All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part II

[GethN7]

I made an informative post about how we differ from TV Tropes on Reddit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/tvtropes/commen ... ey_differ/

[Labster]

I came up with an extension that allows us to highlight links to both YMMV Tropes, and to ordinary tropes. Which should help us a lot with pages that have gotten mistagged, because we can just see them when we view a page. And we should be able to toggle it on and off with a gadget, because it just adds a css class.
Before we implement it, if anyone wants to look over my code, that would be appreciated.  I don't really know PHP, so any ideas to make it better would be appreciated.  It's on Github, here.
-- ∇×V

[nylor]

I still need to go make a post on RPG.net to promote the site, but for now, I've contented myself with linking to ATT whenever I would've otherwise linked to TVT - a little passive marketing, I guess.

[Morganite]

The thing you have to remember about Something Awful is that it's a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Yeah, there's some cool stuff there, like the Let's Plays. (Which is why I personally paid for an account and the archives upgrades - looked at as an entertainment purchase, it easily beats buying a movie for value for the money.) But for the most part, it's just terrible. And the segment of the population that talks about troping websites at all seems to be actively hostile to the entire concept of troping.

We can't make them happy. We don't want to make them happy. And while there might be some people who would actually like our community, trying to promote there is just not worth the tsuris.

-Morgan.

[Bob Schroeck]

The {{quote}} template is very finicky.  I've know for weeks that it will barf if you have an embedded external link in it (unless said link is in a markup, or under some circumstances in the attribution part of the template (though I have yet to figure out the rules for that)).  However, I just discovered this morning that it doesn't like equals signs ("=") in the body of the quote, either.  A good example would be the quote at the top of http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Use ... tish_Money]Useful Notes/Old British Money, which I have left in place as an example.  I have attempted to substitute the HTML entity code for the "equals" character, but the template is too clever for me and simply interprets it as a literal string (at least it doesn't crash the template, though).  Argh.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Labster]

Actually, the equals signs in embedded external links are the main problem. Templates use param=... to pass named parameters in, and pipes to separate parameters. So the solution: use another template, natch. There are two templates to help: {{=}} inserts an equal sign, and {{!}} inserts a pipe character. This is not awesome, and I only learned it after import. Sorry.

So fixing the above page goes like this: http://allthetropes.orain.org/w/index. ... did=566788
-- ∇×V

[GethN7]

We were down for awhile this evening. The Orain guys tried to update ATT with some new features, something went horribly pear shaped, and thus we were down till they figured out the problem.

We're pretty sure what the problem was (one of the extensions we wanted to add is a problem child), tomorrow we were going to see if they could add most of the other stuff one at a time to see which ones work.

I apologize for the trouble this may have caused.

Also, in the meantime, I'm working on adding a free version of the "badges" TV Tropes forces people to pay money for:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All ... :Userboxes

For those not familiar with userboxes, see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userboxes

It's basically a "fun" feature for decorating your userpage.

Anyway, just wanted to warn you guys we may have some minor downtime issues tomorrow, but hopefully nothing as bad as today, and we'll hopefully get some new features in the process.

P.S. - I updated our Twitter concerning the wiki status, and in case of future maintenance periods or site status problems, please check out our Twitter for more information, as either I or Vorticity will try to keep it updated there.

[GethN7]

The Orain guys (a wonderful gentleman named addshore in particular) just fixed a ton of things on their servers, and we can now have the following new features:

Voting: We now have a voting feature where you click on a bar with one to five stars to give a page a rating. We haven't completely figured out the best way to use this, but we were planning on incorporating it on a reviews subpage space.

Blogs: This feature has been enabled, but I'll need to set up a few things first to make creating blog posts easier, but it is indeed enabled. More information on this once I get it set up.

Better looking sidebar menus: Our current sidebar menus are based on a dull but servicable template, and we now have the ability to have really nice looking expandable and editable sidebar menus. I'll have to run a bot to get the ones we currently have converted, but once that happens, I plan to modify our templates to make inserting new ones a breeze.

Trope and YMMV items highlighter: Vorticity and I worked out a custom extension that will hightlight all Trope items in green text and all YMMV items in orange yellow . We plan to make this toggable via gadget in your user preferences.

One feature is functional but slightly buggy right now:

Polls: We have this enabled, and they mostly work as intended, but they show some database hash data on the pages they are displayed on that looks ugly and out of place. We'll probably have to wait for this to be bugfixed before we can make more use of it.

If anyone has any comments or suggestions regarding our new features, please don't don't hesitate to share.

[GethN7]

I had 2 wait for an extension called "MyVariables" to be installed, since it allowed me to make a sidebar link that is unique to each logged in user so you can access your own personal Blog. I also included a link to the index of all the blogs on the site.

Unfortunately, the blogging feature is slightly broken right now, since comments don't work due to some database issues (and posts can submit but wonky errors occur and they aren't logged as a result), which I've asked the Orain guys to look into.

We also have the new sidebar menus set up, but due to some weird bug, the extension works but all the menus are now invisible (though the contents are still intact in edit view and show up on the HTML source code of the pages). I've asked the Orain guys to look into this as well, so if you don't see side bar menus, don't panic, it's just some goofy database bug, and I can run a quick bot job to revert things if I have to.

Hopefully, these issues will be resolved soon.
 

[GethN7]

The blogs are fixed now. Turns out the database error has been flushed.

If you want to "subscribe" to a blog, just add it to your watchlist. You can also comment on blogs as well.

