UESPWiki:Administrator Noticeboard

The UESPWiki – Your source for The Elder Scrolls since 1995

Jump to: navigation, search

The administrator noticeboard is where we discuss and coordinate administrative tasks on the wiki. Although this page is intended for administrators, all users are encouraged to participate in discussions.

Major Discussions
Vandalism: Mostly spam, actually.
Page Archives
Archive 1: Feb 2005 – June 2006. Archived by Aristeo.
Archive 2: June 2006 – August 2006. Archived by Aristeo.
Archive 3: September 2006 - June 2007. Archived by Wrye.
Archive 4: June 2007 - July 2007. Archived by Rpeh.
Archive 5: August 2007 - October 2007. Archived by Rpeh.
Archive 6: October 2007 - November 2007. Archived by Rpeh.
Archive 7: December 2007 - January 2008. Archived by Rpeh.
Archive 8: January 2008 - February 2008. Archived by Rpeh.
Past Administrative Requests
Aristeo's Request for Adminstrator: Approved June 19, 2006
Nephele's Request for Adminstrator: Approved Aug. 13, 2006
Aristeo's Request for Bureaucrat: Withdrawn by Aristeo Nov. 19, 2006
Ratwar's Request for Adminstrator: Approved Jan 31, 2007
TheRealLurlock's Request for Adminstrator: Approved Feb. 23, 2007
Rpeh's Request for Adminstrator: Approved Oct. 1, 2007
Eshe's Request for Adminstrator: Approved Mar. 31, 2008


Contents

[edit] Wikia

If you are having problems (and I noticed you did with the google analytics/squid conflict), the offer of free hosting at Wikia is still open. We can handle the problems of caching for you and ensure it won't become a bigger problem as the wiki grows. Please email me at angela@wikia.com if you would like to explore this. We have lots of options open, including custom URLs (like wowwiki.com) and different skins (like marveldatabase.com), 20 different anti-spam tools, and access to google analytics (which we've made work with squid). There would be no problem installing your extensions and the community would remain in control of the content. This page can help to answer others questions you might have about joining Wikia. Angela 14:01, 21 February 2008 (EST)

I've chosen to move this comment to a new section because it is not directly related to the previous topic (e.g., reporting a problem or suggesting a specific fix to an existing problem), and any followup is just going to diverge even further from the previous topic.
I'm also basically confused about the purpose of this comment. If this is an issue that Daveh would like to discuss with the UESP community, I think everyone would be interested in what Daveh has to say, and would be happy to provide Daveh with feedback on any suggestions. But until Daveh makes a statement that he thinks we need to consider a move to Wikia (and for those wondering, he has never made any such statement on the wiki or in any offline discussions that I have had with him about the site), I don't think that a discussion can accomplish anything. Any discussion about server configuration, server maintenance, or site costs has to involve Daveh. Since any decision about who runs (and potentially profits from) UESP hinges upon questions about the server and costs, without Daveh's participation it would just be a dead-end, abstract discussion.
Furthermore, there are countless complications inherent in any implied move to Wikia, none of which are addressed by Angela's comments. It's not really worth starting to list the complications, because, as I just said, I think this is currently a dead-end discussion. But let's just say that there are problems far more fundamental than whether or not wikimedia extensions are available at Wikia.
In other words, until Daveh starts a discussion, I don't think there's any reason for the community to spend any time being distracted by this issue. --NepheleTalk 18:40, 22 February 2008 (EST)
Given the willingness of Wikia to completely and blatantly ignore the terms of CC licensing (as it did when it started hosting OblivioWiki's non-commercial licensed content as a commercial site), I am 100% against any move to Wikia. But as Nephele said, this was an out of the blue distraction. Unless Daveh is actually interested in this, there's no reason to debate it further -- I just wanted to note that some of us have serious objections to such a proposal. --Wrye 22:09, 22 February 2008 (EST)
I've been meaning to post something concerning this but have been terribly busy and I figure my limited time is better spent doing other things on the site. Wikia (Angela and Jim) have contacted me a few times in the past year or so inviting UESP to join Wikia. While I appreciate the offers I have no intention of moving in the near future for a variety of reasons. Personally I'm rather proud of having one of the larger private wikis out there and hope the admins and other editors feel the same way (because I'm far from the top of the list in making the Wiki as successful as it is). -- Daveh 23:58, 22 February 2008 (EST)
Cool! :) --Wrye 00:27, 23 February 2008 (EST)
That's really refreshing to hear, Daveh. Since you hadn't said anything, I assumed that there was really nothing to this proposal from Wikia, but now having heard it from you, I can totally relax about it. --Ratwar 01:00, 23 February 2008 (EST)
I completely agree with Wrye's points about OblivioWiki - it's not the only wiki they absorbed without regard to the licensing - and I also find the way Angela stepped in to take advantage of a small site problem in such a public manner rather distasteful. It's a huge relief to hear that Daveh isn't interested, and I hope that the "near future" lasts a long, long time! –Rpeh•T•C•E• 13:38, 23 February 2008 (EST)
Yep, good that you will be private in the near future *thumbs up* We (from tamriel-almanach.de) got also an offer from wikia to join them but we saw no advantages to move so we will also stay privat. They started after our answer a german wiki on wikia were they copied over 1300 articles from us + images! Now it's closed of course because i had luck to find it during my researches). It sounds strange but i think wikia is currently on a crusade through all the wikis, good that there are still people who resists! Wish the best for you guys that you will stay free. --Deepfighter 09:50, 24 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Another, maybe useful idea.

