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Editing questions

I have some editing questions. I'm not sure if this is the place to ask. If it isn't could you please redirect me?

I was editing Items from Monsters and I noticed some inconsistencies. I'm detail-oriented, so some of these might be over the top.

Which is the preferred way? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeddiah (talkcontribs) on 2012 December 7 19:01

  • Usually the former, unless the actual game page shows differently. --Fig bucket 03:18, 8 December 2012 (CET)
  • Some of the entries in empty columns have a no break space (&nbsp) in them while most don't. I removed a couple and it didn't seem to break anything but I didn't want to do a mass remove and mess it up for certain browsers. I guess, should they be there or not? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeddiah (talkcontribs) on 2012 December 7 19:01
  • Possibly one row needs a space, to ensure the column overall has some space if there's nothing else in that column at all, but likely it's unnecessary/copy-paste-laziness. --Fig bucket 03:18, 8 December 2012 (CET)
  • For colors, again there are two ways it is being done:
    • span style="color:red;"
    • font color="red"

Which is correct? Or does it matter on the context it is used in? Both are used in a table and both seem to work.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeddiah (talkcontribs) on 2012 December 7 19:01

  • Doesn't matter...I think using style attributes to specify font effects is more up to standards, but use of font tags is well ingrained and will likely work for a long time. --Fig bucket 03:18, 8 December 2012 (CET)

Collection still failing

Warning: fopen(http://wikidev.coldfront.net/rsscollection/ITEMID.rss) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /home/coldfront/domains/kol.coldfront.net/public_html/thekolwiki/extensions/collection.php on line 22

I'm seeing this message an awful lot on newer item pages. Isn't there a way for extension modules to fail gracefully in MediaWiki 1.17, instead of spitting out stuff like THIS? --Wrldwzrd89 12:07, 1 September 2011 (CEST)

  • For the record, I got Mag to fix this a few days ago. --Quietust (t|c) 03:00, 21 January 2012 (CET)
    • YAY! Thanks, Quietust. Much appreciated. --Wrldwzrd89 02:04, 22 January 2012 (CET)

Pages to Nuke From Orbit

Item Drops (By Location). Who uses it? Should it just be deleted? I ask because this page (like a number of others) tend to be neglected when it comes to keeping them updated. More importantly, it seems to have limited use. What I might recommend is instead a category tag Dropped Item (#location), which would be easier to update. Thoughts?--Foggy 14:29, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

  • I wouldn't miss it, I can't say I was ever really aware of its existence. --TechSmurf 18:03, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Never used it, never even knew it was there. It seems like a rather inefficient way of doing things. --Lordebon 18:20, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
  • Nuked. I think there are probably a bunch of derelict pages that should be destroyed, as they were probably never a very good idea in the first place, and will never likely be kept up-to-date and useful. Also: TheKolWiki:Pages for deletion. Although I am going to bring up something in this vein... --Flargen 20:09, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

Another page I thin that is worth nuking is Skills By MP Cost. It's a big-ass page missing a lot of skills, but for the life of me, I can't fathom the use of it. If the consensus is that it is useful, I'll update it.--Foggy 17:33, 6 July 2011 (CEST)

  • What we really need is to be able to just put this kind of crap into a database and have metapages making queries to it. --Raijinili 15:43, 9 July 2011 (CEST)
    • That would be awesome. For now those, we could tag skills with (Category:Skills by MP Cost,X), and nuke the page in the meantime.--Foggy 22:05, 9 July 2011 (CEST)
      • Eh, I loathe to think of a large DB on this wiki. There's things that this server is good for...and unfortunately pages that attract a ton of edits isn't really it.--Toffile 22:29, 9 July 2011 (CEST)

For now, I've edited the Skills By MP Cost page. I think this is something to come back to in about a year to see if people are in fact using it.--Foggy 17:01, 10 July 2011 (CEST)

  • i'd agree that the manual restatement/summary pages really aren't worth the effort. Skills By MP Cost is an example of such redundancy, it should get nuked. replacement by Category:Skills (By MP Cost) in the same way we have Category:Food (By Size) would be just marvellous. Current Projects, anyone? --Evilkolbot 18:09, 10 July 2011 (CEST)
    • If we were to do that, wouldn't adding a category to the Skills template based on the MP tag be easier?--Foggy 19:06, 10 July 2011 (CEST)
      • what's beter than a cat? AUTO-CAT! splendid. could there be any objections? ahem. my template-fu is weak, and my time limited. any volunteers? --Evilkolbot 13:07, 12 July 2011 (CEST)
        • Ok, there's a problem with this. Category sorting seems to show only the first character, and sorts alphabetically. So skills with MP cost 1 and 10 and 100 are all in the same category, and that seems unsatisfactory... --Fig bucket 20:23, 12 July 2011 (CEST)
          • Yeah, I noticed that problem as well (and sorry about the trailing pipe, I thought I got that). Unless someone thinks this page is important, I say we table this page/issue for now and move on to more pressing pages.--Foggy 20:53, 12 July 2011 (CEST)
          • Well, you could always create lots of sub-categories. 0-9, 10-19, etc., and throw in a pretty stupidly long switch statement to categorize each skill precisely (10 and 13 would both go into 10-19, and 10 would be under the 0 listing and 13 under the 3 listing, for example). Otherwise, yeah, I don't think there's a better way around it. Do we want the category deleted? --Flargen 21:15, 12 July 2011 (CEST)
  • On other wikis it is possible to generate tables based on other pages, has that been attempted here? 23:43, 21 September 2011 (CEST) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dcorrin (talkcontribs)

Random Page broken?

