Sundering

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'''Under Revision:''' (Currently being updated.)
'''Under Revision:''' (Currently being updated.)
:* [[Ammunition Template]] - [[Talk:Ammunition Template|Talk]]
:* [[Ammunition Template]] - [[Talk:Ammunition Template|Talk]] - An Adventurer, ??
:* [[Portal Template]] - [[Talk:Portal Template|Talk]] - Sanddh
:* [[Portal Template]] - [[Talk:Portal Template|Talk]] - Sanddh, An Adventurer, ??
:* [[Object Template]] - [[Talk:Object Template|Talk]] - Sanddh
:* [[Object Template]] - [[Talk:Object Template|Talk]] - Sanddh, An Adventurer, ??
:* [[Container Template]] - [[Talk:Container Template|Talk]]
:* [[Container Template]] - [[Talk:Container Template|Talk]]
:* [[Live Event Template]] - [[Talk:Live Event Template|Talk]]
:* [[Live Event Template]] - [[Talk:Live Event Template|Talk]]

Revision as of 15:29, 7 June 2009

Related topics: Recent Changes, {{Post}}

The Forum is a central location for discussions that would be of general interest to other contributors. This also includes putting a link here to very specific discussions that are carried out on the talk pages of articles. The general idea is having one place to check for recent contributor discussions. The wiki is growing and there are now many contributors helping cover more topics than ever. The forum should help avoid missing reading and participating in discussions about standards and practices as the wiki continues to evolve.


If there is a particular contributor that you want to reply to a concern, post a link to the Forum or the article's Talk page on his or her user page (so he or she will get a New Messages highlight when they log in/post again). Two or three-way discussions can be hard to follow when they span more than a single page. Also, if you add this page as a Watched Page it will show as bold in the Recent Changes list. If your post will only be of interest to a single person, feel free to post on just that user's talk page. Discussions will be organized by month, though they may continue past the month they were started and will be archived on the talk page for this article after two months. 

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May 2009

Server Pages & server specific info

This is sort of related to the discussion of general vs personal pages below, but I thought it should have its own discussion.

when I first put up some guidelines for restricting personal pages, I did so because someone had created a page for their allegiance. My reasoning for this was because 1) I thought allegiance pages were mostly irrelevant as general info, 2) I didn't want allegiances from different servers with the same name competing for a common name (like Defenders of Light or some other generic high fantasy sounding guild) and 3) I didn't want actual in-game factions, existing or in the future, to have to compete for the same name as a guild.

Now more recently, there was a discussion on personal vs general pages, started because of Connor the Craftmaster's posting of his adventures as their own page. That discussion so far has concluded that personal pages for entertainment, such as connor's adventures or my fan-fiction, should be placed on the author's user page, under the format User:User Name/Article (example: User:An Adventurer/Character Back-stories).

This gave me the idea that we could do the same thing for server pages. For example: the page Leafcull would be a general description page of the server. The page Leafcull/Allegiances would be a listing of allegiances on LC. the page Leafcull/Allegiances/The Trues would be a guild specific page for my current allegiance, The Trues.

I think this would be a good solution for resolving possible name conflicts. I have no opinion on whether or not the info would be useful though. What does everyone else think? Would allegiance pages be good information to have up?

--An Adventurer 18:54, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

I think it's a good idea. I think the wiki is served by recording not just objects but to record history of the players and allegiances also. --Tlosk 18:57, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

General versus Personal Pages

Discussion here: Asheron's Call Community Wiki talk:Policy

Mediawiki 1.14 Update completed

A list of changes and new help pages is in progress here: Mediawiki 1.14 Changes. Please post there if you find any bugs or glitches (for anything serious please post on my talk page. --Tlosk 14:28, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Filtered Whatlinkshere Results

For a while now I've been trying to figure out a way to get more specific Whatlinkshere results, ideally we could filter results by category however I've been unable to discover any way of doing that currently. I have however come up with a partial solution for at least some types of items that would be easy to implement and could be changed if needed without lots of cleanup edits.

