User talk:Daveh

Note: Feel free to leave me a message here or e-mail me at uesp@sympatico.ca.

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New Job

Congrats on your new job at the UESP. I'm not sure I can say why, but my intuition says this will be a great thing for the community. If there's any way that "kissing up" to you could benefit me, I can't see it at the moment. But what can it hurt? Seriously: I hope it will be a lot of fun for you. We know it will be challenging. --JR (talk) 06:53, 6 January 2013 (GMT)

Shutting Down UESP!

If you are the same Jobatett from GMail then the one and only e-mail I received from you was last August in a minor matter. My e-mail is and has been working just fine for the last few years.... -- Daveh ^(talk) 00:15, 18 January 2013 (GMT)

sorting the error log

awk -vFS=']' '/\[.*\] \[error\] \[client .*\]/ { a[$4]++; } END { for (i in a) print a[i], i; }' < error_log | sort -n > errors.txt

This is from #awk. Lukish_ Tlk Cnt 04:56, 18 January 2013 (GMT)

Password change

Not sure if I can do anything about it but I can't remember my password for Catmaniac66. I remember my password to the email attached to it (same name) but can't get in THAT because its asking me for the answer to my security question it made me set up 3 years ago. It asks me where my honeymoon was. I'm 19 and unmarried. So I'm at a little bit of a crossroads. Any help? I could message you what I think the password is and you could tell me if it's just a variant of it. Any ideas would be helpful though. That I don't know the password when I've logged in multiple times very very recently is perplexing to me.--69.136.59.17 03:32, 22 January 2013 (GMT)

Well, I'm now as confused as you are, because according to our database, you haven't changed your password recently. Are you sure it wasn't something silly like the Caps Lock being on or the computer thinking your Alt or Ctrl key was stuck down? Try again, and then just to be doubly sure, type your password into a text editor, then copy & paste it to the password box on the wiki. If none of that works, is there any system that you regularly use under the name Catmaniac66 that you can log into to prove that this is really you? Your IP address looks to be correct, but given that you've lost both this password and your e-mail password, you'll understand if I want to make sure this isn't a kid brother playing a prank or something. :) Send me that, and what you want your new password to be (something temporary that you don't use elsewhere) to robinhood70@live.ca and I can change it. (Oh and nobody can tell you what your current password is, not even Dave, as passwords are encrypted.) – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:38, 22 January 2013 (GMT)

The password should be the same thing, I just completely forgot it XD! I'll try some usual suspects and try to figure out some way of proving it. I totally understand that something has to check out. Now I just have to find it! This name is a ridiculously old screen name I use for all my site activities but I think this is the only one active. But I'm not planning on being too active currently so it's not a biggie. If I think of something more than a few days from now I'll just remember to leave you a message specifically. Thanks for the help!--69.136.59.17 02:16, 23 January 2013 (GMT)

There are other ways I might be able to verify your identity if you'd like, but they start to involve personal details, so I don't want to have the conversation on a public page, unless you're okay with that. The one way that occurs to me that might be easy for both of us is if you have a Facebook account that matches the real name you have in your preferences. If you do, you can send me a message there and that'll be plenty of proof of identity. Also, don't forget, even if you can't get at your e-mail right now, you can send me mail via the site, or a private IRC chatroom works too. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 04:00, 23 January 2013 (GMT)

Username question

I was wondering, can usernames of accounts that aren't active be usurped, similar to Wikipedia? Because there's a username I want to use, but it's taken by an account that isn't active at all. 71.53.205.96 21:13, 4 February 2013 (GMT)

That's not something we've ever done here before. It would have to be discussed on the Admin Noticeboard first, since they're the ones who would be doing it, probably with help from the database administrators. Unlike on Wikipedia, all our admins have rename user rights, which is the main feature required, but only the database administrators can tell if someone has logged in recently or not without doing anything. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:19, 4 February 2013 (GMT)

Image copy on other wiki

Hey, I've been told to contact you directly about copyright business etc. Well here's a link to a wiki that uses an (old) image from our site, without mentioning us anywhere. ~ Dwarfmp (talk) 19:26, 6 February 2013 (GMT)

Just as a note, I added a attribution link to the image there today. --Alfwyn (talk) 19:37, 6 February 2013 (GMT)

I found another site with at least some of our images copied, here. I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to let you know when I find these things, so let me know if I shouldn't ~ Dwarfmp (talk) 16:09, 10 February 2013 (GMT)

