User talk:Nephele/Archive-2009-09

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Description / Author Reserved Words[edit]

Please can you provide more information on how these work? The documentation says that these are "used as a special variable by #load, for backwards compatibility with current wiki pages" but I can't get them to work. Please can you provide an example? –rpehTCE 22:57, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm guessing the problem is just that there is no #save data for the quest pages. Given how expensive page-existence checks can be, #load only looks for description/author pages if there is some type of entry for the page in the save database -- so that the lookup isn't done for every redlink or invalid article. So Quest Header needs to have a #save statement added to it (e.g., {{#save:ID}}). I also realized after coding the /Description and /Author lookups that it's possible to just have the Quest Header template read those subpages and then #save their contents (unless description/author parameters have been moved to the quest page). --NepheleTalk 05:11, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Search Preferences Issue[edit]

Hi Nephele. For a while now, I've been having the problem that occasionally my search preferences reverted to no namespaces selected and only the bottom three boxes (Search Titles, Search Talk Pages, and List Redirects) ticked off. Well, I just noticed that when I save my preferences in Firefox, all is well; when I save my preferences in IE8, they come back as blank but for the bottom three after I save. (As an aside, my default browser is IE8 when I click on a link, but I have specific shortcuts to Firefox for Patrolling and such, so which browser I use depends what I did to open it.) I'm thinking that the problem is something IE8-specific, and the reason it seemed intermittent to me was simply because of how I hop back and forth between the two. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 21:33, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Actually, I had that problem too, but I think it happened when I switched from only using Firefox to only using Chrome. I don't think it's cleared out since I re-customized the preferences though. –Eshetalk 21:37, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
For me, it's not just at the browser switchover, or so it seems. The Search Preferences page comes up blank the moment after I save it in IE8. I haven't done enough testing to be sure whether that actually affects the searching, though. It doesn't seem to. My impression is that the Preferences take effect regardless of the fact that they appear blank, and that those prefrences get cleared whenever a search fails to find anything. There could be something going on with the browser switchover too, though. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 21:49, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
OK, I just managed to get access to IE8, and I'm getting the same thing: pulling up "my preferences"->"search" in IE8 gives all-blank namespaces, whereas Firefox correctly shows my selected namespaces. Whether I can find the cause, though, is another question ;) I'll let you know. --NepheleTalk 21:58, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
Hmm, first guess is a set of missing quote marks, which would be enough to make browsers handle things differently. --NepheleTalk 22:03, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
Well, I just stumbled across something that seems really odd and will hopefully help pinpoint the issue: when clicking separately on Oblivion and then Shivering, nothing got saved; when clicking on Oblivion and then shift-clicking on Shivering, everything was fine. How's that for weird? —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 22:19, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
(Edit conflict) Yes, the quotes were the problem. I've fixed the code on content2, so if I pull up content2's page the problem's now fixed in IE8 -- at least for me. However, content1 hasn't been updated yet, so for the next few hours you're likely to still see inconsistent bizarreness using a standard Special:Preferences link. I'll be able to fully fix the problem by tomorrow at the latest.
And for anyone else who's curious, the nature of the problem means that it could be popping up in numerous browsers (basically, anything except Firefox, which just happened to deal with the error properly, even though it really shouldn't have). So anyone who has noticed strange things with search preferences, no matter what browser you use, wait until tomorrow and hopefully it should be fixed. If not, then let me know because then there's something else going on, too. --NepheleTalk 22:26, 12 September 2009 (UTC)
Robin Hood: at this point, the oddness is probably just because the problem is half-fixed: on one try your request probably went to content2 (which did the right thing); on the next try your request probably went to content1 (which did the same old wrong thing). --NepheleTalk 22:28, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Frostcrag Spire Alchemy Garden, Ingredients and Respawning[edit]

Thanks for making the change to my contribution.

