From HammerWiki

Contents 1 Tech issues 1.1 Image issue 2 Special:Createpage 3 Usernames fubar'd 4 Monaco sidebar issue 5 Current issues 6 Account Creation issue 7 Quick Question 8 Sitenotice 9 WoW ads again? 10 Another ad issue... 11 Quick question regarding IRC 12 undersirable ad 13 Skin remix

[edit] Tech issues

Hiya Kyle,

I already mentioned some of this on my talk page, but I thought of a few more things and decided to formalize it into a bulleted list of wiki-technical issues that I think you are just the man to deal with.

• Sidebar addition. See my talk page for specifics. Resolved.
• Main Page title removal. See my talk page for specifics.

This is doable using javascript per this discussion, but actually what we recommend doing is renaming Main Page to something more search-engine friendly. Check out this page that Danny, our community development manager for the Entertainment team, created. If you would rather just hide the title on the main page, let me know and I'll start working on a modification for common.js for you.

• Performance. The wiki has gotten very sluggish tonight, to the point of sometimes refusing to generate pages. Do you perhaps run maintenance and/or backup tasks Sunday? If not, that is a concern.

We're aware of the issue and are working to improve performance throughout the network. I believe that most of the issues of immediate concern have been addressed, but we are actively working to prevent them from happening in the first place.

• GameWikis top bar. With HammerWiki now a part of Wikia, the GameWikis top bar is taking up space it does not need to, and it has broken links. I'd love it if you could make it go buh-bye.
• DPL extension. We've been talking about using the DPL extension for a news feeds for the front page. If possible, it would be nice to have.

Regarding the GameWikis top bar and DPL, we are working to move the GameWikis sites over to the Wikia code base so when that happens, you'll have some more control over the themes, and you'll get all the features integrated in to the Wikia code, like DPL, widgets, etc. I'll see if I can get a more concrete idea of when that will be happening; however, all I really know right now is that it will be "soon".

• Interwiki links. Currently w: is set as an interwiki shorthand for links to wikipedia, which messes up wikia's w:c: links. E.g. This should link to Halopedia.

Thanks in advance for any attention you can give these issues. » Bishop · talk « 19:50, 2 March 2008 (UTC)

Interwiki links issue added. - Pendrako talk 12:09, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Replies added above. --KyleH 16:09, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Cool, thanks for the help. About moving the main page, that's a good idea. But that doesn't mean we won't want to remove the title from it...however, I think I now grasp how to do both. Time to go to work! » Bishop · talk « 19:44, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

It seems that was all the nudge I needed, the process was simpler than I had imagined. Let me know if I made any mistakes, and thanks again for the advice. » Bishop · talk « 20:02, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

Wow, that didn't take long at all. Also, another small recommendation: for search engine optimization reasons, I would recommend changing MediaWiki:Pagetitle to be more descriptive and to include the full title of the game (or at least "Warhammer Online"). Check out the pagetitle on Age of Conan Wiki. —The preceding unsigned comment was made by KyleH (contribs) .

Gotcha. Slapped something on there. By the way, the .js solution I was able to locate appears to be a little non-standards-compliant and does not work in all browsers. I see in the discussion you linked that there, supposedly, is a more complex, more compliant, solution. But I can't seem to find it. Can you help? » Bishop · talk « 08:59, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

It works on both IE7 and Firefox for me, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. I'll do some experimenting and see if I can come up with a little more elegant (and compatible) solution. By the way, I noticed that you changed the page title. That should make the listing look a lot better in Google. --KyleH 01:44, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah yes. I forgot to post here after I figured it out. The js was no longer working because I changed the page title--it not longer matched the pattern correctly. I made a minor title change to resolve that problem. » Bishop · talk « 01:49, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

Oh haha ... easy answers are always good. --KyleH 22:45, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Image issue

Just recently, after the most recent maintainence (a couple of hours ago), all the images on the wiki started not displaying in their thumbnails - when clicking on a direct link to the file, I get a 404. Don't make me nervous Kyle ;) - it's likely you guys are aware of this, but in case you're not, yeah. ~ Revoran | talk 15:32, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Special:Createpage

Thanks, a really cool feature. :) I'm assuming we can edit either the Mediawiki page for each type of Createpage to change things like Zone information fields in the zone infobox if need be - or would we only need to edit the zone infobox template to change the Createpage - page? Sorry, my technical language is lacking, it's early morning where I am. ~ Revoran 20:07, 27 March 2008 (UTC)

