Difference between revisions of "NetHackWiki:Community Portal"

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::::::Cool, that fixed it.  Thanks! -[[User:Ion frigate|Ion frigate]] 19:38, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
 
::::::Cool, that fixed it.  Thanks! -[[User:Ion frigate|Ion frigate]] 19:38, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
  
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::::::Actually, I was talking more about putting that style in [[MediaWiki:Commons.css]] so it applies to everybody.  Which I've just done.  --[[User:Ilmari Karonen|Ilmari Karonen]] 18:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
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::::::Actually, I was talking more about putting that style in [[MediaWiki:Common.css]] so it applies to everybody.  Which I've just done.  --[[User:Ilmari Karonen|Ilmari Karonen]] 18:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)
  
 
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Revision as of 18:41, 1 December 2010

NetHackWiki

Welcome! Use this page to discuss general topics with NetHackWiki members. If you want to discuss a topic that is specifically about NetHack, please consider discussing it at Ask an expert.

Another way to contact NetHackWiki is to leave comments on the talk pages of individual users.

Other NetHack communities include:

Archives of this page: 1, 2, 3, 4

Start a new section on the bottom of this page for each topic.

Post a new section

Watchlists missing on new wiki

If you just came here from Wikia, you may have noticed that your watchlist is empty. Apparently, the MediaWikiAuth extension doesn't import it automatically. However, you can fix the problem easily:

  1. Go to Special:Watchlist/raw at Wikia. If you're logged in, you should see a textbox listing the contents of your watchlist on the old wiki. Select it all and copy it to your clipboard.
  2. Go to the corresponding page on the new wiki and paste in what you just copied. Then click "Update watchlist".

Happy hacking! --Ilmari Karonen 01:08, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

PS. It looks like user preferences don't get imported either, even though the documentation says they should be. Alas, I know of no such easy shortcut to fixing that. --Ilmari Karonen 01:18, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Logo suggestion by Ilmari Karonen

Since we're no longer at Wikia, the current logo (which spells "wiki@") seems a bit inappropriate. We should pick a new one. To kick things off, here's my quick suggestion based on the old idea (monsters spelling out the name of the site). There's also an SVG version, although the SVG renderer here makes an awful mess of it. --Ilmari Karonen 02:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Looking good! :) Could be a bit less rainbow'ish, though, but that's just my opinion. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 09:05, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
I think it's pretty much perfect. Looks like happy and colourful and ... oh my god they're tearing me apart, help help! --paxed 10:42, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Problems on this Wiki

Section moved to NetHackWiki:Community Portal/Bugs and feature requests. --Ilmari Karonen 16:57, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

Move announcements at various places

Done: rgrn and most nethack forums.

Done: LiveJournal NetHack community. --paxed 16:17, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Most places in [1] still need announcement postings:

Adom Forum: http://www.adom.de/forums/ Angband forum: http://angband.oook.cz/forum/ Dwarf Fortress forum: http://www.bay12games.com/forum/ Kingdom of Loathing forum: http://forums.kingdomofloathing.com/vb/ Temple of Roguelikes: http://www.roguetemple.com/forums/ dplusplus's blog: http://d.hatena.ne.jp/dplusplus/

BSDForen.de Forum: http://www.bsdforen.de/

Done: FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/ (The NetHack Rules! -group with 860+ members)

I'm growing a bit wary of administrivia. Feel free to beat me to the task.Tjr 15:19, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Unified login (in the remote future)

Each of several major NetHack sites has its own user namespace (this wiki, the old wiki, NAO, freenode, NAO forums, other gameservers). In a long term perspective, some form of unified login would be great. Users would benefit from less signup hassle (and less chance of impersonation). For the wiki, it's a great marketing ploy. Especially as we're competing against ourselves at Wikia. Silly as it seems, each signup act drives away visitors.

I realize this is pie-in-the-sky right now, and we have more pressing chores due to The Move.

Colliding usernames will make unified login difficult. We could let Wikiuser play as w:Wikiuser, and Naoplayer edit as n:Naoplayer until people can merge their accounts themselves. Freenode requires some thought. As a first step, I propose adding a warning "You are about to create a username that already exists on NAO/the wiki/freenode/... Please consider choosing a different name unless you are the same person."