The "random page" link in the sidebar seems to be broken. Everytime I click it, it takes me to the NG page; a friend of mine has a similar problem only it always takes him to the "Salty Mouth" page. It looks like it sends different people to a random page once, but then doesn't generate a new page on the next click? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Idran (talkcontribs)

Sounds like perfectly random behavior to me.--Toffile 05:34, 1 November 2011 (CET)
Yeah, someone else noticed this awhile back, though I'd forgotten all about it. It should take you to a random page every time. Probably a consequence of the mediawiki upgrade. I'll try to remember to get it looked into (again?). --Flargen 05:39, 1 November 2011 (CET)
  • I'm using Firefox 3.6.23 and for me it seems to work fine. --Yatsufusa 06:09, 1 November 2011 (CET)
  • Yatsufusa: You deleted two comments when you added yours. Try to be careful.
  • About the issue, it's not MediaWiki itself, it's the web cache sitting in front of the Wiki. Or you could say it is MediaWiki lying to the web cache. The headers come out with this line "Vary: Accept-Encoding,Cookie,User-Agent", so when none of those three change, the cache thinks it's a-okay to send the cached copy. And shift-reload doesn't seem to work on redirect links in my version of Firefox. For fun (and because it took me less time than fixing Yatsufusa's dropped comments) I tried loading the page with about forty different User-Agents, and got a different link eat time. But if I re-use one, it stays the same. This is a command line tool that does no caching of it's own. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 06:36, 1 November 2011 (CET)
  • Does that mean there's no work-around? Before I logged in, "random page" kept sending me to A Smoldering Crater, and now that I'm logged in, all I can get is Anthony Raving, Billionaire Entrepreneur. -GTBacchus 04:40, 3 January 2012 (CET)

New accounts and spam links

I've noticed a recent spate of new accounts for the sole purpose of spamming external links. Are they bypassing the captcha or something? --Itsatrap 17:46, 5 November 2011 (CET)

They're probably answering the CAPTCHAs via proxy (e.g. tricking other users into filling them in so they can get access to free porn or something), a rather common tactic. --Quietust (t|c) 21:20, 5 November 2011 (CET)
There's a new one up. It's a shame that they would think that someone would be crazy enough to click weightloss links on a KoL wiki. Rodgerflint 02:11, 6 November 2011 (CET)
  • It's a general attack on wikis; kol is just one of many. If you look around, especially on less well maintained wikis, you can see the exact same names (or very slight variations thereof) being created and exact same text being posted (which suggests, if someone were enterprising enough, it would be worthwhile setting up a honeypot wiki, and using the edits found there to help with automatic deletes and bans...) --Fig bucket 02:25, 6 November 2011 (CET)
  • Not knowing media-wiki that well, is it possible for us to tweak the create user page to require some knowledge of the game? Nothing hard, but maybe "What color was George Washington's favorite white horse?" type stuff. I do know that reCaptcha has a flaw in that only one word needs to be correct. So if you can OCR that one word, the other one you can get wrong.... --Club (#66669) (Talk) 07:08, 6 November 2011 (CET)
  • Pretty sure that's a feature of reCaptcha, not a flaw. It knows what one word should be and checks that you get it correct. The other word is taken from a scanned text (and skewed a bit), and is included so people can verify the system's OCR interpretation of the scanned word. As for making modifications to user creation: a brief look at documentation yielded nothing promising, with this being the best I saw (but it adds significantly to the workload of admins). --timrem 08:10, 6 November 2011 (CET)
  • I knew it was by design, but come on, really? I can completely fluff one word out of a reCaptcha box (tested with "x" one of them for this edit) and it will work? Misfeature. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 04:34, 7 November 2011 (CET)
  • The point of reCaptcha isn't just to be a captcha, it's also to Mechanical Turk OCR of historical documents to increase accuracy. Most captchas require matching one word, reCaptcha requires matching one word, so it is as good as other captcha systems while also contributing to the accuracy of historical document archival. An overall boon! --Idran 22:49, 11 November 2011 (CET)
  • Club, if you get the obfuscated word wrong, it should mark it as incorrect. Only the unobscured word should be bluffable. --Raijinili 13:11, 25 December 2011 (CET)
Ironically, we have a page about Holiday Weight Gain. perhaps we need to have one of those trippy image-word boxes that FaceBook spams worse than these spammers?--The ErosionSeeker 00:32, 7 November 2011 (CET)
As I can see from public logs, all new spam accounts try to submit their spam messages in a few minutes after signing up. So maybe as a workaround, you may add delay period to all new account when they will be unable to create or edit any wiki pages (24 hrs after registration for example) --NightBird 19:09, 23 December 2011 (CET)
People don't sign up to lurk. They sign up when they want to edit something. To stop them from instant gratification would discourage people from logging back in. --Raijinili 13:07, 25 December 2011 (CET)
it strikes me that the other way round might work. requiring people to make at least one constructive edit in a short-ish time period wouldn't be any work. then we can just ban the rest. a small change to the you've just created an account page. anyway, why would anyone create an account and not use it? --Evilkolbot 13:01, 30 December 2011 (CET)
To use the non-editing features that require being logged in: the watchlist (and its RSS feed), the timezone and date formatting options, the skin chooser (well, they can hope…), the various other appearance settings. Also, there may be people who want to have an account in case they’ll want to use it quickly in the future. Also also, even those who want to make an edit right away… can easily spend a couple of hours reading up on wiki syntax, etiquette and standards before deciding to hit the ‘save page’ button even once. I think an automatic ban for anyone not making an edit within n minutes after account creation would cause more collateral damage than the occasional false positive from your manual patrolling (although it might be less work still, at the cost of people signing up, getting banned and not bothering to come back). --Xyzzyn 17:59, 30 December 2011 (CET)
And my favorite, to reserve a name. YEARS ago I created accounts on all of the various wikipedia wikis. And some of those were pretty damn quiet with me having nothing to contribute. But I wanted to ensure that I got the same user name on all of them. Last year I finally was able to merge them into a single account. And for that same reason I created my KoL forum account very soon after creating the player account, even though I loathe webforums. (This wiki didn't exist then.) --Club (#66669) (Talk) 19:24, 30 December 2011 (CET)
  • Some simple things which may help with the current inundation:
    1. Block all articles that include "bitcoin" (any case)
    2. Block articles which link to the main websites which these spam posts keep linking to (I don't want to repeat them here, since I don't want to add to their reference counts)
    3. If there are any upgrades to the (re)captcha, please install them
    4. Sub-optimal as it is, some extra, trivial KoL-related task for new accounts would make an enormous difference. If you look around, these spam-posts are not unique here, and so anything unique to here, however trivial for a human, will likely prevent them.

