually in the process of porting it to Perl - euuuuckckk PHP ^_^). If you have a problem with vandal bots, I can help with that on several fronts also. Peerless 17:36, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Well, first thing for you to know - you didn't define a prefix in your mod, so it's all but useless until that is fixed - not that you were intending to distribute it, so that's ok. Anyway, I fixed that - then I realized it was calling two columns from the _text table that don't even exist - I checked with a fresh install of 1.5.7 AND a fresh install of 1.4.0 - neither one had a old_user column in the _text table. Quite strange, and I am wondering where your install got that pair of columns - neither an old version (unless this site has been up since the days of 1.3 and I highly doubt that) nor the very newest version has those tables by default. I am wondering if you got this mod (it is actually a mod not an extension - I had to do 4x Diff3s to integrate the changes instead of uploading and calling one file like I expected lol) from an external source and forgot that you ran some external SQL along with it. Anyway, looking foward to talking with you more - do you have some IM service? Peerless 18:27, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Site Status?

Is everything really fixed now? For a while, you had shortcut urls working. E.g., you could go to http://www.uesp.net/Tes3Mod:Better_Bodies, instead of having to type in: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/index.php?title=Tes3Mod:Better_Bodies. How about reinstating that?

Also, I don't think that site is under full load right now, since everyone knows it's been so flakey for a while. To see something closer to full load, it should be announced that it's back up on ES Forums. (Umm, as soon as ES forums itself comes back up.)

Active Users Heh, heh, heh...

As far as I can tell the server is acting fine. It did go down the first day probably just due to a huge amount of traffic it received (no apparent reason). Uptime is at +3 days now and memory usage seems fine. I don't have (or haven't found) site statistics yet, but the network traffic is at around 10 GB/day over the past week which seems pretty average. Announcing it somewhere is fine if I get a chance.

I'll probably re-enable the nice links. I just didn't want to change too many things too fast right away which was part of the reason why it took me so long to diagnose the problems on the previous server.

As for the active users I'm actually closer to you than I thought...hehe. -- DaveH 16:24, 19 March 2006 (EST)

Not sure if he's running off of httpd or lighttpd - working with these URLs is the sixth level of hell (after DNS which will always be first in my mind) in lighttpd. In httpd however, it's just a simply .htaccess modification - in that case there is now way it could break anything, and it increases server load almost none. Just my 2¢ ^^/ Peerless 18:29, 19 March 2006 (EST)

The site is using httpd like the last one. For the last one I did a rewrite rule in httpd.conf for the nice links mostly according to the MediaWiki documentation. Will look up the .htaccess settings for the same thing. I know technically it shouldn't break things but I've seen too many such things that do actually break things from time to time to be always suspicious. DaveH 16:41, 20 March 2006 (EST)

Update on the stats which I had installed today (Site Stats). We're averaging around 50,000 page requests a day which is slightly behind the 70,000 we had some months ago when the site was stable, so that sounds about right. DaveH 16:39, 20 March 2006 (EST)

Not bad. May I suggest Mint? It is far superior to that stat program. Hell, if you like, I can toss you an extra code so you can test it out before buying it - I ASSURE you it is worth the price (-; Peerless 16:56, 20 March 2006 (EST)

I only need/use the very basic stats so Webalizer is fine for now. I'll certainly consider it if I ever need more stats and once the Oblivion rush has died down a bit. DaveH 17:00, 20 March 2006 (EST)

Active Users?

Just noticed the ActiveUsers page doesn't seem to be getting updated. Anyone able to confirm?

Confirmed. I have well over 10 edits, and I don't appear on the list (at least the first page, and it ends at 8 edits, so I should). Peerless 01:19, 29 March 2006 (EST)}}

Confirmed. Which is a shame because it's a pretty cool page! We can get in a scrum over our ranking on it! --Wrye 01:55, 29 March 2006 (EST)

If you can't get this one working, I have a replacement also, which I think actually works a little bit better... Peerless 01:57, 29 March 2006 (EST)}}

Yes, I noticed this too recently (probably due to what you mentioned about the old_user fields...no idea where they came from but probably from an old beta I used once). Would love to see how its supposed to be done...either let me know they relevant SQL query or feel free to e-mail me the relevant pages. Thanks! -- DaveH 15:14, 29 March 2006 (EST)

The old_user table is even in a clean install of 1.6 - so I don't know what's up with that. Peerless 15:15, 29 March 2006 (EST)}}

Yah, it was probably used at one point but is likely that new edits are just not updating that column. -- DaveH 15:19, 29 March 2006 (EST)

If the wiki saves all historical changes then an SQL query of those changes would be a more accurate count of user activity, rather than having to rely on triggers off updates. If this is so, and someone can point me to a DB schema I can whip up a quick bit of SQL to show activity (perhaps also by month, last edit, or whatever). Endareth 21:02, 2 April 2006 (EDT)

That's pretty much what I did but I just happened to use two columns (old_user and old_user_text) that are apparently no longer used or updated. I have no idea where a DB schema might be found or even if there is one publically available. I'll see if I can fix it tonite. -- DaveH 13:55, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

UPDATE: I modified the active users page to use the Revision table in the DB. This seems to update correctly for recent edits now. -- DaveH 17:58, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

Help implementing Active Users page ?

I am looking for some code and doc on how to implement an Active Users Page in MediaWiki.

Thanks for any help!