You are correct, that you must update both the Infobox template (eg. Template:zoneInfobox) and the Createplate message (eg. MediaWiki:Createplate-Zone) any time you want to change the fields in an Infobox. If you don't change the Createplate message, Special:Createpage will not prompt the user for that field. --KyleH (talk) 21:07, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the info, one more thing I noticed is that when I follow a red/broken link, it takes me directly to "Editing Pagename" (where "pagename" is the name of the link) and not Special:Createpage, is this intentional as the feature is still only being tested? ~ Revoran 05:48, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

That is correct. We are going to start replacing the default edit page with that page for red links soon, but it will only be to a few wikis at the beginning. For the time being, the only way to access it is to head to the page directly. Once we have a few more templates in place, it wouldn't be a bad idea to link to it in a few relevant places. --KyleH (talk) 01:07, 31 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Usernames fubar'd

Hi Kyle,

It's recently been drawn to my attention that some user's usernames have been changed. I'm assuming that this is because of the merger between Wikia's and GameWiki's databases. Unfortunately, the resulting names have been extremely badly handled. User:Bishop, for example, is now User:GW-GW-Bishop, which is completely unacceptable. If you look at the discussion on his talk page, this is exactly the thing that he was worried would happen.

Can you (or whoever is responsible for this) please please please revert any usernames prefixed with "GW-GW-" back to their original versions. Thanks. - Pendrako 12:59, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Or if that isn't possible because the usernames are taken by other wikia members - at the very least give those with prefixed usernames the option of choosing a new username? (Not to butt in here, guys) ~ Revoran 15:19, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

D'oh! I didn't realize that there were any name conflict problems. We can rename accounts. I just looked up the Bishop account on Wikia, and we may be able to recover that for him. In most cases, we'd have to rename (to a name of the user's choosing). Either way, I'll post a page where anyone who wants a new name can request the change. --KyleH (talk) 18:35, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Monaco sidebar issue

Hey Kyle :) - After recently becoming a sysop, I edited the MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar page to take advantage of the increased functionality of Monaco, and well... i'll repost my comments in the Community Portal:

Browsing the wiki in IE7 (not logged in - i normally use FF3) I notice that the sidebar keeps changing (on each newly loaded page) between the previous version (before i any edits at all) and the latest version (after I finsihed editing it). This occurs in IE7 whether logged in or not. My first thought was that MediaWiki:Sidebar and MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar were conflicting, but MediaWiki:Sidebar isn't the same as the old version (pre-my changes) so logically they would have already been conflicting before I edited the Monaco sidebar - which they weren't. If no one can help me I might contact a Wikia staff member. Excuse the lack of a timestamp on my signature, it's currently displaying mountains of code that it shouldn't if I type it the usual way. ~ Revoran | talk

It tends to happen much more often on the mainpage (possibly all the time, I wasn't paying full attention) with the latter version displayting more often when I visit any other page - though the old version sometimes still displays. I'm guessing this is an issue with the skin? The er, sig is fixed, btw, so it won't mess up your page. ~ Revoran | talk 21:25, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

That's actually a caching issue. When an anonymous user visits the site, the server stores a copy of the fully rendered page on a cache server so that the server doesn't have to create the entire page again from scratch (it just serves that stored version). When you edit an individual page, it removes that page from cache so the next anon who visits will see the new page. Changes to the interface, such as the sidebar, do not trigger the cache to clear, so it will just take some time for the anonymous user to see the new version. Long story short: it's behaving normally, it will just take some time for it to update for all users. --KyleH (talk) 22:30, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

No worries, thanks for the heads up. :) ~ Revoran | talk 23:15, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Current issues

A couple of minor issues for your consideration:

• Since the arrival of the new skin, I am unable to stay logged in between sessions. Whenever I reopen a browser, I have to log in again -- which would be okay if it wasn't for the fact that I can't have monobook when not logged in...
• Performance. I know, we've been over this before, but HammerWiki still feels pretty sluggish most of the time. I was under the impression that was going to improve?