--Fig bucket 03:13, 25 March 2012 (CEST)

There's also the option of preventing new users from uploading files for a few days after creating an account, which would reduce some of the work needed here. These spammers keep creating pages and uploading pictures, so we'd catch them for the former before they're capable of doing the latter. --timrem 03:22, 25 March 2012 (CEST)

Some additions and changes have been made that will hopefully result in a significant reduction of spam. --Flargen 23:22, 26 March 2012 (CEST)

I added in random questions and a spamfilter mod. If this helped it, w00t, if not please contact me and let me know. I haven't heard anything so guessing it's all good now? Might be wise to have some better questions for user creation, just cycling between two right now. --FrostByghte 17:59, 4 April 2012 (CEST)

Looks to have helped significantly. I've seen one or two get through, but that's a lot better than the ten a day or so that we were getting. Thanks! --timrem 18:49, 5 April 2012 (CEST)

Pah! Ok...now I have both $wgEmailAuthentication = true; and wgEmailConfirmToEdit = true; Please set and confirm your email address to edit pages. I'm running some tests right now to see how this behaves. --FrostByghte 23:49, 27 June 2012 (CEST)

Is there anyway to change the email confirmation message to tell new users that they must confirm email before they can edit? It currently says that email confirmation is required to "activate e-mail features", which doesn't read to me as being able to edit page. And/or a warning on their user page or somewhere obvious that editing is disabled until you confirm your email. I was confused why I couldn't edit anything all of a sudden. Thanks! --Aelfinn 07:09, 2 January 2013 (CET)

a sorry excuse for a business model

  • and so it begins again. is there anything further we can do about the wikivandals? i'd say that disallowing external links to anyone but admins would cut out all of this immediately. i've been thinking about this, and i can see virtually no reason to link externally not using wikilinks. if someone really, really has to put a link in (perhaps because jick does) then a request could be put on the talk. which wouldn't contain the link, of course, but we've all got in-game accounts. is there something i'm missing? --Evilkolbot 13:51, 30 April 2012 (CEST)
    • We could have more questions added to the questcha. As far as links go, references sections frequently contain external links, many of which would not have convenient wikilink alternatives. Pages dealing with complicated game mechanics may also have external links to various helper programs and scripts (plus there's the page specifically dedicated to greasemonkey scripts). If there was a way to make another user group that is basically the current default user privileges, and make the current default weaker (no linking), that might work, depending on how much of a pain it is to move trusted users into the new group (could they be auto-added if their account is sufficiently old, or would it all be manual, etc.). --Flargen 21:22, 30 April 2012 (CEST)
    • Currently we have two questions, one of which is an arithmetic question. (10+10) That's sufficiently common that I wouldn't be shocked if bots could look for those and solve them. We could ask something more kol specific, maybe... (A few variations on what is the playername of account #XXXXXX). --Starwed 23:30, 30 April 2012 (CEST)
    • unless you're whitelisting some sites (Coldfront, anything with "kingdomofloathing", clan sites (there can be an application process to get in; i don't see the harm in accepting most), other fanpages), this is most certainly a bad thing. there are many reasons to link out (sourced statements, sourced spading data, references to websites). also, admins don't notice, but editing certain fields of, say, data, and using certain templates automatically changes links, which brings up the CAPTCHA (so the wiki considers it adding external links). --Raijinili 08:52, 1 June 2012 (CEST)
    • The questy questions are still too generic, the bots/people responsible for the spamming are dumb but they can answer generic questions. I setup questy on the Die2nite wiki with 10 easy game related questions you could look up on the wiki if you really had to. Last time I checked we had 0 spam for more than a year. The worst case scenario is you lose a few legit users, but on the flip-side if they can't answer basic subject matter questions they shouldn't be editing here anyway. Discordance 13:18, 16 December 2012 (CET)

NetHack is superior in almost every way, duh

  • i just banned a bunch of spam accounts. those lovely folks at the NetHackWiki get none of this crap. would it be of any use to ask them how they manage it?
  • there is talk about adding more questions. their questions all mention NetHack explicitly. is that the trick? how about the following question set:
    • In the popular MMORPG "Kingdom of Loathing", what is the player number of "<player>"?
      • Jick (1)
      • Multi-Tsar (6)
      • Mr Skullhead (13)
      • Riff (27048)
      • Bashy (91072)
  • all these players are on the wiki. the questions could even be the other way round. any ideas? --Evilkolbot 14:11, 30 May 2012 (CEST)
    • Are there email verifications along with the captchas and questions? Right now, I'm all for temporarily disabling creation of new accounts until you can figure out a way around it. It's gotten to the point where I can no longer read the recent changes due to the spam. Head over to the nethack wiki and ask them, that sounds like a good idea, along with adding the user name questions. Honestly, I wouldn't ask about Jick, Skully, and Multi, because a 1-20 brute force guess can ruin that. Just my opinion. ~Erich t/c 23:03, 30 May 2012 (CEST)
    • A suggestion - have each wiki admin put a magic word (or phrase or string of random punctuation or whatever) in their in-game profile. Make the login creation question "What is the magic word in the profile of Xxx (#12345)?". Eh, maybe not. Out of curiosity, how hard is it to add more questions or change the answers? Can any admin do it, or does it have to have to go through a bureaucrat? --Johnny Treehugger 22:55, 31 May 2012 (CEST)

