User talk:Nephele/Archive-2010-06

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Small Problem[edit]

Hey Neph! Good to have you back on the site. I'm having a small problem with some of the NPC pages - like this one. It seems like the related quests and NPC summary is screwed in some weird way, at least on my computer. Any suggestions? --Krusty 18:02, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not seeing anything right now when I look, but for a few minutes there had been a bug in the MetaTemplate code. Let me know if you're still seeing strangeness, and if so, what specifically. --NepheleTalk 18:25, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
No problems here either. rpeh •TCE 18:28, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
To be honest, I'm not having the problem anymore either - but at one time, the NPC summary was replaced with question marks and the related quest with code. Seems to work now, though. --Krusty 18:30, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Sounds like the bug that I fixed a few minutes after introducing it. Sorry about the disruption :) --NepheleTalk 18:43, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Wanted Pages/Categories[edit]

I think the latest upgrades have caused another couple of oddities. I'm seeing some very odd Wanted Pages and Categories that definitely weren't there earlier today when I did my maintenance checks. Some of the "missing" links are... odd, and I don't quite know what to suggest as a cause. Sorry to ask again, but could you take a look? rpeh •TCE 18:28, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

See UESPWiki:Administrator_Noticeboard#Updates_to_Archived_Discussions. --NepheleTalk 18:41, 2 June 2010 (UTC)
Sorry about that - I must have been writing as you were adding that entry. rpeh •TCE 19:08, 2 June 2010 (UTC)

Server Lag[edit]

Since you're obviously online right now, can you do whatever it is you do to check our servers? There was widespread server lag within the last 15 or 20 minutes. Robin HoodTalk 20:49, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

I didn't catch this until too late yesterday (having just spent a couple hours working on those edits, I immediately went out to do some gardening after I'd posted them). However, I can see that something is going on again right now -- I just can't figure out what. At the moment I'm wondering whether it's an issue with the squid server -- it might help if next time you (or someone else) notices one of these, try switching to directly using content1 or content2. If content1.uesp.net and content2.uesp.net are both responding quickly, but www.uesp.net isn't, then it would isolate the problem. Unfortunately, if it is the squid server, there's relatively little I can do because I don't really know anything about optimizing squid. In any case, I'm keeping my eyes open... --NepheleTalk 19:57, 7 June 2010 (UTC)
That was the apparent behaviour yesterday, but shortly after trying content1 and content2 individually, the problem appeared to resolve on its own, so I can't be 100% certain. Next time I that happen, I'll try the two servers immediately and see what happens. You'll know when I know. Robin HoodTalk 20:16, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

RE:[edit]

It's okay. I understand. I'm not going to reply to his message. Sorry for any trouble. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 19:06, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Problems with Elliot[edit]

I made a response to him saying that users should know what they're talking about (although I admit that the second part may have been inflammatory) he then reverted it and told me to stay off his page.--TheAlbinoOrc 19:37, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

Elliot is free to delete anything he wants from his talk page, other than official warnings/messages. In general, leaving messages for blocked users on their talk page is unlikely to help the situation, so it's probably best for you to just drop the discussion. --NepheleTalk 19:49, 7 June 2010 (UTC)

related to the deletion thing[edit]

I'm pretty sure a full-blown deletion thing would fail (for the roleplaying pages) and thought your idea was good (of the two that I liked, yours would be more accepted :D ). Any idea when/how this could be done? Mikeyboy52 02:29, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

oops, just saw your post on the community portal thing ;D Mikeyboy52 02:31, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Userspace Patrollers ?[edit]

I've seen you refer to these in several place but where can I actually find information on them ?--TheAlbinoOrc 20:45, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