Will Wagers Editor C# Online.NET http://en.csharp-online.net --Hyle 09:38, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Sure, its a pretty simple special page.

• Download the SpecialActiveUsers.zip file, unzip and copy the PHP into your MediaWiki includes directory.
• Modify QueryPages.php with the line at the top of the $wgQueryPages array:

       array( 'ActiveUsersPage', 'ActiveUsers'),

• Modify SpecialPages.php and add a line in the $wgSpecialPages array:

       'ActiveUsers' => new SpecialPage( 'ActiveUsers'),

• Modify Messages.php in the languages directory and add a line:

       'activeusers' => 'Active Users',

• Note there are other ways to add a special page which are better and don't require as many modifications to PHP files (it makes upgrading harder the way I've done it).

Hope this helps. DaveH 11:48, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Thanks a lot! --Hyle 11:12, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

Crumb Trails

Check out Crumb Trails.

Also, someone added a link to a Morrowind map image recently. I was going to chide him for the image size (1.5mb), but copyright question comes first, I think. --Wrye 19:26, 29 March 2006 (EST)

Yah, if its a map scan it will have to be removed. Bethesda contacted me a few months ago asking for the existing map scans to be removed. DaveH 22:12, 29 March 2006 (EST)

Map link deleted. --Wrye 15:53, 30 March 2006 (EST)

Does copyright jurisdiction fall under screen shots? Because some screen shots would be nice... --Jenic 18:30, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

Nope, screenshots are perfectly ok including composites of shots from the game or the construction set. So you could, for example, take a bunch of screenshots of the world map in game and paste them together to form a complete world map. This sort of thing has been done for all previous games without an issue. -- DaveH 18:33, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

Of course everyone remembers that any screen-shots are {{esimage}}, right? Ha ha, only serious. ⌈Uniblab 23:42, 30 November 2006 (EST)⌋

Sidebar

Dave, I made a few requested changes (from UESPWiki Talk:Style Guide#Oblivion_Trails_on_Tamriel_Pages) to MediaWiki:Sidebar. I hope the changes are okay. See MediaWiki Talk:Sidebar for explanation. --Wrye 22:28, 1 April 2006 (EST)

Last edit to your user page

Just so you know, your last edit to your user page produced this e-mail instead of the correct one:

Dear Peerless, the UESPWiki page User:Daveh has been created on 21:52, 3 April 2006 by Daveh, see http://www.uesp.net/wiki/User:Daveh for the current version. This is a new page. Editor's summary: testing edit count Contact the editor: mail: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Special:Emailuser/Daveh wiki: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/User:Daveh There will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless you visit this page. You could also reset the notification flags for all your watched pages on your watchlist. Your friendly UESPWiki notification system -- To change your watchlist settings, visit http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Special:Watchlist/edit Feedback and further assistance: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Help:Contents

It shouldn't be sending that mail for a updated page, that's the new page mail. Dunno why it did that, thought I'd let you know. Peerless 17:54, 3 April 2006 (EDT)

Mod project technical info?

There's been some talk on various forums of making a larger Cyrodiil, and now things seem to be finally getting somewhere. I know you hosted the DFRemake's technical info in the past so I was wondering if it'd be OK to do something similar for Cyrodiil. Garrett 23:34, 12 April 2006 (EDT)

Yup, thats fine...sounds interesting. -- DaveH 09:31, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

OK, cool. :) Garrett 20:06, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

Image scaling doesn't work

Check this out. I think you bwoke something. ;) Garrett 06:59, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

Ahh, strange. Perhaps it's because the image is very large? -- DaveH 09:31, 13 April 2006 (EDT)

No, it even happens with :Image:OldSiteBanner1.gif. And besides I've seen MediaWiki shrink larger images than this in the past. Is it something to do with a caching setting, perhaps? You may have inadvertently disabled thumbnail generation and/or saving. Garrett 04:34, 17 April 2006 (EDT)

I actually thought that images were disabled when I first came to the site until I experimented. If you can fix this, Daveh, please do so. If you can't, then it's no big deal as TinyPic will provide the same service. --Aristeo 19:05, 14 May 2006 (EDT)

Sysop?

Since you've been doing so much great work would you mind if I promoted you to a Sysop? While there isn't much stuff we need sysops for atm it would be nice to have a few more. -- DaveH 12:38, 20 April 2006 (EDT)

That's great! I definitely have been missing my powers. It would be great to be able to get things done without bothering Wyre all the time. :) Garrett 16:53, 20 April 2006 (EDT)

That's the idea... :) --Wrye 18:09, 20 April 2006 (EDT)

Excellent, thanks. :) Garrett 17:31, 20 April 2006 (EDT)

Too Many String Types

Re string type, we already had that covered with char[size], or if the size is one byte long (e.g., master list in saves), bstring. Let's stick with those rather than adding another string size. --Wrye 11:46, 25 April 2006 (EDT).

I don't see a problem adding more types as needed to properly fit the data (you could also technically say a zstring is a char[size + 1]). Either way it doesn't really matter as I've only seen it in once place so far (SCTX subrecords). -- DaveH 11:59, 25 April 2006 (EDT)

From Teen To Mature

Please check (and maybe add?) the (old by now ;) news, Oblivion got 'M' rating. ^[1] --Vook 09:39, 16 May 2006 (EDT)

The Forum Needs A Moderator!!