Hello,

I am here to propose a new idea (as you can see). Instead of having to go to "Recent Changes", spot an edit, go to the page, look at the history, undo the vandalism, and let the vandal be dealt (did I spell that right<?), to deal with vandalism, is it possible for an admin. to be able to do this? Here it goes, if a vandal/editor goes through a page and types a bunch of noticable curse words on it, or if he/she just blanked the page on purpose, it will show up on their edit description automatically - "Added Censored Text" or something of this sort. This will automatically make this easy for recent changes patrollers and/or editors to spot a vandal on site. Then once you hit a link of some type, it will automatically undo the vandalism. Sound good, bad, ugly, in your thoughts, or am I late in the race and this has already been done and I've never known?

I have posted this here because I assume that an administrator must do this. Please leave feedback. Thank You. --Playjex 17:56, 31 January 2008 (EST)

The edit summary already has several of these features. If an editor blanks a page, the edit summary says so; if an edit replaces a page with new text, the edit summary provides information on the replacement text. And there already is an "undo" link when you view the diff of a page which automatically undoes the edit (admins also have a more powerful "revert" feature reserved for use with clear vandalism).
Trying to go any further than that doesn't seem to me like it's worth the effort. First, the type of changes you're talking about require modifications to the wiki software: such modifications can only be done by Daveh, are difficult to implement, and increase our problems every time we upgrade the wiki software. Second, it's going to be unreliable: either the list of "censored" words is so short that it's not useful or it's so long that it in fact includes many words that are legitimate in various contexts. And such a list will never be able to include all the various misspellings, censored-with-punctuation, and other permutations. Which means that we still will end up relying on patrollers to view the actual edit and make an informed decision about whether or not the edit is legitimate.
So it seems to me like a lot of work that ends up not really changing the current situation. --NepheleTalk 18:47, 31 January 2008 (EST)
Haha, never really thought of it like that, I was in a rush at the time anyway. Thanks for giving feedback though. Have a good night. --Playjex 19:20, 31 January 2008 (EST)

[edit] Server-level Problems

Daveh, we seem to have a few problems at this point related to server-level configuration. Several of them appear to indicate that there is some type of caching on content1.uesp.net that is being too aggressive, and is providing cached versions of pages that should not be cached (or that do not correspond to the requested page). Specifically:

  • The problem with category pages mentioned above
  • A persistent problem on the forums where users are told they are banned when they try to login, even though their account is not banned. See for example this topic. This is happening even in cases where the user is using the new forums.uesp.net site name. My guess is that it is actually a caching problem: a cached version of the post-login page is being displayed, instead of processing and creating a newly updated post-login page. This is starting to become a real hassle for forums users.
  • A problem on the forums where a new user whose message is spamblocked cannot subsequently post the message, even after all links have been deleted from the message. Again, it sounds like a potential caching problem where the new request is not being recognized as a different request.

In all cases, these problems have been reported even when requests are going directly to content1.uesp.net, so the problem is not with the squid server. Would it be possible to go through the other levels of caching that are implemented directly on content1 (e.g., memcache? apache settings such as gzip? any others?) and selectively disable those caching systems one at a time? You could then check and see whether this link and this link then provide the same page or different pages, allowing the source of one of the problems to at least be identified.