Just unofficially, They patrol User and User Talk namespaces like a patroller would. This is going to come in great help when we (hopefully) move RPing to Userspace and the same for FanFic.--Corevette789 20:55, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
Fanfiction is already in userspace it's just linked to in general so that people can find it.--TheAlbinoOrc 21:09, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
At the moment userspace patrollers are not much more than an idea. At some point I need to properly write up the idea and propose it to the community, at which point perhaps they'd become a reality. As Corevette said, they'd be able to do patrolling of the user and user talk namespaces -- take care of some of the more straightforward patrolling, reduce the work for full patrollers, and also hopefully make it a bit easier to make user/talk page edits (since the edits would be less likely to irritate patrollers). If there's interest in the idea, I'll make proposing it a higher priority... although it would be nice to get a few of the existing proposals wrapped up first. --NepheleTalk 21:22, 8 June 2010 (UTC)
So what would you define "interest" as ?--TheAlbinoOrc 23:27, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

One more "floodgate" request[edit]

Okay, one more request, but I think this one's likely to be extremely minor. If you have a chance, can you pleeeeeaaaaaaase ;) make #preview work in namespaces other than Template space? At the risk of angering Mr. Nephele, I'd love you lots and lots if you could! :) Robin HoodTalk 15:32, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Yay! Thanks on both counts, Nephele. Robin Hoodtalk 01:50, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
You're welcome :) --NepheleTalk 02:52, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
This doesn't seem to be working. Does this just need to be copied to all servers and/or require a server restart, or is this a sign that something is wrong? Robin Hoodtalk 16:57, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
I found the reason why #preview still doesn't work outside the template namespace. But while reading the comments I added to the code, I realized why I limited #preview to templates in the first place. I'm pretty sure that if #preview is enabled on non-template pages, then #preview info on true templates will basically corrupt any pages that use the template -- so #preview info added to Template:NPC Summary, for example, will show up on every NPC page whenever the NPC page is previewed. In theory, extra code can be added to ensure that #preview only affects the single page where the #preview code appears. However. that's getting a bit more complex than I'd anticipated... not to mention I suspect there may be forgotten reasons why I avoided that route in the first place. I'm not writing off the idea completely, but I think it's going to have to sit on the back burner for a bit longer. --NepheleTalk 00:39, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
Blech! That's rather annoying behaviour! It's not a big deal to just copy & paste to {{Sandbox}} or elsewhere if we need to, though, so if/whenever you get back to it, if it seems more trouble than it's worth, don't worry about it. Robin Hoodtalk 02:24, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Signature[edit]

Do you think you could take a look at User:Mikeyboy52/Signature1 and tell me if its acceptable? Im using another one for now, but i'd like to use signature1. Mike/|\ 19:35, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

The only think I would think that would be an issue with that is the huge amount of space it would take up on the edit page. Mine is pretty long to begin with and all those images would be murder. Try using the daedric font temlate.--Corevette789 19:40, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
For now it would f* the links up, but I'll work on it, the signature is worth it in my oppinion. Mike/|\ 20:04, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
(Edit Conflict) I don't see a problem with his signature right now; if he uses the font then most people can't read it as Daedric. As for concerns about signature length see RobinHood's signature which is somewhat longer than yours--TheAlbinoOrc 20:24, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
About signatures why does it say this TheAlbinoOrc is an invalid raw signature check HTML tags?--TheAlbinoOrc 20:28, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
(edit conflict) My personal opinion is that signatures should be used to identify the person who made the comment -- anything beyond that is unnecessary and detracts from the discussion. Your signature (both the one in your sandbox and the one you're using right now) messes up the line-heights of the discussion; the daedric one requires everyone reading the talk page to download a bunch of images that have nothing to do with the discussion (images that can seriously impact page performance, as we've learned the hard way -- which is exactly why UESP's daedric books don't use the images).
But that's all just my personal opinion. Policy is what matters, and Wikipedia:Signatures has already been pointed out to you as the relevant policy page. UESP defaults to Wikipedia policy, if we haven't explicitly decided that something else would be appropriate. In this specific case, there was also a discussion on UESP at one point confirming that we wanted to use the WP signature policy. That policy is pretty unambiguous about the use of images.
If you really want to keep discussing this issue, could I suggest you find somewhere more appropriate to do it than my talk page? The constant barrage of "new message" alerts is getting pretty annoying. --NepheleTalk 20:35, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
Just as an update, TheAlbinoOrc's question has been answered on my talk page. Robin Hoodtalk 22:28, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Advanced Search bug[edit]

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:
(SQL query hidden)
from within function "". MySQL returned error "1054: Unknown column 'page_is_redirect' in 'where clause' (70.38.12.115)".