My sense was that Daveh wanted to take control of such matters during a past conflict that became heated. In the past couple of months, I've behaved a few other times as I've seen some other experienced editors do, similar to Alfwyn's action described above. In the above case, I sent an email to the contact address for the site, saying it looks like they have a great site and community, that I understand some of the images on that page may have been taken from UESP, that I have no official role with UESP, but that I believe "we" are fine with them using the images if they attribute, and linked them to our example of how to attribute. I guess I ask Dwarfmp's same question, but from the other side: if that's overstepping, please let us know. --JR (talk) 14:49, 16 February 2013 (GMT)

The reply to my email:

Thank you VERY much for bringing this to our attention! We try to keep up with crediting as best as possible, but sometimes mistakes happen when trying to meet those deadlines. I feel like we emphasize fact quality so much with our writers, that we overlook quality with proper referencing, from time to time.

Be that as it may, I hope you find the corrections suitable. If not, please let us know and we will go back in and make the right corrections.

http://elderscrollsotr.mymiddleearth.com/?s=the+gray+fox

We go to your site every week as a staple of fact checking and reference (esp. with lore) and enjoy it VERY much. Thanks for all you do for the Elder Scrolls Community. Maybe at some point in the future, we can help each other out. Let us know if you're interested at all. Are you familiar with our podcast? If not, I'll leave you our feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/SkyrimOffTheRecord

Hope you enjoy and don't be a stranger. It was nice to hear from you and make a contact :) -- Joe Rojas "Evarwyn" / Creative Dir. / Quest Gaming Network / http://www.questgamingnetwork.com/

Thanks for the quick correction! -- Daveh ^(talk) 15:06, 17 February 2013 (GMT)

I replied to him with a link to General:Links and told him we'd be glad to add his site if he wants to suggest a category and short description. I think what we want is to absolutely avoid any warnings or threats, even implicitly. If someone refused, I'd let Daveh know about it and stop there. --JR (talk) 02:06, 17 February 2013 (GMT)

If you find UESP content used elsewhere with improper attribution a (friendly) notice to the site as well as notice to the admin board here is perfectly fine as a first step. If that doesn't work I would prefer handling any additional actions myself. -- Daveh ^(talk) 15:06, 17 February 2013 (GMT)

DragonFont

Hi, I'm Vuh.

I'm administrator Polish Elder Scrolls Wiki. I would like to ask, would you let me use your dragon fonts on our Wiki.

@font-face {
        font-family: 'DragonscriptRegular';
        src: url('/w/extensions/DragonFont/dragon_script.eot');
        src: url('/w/extensions/DragonFont/dragon_script.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
             url('/w/extensions/DragonFont/dragon_script.woff') format('woff'),
             url('/w/extensions/DragonFont/dragon_script.ttf') format('truetype'),
             url('/w/extensions/DragonFont/dragon_script.svg#DragonscriptRegular') format('svg');
}

Vuh (talk) 09:47, 10 February 2013 (GMT)

I'm sorry that you took the time. I've got the font from another source.

Vuh (talk) 21:24, 13 February 2013 (GMT)

New bot request

As you can see in the Community Portal discussion, Jak has proposed a new bot, and it has been supported by the community. When you have a moment, can you please add Wabbajak to the bot group? Thanks! – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:40, 15 February 2013 (GMT)

Done! -- Daveh ^(talk) 13:22, 18 February 2013 (GMT)

Dragonborn Weapon

I noticed that the list of Unique Dragonborn Items does not include the Blookskal Blade. The enchantment is unlike any other so it does belong there correct? Thanks a lot! soccerdef11 21:15, 17 February 2013

I think the Bloodskal Blade will end up on an artifact page, whether that's the Skyrim one or one for Dragonborn I'm not sure. It's listed with a few other that aren't on the Unique page, at the top of the DB:Weapons page. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 21:35, 17 February 2013 (GMT)

MW search suggestions in namespaces

Someone pointed out that your search suggestions include multiple namespaces -- something that isn't apparently available in the native implementation of search suggestions.

If you didn't patch MW to do this, could you provide a HOWTO? If you patched this in, could you share the code?

