User talk:Blinkingline

Hello!

Greetings! Just thought I'd say "hello" to you. So far we seem to be the only ones editing here.  ;) As you might have noticed, I updated the button template to add information like artist, designer, etc. I figured if this wiki is supposed to be as "complete" as is possible, then we can include that kind of information for each button (for which it is known, at least).

Hey! That works for me. I moved all the strategy articles earlier today, and hopefully will finish up the Skills page today. If the Skills get done and the button template is relatively complete we can start working on creating articles for buttons. (No sense in doing that unless we know the button template is solid.Blinkingline (talk) 16:01, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

A few questions...

I know that things are obviously still a work in progress, but was wondering if you've given any thought to the following:

1. Do we want each set (such as Soldiers, Dork Victory, etc) to be its own category? I see that this is the case for the four buttons that you've added so far. This makes perfect sense to me. I was thinking that each set can be its own category, and that relevant information about the set can be included in text on the category page itself (e.g. Lunch Money was the set that introduced Trip Dice, although I know this is also mentioned on the Skills page). This would mean that all the links on the Skills page should actually be changed to category links. We don't want to have a both a page and a category for each set, since this would lead to duplication of information and then things would have to be changed in two places.
2. A more minor thing... there is a page called "Sets" as well as a category called "Set". Should these be combined/merged? I don't remember enough about Wikimedia (it's been a while) to recall if you can redirect a category to another page, or a page to a category. But having both of these seems redundant to me. What do you think?

I'm sure that I thought of another question last night, but I can't remember it now. Anyhow, nice work so far! We need more people to help do the heavy lifting of getting all the button information and images transferred over here. Stick BM (talk) 15:35, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

In general, I like to use Categories act as "organizational" units, but not use them as the actual article for that topic. So for Sets, there would be an article called "Sets" and that could include a list of all of the available Sets (built using the Dynamic Page List filtering on the category "Set"). Each individual Set would then have its own page, and on that page would be a list of all that Set's Buttons (built using the DPL filtering on the category of the Set name." The main advantage of this is that it gives you a bit more control over the appearance of the pages and it makes the URL's a lot cleaner.

I hope that makes sense? This follows the general method Wikipedia uses. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Equus_(genus) is the article for the category, but the "real" article, which is far more detailed, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equus_(genus) Blinkingline (talk) 16:01, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

Suppress “ Pages using DynamicPageList3 parser tag” category

Don’t suppose there’s a way to suppress this category tag from showing up on the various pages that are using that template? I find it’s just distracting and not very useful since it’s not a category that we are evr going to actually want to create a page for, yes? I guess I understand why it’s there, it’s just not useful. Stick BM (talk) 02:49, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

D'OH! I thought I had fixed that the other day, I must have forgotten to save the edit. Should be taken care of now. Thanks for the heads up! Blinkingline (talk) 03:23, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Dice "Type" vs Dice "Skill"

I was reminded in the BMO forum that strictly speaking "Wildcard" isn't a "skill" but a "type" of dice. I wander if this is a distinction that needs to be made on this wiki. There are "types" of dice, e.g. I guess the variable swing dice are a "type" of dice, as is Wildcard. But this starts to get muddied somewhat. "Turbo" is a "skill" that modifies how the Swing dice work, etc. Maybe I am making too much of this. But perhaps "Wilcard" belongs in its own separate section on the Skill page? Is there some distinction that can be made? "Skill" modifies the kind of attack a dice can make (or the type of attack that they can be subject to, e.g. Stealth), or modifies the "behavior" of a dice during the game (e.g. Turbo or Mood Swing (??)). "Type" means something else(??). But then where do Plasma dice fit in? Should Plasma be under the "Variable" section? The more I think about it, the less I find I want to think about it at the moment.  ;) Stick BM (talk) 13:47, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I saw that comment too and was like "Well crap, how do we want to care for THAT?!"

I like your idea of putting Wildcard under Variable dice. It also makes me want to go back to naming the Skills page "Dice" instead of "Skills", since that is more correct. I think Plasma would also be a good fit there since it's most closely related to Option dice, right? I thought moving the page might break the skills template, but it doesn't, so that means it's no extra work aside from moving things around. Blinkingline (talk) 13:55, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Probably a good idea to just rename the page "Dice", as it's the most generic all-encompassing term here. Plasma seems like it would fit under "Variable Dice" as they are like Option Dice. Maybe there's justification for a small section for "nonstandard" dice, which could include Wildcard and maybe the Fudged Dice too? Is Twinned Dice a skill, or a type of dice? It all starts to get a little muddied. But I think renaming the page "Dice" might be the easiest route here, and then there can be sections for Variable Dice, Skills, Nonstandard dice (or whatever name seems appropriate) and anything else that's applicable. Stick BM (talk) 14:02, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I moved Fudged and Wildcard and Plasma around and moved the whole page to Dice. Blinkingline (talk) 14:19, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

One last comment here... Should the Skills category then become the Dice category? Stick BM (talk) 18:11, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Maybe we just need two new categories? One for "Variable Dice" (for Swing, Option, etc.) and one for "Other Dice" (like Wildcard and Fudged). Thoughts? Blinkingline (talk) 18:14, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

Sounds good to me! And then the Skills category gets deleted? Stick BM (talk) 18:16, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

My thought was Skills would stay, it would handle things like Shadow, Poison, etc. The other dice would get moved to the new categories.