See also: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login

The CentralAuth extension, which Wikimedia uses, has been designed to address just those username collision issues. (That's why it's so complicated; if starting from scratch, it would be much easier to just share the user table between wikis.) However, it's been designed with the assumption that all the wikis are running on the same server(s). I haven't really looked at the code to see if there might be any way to relax that assumption. --Ilmari Karonen 21:29, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
Ah, scratch that, I misread what the issue was. Still, looking at how CentralAuth handles username conflicts might be useful. --Ilmari Karonen 21:31, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Announcing edits on IRC?

MediaWiki can be set up to report edits on IRC. It would be kind of nice to have Rodney announce whenever someone edits the wiki, although some checks would probably have to be set up to avoid flooding the channel if someone makes lots of edits in a short time. (Just having it not report edits marked as minor might be a good start.) --Ilmari Karonen 21:53, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

Please try it out. The usage data will be valueable, if nothing else. (Personally, I'm too old-fashioned to find value in Twitter.)
Speaking from RSS/Atom experience, Special:RecentChanges isn't the right thing to broadcast - too much traffic. At the very least, offer some filtering. E.g. keywords: I expect a Crawl person will want to follow all Crawl-related changes, and so on. Tjr 15:17, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
Rodney will now announce edits in #nethackwiki. --paxed 18:23, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Google and optimization

Google was by far the largest source of traffic to the old site, so our Google ranking is very important. How can we raise it?

  • Original and fresh content. When two sites offer identical content, one of them is downranked as copycat. We need to be different from Wikia, and we should offer Googlebot fresh stuff. Can we please have something like Special:AncientPages, except that it shows only pages that have not been modified since Google spidered it, with (by humans) most visited pages sorted first?
  • Why did our main page see 1722 hits already, but all other articles go virtually unread? The page view counts were much closer on the old wiki. Special:PopularPages, w:c:nethack:Special:Mostvisitedpages. I propose adding a box to our main page that explains briefly what NetHack is, aimed at people stumbling into the wiki.