I did some tests with my game and this is what I found:

Some of the conclusions I drew from my tests are wrong. The main problem is that is I did not know that respawning happens only after 72 whole hours. --Jxavier 05:09, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
  • For plants to respawn, the character must be out of the area (cell) for three at least 3 consecutive game days.
  • If the character re-enters the area within 3 days, the wait time is reset.
  • In the case of the Frostcrag Spire Alchemy Garden, the character must leave the Frostcrag area (cell), not just the Frostcrag Spire Living Area. In the case of Frostcrag, just going outside does not do it. Unlike many of the other areas (buildings, caves, etc) going out of the front door does not cause the character to leave the area. The character has to move some distance from the Frostcrag building to be out of the area.
This is wrong. Going out front door does work. But you have to wait 72 whole hours. So really you have to wait 3 days plus one hour. --Jxavier 05:09, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I am new to the game and I have seen seveal pages that mention it takes 3 game days for an object to respawn. But none of these page go into the detail that character has to leave the area and stay out of the area for 3 consecutive days. I did a search on the key word Respawn. It came up with the page Respawning NPCs. I could not find a page that fully explained the respawning process.

Is there a good page to explain the respawning process, so that other pages can link to it?

Also, think a special mention is still in order on the Frostcrag page, because it is a place where the respawning issue is more obvious.

--Jxavier 00:25, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

The most detailed description of respawning times is at Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot; ingredients work the same way as chests and other containers. If you know of other places that mention respawning, it would probably be helpful to add that link (which, for example, I just did on the Ingredients page). Adding links to information ends up being one of the toughest parts of maintaining a wiki ;)
I didn't realize that Frostcrag Spire has different rules in terms of cell re-loading -- if the zones are linked like that, then it would be helpful to figure out what setting in the construction set is responsible (so that we can understand the mechanism, and predict exactly where else it might occur). Those details would belong on the Frostcrag page.
However, any details on respawning would apply to any location, and so the information would be more useful on a broader page, namely Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot, or Oblivion:Ingredients#Availability if the details are specific just to ingredients. Other pages should just link to that one central location. That prevents redundancy, and makes sure that all of the details are collected in a single place, instead of having different details covered on each of a dozen different pages, making it necessary to read all dozen pages to get the complete picture.
Welcome to the site, and feel free to ask if you have any other questions! --NepheleTalk 02:00, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for your reply.
After reading Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot I found out even more about respawning. Specifically you must wait 72 hours from the next whole hour. So in many cases you must wait 73 hours.
I agree that the details about respawning should be on a broader page. In fact I believe that both Oblivion:Ingredients#Availability and Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot should have a link to a page or a section on a page that describes respawning in general as it applies to both chests and Ingredients and other objects such as generic NPC's.
What I would like to do is create a new page and use the wording from Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot, but reword it to a more general case.
My thought is to create a page named respawning.I would like your thoughts.
--Jxavier 17:21, 13 September 2009 (UTC)
I suppose I could see reasons why an article more specifically on respawning could be useful -- although it really should have significantly more content than just the one paragraph from Dungeons#Loot. And keep in mind that there are articles such as Containers and Leveled Lists, so the article can't add depth by expanding into related topics. One option might be to move Respawning NPCs to the new article, and then transform the NPC content into just one section of the article (which in the process would fix some of the problems with that article). Or if you don't have too much to add right now, you could just create a Respawning redirect that points to the Dungeons section and continue to collect information there for now -- once (if) it expands too much, then the information could be moved.
If you need help with any of the wiki editing features (moving pages, creating redirects, etc), just ask! --NepheleTalk 19:06, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I'd second the idea of a re-spawning article. I think a lot of the information that Nepehele has mentioned could be moved there with links/redirects to the Respawning page, including loot, NPCs, and especially if there are any non-standard respawning items/creatures. I can't think of anything off-hand, but it would be easy enough to script something like that, so there may be something of that nature I'm not thinking of. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 20:19, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I created a new page and started to add links to it. I know the page is short, but it is to the point and fully covers the respawning process as I know it now. The problem with the information one other pages I have replaced so far was that it was incomplete and misleading. Some pages only mentions 3 days without mentioning the player had to stay out of the area. Some pages mentioned both, but did not mention it had to be 72 whole hours or in other words 3 whole days. I hope you can now see why other players and I had so much trouble with the Frostcrag Spire Alchemy Garden. We were mis-lead by the information on other pages that mention respawning.
The concern I have to simply linking to Oblivion:Dungeons#Loot is that players would follow the link and wonder what respawning loot has to do with respawning ingredients or respawning NPC's. We should not assume they would make the connection. In fact it is more likely they will assume the link is a mistake and start searching for information specifically about respawning ingredients or NPC's.
Slightly off the topic is I have notice many places where word variation is used. An example of word variation is: In order to get an area to respawn the character must leave the zone for 3 whole days. We may know that area and zone are the same thing, but other readers may assume that because the words are different, the words reffer to different things. Word variation may be great for fiction writing, but it is not a good idea for more technical writing.
--Jxavier 05:09, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Bureaucracy...with a capital B[edit]