There is a new/s story on reCAPTCHA vulnerability over at Ars Technica, How a trio of hackers brought Google's reCAPTCHA to its knees, should anyone be interested.--MageRed 08:52, 1 June 2012 (CEST)

  • Hope you don't mind me fixing and editing your link. --Raijinili 08:58, 1 June 2012 (CEST)

Is there a possibility of using KittenAuth to use KoL class avatars and having players select, e.g., the two/three icons representing Moxie classes? It's only security through obscurity, unless someone's willing to compile a collection of fanart (or ask for donations of art in the forum). --Raijinili 08:59, 1 June 2012 (CEST)

spammers but no spam?

  • it's too early to remove that question mark. fingers crossed, though. should we allow the spam accounts to remain, freeing us up to do more worthwhile work? or are they regrouping and franticly coding round the latest obstacles and therefore should continue to be unwelcome? i'd say we give the former a try, since it's not the accounts we object to after all. -Evilkolbot 13:40, 2 July 2012 (CEST)
  • My suggestion would be to keep deleting them. It seems somewhat unwise to leave the accounts and so let spammers build an ever increasing army of accounts that, however unlikely, they one day they may figure out how to use. --Fig bucket 22:52, 2 July 2012 (CEST)

Oh look spammers have a new trick

  • seems they can still edit their own user page or are confirming emails (see spam link on the user page of "dietpills")--Ganomex 09:04, 11 July 2012 (CEST)

shoo! bad spammer!

  • i just banned 20-odd new accounts with suspicious names. it seems the spammers can get round the "create a new account" safeguards, but not the "email verification" ones. boo! and yay! i'd say the one or two who manage to make an edit aren't botted about which we can't do anything. i'm happy to keep banning (although the likelihood of false positives increases the longer i go on, which makes me far from happy) but isn't there something else we can do on the "create user" page? --Evilkolbot 13:55, 8 August 2012 (CEST)
    • is there some ereason why there's no CAPTCHA on the create account page? it would be a good idea if it's not technically impossible. --Evilkolbot 14:00, 8 August 2012 (CEST)
      • Bump. Not that it costs me effort or anything, but watching an endless stream of obviously-spambot accounts being created only to be blocked seems like something about which some technical solution could surely be crafted, and thus not something our hard-working admins should need to keep addressing manually. --Fig bucket 01:47, 1 September 2012 (CEST)
        • Bump again. Is editing the questions on the account creation page something that admins can do, or does it require a bureaucrat? --Johnny Treehugger 17:22, 13 September 2012 (CEST)

Questy does allow captcha questions on sign-up. I put 10 game related questions on the Die2Nite wiki sign-up and its kept spammers out for over a year already. Whoever set up questy here hasn't finished the setup properly. Generic questions are easily answered by bots or human spammers. Subject specific questions make most of them give up. Example questions:

  • What class is commonly seen beating baby aquatic mammals?
  • What class is a friend of the animals, especially reptiles?
  • What class casts spells based on noodle magic?
  • What class casts spells based on gravy/dressing magic?
  • What class casts buffs with his stolen bellows-driven musical instrument?
  • What class is most at home on the dance floor?
  • Who created KoL?
  • Who is the head writer for KoL?

Discordance 13:27, 16 December 2012 (CET)

It seems like someone added more bad generic questions the other week? Those don't work because stupid bots, and human spammers answer them all the time. Just put my subject specific questions in (and preferable some more from other people). Discordance 20:47, 11 January 2013 (CET)

  • The default behaviour of confirm edit is in fact to have its catapchas on account creation with "$wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true;". Whoever is in charge of it here has turned it off. Specifically this one I have been talking about [1] and according to Special:Version thats whats running here. Can we get the name of who has access to make these changes so I can bug them on their talk page? Discordance 21:34, 11 January 2013 (CET)
    • the coldfront admins have the rights needed to make such changes. Quietust has the most luck with getting them to do stuff, but he's gone a bit quiet. --Evilkolbot 21:50, 11 January 2013 (CET)

papa got a brand new spambot

  • seems that we've gained a new set of parasites. ones that appear to have botted the email confirmation. not tricky, i'm surprised (and i was relieved) that it took so long. or did something get relaxed? is there anything else we could do? the next step i can see is to follow the kol forums and go in-game invite only. anyone against? i quite liked the idea of drive-by edits. email confirmation killed that anyway. should be fairly simple to bot up. at last a use for ekb. i don't know if i'll have time, though. --Evilkolbot 11:47, 12 January 2013 (CET)
    • If we could, rather than in-game invite, I'd prefer to see account creation just ask you for your name and ID in-game and use a bot to verify the pair. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 20:28, 14 January 2013 (CET)


Shared Counters

What do people think about a category/page that discusses shared counters? Maybe a box on the bottom of the page, much like zap groups, that link to all things that share the same counter? Items off the top of my head include GAPs/Navel/Parasol runaways, Bander/Boot runaways, and Idol/Emblem of Ak'gyxoth. --Erich 04:20, 6 December 2011 (CET)

  • With TPTB re-using these counters to make newer versions of older items, I do think that this should be implemented.

