Perplex City Wiki:Discussion

Perplex City Wiki Discussion Section

As this is a discussion page for the setup and layout of the Wiki, i've set up this page on here instead of the forums. Regular users of the Wiki should be able to join in the discussion on topics which affect the wiki.

Site Upgrade

I upgraded the MediaWiki from 1.6.3 to 1.7.1. It is mostly bug and security fixes, but there are a couple of new features. Changelog. I also made a few customizations to the UI:

• External link image -- it is more like the iTunes external link image. This was an entirely arbitrary decision because I just like it better.
• Tweaks to the Monobook style for a black background/border to acknowledge Anna. This will revert back to the regular background after time has passed.

Functionally, nothing should have changed. As always, let me know if you experience site issues. BrianEnigma 18:50, 29 July 2006 (PDT)

Collaboration of the Week?

I would like to propose adopting some of Wikipedia's projects--especially the Collaboration of the Week project. I'm very impressed with the wealth of knowledge that already exists in this wiki; however, many pages are outdated or stubs, and could use some serious work. Article writing is right up my alley; however, it seems foolish to tackle such a huge task myself. Besides, it'd be a lot more fun to work together as a group, article by article.  :) I'd love to see the wiki shine. Thoughts? xnera 08:42, 3 July 2006 (PDT)

Possible Layout Changes

Someone has also designed a "community banner" which has a drop-down menu leading to all the main important links, and I would like to see that on here, if it's possible. I am sorry all of this had to happen at the same time :\ Lhall 23:45, 30 April 2006 (EDT) The dropdown is now part of the site's Monobook style. The wiki page templates and JavaScript were not agreeing with the standard way of including that nav dopdown, so I had to make my own. The sites are accurate as of today, but if anything changes in the future, I'll have to manually tweak the style. BrianEnigma 08:53, 19 August 2006 (PDT)

Edited New site, new look, new comments here. Do we want any other changes to this site to be considered? Scott 09:45, 2 May 2006 (PDT)

Posted this on another page, but I think we should add a link to Perplex City to the "new to perplex city?" box on the sidebar. PerplexHero 18:25, 19 June 2006 (PDT)

The Monobook style now uses a local cache of Skenmy's custom CSS. I didn't end up linking to it directly sitewide, but made a static copy because (1) the dynamic version ends up being two effective webpage hits for each page request and (2) although I don't doubt Skenmy's intentions, putting a user-editable style sheet as the live site stylesheet just makes me a bit nervous. An accidental missing semicolon or curly brace could be trouble. Everyone that had a custom User:Stylesheet page linking to Skenmy's has had that page deleted, as it's now irrelevant with the sitewide change. BrianEnigma 08:53, 19 August 2006 (PDT)

Main Page

After talking with some moderators, we should be pointing people to #syzygy instead of #perplexcity. Although #perplexcity does have a topic suggesting a change of channel to #syzygy, newbies using unfamiliar IRC clients may not notice the topic, understand its meaning, or have the skill to change the channel. It's best if we just funnel everyone to the same spot and deal with things directly than have the confusion of multiple channels.

User Security Levels

• sysop - gives you editing power on locked pages, the ability to make new users, and other little stuff. Basically it's the gold key access.
• bureaucrat - means you can change privs of other people as well.
• developer - I'm not entirely sure what this does, but presumably gives greater access to backpanel controls, so you can easily change the look and fFeel of things, one assumes.

In case you were wondering, there is also a "bot" priv which make users bots. hey hey :) I'm not entirely sure what the subtleties of that are, actually. presumably you can make a user a bot, and their edits are fFlagged a bit differently, fFor better or worse as you see fFit. make scripts fFor rapid edits of stuff, or red-flag annoying users. either way. we have no bots.  :)

MediaWiki:Sidebar

err .. where'd it go? I mean the article is there and it seems to be fFine .. but the actual sidebar seems to have reverted to something dark and twisted. What gives? any clues? I'm a bit stumped, to be honest. I could've sworn it was there like this morning or something. maybe i'm dumb? maybe i'm special? hmmmm ... Scott 15:43, 4 May 2006 (PDT)

Hrm...I saw it earlier, too. Bri? Lhall 07:25, 5 May 2006 (PDT)

.....And as mysteriously as it went away, it just now came back. I have no idea. Scott 11:02, 5 May 2006 (PDT)

...I have caching enabled in the Wiki server preferences, so if a page is cached before the sidebar gets defined/edited, then the changes won't necessarily appear on a given page until after it is edited again. It may have been something funny with the migration that "fixed itself" upon page editing...? BrianEnigma 21:41, 31 May 2006 (PDT)

Open Registration + Blacklist

What does everyone think about possibly opening up free registration to all, with registration required to edit articles, but using the MediaWiki Spam Blacklist plugin? This is the same one that Wikipedia uses to prevent spammers. I'm not sure how much administrative overhead it is to manually add people to the user database--but even a tiny bit of manual intervention is an extra step that might deter a new user from contributing. I'd like to propose a "register-yourself" model with the Spam Blacklist plugin for a limited trial, until we get comfortable that it's either not working or working better than manually adding people. Then we can either continue to use it or revert back to the old way. Does anyone else have an opinion on this?

I am reluctant to open registration. This is largely because I had to deal with the onslaught of spamming which occurred a year ago, and there's a good chance I would be the one to deal with it again in the fFuture. I can tell you, adding new users is a really simple thing. I have the page bookmarked, so all I need do when given a new account request is input a name, and generate a response to the person. Pretty easy on my part. However i do fFully recognize the fFact that any effort on the part of the luddite user may be the difference between contibuting new work, and turning away and never looking back. So letting the user do their own registration would be a great thing. So. yes. a trial period might be a good idea. Basically, as I understand it, the plugin simply refers to a blacklist everytime an edit is submitted. So as long as their blacklist is well kept, it should work out dandy. My vote is yes to a trial period, then. Scott 23:17, 24 September 2006 (PDT)

Yes, it updates from Wikipedia's blacklist every 15 minutes. They're really good at controlling spam--I don't know how much of that to attribute to the blacklist and how much to attribute to manual removal, but we'll give it a chance for a few days/weeks and see what we get. BrianEnigma 17:35, 26 September 2006 (PDT)