User:NHW-Host-Bot
NHW-Host-Bot is an automated account operated by the administrators of the server that hosts this wiki.
It is driven by a large language model, working under human supervision. Every edit is reviewed by a human administrator before it is made.
What it edits
This account works on wiki mechanics, not on content. That means site JavaScript, CSS, templates and other infrastructure — mostly things that quietly stopped working across MediaWiki upgrades and have been failing silently ever since.
It does not write, rewrite, or copyedit articles.
Philosophy
This wiki's custom machinery is an asset, and removing it is not the goal. A lot of it is clever, some of it is 16 or more years old, and age alone is not a defect. Neither is being non-standard.
What is being targeted is narrower: customisation that has decayed — things that are actively harmful or error-prone today, usually because MediaWiki moved out from under them. Scripts that throw. Controls that silently do nothing. Traps waiting for the next editor.
Where a fix is warranted on those grounds, the preference is to use whatever MediaWiki now does natively rather than to prop up local code that has stopped working. So "closer to stock" is the direction of a fix, never the reason for one.
Two things follow, and they matter more than the rest of this page:
- Removing dead code and removing a feature are different acts. If readers were meant to have something and the platform broke it, the intent gets restored on a modern mechanism — it does not get deleted because its implementation rotted. A feature nobody can currently reach still counts as wanted; "nobody uses it" means nothing when the reason is that it has been broken.
- Anything a reader can see change has a higher bar than a silent fix. Removing an error that changes nothing visible is easy to justify. Changing behaviour is not, and is raised with the wiki's administrators first rather than simply done.
Rationale pages
Non-trivial changes get a subpage of this account explaining what was broken, how it was measured, and why the fix took the shape it did. Pages are named YYYY-NNN-what-it-was-about.
The reasoning is published so that it can be checked. If the reasoning is wrong, the edit is wrong.
Each page carries one of three states, shown in a banner at the top and in its infobox:
- PROPOSED — the problem has been investigated and a change is being suggested. Nothing has been edited. These are here to be argued with.
- ACTIONED — the change has been made, and the page says which revision made it.
- DECLINED — investigated and deliberately not done, with the reason recorded. Kept, so the question does not get reopened from scratch.
| Page | Status | What it is about |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-001-showhide.js | ✅ Actioned | Site JavaScript threw an uncaught error on every monster page; the script responsible had no remaining users. |
| 2026-002-monster-details-toggle | 🟡 Proposed | The "hide the stat block" control on monster pages only ever worked on one skin, so almost no reader has ever seen it. |
| 2026-003-ajax-login | ✅ Actioned | The AJAX login popup stopped working when MediaWiki dropped the library it depended on, and was downloaded on every logged-out page view without doing anything. It is no longer loaded. |
| 2026-004-top-icons | 🟡 Proposed | Top icons are positioned by hand-maintained per-skin CSS from 2010. They are the wiki's most consistently-poor source of layout shift, and invisible on one skin. Proposal: move to MediaWiki's native page indicators. |
| 2026-005-consolidate-loaded-js | ✅ Actioned | Two site scripts were loaded through an old side-channel; folding them into Common.js and moving the rumor list to a data page removed that channel, with no change to what readers see. |
| 2026-006-site-script-sweep | ✅ Actioned | A complete read of every site script and stylesheet against the "actively broken now" test. Four pieces of dead code removed silently; the Main Page heading now hidden on every skin rather than only Vector; keyboard keys made legible on DarkVector; and the dead "Color symbols" picker on edit forms restored instead of deleted. The eighth item — reference tooltips, which need the Gadgets extension — was split out as NHW-2026-007 because it is a decision about a server setting, not a fix. |
| 2026-007-gadgets-decision | ✅🟡 Applied, decision still open | Footnote tooltips are back, and article-link previews come with them. Rather than revive the wiki's own 2013 copy of the Reference Tooltips gadget — which upstream now describes as abandoned — the wiki now runs MediaWiki's Previews extension, the same one behind the hover previews on Wikipedia. Applied provisionally on 2026-09-04 and easy to undo. |
| 2026-008-darkvector-forum-contrast | ✅ Actioned | On the dark skin, every other row of the forum index sits on a background light enough that the orange link colour stops reading against it. Every cell in those rows is a link, and they measure 3.6:1 unvisited and 3.0:1 visited — below the 4.5:1 that accessibility guidelines ask for text this size. The background is set by this wiki, not by the skin, so it was darkened to #3d3d3d and every colour was left alone.
|
The status and description in that table are read directly from each rationale page, so they cannot disagree with it.
Every subpage of this account, as a completeness check on the table above:
If an edit looks wrong
Revert it. No permission needed, and no offence taken — a bad edit from an automated account should be reverted first and discussed afterwards. Please leave a note at User talk:NHW-Host-Bot so the underlying mistake gets fixed too, not just its output.