NetHackWiki:Community Portal

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Revision as of 14:45, 18 November 2010 by Tjr (talk | contribs) (→‎Site name "NetHack Wiki" or "NetHackWiki", important for Google search: new section)
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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

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

There are still some problems that I need to fix:

  • SVG renderer (See eg. Nethackwiki-logo.svg). I know nothing about this, so need to take a look how to fix it.
    • See mw:Manual:Image Administration#SVG. Basically you need to pick a renderer, install it and set $wgSVGConverter. As for the renderers, rsvg is fast but not very good, though still much better than ImageMagick. It's what Wikipedia uses. Inkscape is better, but note the home directory issue. --Ilmari Karonen 07:48, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
      • It's now rsvg. Still looking pretty fugly... --paxed 14:58, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Forums (eg. Forum:Watercooler) require an extension or two. I'll install the extension(s) later today.
    • CreateBox-extension installed, and it seems to work. DPLforum-extension doesn't work? --paxed 11:14, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

  • User watchlists, emails, etc. settings are not imported from Wikia. This is hard, so not worth the effort, most likely.
    • See partial workaround above. --Ilmari Karonen 07:48, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

  • Non-image files did not get moved from Wikia. Need to reupload.
    • Let me know if you need help with this, I should be able to kluge together some scripts to do it. --Ilmari Karonen 07:48, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
      • There aren't that many of those files, so possible to do it by hand. OTOH, if you have the time to help, I wouldn't say no; this is My First MW Installation, after all... Talk to me on IRC, freenode, channel #nethackwiki --paxed 07:58, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Template:Nethack-343 and others (eg. in NetHackWiki:Next_version) need to be checked, they were designed for the wikia monaco(?) skin. --paxed 16:29, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Edit the sidebar, should have links to the wiki forums.
  • Javascript source code hilight doesn't work
  • Editing: Cannot move the javascript color glyph insert box.
  • Show/hide javascript doesn't work: importScriptPage('ShowHide/code.js', 'dev'); in MediaWiki:Common.js
    • Should work now, except we're not using it anywhere? --paxed 20:49, 13 November 2010 (UTC)


Please add any problems you notice to here. --paxed 07:12, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

  • We've got a bunch of missing templates that should be imported. --Ilmari Karonen 08:37, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • The license selector on Special:Upload (which comes from MediaWiki:Licenses IIRC) is empty. Should put some actual licensing options there. --Ilmari Karonen 08:55, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
    • I added some, based on MediaWiki and Wikia ones. --paxed 16:17, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Which reminds me, NetHackWiki:Copyrights is outdated. I assume we got relicensed to CC-BY-SA-3.0 along with the rest of Wikia, but the page still says we're GFDL. --Ilmari Karonen 08:55, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • There's a minor annoyance at Special:Preferences: you are listed as belonging to a group called "wikian". That's clearly not appropriate as we are not in Wikia anymore. —ZeroOne (talk / @) 09:00, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
    • If it tracks users with pre-move accounts, how about calling it "converted wikians"?
      • Good idea. That's how it's shown now. --Ilmari Karonen 11:34, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

  • I'm not seeing the Edit Tools show up under the edit window; is that my settings, or site-configuration setting? --MidnightLightning 19:40, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
    • It should show up now, needed to do ?action=purge on it. --paxed 19:57, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

I'll add my scoop of todos:

  • examine all outgoing [url ]-style links
    • change [http://nethackwiki/wiki/ to [[
  • Fix all occurences of wikihack etc, including in the interface text
    • The edit tools still show Wikihack-specific templates, Color symbols etc.
      • That the "Color symbols" functions happen to be named with "WikiHack" prefix does not matter functionally at all. --paxed 20:13, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
    • wikia needs to be audited for, e.g. with Special:ReplaceText.
      • Need to check [[w: -links; those will be expanded to wikia. --paxed 18:58, 14 November 2010 (UTC)

  • Capitalization: NetHackWiki
    • MediaWiki has a {{SITENAME}} keyword that automatically expands to the official wiki name (currently NetHackWiki). --Ilmari Karonen 01:10, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
      • I overwrote a lot of interface text still on the old wiki because only staff could set SITENAME.Tjr 01:26, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • http://domain/title should redirect to http://domain/wiki/title
    • This is actually problematic, and not suggested, see http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Short_URL --paxed 08:12, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
      • It's bad to create such a structure, but even worse to turn it off. Wikia had this enabled. Besides, it's a convenience when typing in URLs.
      • We also broke lots of URLs existing out there. E.g. from my talk page: offending edits, page history, revert it all,
        • Those urls will now work (index.php will redirect to correct place, keeping the params instact), but I've got no luck getting nethackwiki.com/PageNameFoo to work. --paxed 15:30, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
    • Short urls work now, hopefully nothing broke. --paxed 19:18, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
  • collapse multiple edits to the same page on RecentChanges
    • This is a personal, not a wiki-wide setting. Go to Special:Preferences -> Recent Changes -> check "Use enhanced recent changes (requires JavaScript)". —ZeroOne (talk / @) 23:21, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
  • missing edit button, eg http://nethackwiki.com/mediawiki-1.16.0/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown&action=edit
    • I can't reproduce this, or I don't get what you mean. --paxed 15:32, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Now it's there. Strange.Tjr 15:11, 13 November 2010 (UTC)