--Grimmy

Monster fumbles

Is there some technique to distinguish between misses and fumbles? When I add a new monster it seems that someone will usually correct my fumble message guess, but I don't know on what basis. Nadando 20:14, 10 December 2011 (CET)

Debuff your moxie to the point that the monster can only miss you if it fumbles (preferably down to 1), then wait until it misses you. High HP and DR/DA, or Hero of the Half Shell plus a shield, will help you survive until the monster gets around to missing you. --Johnny Treehugger 21:30, 10 December 2011 (CET)

A secondary method (perhaps if a monster always hits you) is to use the bugged bugbear. The blocking message it gives will occasionally contain both the critical and fumble text for that monster. (Since one or the other of these methods will pretty much always work, there's never a reason to guess, but it's worth noticing that fumble texts almost never describe a monster missing -- rather, they describe it getting distracted by something, some external thing intervening in the fight, or some similar reason.) --Starwed 00:29, 11 December 2011 (CET)

Document URLs

Might be nice to keep track of the urls the game uses. Snarfblat numbers are recorded already, so we could just note it on the data pages for other types of locations. For NPC stores and the like, not sure where best to record it. --Starwed 03:04, 12 December 2011 (CET)

One time a day usable items...

What do you guys think about a page with a list of "usable (once a day)" items? (i.e. jingle bell, Handmade hobby horse, Oscus's neverending soda, Outrageous sombrero, etc.) --Gleezus 20:26, 21 December 2011 (CET)

  • Oops... apparently there is a Daily Activities page which (sort of) covers this. --Gleezus 20:34, 21 December 2011 (CET)
    • If you find anything missing from that page, and don't feel up to editing it yourself, put it on the talk page. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 21:44, 21 December 2011 (CET)
      • It looks like all the stuff I was looking for was there, just had to search a bit. Thanks.--Gleezus 15:58, 22 December 2011 (CET)

Combat messages

Is there a page listing the various combat messages, like the one I started on the Suburbs of Dis? Should there be? Nadando 19:41, 3 January 2012 (CET)

  • There isn't one that I've seen, but if there's a page for haiku combat, it would make sense to have one for... Seussian combat, or whatever you call it. --Johnny Treehugger 19:46, 3 January 2012 (CET)
    • Sounds like it should be anapest combat, as the Seussian meter is called. It will be not so obscure a term once people become familiar with the Just the Best Anapests effect. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 20:48, 3 January 2012 (CET)

collection macro

  • collections are updating very slowly. i know it takes a while, but your own black heart says pachinkoid has 39 when he has 57. that's at least two weeks out of date. is something broken? --Evilkolbot 22:54, 4 January 2012 (CET)
    • Have you've done something to the page to refresh it? I seem to recall that unless the page is edited (page or a section that includes the collection bit) those don't update or update super-slowly. The resolution: be sexier collection looks up to date. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 08:22, 5 January 2012 (CET)
      • i clicked through and it was the collection database that was out of date. seems to have updated now. --Evilkolbot 18:54, 5 January 2012 (CET)
        • Yeah, well, the display case database has it's own lag issues. The wiki is in sync with the dcdb on resolution: be sexier, but that is showing my collection from two days ago. I picked that item to check because I know I've been going up about 200 a day for the last few days. --Club (#66669) (Talk)

new page added to the krakrox quest?

I was going through the empty agua de vida bottel adventures and when I unlocked the temple but did not have the memory of a cultist robe equipped, I found myself fighting "A Group of cultists".

I did not see this mentioned ANYWHERE on the wiki.

and I wasnt sure where to bring this up, so here it is.

--Grimmy 19:44, 5 January 2012 (CET) found this on his "grimmspoon" alt

DB locked?

What exactly just caused the wiki to go into read-only and clear out Special:RecentChanges?--Toffile 04:32, 18 January 2012 (CET)

  • Thank goodness for someone else noticing that. I reloaded and cleared caches and suchlike a time or two before deciding that it really was the wiki and not me. Are we protesting SOPA? --Dram 04:40, 18 January 2012 (CET)
    • I think it would've been hilarious (from a technical viewpoint) if Wikipedia's protest of SOPA accidentally affected other MediaWiki sites, such as ours. They did only have a few days to put together their blackout code... and it kinda shows, since it can be evaded by simply disabling JavaScript. I don't think we'd have much of an audience for a protest... at least, I'd think most people here already know about SOPA/PIPA. No clue why RecentChanges got cleared, since Special:Contributions is still working. --timrem 06:35, 18 January 2012 (CET)
    • As far as I know, Wikia and Wikipedia don't share any server resources; unless this is the result of a very recent MediaWiki software update that was installed without testing (hopefully not!), I imagine it's unrelated. --Improv 11:16, 18 January 2012 (CET)
      • There were some problems in the database, so I was having one of the admins rebuild some of the wiki's database tables, and during that operation they put the DB in read-only mode in order to speed things up. Part of this process attempted to rebuild the Recent Changes list, but it kept timing out on database locks and would never complete correctly, which is why the Recent Changes list got emptied out. --Quietust (t|c) 14:50, 18 January 2012 (CET)
        • ...and now it's been repaired, albeit with a bunch of extra notices about edits being patrolled. --Quietust (t|c) 17:31, 18 January 2012 (CET)
          • The KOLWiki is not on wikia anyhow. I really should not edit when I am so sleepy :) --Improv 18:04, 18 January 2012 (CET)

Cache Problem

FrostByghte and Mag appear to have tracked down and fixed what was causing the cache problems - some seemingly random .htaccess file was overriding the Cache-Control headers on everything and replacing them with stuff that was causing everybody's web browsers to cache all pages for 10 full minutes (and not even request them from the server). --Quietust (t|c) 23:56, 28 January 2012 (CET)