Another problem is with the Oblivion map being inaccessible when using a firewall, as described at Map does not work properly for me. My guess is that firewalls are having a problem with a request sent to www.uesp.net that then triggers followup traffic from content1.uesp.net instead of www.uesp.net . However, the maps cannot be accessed directly on content1.uesp.net because of the Google Maps API license.

--NepheleTalk 18:42, 11 March 2008 (EDT)

Just a question here, but what does "Cached/caching" mean? The more you ask, the more you learn. Thanks. --Playjex 18:15, 13 March 2008 (EDT)
When you go to a web site, the computer automatically saves information from that page so that it'll be easier to load the next time you go to that page. Unfortunately, you may eventually have a ton of pages saved up. Michaeldsuarez (talk· contribs· email) 19:08, 13 March 2008 (EDT)
For the forums issue I've currently set up a Redirect on content1 to forward www.uesp.net/phpbb to forums.uesp.net, which I should have done in the first place. This should prevent older links from having a cache issue. Whether this fixes anything is another matter...I'm not quite sure how to test it other than waiting to see if anyone else complains. -- Daveh 11:47, 27 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Music?

Discussion moved from my talk page

Well, as you all know as none of you have any idea about, I am a great fan of all types of music - EXCEPT RAP!!!!! Sorry, just had to say that. Anyway, I have and frequently listen to the soundtracks from Morrowind and Oblivion (Don't worry, I avoided Bethesda's money-hunger and transferred the files from the game data folders), and I recently discovered that a modding project has released a masterful re-working of the Morrowind theme. They have no copyright on the track itself, and have it available for download. Could we use this? I think it would be a great idea to offer this track for downloading here. As far as I can see, and I work with DRM (Digital Rights Management) a lot, there is nothing preventing us from doing so. I you want to hear it, I could upload it, or I could give you a URL link. However, if we were to do this (Subliminal Message: we most certainly should), then I could contact the creator, some guy under the name of DragonFly, and inform him of this. Any thoughts? --HMSVictory 12:47, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