There's no active moderator and there's more and more commercial spam. I could take the duty (and I promise not to interfere with active users much) but if you don't want me, give the mod right to anyone active on the forum to kill the spam!--Vook 17:18, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

My vote for forum moderator goes to Vook, as it appears from his post count that he's more than earned it. --Aristeo 17:39, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

Don't get me wrong - I know myself enough to know I won't stay on the site long. A month or two more and something else will catch my interest. If you know someone who uses the forum often and will stay longer, choose them instead. It's just that the forum does need any active moderator currently, just to fight spam. --Vook 21:14, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

In that case, I hate to vote for myself, but I have the moderation experience required to do the job, none-the-less the knowledge about the operations of PHPBB, so training time would be 0. I'm also planning on being a member of this site for a long, long time. Only problem is my post count is also 0. But if I'm needed on the front, I'd be glad to help fight the forces of spam on the forums. --Aristeo 21:24, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

The above not being said to withdraw my vote for Vook, just more food for thought. Wouldn't hurt to have two mods, if it comes down to it. --Aristeo

Just an idea, but would turning off Guest Posting reduce the spam? (although I did actually chuckle at one of the jokes that got posted :P ). LeifHawk 21:57, 19 May 2006 (EDT)

Yes, but would require administrative (Daveh) privilages. --Aristeo 21:59, 19 May 2006 (EDT) _{<< Note: Not sysop privaleges, because the forum software and the wiki software are two seperate packages. --Aristeo 12:47, 22 May 2006 (EDT)}

Extra Resources

Need to decide what fits and what doesn't, what is a good idea and what isn't

IRC is a very, very helpful communication tool for us editors. We can have a discussion about an article in there and come to a decision much faster than we can by playing message tag on the discussion pages. The downside to this is hardly anyone visits the page, and usually I'm the only editor on the channel. On the other hand, the forum gives users the opportunity to ask questions, and talk about non-wiki related topics. In addition to the previously mentioned two resources, we might be able to sell "UESP.net" t-shirts to get you some cash to run the site. --Aristeo 13:15, 22 May 2006 (EDT)

Get on IRC!!

On behave of the crew on the IRC channel, we demand that you make an appearance for us on #UESP. Not only have we missed you, but I have never been able to talk to you and would very much like to talk with you "face-to-face". I'm on your channel just about all the time, and when you get a tad bit of free time I'd love for you to come down and say hi. =) --Aristeo 20:32, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

Sure thing. Sorry to have been absent so much recently. Things have gotten busier lately and don't have as much free time. I'll try to pop in later tonite. -- DaveH 09:14, 29 May 2006 (EDT)

=D --Aristeo 10:44, 29 May 2006 (EDT)

Oblivion:Glitches Semi-Protection

Hey Daveh! I requested that the Oblivion:Glitches be semi-protected a while ago. I did not recieve any type of admin response, positive or negative, since the time my request was made. I believe this is because the sysops have all taken a wikibreak at around the same time (May 19-24) and are unavaliable to fulfill/deny my request. Could you help me out? --Aristeo 16:26, 31 May 2006 (EDT) (PS. Sorry to bother you for the 318927489273th time ;P.. )

Do you still need this and if so, why? I've been watching it on and off and while it is a large page and needs organization its not that bad and recent edits have cleaned it up a bit. -- DaveH 13:12, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

Not needed anymore. I alphabetized the page, and Vook divided it up into sections. This let everyone clean the page easier and less painlessly. People have been cleaning up after new members, and thus the article has improved greatly. I heard we even gained some publicity with another site over the page. So no, semi-protection is no longer wanted by me. :) --Aristeo 00:51, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Image Map plugin

Hi Dave, in order to import the Redguards "Map" pages to the wiki, it would be helpfull to have the ImageMap Plugin ( http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/ImageMap ) available. Would it be possible to add it to this wiki? -- The Nerevarine 20:31, 3 June 2006 (EDT)

Same goes for Redguard's "Quest" Pages. A answer if you would implement the Plugin or not would be nice as i also have some ideas on altenative navigation solution for those maps. But as they would mean some work i have to undo if the (for readers and editors) more comfortable ImageMap is implemented, i put their implementation on hold until i receive word from you. -- The Nerevarine 08:26, 6 June 2006 (EDT)

Unfortunately that plugin is for the PhpWiki and not the MediaWiki that we are running so it would require significant work to get it working (would be faster to make something from scratch). Image maps have been brought up several times on the MediaWiki development but they have never seen to make it anywhere, which is surprising considering how simple and useful they are. I'll give it a quick look to see how, or if, I can add image map capabilities to the Wiki but no promises (give me a week or so to see).

