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Ladies and gentlemen, we just just got the following extensions installed:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Arrays
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Regex_Fun
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SubPageList3
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Tabs
I'm currently working out some kinks in how we'll use the last one (need to make sure it doesn't go wonky with other extensions or markup), and the first two Vorticity had some plans for, but I have finally come up with a far less aggravating way to list recap pages (or any other page with LOTS of subpages)
To see my demonstration, check out the new expandable/collapsible menu on this page:
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Doctor_Who/Recap
In fact, the same template can be mirrored on all Recap pages so a full index is at the convenience of anyone trying to find a specific Recap page.
If anyone has suggestions or comments, let me know what you think.
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Hey, does anyone know if there are tropes in existence for the Buffyspeak derisive nickname forms "X McY" (example: Asuka in an Evangelion fic I'm reading calling Mari "Tits McMoron", Buffy in another describing Snape as looking like "Skeezy McEvilpants") and "Xy Xson" (Dawn Summers in yet another fic calling someone who surprised her "Lurky Lurkerson")? A search of the Naming Conventions page -- very nicely tabbed, btw -- shows nothing, but that doesn't necessarily mean they're not already in the tropebase somewhere.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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There are the "Awesome McCoolname" and "Fail O'Suckyname" twin tropes, but those refer to ACTUAL names or nicknames, not made-on-the-spot ones, so they don't cover it.Neither do the "Mr Exposition", "Captain Obvious", and their cousins, but they seem related.
It may be considered a derivation of those, tough. By the very existence and widespread knowledge of the trope, it can be misapplied in a sarcastic way.
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Mm. "Awesome McCoolname" doesn't require the name be in the form "X McY"; likewise "Fail" doesn't have a structural requirement. They're clearly related, but I'm thinking we're talking separate tropes...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Small tech update: Wikilog was disabled since it kept spitting out a ton of errors. The VoteNY extension (used for review pages) has a similar error, but it is still enabled since the errors do not result in anything that would affect normal wiki function, so it can still be used.
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We have review pages now? I must have missed that!
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Cool! I'll have to go rescue my reviews from TVT for anything that has its own page and transplant them.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Orain's been down all afternoon, I noticed. Nothing too serious, I trust? Or did some trolls from TVT finally get around to DDOSing the wiki farm?
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Honestly, no idea why it's down. We had 5 hours of unplanned downtime yesterday, and it's starting to look like the same deal today. Our admins are very available on the weekends, but some days like this the IRC is barren.
Anyway, if we have no other outages this year, we'll have 99.85% uptime (or extrapolated, 99.55% uptime). It doesn't sound too bad in those terms, right?
-- ∇×V
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True 'nuff.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Got an update from Kudu. Apparently, it's some weird issue only addshore knows how 2 fix, so until addshore gets back we'll have to wait *sigh*. It's affecting the whole wikifarm, so it's not just us, though.
In the meantime, I'm testing out some possible new features I was thinking about to make ATT better, so here's hoping its back up soon.
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Okay people, breaking news.
I put in a request to Orain to install some social features to make our time on ATT way more fun and allow people to interact with each other better, which includes message walls (like Wikia, though the classic version is still available), non IRC chat (for those who don't have IRC clients) user avatars (visible on in wiki chat and other places), private messaging, and a few other cool surprises.
For the Wikia fans, it's kinda a "lite" version of their features, but only adding some basic social interaction frills at the moment.
I also am getting a way better notification system put in so you know instantly when you get mentioned on a page, get a talk page message, a page you watch gets changed, as well as a way to be nice to tropers who make good edits and thank them for their work.
Also, I'm finally bowing to the people who want a full blown forum on ATT by getting a "Drunkard's Walk"style forum installed in wiki. It will have avatar support and most other features you can expect from a full blown forum, though it will be entirely in wiki.
Included will be an even better blogging feature (Wikilog has some weird issues), which is one of the modular extensions to the below extension, which will be the core of our new social features:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SocialProfile
This is a large request, but the Orain guys said they'd work on trying to get it all enabled ASAP. Also, most of the reason I'm doing this is because TV Tropes has very poor social interaction, their forum sucks (we don't have post thumping and we won't hose threads just because they piss us off because that's just a douche move), their notification system sucks, they have very few ways tropers can contact each other both publicly and privately (and no, we cannot read your PMs like they can on TVT) in a relaxed, informal way.