I'm no expert on copyright law (talk to Wrye for that sort of thing), so I couldn't say for sure. If Bethesda had released the music for free anywhere, it might be one thing, but the fact that they do specifically sell soundtrack CDs, and separately from the games, makes it seem slightly questionable. While a remix made by someone else may be different from just copying the tracks directly, it's still based on the original, and while that may be okay for an independent site for the composer (though even then it's a bit iffy), I think republishing it here might be pushing the limits. Now, I don't expect that we'd necessarily get in trouble for it, but it may be better just to play it safe. But that's just my opinion. --TheRealLurlock Talk 14:20, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
Well, if you're no an expert on DRM, then I am. Trust me, I've checked through the file itself and there is no protection on it, nor is there a warning. I think this would be a great opportunity. As for copyright, none is stated on the file, nor on the site, nor on the download wizard. My only concern the consent of the author, which is probably the easiest thing to clarify here. The music itself was created on Ejay Orchestral, from scratch, and Bethesda has no rights concerning the track itself. According to American, English and probably Canadian law, any parody/remix/cover or re-creation of a piece of music may be done without the original artist's consent (Nor do they even have to know about it), and unless a profit is made from the production or sale of the track, then no credit must be given to the artist either. As far as my knowledge goes, and that's pretty far, there's absolutely nothing stopping us from hosting the track and making it available for public download. Credit to DragonFly and a link to the Tamriel Rebuilt website is probably a good idea, but hey - we have fanfiction, we have a links page full of unofficial sites, we even discussed fanart, so why not music? --HMSVictory 14:29, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
No, I understand that part of it - but just because there's nothing physically stopping us from hosting this music doesn't mean it's legal and kosher to do so. As for making a profit, we technically are running a commercial website, with ads, for which Daveh receives a certain amount of revenue. So we can't technically say that we're not making any profit off the distribution of the artist's work. As for the comparison to fanfiction and fanart - this doesn't apply because fanfiction/fanart is generally posted by its creator. You can't just go to some other site with fanfiction/fanart and copy it to UESP without the creator's permission, and the same goes for music, I'd say. Perhaps if DragonFly himself wished to post the music it'd be another story, though I'm still not sure if it'd be fully legal if he sampled the original music in order to create the tracks, because at that point it ceases to be a "parody/remix/cover" and becomes a directly derivative piece of work. At any rate, I think this discussion should probably be moved to the Admin Noticeboard, in order to get other people's thoughts on the issue. However, general site policy has been to never copy anything from another site without explicit permission - even other wikis - due to the potential legal complications. You can add a link to the original site on one of the Links pages if you want, that's probably not a problem. But hosting other people's work (in any medium) without their knowledge or permission seems a bit shady to me. --TheRealLurlock Talk 15:58, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
No no no, Lurlock; you misunderstand me. It is definitely legal to offer this file for download on this site. What is not neccessarily spiffy is if we can't get Tamriel Rebuilt to support us in this. Addendum: It does seem odd to me that there aren't files such as this already on the site. Anyway, I've spoken to the developers at TR before about their work, but I doubt they'll remember me. To cut a long story short, DragonFly's permission is the only obstacle in this situation. Concerning the derivation of audio from an original to a parody/remix/cover/etc, there is no point at which legality comes into it, as long as the replication differs in a clear way. Let me give you an example. Listen to Rick James' "Super Freak." Recognise that Ground Bass pattern? MC Hammer directly sampled that from the original recording for his hit single, because he failed in reproducing the sound exactly. MC Hammer, of course, made a profit from U Can't Touch This, and some of the royalties went to Rick James. We will not make a profit from this directly. I don't know about you, but I've never seen an advertisment here that says: "Check out the UESP's cool new sounds for fifty bucks!" I can understand your concern for this, however. I have worked with online music for some years now, and the industry itself has a certain stigma around it. This is why many artists refuse to allow their music to go for sale on legitimate programmes such as Napster or Itunes. They confuse these companies with illegal ones such as Limewire or Grokster. I'll see if I can send an E-mail to the guys at TR. In the meantime, please consider what I have said, Lurlock. --HMSVictory 16:18, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
When MC Hammer sampled Rick James, it's a fair bet he paid for the rights to do so, or at least asked for and received permission. As a counter-example, consider The Verve's song "Bitter Sweet Symphony", which samples the Rolling Stones song "The Last Time". The Verve did NOT get permission to do this, and the Stones successfully sued them, and all royalties from this song now go to the Stones and not The Verve. At any rate, this discussion is beside the point. The real issue here is whether we want to get UESP involved in a potentially thorny legal debate regarding the use of other people's artwork. It's most likely that we could do this and get away with it, but given the possibility that it could get complicated, it's probably better to leave it alone unless we carefully consider all of the possible ramifications of this, something which neither you nor I nor most of the other people on this site are qualified to do. In the end, I'd say the decision should be in the hands of Daveh himself - as he is the one who would directly face the consequences if this sort of thing went bad. --TheRealLurlock Talk 17:05, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
I think the best course of action now is for me to contact DragonFly himself, and see what he thinks. As I said, I've spoken to him before, and he is an avid fan of TES. Legally, we could do it without his permission, but as I'm sure everyone will agree, it'll be better if we get it. Anyway, I know it's besides the point, but under the laws of the UK and the USA, it is legal to: sample an artist's music, change it, publish it as your own and profit from it without their permission. The example you have picked out likely occurred before these laws were introduced. I could take the Oblivion theme, probably now Bethesda's most recognisable piece of music, modify it, muck around with it, and then put it up on the internet for download or for sale on an unofficial website under my name, and all of that would be completely legal. You do not needs the original artist's permission to produce something like this. You don't even have to give them any credit for it. However, it is illegal to attempt to do this while profitting from it without offering any royalties to the original artist. The more similar your version is to the original, the more royalties you must pay. DragonFly, of course, is not making any money from this, and so we need not concern ourselves with this. Anyway, al that aside - I'll contact him and see what he thinks. --HMSVictory 17:20, 24 March 2008 (EDT)
There's a more fundamental question here: do we really want to host it? We've talked about fanart and decided "No" on that one, so why would we want to host fanmusic? A link on the Music page would be acceptable, but I really don't see that we want to host it ourselves at the moment. If we get to the point where we're hosting mods, then maybe. –Rpeh•T•C•E• 17:49, 24 March 2008 (EDT)

Alright, Rpeh. Should I link to the file itself or the webpage, which has a lot of other information, so it might be difficult to find the link? If we choose by the file itself, how exactly would I go about it? --HMSVictory 13:29, 27 March 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Scaling PNG support

Just before the Easter Holidays, there was a discussiong in my talk page between Nephele, Lurlock and myself, about scaling PNGs. I feel that the discussion has somehow cooled off during the holidays and I'd like to reactivate it here. I think it would be quite useful to be able to scale PNGs properly, i.e. maintaining their transparency, for two main reasons: 1) people won't have to upload several different versions of the same image (one for each different size they'd like to have), and 2) if the original image is updated, the wiki will update all sized verisons of that image, again wihtout the need to upload the sized verisons manually.