Taxonomy is hard when the same words can mean different things! Blinkingline (talk) 18:18, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

You carrying on here?

I know I haven’t been busy on this site lately, but just wondering if you are still going to be doing work here? I want to carry on, but maybe more hands are needed here to really get things off the ground. I think this could be much better than the Fandom wiki, but more assistance is needed to get all the button images loaded here and individual button pages set up, amd similarly for the sets. What do you think? Stick BM (talk) 02:30, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

Sorry, I've been pretty busy the past couple of week's and haven;'t had time to dedicate to doing anything over here. Ideally, I think we should be able to pull the images from the buttonweavers DB and get all of those uploaded. From there, it's building out the pages.

Do you think it would be easier to just pull the set pages from the fandom wiki and then create the button pages? Maybe doing all that work will get TheOrgg on board. Blinkingline (talk) 15:31, 26 March 2023 (UTC)

No worries! Just thought I'd check in and see how things are going. Completely understandable that other things are more pressing. I've been pretty busy myself and not had any time to do anything here. I think it's definitely worthwhile to just pull all the images from the buttonweavers DB and get all those uploaded here. Either that of pulling the set pages from the fandom wiki. I'm not sure what would be best here. I pulled the Seven Deadly Sins images from the fandom pages (by "pull" I actually mean just went to the page and saved the images individually, there's probably a better way to get them in bulk). Definitely getting someone else, or several people, on board to help with this would be good. It would be great to get this wiki to a point where we might be able to convince TheOrgg (and/or whoever else is most "in charge") to change the links to the wiki here over the fandom wiki. I really, really dislike that wiki because I find it hard to navigate and the ads are terrible. Stick BM (talk) 18:05, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

If there's a better way to move the images, I haven't found it. I'll see if I can find a way though. In the meantime I'll pull all the set pages and upload them and post to the forums that it is done. Blinkingline (talk) 18:54, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

OK, All the sets have been updated. I stripped the original sets that were on the fandom wiki because some of those were...weird. Now everything is in the Set category. Blinkingline (talk) 19:47, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

It appears that was the carrot that was needed. :) Blinkingline (talk) 13:56, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

Another idea about "Sets"

I'm not a MediaWiki expert by any means. Is it possible to have a page for a set, where it can show the images (and names, or whatever element we want from the template) of each of the buttons in the set? I hope this makes sense. In other words, if I look at the Space Girlz, right now it just has a list at the bottom of the buttons in that set. Is some type of transclusion possible where it can show the image of each button in the set, and it's name (say, with a link to the individual button page)? This would be reading data like the image filename from the template on the button page. Because we don't want to have to link in the individual images again, but make use of the data that already exists on the button pages. Stick BM (talk) 20:00, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

There should be a way to do this with dynamic page links. Basically you would do the list based on the category and format it like a gallery. This MAY take a template to make it work in the list. Blinkingline (talk) 20:10, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

OK, it turns out there are TWO versions of dynamic page list. Fandom uses one, Wikimedia prefers the other one, and it includes a gallery option. YAY!

Unfortunately, to make that work, you need page images and it looks like a lot of the images we have are too small. BOO!

I've sent a request to our host to tweak the PageImage configuration which will hopefully get us all sorted, but I'm not sure how long that will take. They have been pretty quick on previous requests. Here's the link to the issue: https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T10657

That being said, it looks like the images for the United States set are all large enough that they would work. That's a big set, but that would be a good test to make sure the gallery would meet the need. Blinkingline (talk) 15:02, 28 March 2023 (UTC)

“Type Error”

Any idea what is causing the “type error” on many pages (like Brawl and many of the set pages)? Is this because of the issue with images and image sizes that you have mentioned? At the moment this error is causing a lot of the pages to not be properly dis0layed (just an error message), and I’m not even certain what I should be editing to fix the issue. Stick BM (talk) 14:41, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I think it's due to the page images/page information issue. I'm working with Miraheze to get it fixed now, but so far progress has been slow. It's definitely an image issue I think though, because if you strip all the images, the page loads fine.Blinkingline (talk) 17:12, 1 April 2023 (UTC)

OK, Type Errors should be fixed. Still doesn't solve the Page image problem but I'm working on it. Worse comes to worse I can try to build some kind of Gallery template for it. Blinkingline (talk) 18:22, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Front page solicitation for help?