I did look for Wiki plugins/extensions relevant to image maps but didn't find any. If anyone else knows of anything let me know. -- DaveH 13:22, 7 June 2006 (EDT)

Don't look any further. As that very unpatient person i am ;), i wrote a extension myself. It's already finished and i'm setting up an example in the next 1-2 houres you perhaps want to evaluate for implementation. -- The Nerevarine 16:18, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

LOL!!! --Aristeo 16:21, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

No, i'm not joking, here is the example page -- The Nerevarine 17:06, 10 June 2006 (EDT)

Ok, last issues fixed, you can get it from here -- The Nerevarine 10:47, 11 June 2006 (EDT)

More Info on Trainers

I have discovered that using a drain skill spell will reduce the price of training. This also lets you negate having to use master trainers. The skill will drop the price to 0 if you use a drain 100 spell of desired skill and then the skills you trained will be added on to your base total after the spell ends. I hope this is helpful enough to be posted. jason

Toadstool Hollow

The page for Toadstool Hollow needs some wiki fixing: it appears to be getting redirected to a page named "A brotherhood betrayed", which is completely wrong. First, Toadstool Hollow is not part of the "A Brotherhood Betrayed" quest. Second, the page Toadstool Hollow is redirecting to is somehow a separate page from the actual A Brotherhood Betrayed quest page. One consequence is if I try to edit the "discussion" page, it doesn't want to create a "Toadstool Hollow" talk page but rather a "A brotherhood betrayed" talk page. Is this something you could fix up, i.e. create a real Toadstool Hollow page, get rid of the redirect command, and delete the messed up page?

You and the other guy would probally get more help if you put those dicussions in a more general place. --Aristeo 10:47, 4 June 2006 (EDT)

I took off the redirect. Enjoy! --Aristeo 10:50, 4 June 2006 (EDT)

Weekly IRC Meetings

I had an idea to have occasional IRC meetings in the UESP chatroom. This will give us the opportunity to talk about the future of UESP, address the concerns of the readers and writers, and promote the IRC room in general. I have discussed this with JigglesTheFett, who is alright with this, as well as the community in general. Of course, I need your permission as well, and for you to post a date for the next IRC meeting on the site news on the Main_Page if you accept. Then, we could post the conclusion of the meeting as a sub-page for UESPWiki:IRC, and act accordingly. Please let me know of your viewpoints of this. --Aristeo 21:14, 15 June 2006 (EDT)

Sure, sounds like a good idea. Anytime is fine but I'm usually less busy on weekends on later in the evenings (+9pm EST). -- DaveH 17:42, 16 June 2006 (EDT)

I won't be avaliable on next Saturday at all, so do you want to schedule this on Sunday, June 25th at around 9:15 PM EST? --Aristeo 20:28, 16 June 2006 (EDT)

If I can barge in with a suggestion, when working with the Daggerfall Workshop IRC channel I wrote up a small 'outline' or 'guideline' to the meetings which I wouldn't mind letting you use or should I say I'd be honoured if you used it, I have two versions up a .wps version and a .rtf version. Please use it if you want! - Magnus June 16/06

Very nice. :D--Aristeo 22:46, 16 June 2006 (EDT)

"We will be having a meeting in our IRC channel on Sunday, June 25th 2006, at 9:15 PM EST (-5 GMT). This will give us the opportunity to talk about the future of UESP, address the concerns of the readers and writers, and promote the IRC room in general. I encourage you all to come join our conference, so you can voice your opinion on the imminent future of our project." There you go. Use that on the main page at your discretion. ;) --Aristeo 00:38, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Aristeo's Update

You have been given a cookie! Your dedication and diligence to the wiki has not gone unnoticed. A user has seen the progress you've made, and has given you a cookie because of it. Good work! The user had the following to say: You've been working hard on UESP, and spending a lot of money for hosting on it. You defiantly deserve a cookie for being such a good webmaster and writer. --Aristeo 16:11, 19 June 2006 (EDT)

Hey Daveh,

First, I want to thank you for making me a sysop. This has allowed me to do some of the chores that have been piling up. For instance, I've narrowed down the Category:To Be Deleted quite a bit by deleting some of those useless redirects. I even had to block a repeated vandal after an attack.

Second, I'd like to point out that the spam on the forums has been getting increasingly worse as time goes on. I think disabling guest posting would cut down spam tremendously, because all of the spam bots seem to be using guest posting as a exploit. rkMerafel, one of the active members of the forum, pretty much summed up the requests populating on the forum by asking for the following through IRC:

1. No more guest posting
2. A "general" forum (Most forums have a "Community Discussion" or "Member's Lounge" section)
3. Enabling Avatars
4. More moderators

I also want to point out that the UESPWiki:Copyrights page has still not been completed. We need a license that allows people to use and publish our information, but only if they correctly attribute that the information came from our site. I would be glad to find one for you, but considering the legal ramifications, you should probably be the one to do it.

Being the impatient person that I am, I created the copyright page for you. Because of the legal bearing of implementing it on UESPWiki:Copyrights, I'm developing it on my sandbox until it is ready. I picked the by-sa license because that's what some wikis use. The copyrights page should also contain something that mentions the "fair use" doctrine of the United States, which allows us to make walkthroughs and articles about Oblivion, and host screenshots about Oblivion as well. (I know the site is hosted in Canada, but the US fair use doctrine applies because Bethesda is located in the US.) --Aristeo 19:47, 28 June 2006 (EDT)

The Morrowind Main Quest section's improvements have been going very, very slow. I've been working on improving about one article a day and I always get distracted by something else when I log into UESP. I've also just recently had to go to Kentucky, and I've had a pilonoidal abscess which kept me off of UESP for a while. I'm going in for surgery on July 10th, so I'll have to probably fight my way back onto my computer.

I'm proud to be an editor for this site. UESPWiki shows a lot of promise, and a bright future. If there is anything else I can do to help, don't hesitate to ask.

--Aristeo 19:12, 26 June 2006 (EDT) (P.S.: I gave you a cookie a while ago. I replaced it to the right of this note.)