This popped up when I did a search for Titles Only with everything else (including List Redirects) turned off. There are no typos in 'page_is_redirect' and it's definitely a column in the 'page' table, so maybe you specified the wrong table name? *shrugs* Robin Hoodtalk 22:40, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I just checked this it isn't something like the strange problem RobinHood had yesterday searching for daedra under the same conditions returned this:
:Jump to: navigation, search
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

    (SQL query hidden)

from within function "". MySQL returned error "1054: Unknown column 'page_is_redirect' in 'where clause' (70.38.12.115)"
--TheAlbinoOrc 22:53, 10 June 2010 (UTC)
As you've already noticed, the problem is fixed. But since you seemed curious ... I changed the search function to not use the page table any more, but instead use copies of the variables that I've added to the searchindex table, so the correct column is now 'si_is_redirect' instead of of 'page_is_redirect'. However, I'd missed one case in the existing code that needed to be overridden. --NepheleTalk 02:52, 11 June 2010 (UTC)
I'm a former DBA. Can you blame me for being interested in SQL queries? ;) Robin Hoodtalk 03:20, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Can this be done?[edit]

It's not really a big deal, but I was sort of hoping that with #splitargs, I might be able to set up some sort of iterative counter for each call. You can see what I've tried in my sandboxes: the "meat" of the idea is here, with the parent here and the test call here. As you can see by the edits to the Gimel and Dalet sandboxes, I tried a number of different things, all to no avail.

If it can't be done, it can't be done. I can think of other ways to design the template I want to (which may end up being better in any event), but before I give up entirely, I figured I should ask the designer of MetaTemplate herself. :)

Thanks for your time! Oh, and feel free to...errr...play in my sandboxes. Robin Hoodtalk 05:05, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Are you sick of me yet?[edit]

Found another problem for a server-access type person...at least I think so. Compare the following two pages: Content1 Content3. (I'd love to tell you what it's like on Content2, but Content2 just blew up or something.) If you haven't already noticed, look down at the "Wiki data and tools" section. On Content3, we seem to be missing Special:PopularPages. I get nervous when different servers show me different things! Robin Hoodtalk 21:59, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

Changing Usernames?[edit]

Hey Neph. Just thought I'd point your attention in this direction. Apparently, something went wrong when I renamed the user - but I really can't figure out what the problem is. When renaming users, you have close-to-zerio options available, and I'm pretty sure I did it correctly. Still, the new account, "Pauper", is inactive and he can only log in using his old name. Any suggestions? --Krusty 23:26, 14 June 2010 (UTC)

Do you happen to remember what you saw after clicking submit on the Renameuser page? Specifically, did it look something like this? Or did it perhaps return some other type of message, or even just time out and never really give a message? Just wondering whether there's anything obvious that might have been different when you tried doing it. As you say, there aren't really many options -- although I suppose I did make a different selection on the only available option (I turned off "move user page" since you'd already taken care of that). --NepheleTalk 00:39, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
Thanks for looking into it. I saw the exact same image that you put up, which lead my to believe that everything was fine. The Recent Changes updates also seemed fine, so we might have some kind of minor bug with renaming. On the other hand, this is not the first time I have experienced actions that had to be done "twice" to work. Fortunately, renaming Users is a pretty rare action, so it's not a big problem, but in time we might have to do a bit of experimenting to make sure everything works. --Krusty 07:20, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Metatemplate doesn't like me[edit]