(Not just a random request. I'm the release manager for the MW tarball.) -- MarkAHershberger (talk) 20:16, 2 March 2013 (GMT)

I don't recall having to do anything special to get it work. We did have a bunch of custom search stuff in our UESPWiki:UespCustomCode extension but I'm pretty sure we no longer use any of the search related changes in it since v1.19 and moving to Lucene. Could it be that the Lucene search suggestion implementation uses $wgNamespacesToBeSearchedDefault while the default MySQL search suggestion doesn't? My notes from our Lucene setup doesn't show anything obvious other than the list of namespaces in the all_content parameter in lsearch-global.conf. I'll dig into it a bit more and see if any of our custom changes/extensions are coming into play here. -- Daveh ^(talk) 20:36, 2 March 2013 (GMT)

I did a quick review of things. Our modification to the MediaWiki files is currently limited to the three files list here and are not related to searching at all. The custom search changes in our UespCustomCode extension have been disabled and I don't see anything that would impact which namespaces would be searched. Offhand I don't recall ever having to do anything special to get the suggestions working with all our namespaces with Lucene (we never used suggestions previously). -- Daveh ^(talk) 21:15, 5 March 2013 (GMT)

Wiki API not returning certain data

Hi there. I have been making use of the wiki API for this little project I've been working on. You can see an example of the stats here. But I've run into a critical issue. For some reason the list=recentchanges api isn't returning information concerning page moves. It only returns:

{"type":"log","ns":6,"title":"File:MW-quest-Place-Zainab Camp.jpg","rcid":1189347,"pageid":147052,"revid":0,"old_revid":0,"user":"Jeancey","timestamp":"2013-02-17T22:52:26Z","logid":1037956,"logtype":"move","logaction":"move","move":{"suppressedredirect":""}}

instead of the expected output:

{"type":"log","ns":6,"title":"File:MW-quest-Place-Zainab Camp.jpg","rcid":1189347,"pageid":147052,"revid":0,"old_revid":0,"user":"Jeancey","timestamp":"2013-02-17T22:52:26Z","logid":1037956,"logtype":"move","logaction":"move","move":{"suppressedredirect":"", "new_ns":the_new_namespace,"new_title":"the_new_title"}}

as the api does on other wikis I deal with. This makes it impossible to tell where pages have been moved to in the API. Do you have an idea why this is the case? Thanks Moussekateer (talk) 23:29, 26 March 2013 (GMT)

Off-hand no. The base wiki code is mostly unmodified so the only thing that might be causing it would be our UespCustomCode extension, although that shouldn't affect the API calls at all. It could be a bug in MediaWiki v1.19.3. Do you happen to know which MediaWiki versions you've confirmed as working? Either way I'll do a little digging in the code and see if anything obvious shows up. -- Daveh ^(talk) 23:33, 26 March 2013 (GMT)

The ones I know are confirmed working have either 1.20.2, 1.18.6 or 1.16.5 installed. Thank you for taking the time to have a look. I'll try to see if it is indeed a bug or if anyone has had experience with this before. Moussekateer (talk) 23:44, 26 March 2013 (GMT)

What parameters to api.php are you using to get that output? I tried testing it on www.mediawiki.com but I don't get anything past the timestamp field. They are running v1.21 so see if they output the expected format or not. -- Daveh ^(talk) 23:58, 26 March 2013 (GMT)

I am using these parameters api.php?action=query&list=recentchanges&rcprop=user|timestamp|title|ids|loginfo|redirect&rctype=edit|new|log&rcdir=newer&rclimit=500&format=json. Moussekateer (talk) 00:15, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

Possibly relevant: try it with format=xml or format=xmlfm and you get an error message:

<error code="internal_api_error_MWException" info="Exception Caught: Internal error in ApiResult::setIndexedTagName: Bad parameter" xml:space="preserve"/>

Doing a little more tracing, it didn't like the "loginfo" property in rcprop. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 05:03, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

Hmmm that does seem to be the issue. But the loginfo parameter is the one that contains the information I need unfortunately. Double checked and the auto generated api docs here do list loginfo as a valid parameter so not sure what's going on... Moussekateer (talk) 21:54, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

Request for abuseeditor rights

So I sent you an email a couple weeks ago and I'm not sure if you've seen it or not (or it got lost), and thought I might ask here. I'd like to have abuseeditor rights so that I can make changes to the filters without having to go through an admin or Jak, since I keep catching words that should be added or sites that should be whitelisted. Thanks for considering. Vely^►t►e 00:21, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

I'm hesitant to give out any admin related rights to anyone without getting feedback from other admins and editors. I would have you post this request on the admin noticeboard. If there's no objection from anyone there I have no problem giving you access. -- Daveh ^(talk) 14:31, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