  • Cool. Should we at long last remove that notice on the main page I put up soon after we had the mediawiki upgrade? --Flargen 02:24, 29 January 2012 (CET)
    • YAY! That was mighty annoying, glad the cause has been found and fixed. If there are no more lingering issues, I say take down the notice on the Main Page. --Wrldwzrd89 02:56, 29 January 2012 (CET)
    • Don't say that, something else is going to inevitably break now.--Toffile 05:49, 29 January 2012 (CET)
    • Well that seems to work, but the enhanced recent changes (enable via Special:Preferences, advance options, which groups page edits) are still not collapsible groups. Some javascript somewhere is no longer being including since the upgrade or something. It drives me nuts ;) So yeah, there is always something ;) --JRSiebz (|§|) 06:31, 29 January 2012 (CET)
    • Heh, that is a problem for me as well. There's also the double arrows on sortable tables, which is again .js related. --Starwed 00:58, 30 January 2012 (CET)
      • The missingn link for collapsible enhanced recent changes is http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/skins/common/enhancedchanges.js; I tried loading it via the Firebug console and got the arrows. The table sorting seems to work for me… What’s the issue with it? --Xyzzyn 01:30, 30 January 2012 (CET)
        • Table sorting works for me too, but I have two arrows instead of one at the top of sortable columns. --Fig bucket 01:37, 30 January 2012 (CET)

Oh, the arrows look correct to me now. Not sure when that changed. I'd noticed it as recently as a couple of days ago, so maybe something with the cache somehow fixed that too? --Starwed 02:28, 30 January 2012 (CET)

  • I believe I noticed this fixed with the changes here. Which makes sense since it's a change to sorttable code. --timrem 04:27, 30 January 2012 (CET)

Copying

All uncopyable monsters, except the Ultra-Rare version of the Pooltergeist, are now explicitly marked as cannot be copied. Additionally, they should all be listed in the new category Uncopyable. Phew, that took a while. --Wrldwzrd89 22:31, 1 February 2012 (CET)

Scratch that, the ultra-rare pooltergeist now has its own page, so it is now included in the list of uncopyable monsters! My work is complete. --Wrldwzrd89 01:49, 2 February 2012 (CET)

Anapest Oyster Eggs

Any Anapest combat gives 4 Oyster Eggs instead of 1. Tested in all 3 Suburbs of Dis locations, and in the Giant's Castle with and without Just the Best Anapests (4 eggs with the effect, 1 egg without). There is no special text denoting the fact that you find 4, but that many are added to inventory. At first I thought it was just KoLmafia not parsing the item drop correctly, but I verified using /count before and after, as well as actually looking at the items in my inventory. I've submitted a bug report, so my changes to Oyster Egg Day and today's subpage may need to be reverted if it is a bug. --timrem 07:01, 3 February 2012 (CET) Additionally: Drunken Stupor gave one egg with Just the Best Anapests, probably since the text was not made into anapest form. On an only slightly related note: Is there any reason we don't have specific Oyster Egg Day pages as subpages of Oyster Egg Day? So something like Oyster Egg Day/XXXIV instead of Oyster Egg Day XXXIV. Many of the pages are just a list of egg locations, and I think as subpages they'd automatically link back to the holiday article. --timrem 10:10, 3 February 2012 (CET)

I wonder if they're currently fixing this? I haven't gotten any eggs at all since I got Just the Best Anapests to try it. I'm adventured in places the wiki page said had eggs, including Dis, and I do have the basket equipped. --Notsupposedtobehere 12:01, 3 February 2012 (CET)
Logged on to a multi through mafia, started adventuring in Clumsiness Grove: 2nd adventure it stopped telling me I got 4 eggs again. Logged on straight through firefox, just to be 100% sure. "/count black paisley" didn't know what I was talking about, so I adventured once in the Glacier of Jerks and got an egg message. "/count black paisley" then returned 4. Same results using Just the Best Anapests and adventuring at McMillicancuddy's Farm, so it looks like simple RNG that you didn't get any. --timrem 17:54, 3 February 2012 (CET)

Just got a reply to my bug report saying it's been fixed. I'll double-check it and make the changes on Oyster Egg Day. --timrem 21:40, 3 February 2012 (CET)

NeedsStats

someone make a NeedsStats template. it helps organize stuff for someone to take a Dwarvish War Uniform to in one casual/softcore run. --Raijinili 23:46, 7 February 2012 (CET)

Done! I also created a category for pages tagged with this new template to live in, as a subcategory of Needs Content. --Wrldwzrd89 01:14, 8 February 2012 (CET)

Wanted Pages

Special:WantedPages includes links made from Talk pages, User pages, and a few other sources, which tend to fill up the list with junk and make it really hard to find actual wanted pages and bad links in real wiki content. Is it possible to modify the query to it doesn't include talk pages? Or can we go in and remove the links from the offending pages to clean this list up? --Turing 15:15, 9 February 2012 (CET)

  • It also includes every page that has ever been nominated for deletion, due to the way the {{#ifexist}} parser function works (and this is apparently by design). --Quietust (t|c) 15:24, 9 February 2012 (CET)
    • "WantedPages" is a very poor name. "RedLinks" is better. i may be speaking out of turn here, but i'd say that even on user or talk pages the correcting of links is absolutely positively 100% OK. that being said, if you do anything else you'll still be admonished and/or banned. still, who's going to tell JRSiebz his sig has a redlink in it? --Evilkolbot 22:26, 9 February 2012 (CET)
      • I've corrected user and talk page links when I've moved various pages. Probably haven't done so consistently, but I've done it before. --Flargen 22:31, 9 February 2012 (CET)

