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Everything should be working now, and I've left a note for Orain to dump the cloud cache for future upgrades.
We passed an important milestone today: Over 200 edits in one day... enough to fill up Recent Changes with new stuff. I'm excluding those days where I went crazy with page moves, because it's super-easy to get 15 at a time with page moves. A couple of new users, notably Ecclytennysmithylove, have proven to be very productive editors.
-- ∇×V
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Was there any kind of support activity planned for this morning? Because it's down again.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I have a question tangentially related to ATT that I want to ask:
GethN7 posted an article wherein he states that he's actually not offended by criticism. I find that he has good points to make, and want to ask ATT's other admins what their own opinions on criticism are. I'd like to hear your own take on the matter, and your own points. 
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(EDIT: my previous post finally showed up, so consider this post redundant.)
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Was there any kind of support activity planned for this morning? Because it's down again. It's time to pay their server bill, and until the server company logs a payment, we're down.
Basically, Kudu, who set all this up, is AWOL, and John Lewis is just as annoyed as we are, and is currently working on addressing that issue ASAP.
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Well, it came back up around 45 minutes ago, judging by the Recent Changes page.
And to answer Tennie's question, Criticism Is Good, If It Is Good Criticism. The ass from TVT who hung about for ten minutes then ran off snarking because some of his edits got reverted didn't offer good criticism. People who say something like, "hey, you've got a systematic problem with X" and stay to propose and debate solutions, they give good criticism. It's in the rules for the staff -- http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All ... Wiki_Staff]it's not treason to disagree with the staff and we want to know if you thnk we're doing something wrong, even if it's a subjective thing that we might not agree with.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Actually, it's Dusti, not kudu. It's not like we didn't see the disaster coming; I filed bug tickets and harassed people on IRC about this over the course of the last two months. And then it happened anyway. It reminds me of Hurricane Katrina insofar as it was a disaster that everyone expert knew was coming, but nothing happened anyway. I've informed that this is a last chance.
I believe I've been called on to say something about criticism. I think I'm going to start with the cliche I learned from the Perl community: Mistakes are the best way of learning. There's no real harm in small mistakes; in fact they're to be valued for learning. We have a website about literary criticism, ultimately, so learning and teaching is what we do. This, of course, applies to the admins too. If we're not learning too, what's the point of it all?
At a deeper level, it's I want all of my philosophy to be reversible, unless there's some obviously irreversible process going on. (Sorry for the thermo terms applied outside the field, but it's what I know.) Something that applies to me has to be able to apply to everyone else. It's a very useful tool; I can use it to discount Ayn Rand's philosophy out of hand.
So I usually have no reason to assume that I'm the right one in an argument. I have no cause to qualify an argument other than its merits -- wisdom may come from a child or an elder, just typically more often with the latter. I am entirely anti-authoritarian; because an authority "says so" is never a good reason to do anything. "Because the authority has guns" or "because the authority thought about this problem and I haven't" are fine, though. But anyway, if I'm an authority, that doesn't actually justify anything I do. Since criticism is necessary to counterbalance and inform authorities, it's an absolutely necessary part of All The Tropes.
Anything particular I should address?
-- ∇×V
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We have caught the attention of the "fucknotvtropes" Tumblr
06-13-2014, 12:06 AM
As you can tell by the name, they think TV Tropes is a pretty crappy place.
I recently stumbled across them and they've mentioned us a few times (mostly in a neutral way), and I decided that if I was going to take Project AFTER's criticism and try to listen to them, then I might as well take as many pointers from this Tumblr (which has a lot of good points about why TV Tropes is a cesspit) as I can to avoid ATT becoming as terrible as they see TVT as being (and given some of the stuff they've highlightled, I certainly hope so).
http://fucknotvtropes.tumblr.com/post/8 ... der-thinks (a blog post in which I mention how I'm not going to be butthurt over criticism is mentioned here, as I sent them a link to let them know I read their Tumblr and apreciate their efforts)
http://fucknotvtropes.tumblr.com/post/8 ... opes-after (a post in which they mistaken assume the Popular articles section of the main page of ATT means we endorse pages like "Breast Expansion". Submitted a response to clear up that it was a technical goof)
Also, issued a blog post further clearing up the issue:
http://gethn7.blogspot.com/2014/06/in-r ... icism.html
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FYI: Stuff is broken again and we don't really know why. Everything was working fine, and now a whole bunch extensions don't want to play nice. No changes in-between either, it happened hours after we came back online. Anyway, it's mysterious and they're on it, so we don't need more reports.
-- ∇×V
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Say, what happened to the forums? They're gone.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Say, what happened to the forums? They're gone. Due to some incredibly goofy extension issues, it seems some of our extensions arwe crapping out for reasons that has got even the Orain staff confused.
They plans to consult with the MediaWiki developers today to figure out what the deal is.
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I take it that is the same reason that the Darth Wiki pages all have raw CSS dumped into them by the {{Darth Wiki}} template, too?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Yeah. I'm not going to blame lack of response here on the part of Orain. They've put more than 8 hours into solving our particular problems, and have just come up empty. The theories are starting to get crazier as we try to figure out why it hates some extension now -- my personal theory right now is "cosmic rays".
-- ∇×V
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I wouldn't think of blaming them, given what you've told me. My hat's off to them for the effort they're putting into this.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Some ATT updates:
1. As for the broken features, addshore showed up and has managed to fix the broken forums namespace, and Orain is planning to upgrade to the soon to be released 1.23.1 to see if that fixes things.