I just did some updates to {{Tl}} and variations, and I got rather...creative...with Metatemplate in {{Tlp}} and {{Tlx}}, which it didn't seem to like very much. If you look at the coding of it, it does this: {{#unset:1}}{{#splitargs:Tlpx/Parameter|1}}. In essence ignoring the first unnamed parameter in the #splitargs call. On the surface, that seemed to work fine, but it produced some rather unexpected results in some cases:

Description Code Result
Normal
{{tlp|example|parm1{{=}}1}}
{{example|parm1=1}}
Extra space not ignored
{{tlp|example |parm1{{=}}1}}
{{example |parm1=1}}
{{{1}}} not set properly
{{tlp | 1=example | parm1{{=}}1}}
{{ parm1=1}}
{{{1}}} not unset properly
{{tlp | 1=example | 2=parm1=1}}
{{example|parm1=1}}

I thought you might want to know. If I'm understanding this correctly, when {{{1}}} is passed by name, it's not quite being interpreted correctly by #unset, and so the first "truly" unnamed parameter creates a conflict in example 3, or it sees no {{{1}}} to unset in example 4. I'm at a loss as to what's going on in example 2, though.

Also, it occurred to me while doing this that a nicer way to implement this would be if #splitargs had a "skipargs" parameter that either ignored the first x parameters (e.g. {{#splitargs|TemplateName|skipargs=5}}, probably the best way) or ignored specific parameters by-number somehow (e.g. {{#splitargs|TemplateName|skipargs=1,3,4,8}}, which I see no particular use for off-hand, but you never know). That said, there's no rush, or even a need to do it at all if it poses problems — I suspect that most or all current uses of tlp/tlx will be fine as-written, and if not, we can always revert to the standard method if need be. Robin Hoodtalk 04:16, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Realistically, it's going to be a few weeks before I can do any more work on MetaTemplate... just a few too many things going on. I'll try to look into this when I finally get a chance, though. --NepheleTalk 05:53, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
No worries (and like I said, no rush). Thanks for letting me know! Robin Hoodtalk 05:57, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
OK, I started by picking out the details that I could understand and focussed on those; in other words, I still haven't fully processed what's going on here.
So far I've fixed example 4 -- {{#unset:1}} should now unset both true numbered arguments and fake numbered arguments.
As for example 3, I think what you're encountering is actually an underlying wikicode issue. If you start explicitly numbering parameters, you have to explicitly number all the rest of the parameters. When you use "1=example", the wikicode stores "example" to key "1" in the namedArgs array -- not to key "1" in the numberedArgs array. When it processes "parm1{{=}}1" it puts it in the next available slot in the numberedArgs array -- which in this case is "1", not "2". That assignment is done before MetaTemplate starts changing with anything, and I'm not going to get involved in trying to retroactively fix the mess. You could check mediawiki to see whether it's a reported bug and, if so, whether they have done something about it or are planning to do something about it.
I'll post again if I make more progress on the rest. --NepheleTalk 00:20, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
A bit more: I'm also concluding that example 2 is just standard wiki behaviour, If you create a template containing nothing but "{{{1}}}", you can test what happens to the spaces around a parameter. I think the wiki's rules about when to strip spaces and when to keep spaces might be a bit strange (apparently different for numbered vs. named params, potentially different for various combinations of templates/tags/etc., and I'm pretty sure they've changed between versions).
I'll probably still also add a skipargs parameter, but I wanted to start by working through existing bugs before potentially adding new ones ;) --NepheleTalk 01:18, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, I'll play around with the parameter passing in example 2 some more. I have a vague recollection of running into that at some other point, but I couldn't recall under what circumstances. It makes sense that it would be the wiki software at fault there, though, as I would expect that by the time you get a parameter at MetaTemplate's level, it should already have been parsed out and stripped of any surrounding whitespace (at least nominally, even if it's not occurring in this instance). The explanation of what's going on in Example 3 also makes sense. It seems like a silly way to do it, but I can understand how it probably came about. Robin Hoodtalk 02:21, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
It looks like you're right, unnamed parameters don't strip spaces. See my very simple testing here. Robin Hoodtalk 17:28, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
After searching ([1]), it appears that this behaviour is pseudo-intentional. If I understood Tim Starling's response (at the bottom), it was a bug initially, but a large number of templates make use of the bug (I suspect {{Chart}} might for its blanks), so fixing it would break those templates. Robin Hoodtalk 17:51, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