Maximizing Your [x] and Challenge Paths

I'm thinking that an extra category can be added to the Maximizing Your... pages to reflect challenge path only effects. For example, there's +60 ML to be had in a Boris run, which can be added to the Maxing ML page, but the effect doesn't fit under any category because it's Challenge Path only. Same goes for the regen effects in a Fist run. Any thoughts on this? --Erich 22:28, 7 March 2012 (CET)

  • How about under Passive skills, non-buff skills and others. I'm pretty confident others cuts it for the few effects there are. --Yatsufusa 16:21, 13 March 2012 (CET)

Item metadata

We already have item data pages, but they're only used for a handful of things. I've often thought that it would be useful to move all the item data into the data namespace. The wiki is full of tables listing items, and being able to pull information into them automatically would be nice. Thoughts? --Starwed 21:25, 17 March 2012 (CET)

  • This would be great! Just having the item data in one place would make the basic page creation task easier than knowing which templates should have what data, and would allow templates to do more things automatically. I recently fixed [2] a booze page that was missing duplicating the type=booze entry from the item template into the useitem template, and therefore didn't show the drunkenness even though everything else was correct. Perhaps more importantly it would allow templates to do *new* things, such as finally streamlining and standardizing consumables. --Eleron 21:46, 17 March 2012 (CET)
    • This isn't the first time this has been suggested - it's been brought up at least once several years back, and there were several arguments against it. One was that it'd make item pages more confusing for users to create/edit. Another was that a lot of the data doesn't really need to be in the data page because it's only used in one location (namely, at the top of the item page) - certain fields like item type are okay (for food/booze/spleen), but item ID or description would be pointless. Yet another is that the way the item data pages are currently being used, adding more fields places even more load on the wiki (since they use {{Data}} to fetch each field) - to mitigate that, we'd need to convert the item template to use the INFOBOX style of loading data pages (which seems to be what you have in mind), but that method prevents you from specifying custom parameters. I also recall some attempts to do this sort of thing for item consumption info, but that broke down on the numerous items that have multiple cases (e.g. around the world). There were probably some others, but those are the ones I remember the best. --Quietust (t|c) 04:37, 21 March 2012 (CET)
      • Back then the reason I stopped pushing for accurately handling consumables on the wiki was just my perception that you insisted on not having item data on item data pages and on not adding information to the wiki that you didn't find useful. There were no technical problems, it just required template and page rewriting. --Eleron 08:23, 21 March 2012 (CET)
1. I really don't think it would be more confusing than the current state of affairs -- to get the image to show you already have to edit the metadata.
2. The second reason I strongly disagree with -- with full item metadata, a lot of tables which have to be manually maintained can be at least partially automated. As with monsters, the descriptive text could stay on the main page, but the item ID would be sensible to have as metadata.
3. Third reason: I don't know enough about the state of the servers to know whether that is a concern or not. Certainly we'd get rid of {{Data}} in places where it was no longer needed.
4. Are there particular places in use where we would need custom parameters? --Starwed 05:45, 21 March 2012 (CET)

Outfit metadata

We've fallen a bit behind in updating {{item}} to match the changes and additions Jick has been making to item descriptions. The display of the number of pieces in an outfit is one such thing, as well as the blank lines before and after the outfit entry; and we probably need a special entry to deal with the special free-pull entry for Boris's Helm (I think the special cannot-be-equipped-in-hardcore can be supported by existing generic notes). There might be other things I'm forgetting. The outfit thing is why I really bring something up here: would it be worthwhile to create a new set of metadata pages for outfits? We could store the number of pieces of the outfit there, as well as most of the data that is currently passed into a template on current outfit pages, and just have these templates retrieve that data; outfit summary pages might also find this useful. As is, I will just go ahead and add a pieces= parameter to {{item}}, and we can adjust it to look for outfit metadata if we go that route. --Flargen 22:34, 1 April 2012 (CEST)

Uh-Oh! Your recent change to the Item template seems to have broken a few things. Have a look at Seeger's Unstoppable Banjo as an example... shouldn't it say "Cannot be discarded" since it is a Quest Item? --Wrldwzrd89 01:42, 6 April 2012 (CEST)
The changes to {{item}} didn't do that, it looks like when adding "pieces=4|" to that page (and a few others), "pieces=4|S" was added instead, which just messed up the "autosell=0|" which was on the following line. I fixed the few pages I found the error on. --timrem 02:12, 6 April 2012 (CEST)

Data namespace caching

For some odd reason, pages in the Data namespace (Data:Sonar is a perfect example) are being cached too long. The only way I've found to force an update is to purge the offending page. The cache persists, even after edits are made to the underlying page... seems to be based on something other than edit count, since multiple edits in a short period of time don't help matters. I'm sure other editors have found this behavior as perplexing as I have. --Wrldwzrd89 23:26, 27 May 2012 (CEST)

  • Been like that since time immemorial. Similarly with the Template namespace. Not sure it can be altered. For data pages things are just complex. The data pages dynamically format their own page source by calling another template and that's what you see displayed. Templates have a similar dynamic and frequently have to reference themselves (examples, displaying the source code without having to edit, etc). Dunno if that's the actual reason for the slowdown; could just be those spaces are given much lower priority to make sure that the changes are propagated throughout the wiki first (which can take a fair amount of time on high-use templates like {{item}}). --Flargen 00:39, 28 May 2012 (CEST)

Rollover and real-life calendar dates

So rollover occurs in the evening, but I've been operating under the assumption that rollover is associated with the following real-life calendar day, where the majority of the day occurs. For example, Tuesday night rollover changes would be marked in the wiki as Wednesday changes. Is this correct? --Itsatrap 02:39, 24 June 2012 (CEST)

  • I've always done that, putting things in "KoL time/date". Except for announcements, which are usually in Arizona time/date. --JRSiebz (|§|) 06:42, 24 June 2012 (CEST)

Image cleanup

Wow. We have a whole bunch of unused images. Maybe it's time someone cleaned these up?