I was just skimming over the list of RfAs after posting my non-RfA message on the Administrator Noticeboard, and I notice that there's no archived discussion of your becoming a Bureaucrat. Should there be, or was that an informal decision of some kind? I vaguely remember it happening maybe a year ago, but I don't really remember the circumstances under which it happened. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 20:34, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

No, there was no RfB discussion. It was an unsolicited (and unexpected) change made by Daveh. At the time (16 June 2009, for those who didn't notice) I was somewhat focussed on the wiki upgrade. I later considered starting a retroactive RfB discussion (and even had some informal discussions with other admins), but in short I opted not to. Nevertheless, if the community would like to have a RfB, I'd be happy to start one, even now.
In part because my Bureaucratship was never a community decision, I've consciously refrained from using any Bureaucrat powers (those powers are essentially just batch-deleting pages and controlling rights other than Patrollership -- the other powers are also available to admins). I've also never particularly wanted to be a Bureaucrat -- I've previously stated and still feel that having Daveh make the final decision about Administrators is preferable. On the other hand, in cases where Daveh is unavailable a backup Bureaucrat may be useful.
Also, the reason given by Daveh for the Bureaucratship ("technically already one") is entirely true. With my current level of server access, I can do tasks far beyond what is available to Bureaucrats (in Wikipedia terms, I have capabilities similar to a System administrator). I can change the site's software; I can change settings (for example, giving admins the renameuser right); I have direct access to the site's database (allowing, for example, this action). In fact, at this point there are relatively few differences between what Daveh and I can do (access-wise, at least -- there are many tasks that only Daveh knows how to do, and other tasks that only Daveh has needed to do).
Request for Server Access was the discussion in which I first proposed being given server-level access. Since then, Daveh has gradually increased the extent of my server-level abilities (for that matter, the site's number of servers and complexity have also changed substantially). Those changes have generally been documented on Upgrade History, although in most cases the community was probably unable to recognize the implications of those changes (in some cases, even Daveh and I didn't quite expect some implications!) If the community would find it informative, I could try to provide a more complete summary of my current server-level access -- although such a summary would probably be mostly technobabble to anyone without unix sysadmin knowledge ;) --NepheleTalk 22:14, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
I must have been confusing the Bureaucrat rights with the server-level access rights. Given that it's a significant change in rights, I'd suggest linking that discussion on the AN page, just like the RfB and RfA requests. Apart from that, though, I personally see no reason to retroactively have an RfB—as you point out, the server-level access is far more encompassing than the Bureaucrat rights in any event. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 22:35, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Good point about the links -- and now done! --NepheleTalk 23:33, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

page changes issue[edit]

Twice now I have seen changes recorded in the history of articles or recent changes pages that do not appear on the current version of the article. I didn't think much of it until I made a post of a talk page and it did not appear, except in the html code when I pressed edit. Could you do me a favor and see if there are two comments (rather than one) on the Bjoulsae River talk page? I'm curious as to whether other people can read it but not me.Temple-Zero 17:05, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