Will do. Thanks for replying. Vely^►t►e 17:45, 27 March 2013 (GMT)

Memory Allocation

Hello. I have halved the size of the Solstheim map image (sent to you via e-mail) and uploaded it here under File:User-Roger-Solstheim Map 02.jpg. However, it seems the server is unable to allocate enough memory to create a thumbnail, as indicated by the warning on a gray background when trying to view the thumbnail of that image. Is there any way to fix that or am I supposed to divide the image in several parts? --Roger (talk) 17:50, 7 April 2013 (GMT)

This just means that the temp drive is filled up. This happens periodically, and it just has to be flushed. Now would be a good time to flush it. And Daveh, any idea why this keeps happening? You could probably set up a script to clear the temp drive monthly (or however frequently is necessary). • JA^T 19:08, 7 April 2013 (GMT)

Thanks for the map...I haven't had time to reply to your original email this weekend. There is a cron script to clear the temp space and it looks like there is at least 1GB free on all content servers /tmp. Given the large size of the image it could be too large for the thumb nail creation programs. I'll take a look and see if I can narrow it down. The map itself is great and can definitely be used for the map application. -- Daveh ^(talk) 01:29, 8 April 2013 (GMT)

I am unsure if it will help, but googling brought up that $wgMaxShellMemory (defaulted to 100 MB) in LocalSettings.php should be increased. Why would "unable to allocate enough memory" be reported if it was a problem with temp space? --Roger (talk) 13:54, 8 April 2013 (GMT)

Roger: you're right, that was indeed the problem. I temporarily increased the value on one of our servers and then refreshed the page and the thumbnail generated properly. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 02:02, 1 May 2013 (GMT)

Thanks, but, assuming you have changed it back, thumbnails of other sizes can't be generated now. AFAIK, Igor van Dame's and my sandbox are suffering from this. --Roger (talk) 15:46, 3 May 2013 (GMT)

Dave: thoughts on making this a permanent change?

Roger: I was able to repeat the process for Igor vanDame's sandbox, but even at 300MB, yours still causes an error. Since I'm not overly familiar with our hardware specs, I didn't want to play around too much. You may want to convert to a smaller resolution on your end and upload a new version. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:41, 3 May 2013 (GMT)

Check User Privileges

And while we're putting you to work anyway, can you grant Check User privileges to Alpha Kenny Buddy, Dwarfmp, and Legoless per this discussion. Thanks! – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 19:50, 7 April 2013 (GMT)

Done! -- Daveh ^(talk) 13:56, 8 April 2013 (GMT)

Use of Google Map API for Arena Map work

I'm at the start of a long process to provide interactive maps for all 400 cities in Arena. I have viewed with interest your implementation of the newer TES titles in Google Maps and I would like to do the same for Arena. I have some experience working with ESRI ArcGIS program but will need some guidance on custom maps following your guidelines.

I can pop onto IRC chat, or can connect to any ventrilo/teamspeak/mumble server you may have access to to discuss this further. I cannot email you because you are not part of the Users group. Thanks in advance for you help. Igor van Dame (talk) 03:39, 9 April 2013 (GMT)

You can e-mail directly if that works. Note that I'm in the process of rewriting the site maps to use the v3 Google maps API. The existing maps and new ones will be free to use. The original maps have a good design walkthrough at Oblivion_Map_Design. Whenever I get around to finish the v3 maps I'll try and do a similar article. -- Daveh ^(talk) 12:08, 9 April 2013 (GMT)

Creative Commons Licensing

Hi Dave, could you possibly take a look at this Administrator Noticeboard post that I made some time ago.There has been no response to it at all yet. I originally posted it on UESPWiki_talk:Copyright_and_Ownership, but was advised in IRC that it would get more immediate attention if moved to the AN. As I mentioned in the original comment, I'm happy to help with remedying the situation, but I don't want to "jump the gun" and go doing this without proper approval. Thanks for your time. — Daric✐ 22:06, 10 April 2013 (GMT)

GMT Moved Forward

The clocks went forward an hour in Britain a few weeks ago, so should the GMT post times be moved an hour forward as well?--DCChuckles (talk) 14:40, 8 May 2013 (GMT)

I think you're confusing GMT with Western European Time, which is used by Britain in the winter months until it transitions to Western European Summer Time. GMT doesn't change. • JA^T 18:17, 8 May 2013 (GMT)

Ah, okay. Damn, I'm British, I should know that.--DCChuckles (talk) 19:33, 8 May 2013 (GMT)