I realized that it's possible to make invisible links on pages (a link that isn't actually displayed, but will cause the page to show up in the whatlinkshere list) and that you can also have a whatlinkshere link to a nonexistent page, which allows us to specify a page for a specific type of links we want to filter for (just Shopkeepers, just Creatures, just Locations, etc).

These special links can automatically be included in component templates. For example, to get a list of just shopkeepers that sell a particular item, we can place this: [[{{PAGENAME}}/Sold By|<nowiki></nowiki>]] inside the {{Inventory Item}} template since it is only used on Shopkeeper pages. This would automatically create a link to each item for that shopkeeper of the format Item/Sold By which would then be used in the {{Sold By}} template which would be modified from a straight whatlinkshere link to [[:Special:Whatlinkshere/{{PAGENAME}}/Sold By]]. So instead of including all links (like recipes and patch pages etc, it would only list shopkeepers.

I was trying to think what else we could use this for and so far I've come up with:

  • Items included in recipes.
  • Creature locations (I will need to make a component template for creature lists that will be closer to item lists). (I'm leaning towards being able to specify the type of location as well, so we could get separate lists for dungeons and landscape locations).
  • Trophies (may not be possible without changing the template in a significant way).

Are there any other ones that would be good to include? Also input on whether to include this for just item types that generate big lists and skip smaller ones that could be ready through quickly, or to do this for them all.--Tlosk 11:17, 10 May 2009 (CDT)

That's a very clever solution. I was going to suggest looking at the Semantic MediaWiki extension, but it appears that it doesn't support to-many relationships (like the shopkeeper selling multiple items). --Widgeon 17:29, 11 May 2009 (CDT)

I'm not sure I understand exactly how this will work, but if you say we can just modify the templates and it will work, then it sounds good to me. I agree with the things you listed. I would divide creatures into 3 types instead of 2: Dungeons, POIs, and general landscape - the listings found in Geographic Area and Town pages. --An Adventurer 18:10, 11 May 2009 (CDT)

Yeah it's kind of convoluted, but thankfully the implementation is transparent and a poster doesn't have to do anything different. However once implemented it will break existing vendor/recipe links so I'm going to wait until we finish updating existing entries with the new templates to turn the key so to speak (in the meantime we'll just get the full list of links like normal).

But so you can see it in action, here's a hardcoded example:

Old style (all links) for Stout: This item is sold by one or more shopkeepers.

New style (just shopkeepers) for Stout: This item is sold by one or more shopkeepers.

This first one finds all pages that link to "Stout," but the second one just the pages that link to "Stout/Sold By" and that's only the pages using the new shopkeeper template.

--Tlosk 20:11, 11 May 2009 (CDT)

10th Anniversary Event Preview

I think we should create a page dedicated to information about the 10th anniversary event. It would be similar to the 100th update preview page we had.

I would want it to be more than just re-posting articles and statements from devs. For example, we have a thread about the teaser video they posted with more than 140 replies and a great deal of information posted by Sev. It'd be useful to have a few simple statements about this new two-handed weapon skill to sum up the 20+ dev posts about it.

Frelorn also hinted that there might be a special test server for this patch. More information about this, all in one place, would be helpful as it is released. In the event there is another test server I would probably want to treat it like we did for shadowfell.

Thoughts?

--An Adventurer 13:55, 6 May 2009 (CDT)

Definitely, I'm sure we'll get a ton more info as the event gets closer, and we should add a link on the main page again like we had for the 9th preview.--Tlosk 11:17, 10 May 2009 (CDT)

I'll start a page here: Asheron's Call 10th Anniversary Event Preview --An Adventurer 12:11, 12 May 2009 (CDT)

April 2009

Site Copyright Migration

When the Mediawiki software was first developed several years ago it adopted the GNU Free Documentation License and this is the license currently used by ACC Wiki. There are a number of problems with the GFDL that place limitations not intended on how wiki content can be used. The Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license provides greater flexibility, clearer language, and fewer restrictions. A special amendment was recently added to the GFDL that enables CC-By-SA migrations between November 1, 2008 and August 1, 2009. The change was made specifically to enable Wikipedia and other projects in a similar position to make licensing changes.