Semi-Editable Main Page

Quoted from the main page's talk page - I've made it so that the introduction of the main page is editable. That part of the main page is on a template called {{home}}, which is not protected. I've also made the main page so that it's difficult for vandals to detect this. The idea came from Wikia, so hats off to them. --Aristeo 00:36, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

I hope this is alright. :) --Aristeo 14:03, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

Yah, I noticed...should be fine, good idea too. -- DaveH 18:16, 27 June 2006 (EDT)

Not Paypal Verified

You might recieve more donations to help you run the site if your Paypal account was verified. People like me are paranoid about these kinds of things. Also, since you live in Canada, I want to ask you if you accept USD donations. --Aristeo 20:28, 29 June 2006 (EDT)

Your Task List, Comments From Aristeo

I was looking at your task list, and it looks like many of the things on it have already been done by you, me, or someone else. Here are my comments on it.

Task	Status
Database Backups: Figure out how to do daily off-site backups of the database. Have done a good deal on this and close to getting it finalized. Need to redo this for the new server.	(No comments.) Half-done. I got most of the automatic backup working but its still not working for some reason. Will look into it ASAP so I can stop doing manual backups.
Site Pages: The main site page, mainly UESPWiki:About and UESPWiki:Editing, need some organization and editing to better let people know what needs to be done and how best to go about it (for new users at least). Ideally some sort of todo list which can be checked off as things are done would be nice for specific items. Include a simple/short "statement of purpose" for the site.	Done, Done, and Done.
Site Map: We need a sitemap page that lists, in a heirarchy, all the main pages in the site.	See Special:Allpages for now. I'll be working on doing a heirarchy with the categories soon. These are fine although I was thinking about another Special: page which would generate a rough tree heirarchy of the site using categories. This is lower priority for me though.
Upgrade Wiki: Running 1.5.0 currently and will look at upgrading to 1.5.X sometime.	Buddy, they already have 1.6.7 out! We gotta get this baby upgraded! Will try to upgrade this week.
System Security: I need to learn more system administration in order to ensure the site is reasonably secured.	Learning how to be a Jimbo Wales isn't the easist thing to do. I would start by looking at how some of the bigger wikis, notably Wikipedia, do things. They have an administrators's how-to guide, which I read thouroughly after you gave me administrative privaleges. I've learned a lot already setting up the site and optimizing it best I could. Still lots to learn and I'm sure it will be an over ongoing process for me.
Copyright: Update the UESPWiki:Copyrights page.	Done. All it needs is your stamp of approval. Looks good.
Complete Old Site Edits: There are still a few pages here and there left from the old site to be input into the Wiki.	These needed pages become fewer every day.
Images: Need to upload images to the Wiki.	Do you mean from the old site? Yah, upload any image used from the old site into the Wiki (lots are done already I think).
Files: Need to figure out how best to handle file uploads within the Wiki.	If we update to the latest MediaWiki version, we can sort the images by license. We can also sort them by category, and give them better names. I don't like calling files images...they're not images, they're files! Not a big deal yet anyways as our file content is still low.
Style: Some pages could do with some style improvement to make it easier to read and find information. For example, the Morrowind quest walkthrough pages are decent, but I just feel they could be made to look and read better.	One of our biggest problems, it's being worked on extensively. Still very much improved though, and you can't build Rome in a day anyways.
Extra Resources: There are number of things the site could be providing (on-line chat/IRC, message boards, commerce, etc....). Need to decide what fits and what doesn't, what is a good idea and what isn't... Added site forums.	In my opinion, the IRC is the most useful of the three. No one seems to be on, unfortunatly. (Including you! Shame, shame, shame.) Forums are a good idea, but we need to find the right forum. There's an arguement about this currently on UESPWiki_talk:Editing. I will try to be on IRC more often...I'm not a natural born chatter. Forums are cleaned up and guest posting is disabled which should reduce or eliminate the spam.
Donation Page: Need a very simple/straightfoward page that can let people donate a few bucks towards the site cost (Paypal likely).	Your PayPal account isn't verified. Please verify it, I really want to give a donation. Thanks for the reminder. I had started to verify months ago and finally finished it this morning.
Hand-Held Games: Need to add sections for the ES hand-held games.	I've made some stubs, see the task list for more information.
PHP Caching: Install some sort of PHP cache system as recommended by the Wiki documentation.	We already have a PHP caching system. Yup and site performance is very good even with the surge of visits following Oblivion's release.
Link Pages: Need a page for each game (namespace) that lists external links, preferably organized in some simple categories (if there are enough sites to support them).	I'm working on merging all the game-specific link pages into one big link page at General:Links.