Implementing proper scaling of PNGs is quite simple. All it requires is a current installation of ImageMagick on the server and a couple of changes to the wiki settings. Instructions can be found here. If there is support for this implementation, we can ask Daveh to do this. --DrPhoton 04:54, 26 March 2008 (EDT)

To me, this already seems to be everything that is required for a request for Daveh to implement the feature; I'm not sure what additionally is needed. --NepheleTalk 00:37, 27 March 2008 (EDT)
OK, I'll ask Daveh then. --DrPhoton 10:04, 27 March 2008 (EDT)
What does "PNG" mean? Only curious so I'll know later. Thanks. --Playjex 12:11, 5 April 2008 (EDT)
Portable Network Graphics; it's a graphics format that allows better color resolution and better transparency than GIF; it's also copyright-free. We have several PNG images on the site; Daveh's graph of site use, for instance, or the icons for various game items. –Rpeh•T•C•E• 12:19, 5 April 2008 (EDT)

[edit] Interwiki linking between Tamriel-Almanach and UESP

Question moved to Community Portal.

[edit] Archive Protection?

This is something that happens every so often and, whilst it's not a serious problem, I'd rather months-old discussions weren't re-opened unnecessarily. What would you say to putting full protection on archive pages whenever they are created and adding it to the ones that already exist? I'm not hugely bothered one way or the other but it's a thought I just had so I thought I'd bring it up here. Thoughts? –Rpeh•T•C•E• 17:05, 29 April 2008 (EDT)

I think that would be more trouble than it is worth. --Ratwar 17:28, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
Umm... I'd have hoped for a bit more feedback than that. All it would mean is clicking about four more buttons when archiving a page. I can see objections in that it would be overprotective but in terms of work, I don't see a problem. –Rpeh•T•C•E• 18:27, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
I was talking about the work that would be needed for any editor to change the categories on the article or the even create archives. I don't think either of these is necessarily administrator tasks (though we often end up doing them). If we protect them, then people need to talk to an administrator every time they wish to do something with the archives. I see no huge advantage to protecting them, and at least a bit of hassle associated with it. --Ratwar 18:58, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
I'd have to say no as well - there are times when someone might need to re-open an older discussion, and it shouldn't be impossible to do so. Of course, the appropriate action would probably be to move the dicussion back onto the main page instead of continuing the discussion on an archive page. Protecting the archive pages essentially implies that the conclusions of those discussions are now immutable laws, set in stone for all eternity. When in fact, it's entirely possible for new issues to crop up related to those old discussions, which would warrant a re-examination of their results. While I mostly agree that dragging skeletons out of the closet is not usually a good idea, there are times when it makes sense to do so, and I don't think we need to completely disallow that in all cases. --TheRealLurlock Talk 19:02, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
Okay, good points... but we already have warnings at the top of some pages such as this and this. I'd thought that our policy was to disallow edits on archive pages; certainly I've reverted edits on that basis in the past. I'm not trying to shut down older discussions - perhaps a link to the latest talk page on an archive notice would help here? I'm trying to work out what people think should happen and how that relates to what has already happened. –Rpeh•T•C•E• 19:21, 29 April 2008 (EDT)
I don't think we want editors posting to archives; if an editor wants to reopen an old discussion it should be done on the active talk page, with a link to the old discussion or a copy of some of its contents. Nevertheless, I'm not sure that adding protection to archive pages is appropriate. It is an additional step that has to be done by an administrator (two steps in fact: clicking the "protect" tab and adding the appropriate category to the page). It's not a huge amount of work. But on the other hand, it's also not a huge amount of work to click "undo" when an edit is made, and undoing is something that can be done by any editor. Also, there are times when edits need to be made to archives, in particular when pages are moved or links need to be updated. I'd prefer not to turn those tasks into admin-only tasks.
Overall, it doesn't seem like it fits with the existing Protection Policy, and my guess is that it will create more work than it will save. --NepheleTalk 18:21, 6 May 2008 (EDT)
Okay. Good points. Thanks everybody. –Rpeh•T•C•E• 00:56, 7 May 2008 (EDT)
Retrieved from "http://www.uesp.net/wiki/UESPWiki:Administrator_Noticeboard"
Sponsored Links
Personal tools