For more information, see here:

http://wiki.4intra.net/Wikilog

The Special:WikilogComments special page is broken (you can use this to view all Wikilog comments), so don't bother trying to use it, but everything else works fine.

Our sidebar menus are still a little jacked up, but that's going to be examined in more detail next week according to Orain staff. In the meantime, the affected pages don't look too horribly messed up, so it's not exactly a panic button issue.

More information on the side bar menus when I get it, but for now, have fun editing, and, if you like, have fun blogging!

[Dartz]

Is it just me, or has it all gone 404? Somebody fiddling with something?

EDIT: It's back.... sorry.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

[GethN7]

Is it just me, or has it all gone 404? Somebody fiddling with something?

EDIT: It's back.... sorry.

 

Actually, Orain's server has been in and out because they've been doing a ton of server maintenance and optimization. Hopefully, the worst is behind us.

As a happy consequence, our new features are now fully functional, which includes, polling, voting, and our new link highlighter.

Our sidebar menus are no longer messed up as well.

If you want to mess around with the new features, go ahead and play around in my sandbox:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/User:GethN7/sandbox

Finally, I just tweaked a few gadgets to fix some bugs and I have added some userboxes to decorate your user pages with.

More on that here:

http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/All ... :Userboxes

[Bob Schroeck]

Can we please get something better than the current search function?  Maybe hire a medieval scribe to manually page through all the files on the wiki every time we want to locate something?  At this point, the only way I can find a file is if I know it already exists, which kind of defeats the purpose of a search.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

The Orain guys are already working on that. Now that they have the main server somewhat more organized and efficient, they were planning on getting the search feature improved.

[GethN7]

I added a subpage where we can review works, which uses the LiquidThreads layout for organization and has a one to five star voting box in the upper right corner so you can vote on works.

As for the ability to create new pages, I replaced that ugly box with a nicer drop down menu where you select the preloaded page template you want and click "Load".

Let me know if there are issues with either feature.

The Orain staff and myself have been in discussion about getting a search backend installed that should make search far less aggravating, which will be using the CirrusSearch extension (no Google nonsense, thank God), more on that as I get updates.

[Bob Schroeck]

Fantastic! Now what would be nice is if we could somehow extract all the existing reviews and port them into the new system...

As for the new page creation, can we add the {{reflist}} template to all the skeleton pages, and {{tropelist}}/{{examples}} to works/tropes? Hm. And maybe pre-stub works, tropes and creators? (Yes, I know, I can probably figure out how to do that myself. It's just that I've found another "master list" page which points me at things that need fixing in quantity...)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

...With a capital "T", that rhymes with "E" and stands for ... error messages.
Many of the Special pages, but for my particular needs the Logs page and the Recent Changes page, are returning HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors.  I just started moving some pages and realized I'd used the wrong spelling for the namespace I was moving them into.  (To my credit, it was a made-up word that was misspelled several times in the "parent" page; I just picked the wrong instance to use as my reference.) 
Anyway, what's up with the 500 errors?  And in the short term, is a move revert in any way different from a move with "revert" added to its comment?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

Fantastic! Now what would be nice is if we could somehow extract all the existing reviews and port them into the new system...

As for the new page creation, can we add the {{reflist}} template to all the skeleton pages, and {{tropelist}}/{{examples}} to works/tropes? Hm. And maybe pre-stub works, tropes and creators? (Yes, I know, I can probably figure out how to do that myself. It's just that I've found another "master list" page which points me at things that need fixing in quantity...)

 

 

As for extracting all the old reviews, I'm afraid that would be next to impossible at present.

Unlike the rest of the wiki text page sources, which was stored in easily accessible flat files easily read off the server by a page scraper, the review system used by TV Tropes relied on a custom PmWiki extension in a completely different storage format than what is used by the rest of TV Tropes.

The means to port those does not exist at this point and given how it was done, probably more trouble than it's worth to attempt.

As for the new page creation system, it's partially broken until a patch I submitted gets sent through Orain's GitHub, so I'll reenable the old way of doing so until that's done.

However, I do have some good news. They recently installed CirrusSearch, a new search backend that should make search far more efficient.

As for the template changes, I'll get around to adding those, thanks for letting me know

The error messages and Special page issues we are already aware of and have sent the Orain staff a bug report on.

And in the short term, is a move revert in any way different from a move with "revert" added to its comment?

Not really.

[Bob Schroeck]

Thanks.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Bob Schroeck]

Okay, now saving edits is throwing a 500 error, and going back to the page shows nothing was saved.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[GethN7]

We've identified the issue: Apparently, some processes used by MediaWiki are sucking up a ton of resources, and the PHP is timing out:

More info here:

http://github.com/Orain/ansible-playbo ... nt-3281888

[Bob Schroeck]

Page size seems to be a contributing factor. I haven't determined where the break point is, but short pages save just fine.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

[Another Troper]

Oh no. :-( Didn't TV Tropes actually have the same problem with big pages? Im no PHP programmer.

[robkelk]

MediaWiki does display a warning when one edits a page that's larger than 32kb. There might be a reason for this...
--
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

[GethN7]

Yes, MediaWiki does have a large page limit, but the good news is that that can easily be worked around by allocating more memory to handling page operations.

By default, MediaWiki actually has a somewhat higher page size allowance than PmWiki, but it still has a limit. Unlike PmWiki, though, the ceiling can be raised pretty high with some settings tweaks.