I have a few other things I'm hoping we can get enabled soon to make our wiki awesome and fun, and if anyone has further questions or comments, please let me know.
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But we still don't have any plans to have forum roleplays or TV show chitchat on the TVT forums. At least we won't if you want to keep me happy.
Oh, the other news is that we're finally back up. 15 hours of downtime, which is certainly in the "less than awesome" area. I'd complain about it but... they know. And I always knew that we would be taking a risk as Orain's biggest customer. But the flipside of that is that we get great service in allowing for customizations. The problem isn't a lack of service, but availability of help at the right times.
Anyway, I'm sorry to everyone who lost valuable troping hours, and had to do something productive instead.
I'm finally taking care of the mass renames today... or I will, once I delete all of these unused categories. The scourge of namespaces will be no more! Despite the fact that some guy is still trying to get them back on the forums. What he's saying has merit, but it's just I have a different set of values -- I'd rather trade accuracy for speed and ease of use. Especially when the penalty for inaccuracy is so low.
-- ∇×V
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Ok, my plan to add some cool new new features didn't pan out as well as I hoped.
Partially, this was because the Orain guys had to jump through hoops to get most of it mostly functional, and even then there were errors out the wazoo. The other half is that some of the new features I had in mind had some broken features to begin with. 
However, it was not totally fruitless. We now have a much improved notification system installed, and I plan to replace our current forum with a LQT style forum, which works nicely with our new notification system.
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No kidding it didn't work out as well as planned. We asked for our Overlords to remove the extension, which they did right away... and promptly crashed our wiki. And for some reason (presumably heartbleed-related), they can't ssh into the web server. Which means we've been waiting the last two hours for Orain's server overlords to get back them.
-- ∇×V
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vorticity Wrote:No kidding it didn't work out as well as planned. We asked for our Overlords to remove the extension, which they did right away... and promptly crashed our wiki. And for some reason (presumably heartbleed-related), they can't ssh into the web server. Which means we've been waiting the last two hours for Orain's server overlords to get back them. Heartbleed has nothing to do with SSH. It's a bug in some versions of OpenSSL, a completely different program.
--
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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Ah, well then. Feel free to email my boss and tell him he's being too paranoid and to take down the ssh whitelist. It's not just one shop that's taking precautions with ssh.
Just because a system shouldn't be vulnerable doesn't mean it hasn't been exploited. When you have a hack like this that potentially exposed so much data for so long undetectably, you really cannot pretend that any subsystem is safe. After all, the data could then be used to take advantage of other privilege escalation bugs.
Bruce Schneier Wrote:Basically, an attacker can grab 64K of memory from a server. The
attack leaves no trace, and can be done multiple times to grab a
different random 64K of memory. This means that anything in memory --
SSL private keys, user keys, anything -- is vulnerable. And you have to
assume that it is all compromised. All of it.
"Catastrophic" is the right word. On the scale of 1 to 10, this is an 11. In other words, freaking out is the correct behavior here.
In other news, 23 hours of downtime. Downtime is frowntime
-- ∇×V
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As a 20-year veteran in IT, much of that in IT security, I must disagree - "freaking out" is never the correct behavior.
(And Mr. Schneier is a cryptographer - that doesn't mean he knows anything about code. If you want a reliable source for alerts, try Carnegie Mellon University - the source the professionals use. http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/720951]Here's their page on this bug.)
You're spreading FUD. Please stop.
--
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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Perhaps, but if I spread enough FUD maybe it will finally get people to choose unique passwords when they reset.
-- ∇×V
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XKCD has a good explanation of it
Although, I remember my very first C programming module where trying that caused 'interesting' things to happen.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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That is a great explanation, Dartz. I've just shared it with all my coworkers.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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So... the wiki is still down. 504 gateway timeout this time. No questions or comments, just noting.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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502 Bad Gateway or 502 Worst Gateway?
It turns out we had not much to do with it. One of the production servers crashed (the front-end, not the DB I believe), and the entire system needed to be cloned to a new server. The server itself is up, but only seems to have connectivity for a minute at a time. The ETA for a fix is "probably when kudu gets back".
-- ∇×V
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I think orain needs to hire a second kudu. This single-point-of-failure is getting annoying.
--
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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