--Tjr 22:03, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

The special page idea sounds interesting. I suspect one reason for the main page being so far ahead here is that all the move announcements link to it. People get curious, click the link, go "oh, it's just like the old wiki, just a different skin" and leave. Things ought to even out once the idly curious folks are replaced by people actually interested in looking something up. --Ilmari Karonen 22:26, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
BTW, I think the reason - ranks so high is because MediaWiki uses it as a dummy page name for loading some site JS and CSS code. Although the fact that those hits get counted at all could be considered a bug. (At least, I hope that's it. The other possibility is that there are some broken links somewhere actually sending people to that page.) --Ilmari Karonen 22:32, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
There are broken links, see above near http://domain/article. Tjr 22:40, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
Just to make it clear: Those broken links have been taken care of. Also: - is indeed used as a dummy page name by MW. --paxed 15:22, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
Don't Panic! Most of the visitors right now are those who already know the wiki, but have seen the move announcement in RGRN, LJ, whatever. They just pop in, put the new link in their bookmarks, and go on with their lives. --paxed 07:37, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
On 9 May 2024, the moon is new. Be careful!
Agreed. It does suggest the possibility that a well timed main page redesign might encourage those visitors to look around a bit more. We might as well do it anyway, seeing as the current design was optimized for Wikia. One idea I had was that we might borrow the idea of a Did you know? section from Wikipedia (probably starting off without any age or length limits, basically just a regularly updated list of curious NetHack trivia). It shouldn't be hard to manage, and should serve as a nice hook to lure casual visitors in.
Ps. I already made some small tweaks to the main page, including greeting logged-in users by name and notifying them of full/new moon like the game does. I also wrote a quick little template for displaying moon phases like NAO does (although my version so far only has one image for each of the 8 phases nethack uses internally). --Ilmari Karonen 08:25, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
Moon phase does not show up for me.Tjr 17:14, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
You mean on the main page or at Template:Moon phase? The version I put on the main page only says anything when the moon is new or full, just like in the game. I was thinking of putting (something like) {{moon phase}} on the main page too, but hadn't got around to the that yet. --Ilmari Karonen 19:32, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
  • rel="nofollow". I changed most high-ranking incoming links, but virtually all wikis make external links useless. This is the reason for our abysmal Google rank. (Forums fare better.) The only solution I can see is to ask the respective admins to add us to their interwiki table, and then to make those links interwiki links. Of course, we have to link to them with a "good" link first... --Tjr 03:51, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
The list of incoming links. Admins go to "view deleted". Our former wikihost should not see this.
  • SEO stuff
    • valid html. errors on main page.
      • If MediaWiki generates non-valid html, bring it up with MediaWiki devels. Trying to patch those myself would be futile. --paxed 14:40, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Robots.txt needs a sitemap: "Sitemap: http://nethackwiki.com/sitemap.xml"
      • See mw:Manual:GenerateSitemap.php. This should probably be run from cron or something. --Ilmari Karonen 10:14, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
        • Sitemap is now done, and will be generated once a week. --paxed 15:22, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
          • It doesn't work. Google thinks the sitemap says http://sitemap-wikihackdb-ns_0-0.xml.gz. --Tjr 02:49, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Perhaps control how we appear in Google results. Example to improve upon: <meta name="description" content="NetHackWiki is about NetHack, the roguelike game, and its variants.">
    • The main page should not link to unrelated wikis in the footer.
    • Make it easy to link to us. Example, see the sidebar or the end of the text: http://www.wordsinarow.com/how-to-get-links.html, linktous.
    • Duplicate content should be removed. Article on that.
      • www.nethackwiki.com now redirects to nethackwiki.com
  • broken internal links
    • Template:Timeline_of_NetHack generates http://nethackwiki.com/nethack/nethackwiki-test/mediawiki-1.16.0/index.php/Hack_1.0
      • Looks like the EasyTimeline extension was broken before, and some of the broken imagemaps are still cached. Bumping $wgTimelineSettings->epochTimestamp should fix it. --Ilmari Karonen 13:02, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
        • Fixed. --paxed 14:35, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
    • http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/$1 is linked from 43 pages as Googlebot sees them, e.g. http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Detect_monsters
      • Huh? google:link:http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/$1 says "Your search - link:http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/$1 - did not match any documents." to me. --Ilmari Karonen 13:19, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
        • It shows up in the Google Webmaster Tools. I've requested a "show as the Googlebot sees it". Please tell me your Google account, and I'll add you to webtools. --Tjr 14:03, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
          • http://pastebin.com/3EQUZU6f shows the offending page. -Tjr 06:55, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
            • The only /wiki/$1 in there is wgArticlePath, and that we cannot change, it's a MediaWiki variable which has to be like that. --paxed 08:39, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
    • top really non-existant: forum:help, NetHackWiki:Privacy_policy
    • Forums are excluded by robots.txt. Just look at the links in Forum:Watercooler.
  • Our top 6 key words and their relevance are, as reported by Google: nethackwiki 100%, edit 63%, nethack 36%, monster 35%, navigate 33%, search 31%.
    • Please make {{SITENAME}} report NetHack Wiki.
      • It should match link anchor texts, though...
        • Didn't we just go through a whole bunch of work standardizing on "NetHackWiki"? Seems a bit silly to start changing the site name again already. --Ilmari Karonen 13:19, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
          • People enter "nethack wiki" and "nethack" into Google. So that's where we need to show up. Google External Keyword Tool. I didn't know better when using NetHackWiki, my fault. Changing it shouldn't be that hard with Special:ReplaceText. --Tjr 14:03, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
            • I'm in favor of keeping it "NetHackWiki", even if it means google doesn't like us. "NetHack Wiki" just doesn't do it for me. --paxed 14:35, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Please hide MediaWiki keywords from bots, e.g. coding them in images/scripts/...: edit, navigate, search, stub, png (in monster template), and the other ones from the top, left, footer, and section edit bar.
      • That sounds like a hopeless and futile quest to me. This is a wiki, there will always be wiki-ish things on it. --Ilmari Karonen 13:19, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
        • Doing it in the top, left, and footer bar would be enough. --Tjr 14:03, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
        • This'll make it impossible to use the wiki on browsers without javascript, though. --paxed 14:35, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
    • I am going to rename the category NetHackWiki into NetHack Wiki.Tjr 11:44, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Decided against it to avoid keyword stuffing.--Tjr 02:49, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I've bought Google Adwords as a stop-gap measure. Please let me know if you see a way to improve the ads. --Tjr 20:31, 23 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Unrelated to the ads, but I just noticed that the main page of this wiki is currently on the seventh position of first page the Google search "nethack wiki". :) —ZeroOne (talk / @) 13:22, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Amateurgeek even blogged about the move. I our Google rank sticks even after the various blog updates loose freshness. --Tjr 17:23, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Source code syntax highlighting?