--Aristeo 19:34, 17 July 2006 (EDT)

--DaveH 09:43, 27 July 2006 (EDT)

Official Welcome Back Message

Mr. Humphrey! According to my calendar, today is the day that you're off of your vacation. Welcome back to the wiki! Let me know when your ready for me to share with you the current issues, debates, and progress we're having and have had on the wiki. I have so much to tell you, that it'll all probally make you want to go take another vacation! ;) --Aristeo 09:36, 20 July 2006 (EDT)

Archiving Your Talk Page

Ever thought about archiving old conversations on your talk page? It might make things seem less stressful, and cleaner. :) --Aristeo 16:53, 26 July 2006 (EDT)

If you want me to, I can do it for you. --Aristeo 23:42, 21 August 2006 (EDT)

Random page

It's been pointed out at Aristeo's talk page that the random page function will frequently link to pages like the book /Desc pages, especially since there are so many of these various subpages (all the books have /Desc and /Author pages; all the place pages have /Description and /Directions pages, etc). Would it be possible to modify the random page function to skip any subpages? It might also make sense for it to skip pages that have tagged as stubs, or pages that are less than some arbitrary length. These modifications would probably make the random page link much more useful for casual readers trying to see what the site has to offer. --Nephele 15:15, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

I oppose having stubs disabled from the random page, as I said on my talk page. I can understand subpages being filtered out, as most of them are one-lined anyway. --Aristeo 11:03, 17 August 2006 (EDT)

RSS feed

I've been experimenting with the RSS feed from Special:Recent changes today, and I've been encountering some problems. It seems that if I'm not logged into UESP the feed works fine, but once I do log in, I just get an error message:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: http://www.uesp.net/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&feed=rss
Line Number 1, Column 1:
^

Any ideas what could be causing this? --Nephele 16:18, 25 August 2006 (EDT)

DPL Namespace

I recommend that you userfy the "DPL" namespace that you're creating, as it violates the namespace policy and it doesn't have anything to do with the wiki or the Elder Scrolls series. The userspace is generally where notepad-like pages like these go, and is perfect for pages like these. The decision to do so, of course, ultimately lies with you, but I hope you do the aforementioned to help further the quality of UESP. --Aristeo 18:36, 27 August 2006 (EDT)

To Swear, or not to Swear?

A while ago, I brought up an issue about profanity and UESP. Should profanity be allowed on UESP, and if so, to what degree? The discussion hasn't generated much attention (probably due to lack of interest), not to mention a consensus hasn't developed. Without spending too much time on this, I'm going to give you both sides of the issue:

1. Only use profanity on articles or talk pages when absolutely necessary. Not only is profanity potentially offensive, but it could degrade the public view of the site and its members. Profanity should not be used in discussion, because it promotes personal attacks and could possibly offend others. Profanity lowers integrity, and moral and ethical principles and soundness of moral character should be the prime characteristics of every editor.
2. The Elder Scrolls includes games that have mid-teen to mature content, and banning profanity would just be silly. For example, look at Oblivion: Binge drinking, sex, drugs, blood and gore, and even mentions of necrophilia are present. The banning of profanity on pages that readers usually do not even look at would just be ridiculous! Of course, articles should always be as professional as possible, but who cares if someone throws in a couple "higher-level" words in a discussion?

Could you break the tie for us? Or at least, let us know what your opinion is on the matter and we could discuss it from there. --Aristeo 14:15, 19 September 2006 (EDT)

Anti-vandalism tools

I notice that the Wikipedia users make extensive use of anti-vandalism tools, like vandalproof, and vandalsniper.

I was wondering if there are any such tools that can be used for a wiki other than Wikipedia...? -- Lee Carre 22:52, 27 September 2006 (EDT)

We have a recent changes page where you can see every change made to the wiki. Wikipedia has tens of edits per seconds, so they definitely need anti-vandal bots. We don't have nearly that high an edit rate, so an anti-vandal bot would just take up bandwidth. --Aristeo 23:04, 27 September 2006 (EDT)

I'm aware of the recent changes page available for every wiki, but I also see your point about edit rates. I was just interested if it were possible -- Lee Carre 13:27, 28 September 2006 (EDT)

It's possible, but not economic. An external editor might be better for our purposes. --Aristeo 13:33, 28 September 2006 (EDT)

Things we have wanted to ask you about.....

This is a list of things that we've wanted to ask you about in IRC or around the site, but never got around to asking you. Please review this list and let us know what you can do.

• Could you enable users to upload .svg (scalable vector graphics) to the wiki?
• The thumbnails on the site are not generating correctly. I believe Nephele has e-mailed you a way to fix this problem. Could you install the fix?
• TheRealLurlock and Booyah boy would like their name to be changed, and Nephele has found a way to do so (see UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard).
• The "StringFunctions" extension mod that you previously installed has been updated to include some new functions. In order to improve the performance of the Template:Daedric page, among other things, it has been asked that you update StringFunctions.
• We were also discussing the inclusion of a new extension called the SpamBlacklist. This would allow us to eliminate spambots from the site.
• We have also discussed how turning on anonymous editing would make editing much easier for the less serious editors, as well those of us that monitor the recent changes page could be able to discriminate newbies and the experienced much more easily.
• Currently, anyone can mark edits as patrolled. It would make the patrolled edits feature much more useful if only administrators could mark edits as being patrolled.

Thanks! --Aristeo 21:54, 8 October 2006 (EDT)

Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Most of the above things are done as mentioned on Upgrade History. The rename user extension requires v1.7 so I can't install it yet. If just a few users wish to be renamed I can probably do it manually for now. DaveH 12:33, 15 October 2006 (EDT)

Excellent! I think it has been brought up once that the RenameUser extension requires v1.7, but Nephele discovered a way to reassign edits with a script (see UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard). Also, I noticed that you neither enabled nor rejected anonymous editing, so please let us know what your thoughts on it are at your earliest convenience. --Aristeo 12:41, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

How do the other sysops feel about enabling anonymous editing? I'm fine with it (I think) as the worst case is simply having to disable it again and do a bunch of reverts. I did add the SpamBlacklist extension but are there anymore useful extensions worth considering? -- DaveH 12:47, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

I haven't heard anything from Endareth since May. Garrett and Wrye have not been active administratively, so I'm sure they wouldn't mind. I have talked to Nephele and Lurlock through IRC about it, and they both agree that it could be made to work.