I was wondering if adding a section to the Front Page might be worthwhile, something along the lines of "Do you want to help?" and then a couple of links to categories of pages and/or images. Like pages that need more information, and pages (or the image files themselves) that are either missing pages or could use better images. (Like the image for the Max (promo) could be better.) Was trying to think of good category names, because "Needs image" doesn't necessarily reflect that the image is missing or just terrible. "Needs information" might be all right for pages that need better/more information. Any thoughts? I just thought that if we ever actually start getting more traffic here, then it might to highlight to other people how exactly they could help on the front page, and provide them with a list (or category or two) of ways that they could consider helping out. Stick BM (talk) 15:58, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. I'll write something up and find a nice way to display it maybe on the bottom of the front page.

I think for Max(promo) that's a scan of the actual button. I updated it to use the BMO image instead. It's smaller, but I think it's probably a better image. Blinkingline (talk) 17:17, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Miraheze doing something odd with images?

Just noticed today that a lot of images aren't showing on the pages. The links are present, but I'm seeing file names instead of the images themselves. If I click on the file page to get to the image, I don't see it, and then if I click on the filename there, I'm getting error messages of the form "Unauthorized This server could not verify that you are authorized to access the document you requested." Any ideas, or is this some internal error with Miraheze itself? Stick BM (talk) 13:36, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

They've got an outage right now they're working through. Looks like there might have been a drive failure. Blinkingline (talk) 13:41, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Ok, I thought that it might be something along those lines (database issue, drive problem, etc), since many images were affected. Out of curiosity, is there some place that you were able to see a report of the issue, so that I could check in the future? Stick BM (talk) 14:15, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

When I noticed the issue this morning I joined their discord to get more information. https://miraheze.org/discord

The actual issue is being tracked on Miraheze's Phabricator: https://phabricator.miraheze.org/T10717 Blinkingline (talk) 14:23, 11 April 2023 (UTC)

Fanatics

Wooo, I started working on cleaning up the Fanatics page. There's a lot of buttons listed there. I don't think there's a particularly good way of handling the recipes, as there are lots of long recipes. I think we just have to be prepared that there's going to be a lot of lines in the gallery that look a bit messy. A few thoughts...

Should we make a new template specifically for Fanatics (one that is similar for the regular buttons)? I had in mind that instead of making each Fanatic part of the "Button category", maybe we make a separate "Fanatic category" which is a subcategory of the Button category. So that Fanatics don't appear on the "normal" Button category list. The new template will be much like the template for buttons, but will make them not tournament legal by default, and will put them in the Fanatic category (instead of the Button category). And anything else that we can think of that would be specific to Fanatics. What do you think?

Also, I was not planning on making individual pages for each Fanatic, but maybe I will make one for each of those with an "Origin Story" as is stated on the Fanatics page. This seems like a good place to offload that information as I don't think it needs to be in the main Fanatics page (which will make that page shorter). I suppose at some point any Fanatic that has flavor text could also get its own individual button page, but that could be for the future. Stick BM (talk) 18:30, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

I think a page with the Fanatics as a set is probably fine. I like the idea of if we have an origin story, make a button page for it. Ideally when everything is done we maybe end up with a button page for each one, but that can be a much lower priority, I think. As that happens we could adjust the category as needed.Blinkingline (talk) 18:59, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Ercountered when trying individual button pages

As I said in the title, I'm getting errors when trying to look at individual button pages. An error of the form [b81adb5066739de0075d359f] 2023-06-23 15:15:10: Fatal exception of type "Error". Please advise! Stick BM (talk) 15:16, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Uggggh. Looks like something is wonky with one of the extensions. I'll get it looked at. Thanks!

Image issues

One more issue that I've noticed here. Look at Steven Universe and United States. There's some issue with the images being displayed here. Are they "too big" or do they need to be downsampled? I'm not 100% certain what the message being displayed there is supposed to be telling me. The issue carries through to the individual pages on the Steven Universe buttons (there are no individual pages for the US buttons). Suggestions as to what to do here? These are the only two set pages that I have noticed a problem. Stick BM (talk) 13:22, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

Cool, let me get a ticket open. Those file resolutions don't seem crazy out of whack, so it could just be a tweak to a background setting to correct it.

Will let you know what I find out! Blinkingline (talk) 14:10, 27 June 2023 (UTC)

OK, should be fixed now. Let me know if you spot anything else! Blinkingline (talk) 13:43, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Can we delete this template/page?

Template:ButtonDice doesn't seem to be used on other pages, but it's showing up in things like Category:S-Swing. I'd delete this myself, except that I don't have the power to do so.  ;) Or if there's a reason to keep it around, maybe the other templates used on that page can be altered to not add the category to another template. Thanks! Stick BM (talk) 13:42, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that Was something I made early on as an experiment that we ended up not using. I deleted it, and it's not showing up as a wanted Template, so we should be good. Blinkingline (talk) 13:50, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

Can this template be installed?

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Template:Lowercase_title

This will allow button names with lowercase titles to appear, as is how they are listed in the list of Fanatics (and there's a few other buttons where it could be used too).

If I was an admin, I could install this template.  ;) Stick BM (talk) 19:22, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Done.

Templates are just pages in the Template namespace. You shouldn't need any extra permissions for that, I don't think. Blinkingline (talk) 22:09, 14 November 2023 (UTC)