2. We recently dual licensed our contributions to use both CC BY SA 3.0 and CC BY SA 4.0 licensing. Unlike when TV Tropes relicensed their content to screw people over, we did this to allow people to redistribute under the new 4.0 license as well as under 3.0 (you can use the license of your choice)
More details can be found in this blog post:
http://gethn7.blogspot.com/2014/06/abou ... anges.html
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Happy news, everyone!
Addshore popped in, took a look at our site, and found the problem.
Thanks to a weird change in the Echo extension, the way it hooked into MediaWiki caused a bunch of other extensions noses to be knocked out of joint, but addshore got us using a version of that that doesn't cause half the wiki to mutiny.
However, we may need to wait a day or two for everything to be fully functional, like the CSS stylesheets. A server refresh is current underway to flush things to fix that, but it may take a day or two. (Don't worry, this does not mean we'll see any broken code splattered all over certain pages in the meantime)
That aside, everything (like the forums/LQT especially) are fully functional again!
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Major updates planned for our wiki interface and user options
06-30-2014, 12:53 AM
Ladies and gentlemen, I have recently made some major changes to the look of the wiki to have rounder corner and smoother design, see the link on the sitenotice for more details, hope you guys like it.
Also, I have filed a request for some new features to be added to extend user options when looking for pages, manipulating the TOC on pages to whatever users prefer, as well as adding some other stuff to make things work better, more news when that request has been completed.
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A breakdown of the new features we have added
06-30-2014, 02:41 PM
We now have several new features and extensions, here's the breakdown:
* [ http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TocTree TocTree] - You can now have greater control over the TOC (Table of contents) on pages, with options to expand and/or float the table in your user preferences. The float tables are somewhat buggy, so it's recommended they not be used, but now you can toggle whether the TOC can be folded or expanded accordion style like you would with page sections.
* [ http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:RefreshSpecial RefreshSpecial] - Admins (or anyone else granted the "refreshspecial" right) can now refresh the status of all special pages to update cache information. This should be used sparingly, due to the high processor load of the extension, but this should make maintenance tasks much easier to accomplish.
* [ http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Spe ... gorySearch Category Search] - The MultiCategorySearch extension has been added to ATT, and a new link has been added to the Troper Tools on the sidebar. This will allow searching for pages by Category (up to 5 can be selected, with up to 3 excluded). Warning, this is case sensitive, so you must type in exact Category names.
* [ http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extensio ... yTagSorter CategoryTagSorter] Categories are now automatically sorted in alphabetical order, though this can be disabled in user preferences for those who prefer the stock MediaWiki Category listing.
* [ http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Cat ... e_Workshop Trope Workshop] has been enhanced with two expandable lists that will show the pages and discussion pages in that namespace, from last updated first. It's not exactly as well featured as TV Tropes's YKTTW yet, but it should be an improvement.
* The Trope/Work templates have been condensed for conciseness, with small "question marks" added next to each icon link to act as backups to the icons links and if they are red, to show the icon leads to a redlink, since the tooltips do not display that info properly with just the icons. These will be seeing more refinement over time, and if need be, they will be reverted to their original state before the change.
* A new gadget has been added (default enabled) that will smooth the appearance of most stock MediaWiki skins with rounded corners. This is an aesthetic change, and can be disabled by disabling the 'Rounded Corners" gadget in user preferences.
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Very cool, Geth. First chance I get, I'll be playing with the new toys. (Well, except for the RefreshSpecial.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Or I would if I could, but... I opened up the main page and found I been logged out, and the damned thing refuses to recognize my password or my email address for resetting my password.
-- Bob
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...and my shoes began to squeak.
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That issue seems to be fixed now. They have been trying to fix the logout message to not say anything WMF specific for awhile now, so any trouble was when they were still working on that.
If it's still a problem, I'll let the Orain guys know ASAP.
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Looks like I'll have some time tomorrow. Are there any pages that desperately need manual editing at the moment?
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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robkelk Wrote:Looks like I'll have some time tomorrow. Are there any pages that desperately need manual editing at the moment?
Some of our pages are grossly outdated, we have a lot of stubs, and some needs some more tropes.
That's the high points of what needs fixed, go ahead check the "Utilities" section of the recent changes header text for anything else I might have forgotten.
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Okay, got in. Not the wiki's fault but mine -- used the wrong password, and forgot that I used a custom address for my email. Bad Bob, no biscuit.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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GethN7 Wrote:robkelk Wrote:Looks like I'll have some time tomorrow. Are there any pages that desperately need manual editing at the moment?
Some of our pages are grossly outdated, we have a lot of stubs, and some needs some more tropes.
That's the high points of what needs fixed, go ahead check the "Utilities" section of the recent changes header text for anything else I might have forgotten. Well, that was a productive afternoon+early-evening - adding a few Laconic pages, cleaning up all of the double-redirects except for the two self-illustrating ones, creating a few Category pages, fixing an old reference that said "this is TV Tropes", changing more than a few pages with "trope" tags to "works" tags so that all of their subpages would show up in the navbox, and finishing off a project that somebody else had started of turning a huge page into a summary page with its references on subpages.
What? That was barely the tip of the iceberg?
To quote from that now-summary page, "Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!"
I'll do more tomorrow. (But then I'm getting out of the house and enjoying my vacation.)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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