As for more useful extensions, I found one that Wikipedia uses called "Newuserlog" that adds a log of account creations to Special:Log and Special:Recentchanges. In other words, account creations can be monitored just like page deletions or page moves. In collaboration with the Checkuser extension, this could allow us to monitor people who spam the site by registering too many accounts. Only problem with this is that the link to the code does not seem to be working at this time. --Aristeo 13:09, 16 October 2006 (EDT)

MySQL error

Check it out: Oblivion:Allies_for_Bruma

I don't see it, the page works fine for me. What is the error that you are seeing? Could you copy/paste it here? --Aristeo 09:20, 21 October 2006 (EDT)

It's working now. I guess someone fixed it already.

.svg doesn't work

.svg images do not work. Nephele believes that the server needs to have some sort of program to make it work, so she'll have to tell you more about it. --Aristeo 23:17, 30 October 2006 (EST)

In the wiki settings files it says:

"Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) may be uploaded as images. Since SVG support is not yet standard in browsers, it is necessary to rasterize SVGs to PNG as a fallback format. An external program is required to perform this conversion"

Then it lists as the recognized conversion programs: ImageMagick, sodipodi, inkscape, batik, and rsvg. So I'm guessing one of those has to be installed, and then $wgSVGConverter needs to be set to whichever one you've chosen. It looks like installing ImageMagick may also enable a few additional features (mainly support for resizing additional image types).

The other relevant setting I can see is $wgAllowTitlesInSVG (default value false) which needs to be set to true if the server has problems recognizing the MIME type for SVG images. That's about all I could see from scanning the settings files --Nephele

Yah, I noticed the problem and installed ImageMagick last night. Unfortunately the test SVG is displayed in all black (on Firefox) and not at all on IE6. I'll continue to look into it though. -- DaveH 09:05, 31 October 2006 (EST)

It seems ImageMagick is working fine but the problem is it does not support all SVG features, including gradient fills which is why the information icon is displayed as black. I'll continue to look into it when I have time. -- DaveH 21:57, 31 October 2006 (EST)

feeds for special pages & server time

There seems to be a problem with the feeds

This affects both "new pages" and "recent changes", as well as both RSS and Atom formats for each page. As far as i can tell it's just because the XML declaration isn't on the first line. Has somebody been fiddling with the PHP source?

Also the server clock is a little off, you might want to install an NTP client. Server time affects HTTP caching as well as the "reported" time of events. -- Lee Carré 10:15, 6 November 2006 (EST)

Thanks. I've known about the RSS issue for a while but was never able to track it down until now. It turns out there was just a single blank line at the end of one the Wiki extensions. I'll also look into getting a NTP client (the ntpd daemon is not installed on the server for some reason). -- DaveH 10:51, 6 November 2006 (EST)

Good stuff, my feed reader is much happier, and so is the validator, only gives a warning now. Maybe an updating the mediawiki package will fix it.

i assume the issue has been reported to the author of the extension so that they can fix the problem and avoid others running into the same issue? -- Lee Carré 18:33, 6 November 2006 (EST)

Actually, the problem was that I copied & pasted the extension source into a text editor and probably just grabbed an extra line at the bottom by mistake. The original extension source code on the MediaWiki SVN repository does not have a space at the end. I've never used RSS feeds so if there are any other issues, major or minor, just let me know. -- DaveH 18:37, 6 November 2006 (EST)

Ah i see, that's fair enough. I love syndication, and use feeds all the time, makes life so much easier, so sure, i'd be happy to report any other UESP specific issues. I'm actually off to comment about the implementation of RSS and Atom in MediaZilla :p as you probably saw, things could still be improved, but at least 1.8.2 is using Atom 1.0 now (Atom 0.3 was deprecated a long time ago)

Anyway, thanks for the quick fix :) -- Lee Carré 19:17, 6 November 2006 (EST)

I'm still having problems with Google Desktop's Web Clips. It used to work some time ago, but hasn't been working or a while now. Thought you might wanna know ;) --DrPhoton 09:03, 8 November 2006 (EST)

I assume that's a feed reader/aggregator? If so, which format are you using? RSS is generally more compatible than Atom.

The feeds are valid, so maybe it's a problem with Google, try asking them about it, or reporting a bug so they can have a look. -- Lee Carré 01:46, 9 November 2006 (EST)

Forum spam reporting/prevention

If I can make a suggestion, since I've taken on the duties to moderate the forums (which is no problem for myself), I've found that it's kindof hard for me to find all the posts of spam. Since all I can really see is the topic names and the last poster (it's a lot of work to go searching for it all sometimes.) And I was wondering if you could maybe somehow come up with a report feature for the spam? It'd make my work a lot easier to maintain. So instead of searching every thread I'd just have to look at a list of spam. - Magnus 8:35PM (-4:00GMT) November 9, 2006.

From an regular user perspective, i'd be happy to actively report spam when i came accross it using such a feature, and i'm sure others would too (nobody likes spam) -- Lee Carré 09:00, 10 November 2006 (EST)

In IRC

Please come to the IRC room at your earliest convenience. A few of us would like to talk to you about the wiki. --Aristeo | Talk 19:56, 10 November 2006 (EST)

Is that directed at anyone in particular?