As we can now highlight syntax for several programming languages (Thanks to an extension using geshi), should we change the source code pages to use that? For a short test, see User:Paxed/src geshi test. --paxed 08:48, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

Yes. --Ilmari Karonen 10:02, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

How would we link to the function definitions in the source files? Geshi only knows the function name, so the links would have to be something like http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Src/feel_cockatrice, which would redirect to the correct place in the Source namespace. I already have a list of the functions at User:Paxed/Source Functions, but what would be best format for the function redirects? Source/function_name, or Src/nh343/function_name or what? --paxed 17:35, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

You mean the text the human user will see? Why not [[Src/feel_cockatrice]]? BTW, your list of source functions is incomplete, and macros are excluded entirely. ---Tjr 20:32, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
Yes, I know it's incomplete, it's automatically generated from the src-directory, and macros aren't as easy. --paxed 20:50, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
I think something like Source:function_name() (or Source:Nethack 3.4.3/function_name()) might make sense for redirects. --Ilmari Karonen 00:06, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
BTW, I wonder if it would be better to keep the line numbers hardcoded and somehow kluge GeSHi to skip over them? One nice thing about the way the source files are currently marked up is that adding annotations is really easy and idiot-proof; you can't mess up the line numbering without spending some effort on it. --Ilmari Karonen 00:06, 19 November 2010 (UTC)
I'm kinda leery about the parenthesis there. Maybe SourceRef:function_name? Also, I've hacked on the hilight extension, see how it looks at User:Paxed/src geshi test2. Biggest problem with it: It currently makes editing page sections impossible. --paxed 08:44, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
I solved the problem that prevented editing page sections, and I've changed all of the 3.4.3 source files to use this new syntax coloring. --paxed 19:21, 20 November 2010 (UTC)
Currently the function names link to Source:Ref/function_name, is that good? Comments? If no objections, I'll run a bot to add the redirects... --paxed 15:41, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Fine. --Tjr 16:34, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
Added the source reference redirects. --paxed 20:57, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

Has anyone else noticed that the highlighting seems to make spaces and underscores indistinguishable? I'm using the old MonoBook skin, so that might have something to do with it. -Ion frigate 03:25, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Indistinguishable? In what way? I don't see such a thing, even if I switch to monobook. Screenshot? --paxed 21:02, 25 November 2010 (UTC)
Or rather, underscores seem to show up as spaces; I uploaded a screenshot as
Underscore.JPG
. -Ion frigate 04:02, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
Sorry, all I can say is that it Works For Me... --paxed 07:11, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
Perhaps what you're typing in the firefox search field isn't an underscore? Try entering the underscore via the Windows alt-code (underscore is 95). --paxed 07:26, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
I can replicate the bug if I change the style #line .de1, #line .de2 { font: 1em/1.2em monospace; } to font: 1em/1em monospace;. This causes the lowest few pixels of all characters to be cut off, making underscores look like spaces. Perhaps on your browser even the 1.2em line height isn't enough? It might be safer to set the line height to something larger, say 1.4em or more, and, if desired, use negative margins to tighten up the line spacing instead. (For example, #line .de1, #line .de2 { font: 1em/2em monospace; margin: -0.8em 0; } looks identical to the current style for me, but avoids any risk of characters being cut off.) --Ilmari Karonen 09:55, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
Apologies if this is a stupid question, but how do I change the font style? My knowledge of firefox/mediawiki is somewhat lacking. -Ion frigate 04:25, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
Edit User:Ion frigate/vector.css (assuming you're using the Vector skin. You can find the link to each of the skin specific css files in your Preferences -> Appearance -> Custom CSS) put something what Ilmari suggested above. (I tested this with #line .de1, #line .de2 { font: 1em/1.4em monospace !important; }) --paxed 09:28, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
Cool, that fixed it. Thanks! -Ion frigate 19:38, 27 November 2010 (UTC)
Actually, I was talking more about putting that style in MediaWiki:Common.css so it applies to everybody. Which I've just done. --Ilmari Karonen 18:41, 1 December 2010 (UTC)