When You Get Time[edit]

Could you take a look at Category:Archive-By Date at some point and figure out why the sections show they have no pages in them when they actually do ?--TheAlbinoOrcGot_a_question? 18:14, 15 June 2010 (UTC)

Just to expand on this and make Nephele's job easier, what's happening is that the number in parentheses is only counting the number of sub-categories, not the number of pages in the category. I don't remember if this is the expected behaviour, or if it's possibly a case of CategoryTree interacting with MetaTemplate's catpagetemplate. Robin Hoodtalk 18:49, 15 June 2010 (UTC)
That's the standard behaviour for CategoryTree -- by default the value for "mode" is "categories", which means that CategoryTree is only counting/displaying the subcategories. Other options for "mode", as documented at the linked page, are "pages", "all", or "parents". The default can be changed, on a per-category basis, a per-namespace basis, or a site-wide basis (the latter two are system configuration changes that only Daveh and I can do). --NepheleTalk 23:44, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
How do you change it at the category level? Just a <categorytree> tag to artificially create the category? Also, not that it matters, but I think all admins can edit MediaWiki:Categorytree-member-num to change the site-wide template. Speaking of which, I wouldn't mind using the one at MW: ($1 C, $2 P, $3 F) (note that the code behind it is actually more complex, but that's how it would appear in the category display, give or take), but that's not really a discussion for here. Robin Hoodtalk 02:10, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Catpagetemplate[edit]

I love the new features. Is what I've done on Category:Proposed_Deletion too complex for use on all the other pages like that? Should I just switch it to {{#sub:{{{sortkey}}}|0|8}} or something similar? Robin Hoodtalk 03:09, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Also, it appears as though catposttext isn't working. I tried adding {{#define:catposttext|test}} to Category:Archive-By Date and nothing changed, at least in Preview mode. Robin Hoodtalk 03:34, 26 June 2010 (UTC)
In reverse order:
  • My mistake on the post/pre text. The correct parameters are cattextpost and cattextpre.
  • The proposed deletion stuff looks good (and makes using that category much easier!). I didn't respond right away because I was only able to think about it superficially at first. So, for example, I wasn't able to think about the subtle details such as why {{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}} has to be the original sortkey instead of {{REVISIONYEAR}}/{{REVISIONMONTH}}/{{REVISIONDAY}} (because the latter drops '0' from month/day, so 2010/7/9 and 2010/7/10 wouldn't sort properly). I suppose if we wanted to be really obsessive, the sortkey on Template:Proposeddeletion could be changed to {{#sub:{{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}}|0|4}}/{{#sub:{{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}}|4|2}}/{{#sub:{{REVISIONTIMESTAMP}}|6|2}}. Basically, my main concern is to try to get as much of the catpagetemplate processing done on the individual pages (where it only needs to be done once) instead of on the category (where it needs to be done every time someone views the category). But the bottom line is that efficiency nitpicking isn't really important unless the category page starts to display slowly.
--NepheleTalk 23:34, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
It's only marginally less ugly, but we could also use {{REVISIONYEAR}}/{{#sub:0{{REVISIONMONTH}}|-2}}/{{REVISIONDAY2}}. Robin Hoodtalk 01:58, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
While rediscovering REVISIONDAY2, I noticed that if we upgrade to 1.17 at some point, REVISIONMONTH becomes 0-padded. Robin Hoodtalk 02:53, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Armor Rating discrepancy[edit]

I thought this might interest you after the recent discussions on other CS vs. in-game discrepancies. See this discussion. Both the CS and Tes4Edit confirm that the armor value should be 0...but in-game, it's not. Robin Hoodtalk 20:41, 25 June 2010 (UTC)