Anyway, neither is a major issue at the moment. But both would be nice to get resolved, just the same. » Bishop · talk « 19:22, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Heya! Both of these issues are related (our engineers made some changes to improve performance which created the login cookie issue), and we're working to resolve them as quickly as possible. --KyleH (talk) 19:24, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Glad to hear it... we have a poor situation in that the NDA for Warhammer Online has just been lifted, and there's a really important window right now where new information is likely to come in, in large quantities, assuming the site can handle it. If the wiki is unbearably slow, like it seems just now, we risk alienating a whole lot of first-time editors. » Bishop · talk « 22:10, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I know. :( The engineers are working on it ... I think we got most of the major issues taken care of (login cookies, etc.), but they are still working on the performance issues as well as a problem with Opera. I anticipate that the issues will be fixed soon. --KyleH (talk) 22:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Tonight, the wiki has become extremely slow, to the point that it's taken me over 35 minutes at my connection speed (nominally 500kbps, but Australia's appalling infrastructure and terrible ISP's limit it to 50kpbs download) to get to writing this comment. The main page was unloadable and recentchanges was pretty bad too. Not sure whether this is due to traffic for the HammerWiki:Hunt for Tzeentch promotion - but it's a big issue right now. Like Bishop stated, we don't want to alienate anyone. ~ Revoran | talk 18:24, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Account Creation issue

Hey,I was unable to create an account, on Hammerwiki, I am posting through a proxy server, would this be an issue? 220.240.224.4 03:47, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

What happens when you try to create an account? Do you see an error message? Using a proxy server shouldn't inherently prevent you from creating an account. --KyleH (talk) 03:58, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, just seems to have been an error, I was being silly and put my birthdate as today, once i changed it, its fine, sorry for the inconvenienceBkcokota 04:38, 10 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Quick Question

Hey, after changing the category in Template:Stub from Category:Stubs to Category:Miscellaneous stubs (i'm generally in favour of not adding articles to master categories) - I noticed it's taking ages (3 or 4 days so far, I think) for all the pages on which the template is used to transfer from the old category to the new one. Is this just a caching issue / server strain from all the transclusion? Don't spend too much effort on this question, - i'd just like to know if it'll eventually resolve itself or not. Thanks :) ~ Revoran | talk 02:24, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

There is some weirdness happening related to categories resulting from the MediaWiki 1.13 upgrade. I'm checking on it and I'll let you know when I find out more. --KyleH (talk) 20:47, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sitenotice

You might want to change the sitenotice to reflect that the Hunt promotion is no longer active. :) Aiiane 07:30, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

It should be fixed now - take a look at the sitenotice / mainpage if you wish. :) ~ Revoran | talk 08:06, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] WoW ads again?

Hey, it's come to my attention that there's a new WoW skin ad - while I won't go back into the old discussion on it, other than to say that even more new users who weren't here for the old discussion have expressed distaste at it (it's also fairly obvious we were singled out for the advertisement) - I was wondering why we weren't notified beforehand as it was stated we would be? By you or any other Wikia staff member? If you did notify us and i've missed it, or if you're aware of this and have started a discussion on it, kindly point me in that direction. ~ Revoran | talk 14:00, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Oh by the way, the relevant talk for this is on Talk:HammerWiki - at the top, i'll move it down at some stage. ~ Revoran | talk 14:08, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

I apologize. The long and short of it is that we screwed up. There were some problems with the ad when it ran the first time, so we had to put it up again at the very last minute. I apologize for not letting you know ahead of time, but even our sales guys didn't get any advance notice. It will run until the 31st, after which time you shouldn't see any more homepage skin ads for a long while. --KyleH (talk) 20:23, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

May we ask what the issue was? By looking around the other projects it seems the issue was restricted to HammerWiki, as none of the other sites that originally played host to the splash advert have had it put up again (at least none that I had noticed). More importantly, as visitors to the site have now begun voicing concern and anger by the presence of such ads, was it due to something we did that the other projects did not, and is there a way for us to ensure that it does not happen again? -- Heaven's Agent 05:25, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the gritty details, but I am told that we messed up the dates when it was originally supposed to run (see this note), so apparently we are obligated to run it again to make up for that mistake. I understand where you're coming from, and I'm sorry that you're stuck putting it up again. --KyleH (talk) 19:27, 25 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Another ad issue...

After viewing the main page logged out in IE7, I noticed that most of the expand-out naviagtion menu (ie: when I hover the cursor over "RvR" it expands to the right with Campaign -which then expands further and the new menu is completely obscured-, Keeps, Scenarios, Battlefeilds) are obscured to some degree by the animated bar ad at the top of our main page. If something could be done about this that'd be great, as we can't really have ads obscuring any content, or have users accidentally click on the ad while trying to navigate from the main page. And obviously it's not really reasonable for me to reformat the navigation menu just for a main page ad.

As far as I know the bar ad is only on the main page, so this only affects the main page. Though i'm aware that many of our users arrive at pages through google searches rather than visiting the main page, and that the main page has more detailed navigation further down, that's not really the point. It is our main page after all. And people often get their first overall impression of a wiki from the mainpage, those who don't just come here from Google.