Does anyone know of a guide for an IRC beginner/newbie, such as finding a decent client and how-to connect/use etc. -- Lee Carré 09:58, 22 November 2006 (EST)

(x)HTML validation

The Main Page does not validate, and it seems the template for all pages is also invalid, even against the Transitional DTD

to reach Transitional validation:

• lower case elements and attributes need to be used (XML, and therefore XHTML, is case-sensitive)
• inline elements like <dl> and <dt> should not contain block-level elements like <div>, inline elements may only contain other inline elements, block-level elements can contain inline elements
• ideally use CSS instead of align="right", if this isn't practical, and the layout needs to be edit-able
• specify missing alt="Creative Commons, some rights reserved" attribute for creative commons image

that should be it i think, but obviously validity does not equal best practices and i can advise on them as well. Validation is the first step :) -- Lee Carré 22:54, 27 November 2006 (EST)

Thanks. I have the TidyHTML extension installed but don't always check it regularily. -- DaveH 11:08, 28 November 2006 (EST)

Transparent PNGs

I put this here in case you haven't seen it on Aristeo's Talk page. There are some possible fixes to the transparent backgorund problem in IE6, which are quite easy to implement and will allow us all to use PNGs without worries. Some fixes are here and there is another one here. --DrPhoton 09:07, 1 December 2006 (EST)

HTML tags

Can you enable the KBD, Q, ABBR, DFN, and ACRONYM tags please?

The utility of the KBD tag should be of obvious value to those who make any use of the CODE and TT tags, since TT has been established as console-output and KBD has been established as console-input.

The Q tag takes care of applying the locale-correct quotation characters (there are approx twelve of them!) in the user's browser, which would be both easier than type &amp; and more correct than forcing &amp; (the en-us and en-gb characters) for all quotations regardless of the user's locale.

The ABBR, DFN, and ACRONYM tags are quite important for us who are trying to write technical documentation on the innards and workings of the various games, like Daggerfall.

The requested tags do not pose any security risk, and indeed are merely formating directives to the browser (not executable directives like the SCRIPT or OBJECT tags).

Many many thanks, ⌈Uniblab 20:03, 3 December 2006 (EST)⌋

Anon Unblock Request

The IP address that you recently blocked requested that he be unblocked from editing. Since you didn't say the block was final, I assumed that you were blocking as the first person on the scene and we're allowed to debate the continuing of that block in light of recent circumstances. Therefore, I asked the community if we should let him apologize and ask for some sort of parole on the the administrator noticeboard. --Aristeo | Talk 02:30, 7 December 2006 (EST)

Nod...I just happened to check the site right after the vandalism. If its fine with the rest of the admins/regulars I'm fine with it as well. -- DaveH 09:14, 8 December 2006 (EST)

UESP problems

Daveh, a change is urgently needed to UESP's www.uesp.net/robot.txt file to allow the server to stay up for more than 2 hours at a time. At the least this line needs to be added:

 Disallow: /w/

See wikimedia for more information. I have sent you several emails about this issue. On the offhand chance that you are able to access the web page but do not have email access, I'm also adding this suggestion here. If you are able to communicate via the web page, I would be happy to provide more details here (assuming the site stays up long enough for me to be able to get back in) --Nephele 13:49, 12 December 2006 (EST)

Thanks...I just came to same conclusion after figuring out it was probably due to spidering by Yahoo. I made changes to the robots.txt file which hopefully will fix it. I've been travelling which is why it took so long for me to respond (I restarted the server a few times but didn't have enough time to figure out the cause until now). -- DaveH 14:14, 13 December 2006 (EST)

Thanks Daveh. I've sent you a few emails about what's been going on. The changes you've made to the robots.txt file should clear up the immediate crisis, but I'm still concerned about the underlying problem of connections not being released; a few of my earlier emails (sent Friday night) are about that side of the problem. I'd be interested in discussing that at some point; let me know if there's a good time/method of talking about it. --Nephele 14:28, 13 December 2006 (EST)

Daveh, when you get a chance the server should probably restarted again to prevent the number of permanent "gracefully finishing" processes (already at 14) from continuing to build up. Thanks. --Nephele 12:11, 15 December 2006 (EST)

Oops...I forgot to do this on Friday and I could not get Internet access on the weekend. I'll look into possible solutions but it likely won't be until the new year until I get a chance to implement something. For now I just might do a cron script that restarts the server every day or so. -- DaveH 10:50, 18 December 2006 (EST)

If you are going to be completely without web access over the next couple weeks, setting up a cron job might be a good idea. Even if you're able to disable the RSS feeds, they're not the only broken connections that show up in the logs. So I know I'd feel less worried about the server if I knew it would automatically get restarted once every day or two. --Nephele 15:39, 18 December 2006 (EST)

New UESP problems

We seem to have triggered a new significant problem with the UESP site (see new entries at UESPWiki:Community Portal#UESP Server Problems). The main symptom is that it has become nearly impossible to post any new edits. I suspect that we may be out of hard disk space, which is supported by the fact that purging image thumbnails has allowed me to post some edits. But I can't tell for sure, and can't do much to really help with increasing hard disk space. I'd really appreciate it if you could look into this and provide some advice. --Nephele 02:29, 24 December 2006 (EST)

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