Also, I spotted one image that looks like it was uploaded with the wrong file name, and thus wasn't fixed during the last automated addition of kolimage tags. Sadly, the image no longer exists on KoL's servers. :( --Wrldwzrd89 01:13, 3 July 2012 (CEST)

  • Sorry for the revert, but while it certainly is a wrong filename (.jpg), which is annoying, it's not clear whether TPTB removed it from their servers---very unusual---or perhaps it's still there but under a different name... --Fig bucket 01:21, 3 July 2012 (CEST)
  • I found the right image name via KoLmafia's cache, and uploaded it. —Yendor 02:02, 3 July 2012 (CEST)
  • Most of the images are either old versions of updated content or are used in templates which mess up the report. Kill some of the custom avatars and leave the rest.--Toffile 01:42, 3 July 2012 (CEST)
  • I have some somewhat-related questions. On this page, there is a long list of images that were renamed. I don't understand why some of the picture names had to be changed. It appears that many were given longer names so that their actual file names could be turned into redirects to the longer names (see the "short names" list). This makes no sense to me. Is there a reason for this, or should the images with the longer names be deleted? What's also interesting to me is that one of the images that was "renamed for consistency" was removed by an administrator. Does that indicate that this practice is pretty much useless, and that the other duplicate images of this kind should be removed? --Oneforfortytwo 18:37, 13 July 2012 (CEST)
    • I don't know for sure, but some of it could be because some images are served up from something like an /ad/ directory on the wiki, which can lead to adblocker programs blocking them. Changing the name changes what directory the image ends up in. --Flargen 19:43, 13 July 2012 (CEST)
    • MediaWiki doesn't allow users to upload files with just a 1- or 2-character-long names (at least, not by default in the version I tested this with). You get an error "File names must be at least three letters.". Most of those "renamed for consistency" were related to other short-named files (the w1, w2... w16), so they should be kept as they are. Looking through the whole page, I don't see a need to change anything there. --timrem 19:46, 13 July 2012 (CEST)
  • Thanks for resolving the issue, Timrem. As for the unused images, Toffile suggested deleting the custom avatars, but I didn't see any of them. If they exist, could someone please point them out to me? Also, was the consensus that the rest of the unused images be left on the wiki? After glancing over the list of them, I don't see anything that merits immediate deletion. --Oneforfortytwo 21:53, 13 July 2012 (CEST)
    • There were a few, but they may have been deleted in the interim. --Toffile 04:37, 14 July 2012 (CEST)
  • If everyone says leave them alone, then I'm in agreement. --Wrldwzrd89 23:36, 13 July 2012 (CEST)

Spam Blacklist Extension errors

  • I just saw the error message below when editing this page:

Warning: file_get_contents([[m:Spam blacklist]]) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/coldfront/domains/kol.coldfront.net/public_html/thekolwiki/extensions/SpamBlacklist/BaseBlacklist.php on line 274

--Wrldwzrd89 23:40, 13 July 2012 (CEST)

MoxieNoHit info move to monster data pages

I've noticed in several places that plans were made, for example in the combat template, to move the MoxieNoHit stuff to the monster metadata pages. Was that ever implemented? If not, I'd love to help transition over stuff. --Wrldwzrd89 21:08, 14 July 2012 (CEST)

  • I've certainly no objections. Can just add that field onto the data pages for monster's it's relevant for, and then we can start modifying templates to look there. --Flargen 22:31, 14 July 2012 (CEST)

Effects by number pages conversion to wiki tables

I successfully converted the newest of these (1100-1199) to a wiki table format. However, I needed about ten attempts at it before it looked right... and the resulting page is over 1000 bytes bigger than it was before. Anyone want to try their hand at converting the other ones? --Wrldwzrd89 02:06, 24 September 2012 (CEST)

  • I don't think you need to specify 270px width everywhere, you could've just done it for the entries in the first row. Or, why not just replicate the structure of the existing tables, like so:

1100.
1101.
1102.

1133.
1134.
1135.

1167.
1168.
1169.

Unless making each entry a separate table cell was part of the goal of course. --Fig bucket 02:27, 24 September 2012 (CEST)

Typo -> Sic

Oneforfortytwo has suggested that {{typo}} be changed to {{sic}} (since, after all, it inserts "[sic]" into the page), such that the latter will be the actual page and the former will be the redirect. I've written a bot script to replace all 200 instances - any objections to running it at the end of the month (or possibly earlier)? --Quietust (t|c) 02:23, 26 September 2012 (CEST)

  • ...and it's done. --Quietust (t|c) 04:56, 29 September 2012 (CEST)

Page move request

I don't know how to move pages (perhaps I don't have permission?) but can somebody please move File:Tp_32.gif to File:Tp3_32.gif? Thanks. I uploaded all of the new tiny plastics images but like an idiot I ballsed up the name of the very last one. --Melon 13:11, 16 December 2012 (CET)

cdn.coldfront.net

Did something happen to the wiki or the cdn.coldfront.net site? Suddenly today, no images or style sheets seem to be loading and the common factor appears to be stuff hosted on cdn.coldfront.net.

$ lynx -source -dump http://kol.coldfront.net/thekolwiki/skins/monobook/images/logo.jpg
<html>
<head><title>403 Forbidden</title></head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<center><h1>403 Forbidden</h1></center>
<hr><center>nginx/1.2.6 cdn.download.io/0.1.3</center>
</body>
</html>
$

The wiki works oddly with no javascript loading, and looks funny, too. --Club (#66669) (Talk) 05:07, 17 December 2012 (CET)