Here's an example screenshot - feel free to delete it once you've seen it, or I can later. ~ Revoran | talk 18:15, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree that is a major problem. I have reported it, and hopefully it will be fixed soon. Thanks for pointing it out! --KyleH (talk) 18:17, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Anytime ;) Thanks for reporting it. ~ Revoran | talk 21:02, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Quick question regarding IRC

For creating an IRC channel for HammerWiki on the irc.wikia.com server, who in wikia would I need to contact? Or am I allowed to create one on my own? 11:01, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Ugh, just realised I could just as easily log on to #wikia and ask. My bad, thanks for all your help Kyle. ~ Revoran | talk 11:03, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

If you want a channel on the web IRC gateway for the Warhammer Wiki, I'll be happy to help with that. Is that something that you're interested in? --KyleH (talk) 17:48, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Actually, that would be handy - it would then be less fuss for users to log on if they can't access a client like mIRC etc. ~ Revoran | talk 23:49, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

As well, registering my nick and getting someone with op rights in the channel (as opposed to the bot that's op in there now) would be great. I assume you can direct me as to how to register my nick, and that fixing the bot and gettign a permanent op would happen when the channel itself was registered... ~ Revoran | talk 09:20, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

We have added #HammerWiki to the channel list on the IRC Gateway so people can access the channel without an IRC client. You can access it here. Unfortunately, the channel itself is not registered, and the bot that is in there now is the only op, so we have no real way of recovering channel unless someone has access to make the bot op someone. Registering your nickname, however, is easy: /msg nickserv register <your password> <your email address> --KyleH (talk) 18:32, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] undersirable ad

Hey Kyle, sorry about the absence, but when I finally got a little time on the net today I noticed an ad on HammerWiki's front page. At first glance the ad looks a lot like it's a part of HammerWiki - it's clearly intended to. It could trick someone into clicking on it at a cursory glance, which isn't really on.It is relevant to the wiki though, moreso than other ads, so props there at least. Here's the address of it: http://m1.2mdn.net/viewad/2172050/112629/warhammeronline-wikia-com_warhammer-bundle.png ~ Revoran | talk 08:08, 7 February 2009 (UTC)

Wow ... that's pretty ... clever. Could you email that information to community@wikia.com so our ad ops people can take a look at it? There is some more information about reporting bad ads here.

[edit] Skin remix

I saw you were the one who deployed the current skin (apparently done by a Christian guy), I'm redoing it with a dark background (forced choice, there's TOO many things in the game with a dark bg/clear type), you can check it in my monaco.css could you please get Christian or whoever is your resident designer is to check it and give me some hints/constructive criticism with it? --SirRandomage 10:52, October 12, 2009 (UTC)

Wow, that looks really cool! I think that one problem that you're going to run in to, however, is that all of the tables, infoboxes, etc. have been designed for a light background. That can make it a real challenge to transition to a dark background. Additionally, if a user has selected a different skin, such as Monobook or a different Monaco theme, the site may look strange if the tables and infoboxes are specifically designed for a dark skin. I highly recommend checking out the advice at Help:Customizing Monaco/Dark skin for information about how to make the wiki work well regardless of skin choice. Help:Customizing Monaco has some other general advice, but you seem to have a pretty good handle on it. --KyleH (talk) 19:29, October 12, 2009 (UTC)

Cheers, thanks for the ego-boost, but can you please fetch me a Fascist Art Director and get me some harsh criticism? :P

About the dark background, I got that covered, using classnames for table should fix it, colors for bright skins will be placed in common.css and the dark version in monaco.css --SirRandomage 20:37, October 12, 2009 (UTC)

haha, I love the card. Unfortunately, I'm not in a very good position to give advice, and Christian is overwhelmed (literally) by other projects. I'll see if I can find someone who can give some more direct criticism, but you may want to reach out for some more help. :( --KyleH (talk) 22:38, October 12, 2009 (UTC)

Dangit, well, put me in queue with Christian, I plan to propose this skin as official as soon as it's developed enough. Late help beats no help. :P --SirRandomage 23:08, October 12, 2009 (UTC)

One thing I noticed you missed, is that you should define .usermessage a and .usermessage a:visited. Right now, the background color and the link color are almost exactly the same, so it's difficult to see the link for wikis where you have new messages. --KyleH (talk) 20:34, October 13, 2009 (UTC)