A lot of geishi links seem to point nowhere. I've put the list of 404 found by Googlebot at NetHackWiki:Community_Portal/geishi404. --Tjr

Site name "NetHack Wiki" or "NetHackWiki", important for Google search

People overwhelmingly search for "nethack" or "nethack wiki", and don't find us. Google has us keyworded and well-ranked for "nethackwiki". There seems to be no connection between "nethackwiki" and either "nethack wiki" or "nethack". (I'm sorry, I was not aware of this disconnect ahead of time.) This is a real problem because Google was the main referrer on the old wiki.

Monthly searches on Google: 60,500 for "nethack", 165,000 for "net+hack", 2,900 for "nethack+wiki", surprisingly same for "wikihack", negligible for "nethackwiki". Source

Our keywords are, as reported by Google Webmaster Tools: nethackwiki 100%, edit 63%, nethack 36%, monster 35%, navigate 33%, search 31%.

The goal is to make us relevant for "nethack", and for "nethack+wiki".

IMHO things can still be fixed at this time, and should be. Global on-site replacement is easy with Special:ReplaceText. I can edit the various other wikis myself. Most visitors won't even notice. But I would hate to annoy those helpful individuals who switched external links with another requested change. (Not very many have done so using NetHackWiki as anchor text.) I don't know how bad the mis-match between link anchor text + domain "nethackwiki" versus page title + contents "nethack wiki" is.

What are your opinions? --Tjr 14:45, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

1) "net+hack" we can ignore, they're not looking for us. "nethackwiki" doesn't get more searches because there hasn't been a "nethackwiki". (the old site was called "wikihack", remember?) I'm sure "nethackwiki" will get more searches in the future when people realize that's our name. IMO, using extra spaces will just annoy, maybe create problems/annoyances with some things (category rename, text renames, etc). And most of the links that link to us from reputable roguelike sites will be either "NetHackWiki" or "NetHack Wiki", so eventually google will start ranking us higher than the old site. (domain name match!) --paxed 14:54, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
Google has already reacted, but we're not nethack (wiki) to them. --Tjr 15:07, 18 November 2010 (UTC)
Edit: current keywords + goal. --Tjr 15:28, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Too many forums?

Do we really need a "Help Desk" forum and the Talk forum? I'm thinking maybe we could get rid of the help desk one... Would require moving the articles in the other one into the Talk forum. --paxed 15:30, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Good idea. --Tjr 15:53, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Let's audit advice

The wiki seems to contain a lot of bad advice. Most of its bad reputation is due to that. Advice should make clear its assumptions on player skill, conducts, and available in-game resources.

Let's audit all pages for junk.

I suggest starting with special:popularpages, and adding [[Category:AdviceAuditedBy|YourUsername]] to pages that you have checked.

Thoughts? Better ideas? --Tjr 00:50, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

From a technical viewpoint, a template (e.g. {{Audited|YourUsername|~~~~~}}) would seem better. --Ilmari Karonen 01:06, 29 November 2010 (UTC)
Good point. Especially if several people review the same page to minimize play style bias. BTW, is there a way to find all (popular) pages that are not in a given category? --Tjr 01:10, 29 November 2010 (UTC)

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