  • autocompletion popup when typing [[ ]]
    • Installed [[1]], but it might need some tweaking... --paxed 10:20, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

  • make font larger
  • very long backlog of editing work
  • create good content for other wikis that links to Nethack. (But I already annoyed the D&D people.)
http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/NetHack, http://fiction.wikia.com/wiki/NetHack, http://elona.wikia.com/wiki/index.php?search=nethack&fulltext=0, http://archive.gamespy.com/legacy/halloffame/nethack_a.shtm, http://adom.wikia.com/wiki/Links
  • Wikipedia should link to us, including all languages, all cite notes unrelated pages etc.
    • Only Russian Wikipedia still needs to be updated.
    • We could even ask to be added to the Wikimedia interwiki map. --Ilmari Karonen 11:46, 10 November 2010 (UTC)
      • That's crucial for our Google ranking. Which prefix do you propose, to standardize things when asking other gaming wikis?
        • I decided on [[nethack:pagetitle]], see here.
  • traffic monitoring here
  • Where should my list of (corrected) incoming links go? Perferrably on the wiki, out of sight of Wikia.
    • Sounds like a contradiction in terms; kind of hard to keep anything hidden on a public wiki. (I suppose you could install one of the extensions that try to implement read restrictions, or maybe put the list on a page and delete it. But both are pretty klugey solutions.) Are you worried they'd try to revert you? --Ilmari Karonen 08:14, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
Yes. A page only admins can see would be perfect.Tjr 14:08, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Not related to the move AFAIK, but it seems the dat/*.des files are missing from the Source: namespace. --Ilmari Karonen 08:14, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • Makedefs and the unix/, windowport subdirs are also missing. Users will not be able to find main().Tjr 14:08, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

  • import wikimedia help, or interwiki-source wholesale
    • I tried adding help as an interwiki prefix, but that didn't work.
    • import images referenced in help.
  • http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Autoconfirmed We have semi-protected pages which can be edited only by autoconfirmed users.
  • Interwiki links to other wikia wikis look broken, but actually do work. Example: w:c:gta:Special:RecentChanges.
    • That looks like a normal interwiki link to me. --Ilmari Karonen 21:39, 11 November 2010 (UTC)
  • All external links are currently rel="nofollow", we should switch that off. (At wikia, it worked fine with "real" links.)
  • Could we please have http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RandomInclude ? I'd like to add random, unobtrusive links to other wikis leaving Wikia. [2].
    • You could already kluge up something like that with ParserFunctions, e.g. {{#switch:{{#expr:{{#time:U}} mod 3}}|0=foo|1=bar|2=baz}} = foo. --Ilmari Karonen 04:36, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
      • Then Googlebot would see links to the one same wiki all over the place because it requests pages in short sequence. That defeats the purpose of randomization: I don't want to worry about rotating and spreading the links evenly over all the wikis I want to help.Tjr 17:14, 12 November 2010 (UTC)
        • I'm pretty sure Googlebot doesn't hit a single site that fast (rather, they crawl many sites in parallel), but in any case, {{#switch:{{#expr:({{#time:U}}+{{REVISIONID}}) mod 3}}|0=foo|1=bar|2=baz}} = foo should fix that. --Ilmari Karonen 19:41, 13 November 2010 (UTC)
    • "{{Template:AWA_Promotion}}" = "Template:AWA Promotion" codes that. But: 1) it needs to be put somewhere active, (sidebar didn't work) 2) rel="nofollow" needs to be turned off, 3) how much does it affect load times? 4) Do we want to support other movers? (I say yes.) 5) If no-display is bad, make it say "visit a random wiki". Tjr 04:05, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
    • We now have "ad" links on the bottom of the page. --paxed 06:13, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
      • It turns out rotating links aren't so good. Let's make it depend on REVISIONID only, and let's gradually replace the "ads" with sites that are related to NetHack and actually link back. Tjr 22:26, 15 November 2010 (UTC)
  • If you edit an article as an anon and click login instead of going through the captcha, your edit will be discarded.
    • It should be still there if you use the back button, but I agree that this isn't very intuitive. It's standard MediaWiki behavior, though. I believe Wikia has an AJAX-based login form that solves this issue, we should see if there's an existing extension to do the same. (Actually, it should even be possible to do this via MediaWiki:Common.js, no extension needed. But installing an existing piece of code should still be easier than writing it from scratch.) --Ilmari Karonen 04:53, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
      • I wrote a little script to do it. Let me know if you find any bugs. (Cache purging may be required as usual.) --Ilmari Karonen 10:09, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
        • Firefox cannot auto-fill the password at that form. Tjr 21:48, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

On the old wiki:

  • poll on the old wiki: why aren't you at the new site?
  • traffic monitoring on the old site: people how do come, from where and why?
    • No, let's not touch the old wiki. --paxed 19:26, 14 November 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 [3] 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)
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.
  • 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)
    • 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)

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)

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

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. I don't know how bad the mis-match between link anchor text + domain "nethackwiki" versus page title "nethack wiki" is.

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

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