It's an obscure technical issue that results in out-of-date versions of pages sometimes being displayed. For now, Bjoulsae River should be fixed. I'd meaning to experiment with a larger-scale tweak to prevent this type of problem entirely a couple of weeks ago and forgot; I'll try looking into it some more right now. --NepheleTalk 17:40, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Unwatched watched pages[edit]

I notice that you're hunting for the cache bug and figured that while you were at it, maybe you'd like to hunt this one down as well: I've noticed before, and just had it reconfirmed by the Useful Enchantments page, that somehow, watched pages sometimes become unwatched in the sense that mail about page changes stops being delivered. The pages still show up in My Watchlist and are still marked as Watched on the page itself...but mail doesn't come through for any changes until you reset the page with an Unwatch/Watch. Oh and yes, I can confirm that they're not just getting caught in my spam blocker, since UESP is safe-listed and I go through my spam every day anyway.

Also, my general impression is that this seems to happen in waves. Something causes the semi-watched behaviour on large numbers of pages all at once (for example, I once lost tracking on most, but not all, of the various Admins' and Patrollers' talk pages, which I normally keep Watched). After that something, any pages that you fix will remain fixed until the next something. Whatever this something is, it doesn't seem to happen very often, but I'm pretty sure I've seen it happen to the same page more than once (hard to be positive, since it happens so rarely), so I'm guessing it's some kind of recurring event. Good luck hunting this one down! ;) —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 21:01, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Any chance it's something as simple as that you haven't visited the page since it was last edited? As long as you haven't visited a page since it was edited (as long as that page is shown in bold face on your watchlist), you won't get sent any more notification emails. In other words, assuming you've newly added a page to your watchlist, you'll get sent an email the first time it's edited -- and at the same time the page is flagged as unvisited (bold-face in watchlist). If you don't then visit the page, it could proceed to be edited 50 more times, and you wouldn't get any more emails. The unvisited flag is cleared when you view the page (of course, you have to be logged in), and then you'll be emailed again next time the page is edited.
Other than that, there's nothing obvious in the code that would cause emails to stop being sent. And I'd probably need to know of a page that currently is being problematic (given that you're the most recent person to edit Useful Enchantments, I'm assuming anything happening with that page has already been reset) -- there are a few too many pages in your watchlist for me to have a chance of randomly picking a page for investigation. --NepheleTalk 02:29, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Oh, and it seems that a page is only flagged as visited once you somehow see the most recent edit made to the page. Of course, viewing the page (e.g., following this link) works. Or a diff showing the most recent edit, e.g. this or with intermediate edits, works. But a diff only with older edits would not work. You can experiment yourself pretty easily to see what does it -- just keep an eye on what de-bolds the page on your watchlist or, alternatively, removes the green "changed since my last visit" text on the history page. --NepheleTalk 02:38, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Hmmm...in this case, at least, it might just be that I hadn't visited it after my last e-mail about it, as I do remember it was bold in my list, but I never got an e-mail. Maybe I just deleted the last e-mail thinking I'd already seen the change but in fact I hadn't. I don't think it would've been the case previously, but I'll keep an eye on it. As for the size of my watchlist, I'll have you know I just removed a bunch! ;) These things happen when you've got auto-tracking turned on. I wish there were an easy way of telling when you last edited a page from the View and Edit Watchlist menu...that'd make pruning it a whole lot easier. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 03:10, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Not sure if it could be the case here, but I've noticed that happening to me, and realized I was accidentally checking my emails while logged out of the wiki, so the wiki didn't trigger that I'd "visited" the page. Just a thought. --GKTalk2me 05:45, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
That's an interesting possibility I hadn't considered. It's entirely possible that I'd done that at some point for a whole slew of pages before noticing I wasn't logged in, which would definitely explain why it happened to a bunch of pages at once! We'll go with that explanation then, unless at some point the problem resurfaces when that's clearly not the case. —Robin Hood (TalkE-mailContribs) 06:14, 16 September 2009 (UTC)