User talk:Stick BM

Looking for an opinion

You had mentioned doing page imports from the old wiki and just editing them to the new wiki. So I took a look at one of the more wanted pages and just did a straight import of this page: Button Men Online. Aside from the file imports, which have to be re-uploaded, I feel like that page just looks exceptionally cluttered. There's a fine line for historians and archivists about what should and should not be included in wikis, generally revolving around the broad topic of "relevance". For that page, how much of that is actually "relevant" to the game? Any thoughts? Blinkingline (talk) 20:49, 10 March 2023 (UTC)

I'd generally agree with you here. There's not much relevant in terms of playing the game. Maybe there's something to be said to have a brief history of the online game (and/or other versions of the game, which is sort of hinted at a little bit in Miscellaneous, but we probably don't need a lot of rambling about things, which some of this comes across as here. So a brief history, but that's likely it. Stick BM (talk) 17:12, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

OK, I cleaned it up a little bit, but I still think a lot of the "interview" information isn't relevant and could probably be summarized in a way that is way more readable/useful. Blinkingline (talk) 20:00, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Template for Sets?

For consistency's sake, I'm considering creating a basic template for sets...that would basically cover the standard information we want to see there:

Release Date: Spring 1999
Publisher: Cheapass Games
Designer: James Ernest
Artist: Carol Monahan

Thoughts? Blinkingline (talk) 13:07, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I had thought the same thing. I guess a template seems appropriate. But I do wonder if it’s just going to be duplicating information on the individual button pages. Is that duplication desirable here? Stick BM (talk) 13:17, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

I questioned that a bit too. I think there's some value in it if you're exploring from a set perspective over a button perspective, and I think it's a minimal amount of effort with a template. (I also think without that information, there will be a lot of scantily populated Set pages.) Blinkingline (talk) 13:28, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

OK, I've looked back at it, and the advantage to using DPL is that if the data changes a lot, then it would automatically update the data. In the case of Sets, that probably won't happen. Fanatics would get new buttons I guess, but other than that, I don't think there's a really good reason not to just statically do this instead.

I provided examples for how to do that on the Soldiers and The Big Cheese sets. Take a look and let me know what you think.

I think it's a definite improvement over the old wiki's set up. Blinkingline (talk) 14:28, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Looks good to me! That is probably the easiest way to provide that information. I do like there being the individual page for each button, where we can include the flavor text, etc, but having the images (and links to the buttons) from the "set page" is great.

So the plan seems to be

1. One page for each button (this might have to not be followed for the Fanatics)
2. One page for each set (with a gallery of images of the buttons in the set)
3. A category for each set too (the same name as the set)

This might be a little bit of overkill, but it at least lets you navigate around easily to get to all the buttons in a set, etc.

Stick BM (talk) 18:17, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Right, the Set Category will help as far as organization and searching (which 99% of people won't be interested in, but it really does help the MW search engine out) and Set pages themselves can hold the things like design notes that TheOrggg has collected. Then individual buttons can hold whatever information is relevant to a specific button (which may include specific design notes, game play stats, etc.) Blinkingline (talk) 13:14, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

Gallery formatting with recipes vs. without

I thought the recipes in the galleries was not a bad idea, but then I forgot that some buttons have pretty complex recipes, which creates a formatting problem. I first noticed it on Seven Deadly Sins, but I could see it impacting other sets as well. Blinkingline (talk) 23:20, 8 April 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I’m not convinced either way. I like the idea of the recipe in the gallery, but it gets pretty messy looking when they start spilling over to multiple lines. I don’t suppose there is a way to get the gallery to “pay attention” to the text included there, is there? I suppose it’s also difficult in that the gallery is supposed to adapt to whatever device that the user is using to view the page. Open to suggestions here. Stick BM (talk) 00:42, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Not really, as far as the gallery is concerned, it's just text, and it will just break it like any text that it can.

One thing gallery CAN do is replace the link to the file with a link to a page. That might be worth doing and then it would make dropping the recipe a little cleaner.

If you want to take a peek at the gallery documentation, it's here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Images#Rendering_a_gallery_of_images Blinkingline (talk) 01:27, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Hmmm, I’m not certain exactly what you’re suggesting here, to be honest. I did find another option that might serve a workable solution. Check out how BROM looks now. Peace was using two lines for her recipe, but is now using only one line there. Will try something similar in the Seven Deadly Sins set to see how it looks. Stick BM (talk) 02:09, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Additional… No, I guess what I was thinking won’t work, as it is still dependent upon the device people are using and the orientation of the device, etc. It works in certain situations, but not others (testing on my iPad). Stick BM (talk) 02:15, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

What I was saying is that by default if you click the image, it takes you to the File of the image, which seems a bit counter intuitive.

However you can modify that behavior. Compare Bane (link to page) vs Bluff (link to file) in that section now. I'm not sure there is a good answer for the recipes thing, though I'm leaning toward not including them since they can't be displayed consistently.

Blinkingline (talk) 04:12, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

Well, I think we shouldn’t sacrifice “pretty good for most sets” for a few troublesome sets or buttons. Most buttons have four or five dice, and a little altering of the ‘widths’ parameter can accommodate the recipes pretty well. (I’m basically ignoring Fanatics, as they are a special case.) For buttons with six or more dice (or some recipes with lots of skills), we can manually split the recipe across two lines in the gallery. Perhaps not ideal, but frankly, I think that if the recipes aren’t included in the galleries, then people will start to add them anyway. So I think it’s better to give them some guidelines to try to make the result look decent, rather than tell them “don’t do that”. It is, after all, a wiki, and probably must accede to the desires of the majority, or they go elsewhere or back to Fandom (which is atrociously laid out with all its advertisements). I mean, we want this to become the new “official” wiki and I think it’s gotten a very good start, but it should basically provide people what they want to keep them coming here. That’s my thoughts. Stick BM (talk) 15:03, 9 April 2023 (UTC)

I guess if we hard line break them into 3s when they get ridiculous, that's not awful. I also think it looks a bit nicer if it's justified to the center rather than the left. It's a bit more formatting wikitext, but I think the result looks nicer over all. I just did that to BROM (and linked the images to the pages). Let me know what you think.

https://buttonmen.miraheze.org/wiki/BROM#Buttons Blinkingline (talk) 13:22, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

Discussion Database schema update

Looks like this has been resolved for me now. Let me know if you see any other issues. Blinkingline (talk) 04:58, 27 June 2023 (UTC)