Barring any objections, I propose we migrate from the GFDL to CC-By-SA on April 30th, 2009.

More details can be found here and here.

--Tlosk 18:02, 16 April 2009 (CDT)

To: Tlosk
I'm all for fewer restrictions on the information here. --An Adventurer 11:38, 17 April 2009 (CDT)

To: Tlosk
Migrating to CC-By-SA sounds good to me. --Widgeon 01:05, 21 April 2009 (CDT)

Badges

Anyone think profile badges would be a good addition? I realize its just a little extra fluff thing, but it might get more people interested in their asheron.info profile and hopefully contributing. Wikipedia has these things, they are called userboxes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Userboxes

I was thinking we would have one for each server, so you could display what worlds you play on. There could be one for PKs, PKLs, and NPKs. One for monarchs. The ones that got me thinking about this were badges for number of contributions. For example, 50 contribs and you have one with a pyreal mote image. 100 is a pyreal sliver, 200 is a nugget, etc. This is what I was thinking would possibly motivate people to contribute some more.

Any thoughts? Would this be nice or is it a waste of time? --An Adventurer 11:03, 15 April 2009 (CDT)

I don't have any objections. --Tlosk 15:11, 20 April 2009 (CDT)

I Like it! --Immortalbob 18:54, 9 May 2009 (CDT)

NPC Table Template

I have a suggestion for a new wiki template to be used in the page templates for towns, geographic areas, POIs, dungeons, and anywhere else NPCs may be found: An NPC table template, similar to the dungeon table template. Something like this:
NPC Name Location Purpose Served
-- -- --

Geographic Area Example:

NPC Name Location Purpose Served
Adrien Swiftblade Paradox-touched Valley Tent Quest: Paradox-touched Olthoi Egg Quest
Ethan Wintermaine Paradox-touched Valley Tent Quest: Aerbax's Prodigal Olthoi
Hisham al-Evv Paradox-touched Valley Tent Vendor: Small Olthoi Venom Sac Shop

Town Example:

NPC Name Location Purpose Served
Archmage Cindrue 42.6N, 33.9E - second floor Vendor: Magical supplies
Ecutha the Tailor 42.6N, 33.5E - first floor Vendor: Clothing
Fispur Ansel the Grocer 42.2N, 22.6E Vendor: Food and cooking supplies

This looks much better than what is currently in the town template, and it would allow us to list all NPCs in one section, instead of subsections for vendors, crafters, quest npcs, misc npcs, and outskirt npcs for all those categories. By using Location instead of Coordinates the the general Purpose Served we can use the same template for NPCs in locations other than towns as well. The Template could even be used on the outdated NPCs pages.

edit:

perhaps a better table still would be this:

NPC Name Location Type Details
En al-Pisci Yaraq Quest Apple Grinder of Doom Quest
Merchant 12.3S, 12.3E - Desert Camp Vendor Basic Supplies
Town Crier Yaraq Misc Rumors

with Purpose Served divided into type and details, and with the columns sortable.

--An Adventurer 13:41, 14 April 2009 (CDT)


I've finished the template using your last example as the basis, {{NPC Table}}. Add more example types if you think of some more. We had shopkeepers and vendors called one thing some places and the other in others so when I was normalizing the template names I changed uses of Vendor to Shopkeeper to align with the category. You can integrate the template into the Town Template if there's nothing else to add to it. --Tlosk 13:24, 15 April 2009 (CDT)

Quest Pages

I have noticed that when copying and pasting links to quests that end with (Quest) on the official turbine forums the link breaks. For example linking to Composite Bow Quest results in http://asheron.info/~asheron/index.php/Composite_Bow_(Quest which is missing the ending ")". It can be fixed by editing the link after you post, but not everyone knows that or does that.

I have two suggestions:

  1. For every quest that ends in (Quest), make the broken link page redirect to it. So Composite Bow (Quest would redirect to Composite Bow Quest.
  2. Change the naming scheme to no longer include parenthesis. The parenthesis are really there for disambiguation, so that entries that share the same official name can be distinguished. However, since quests do not actually have official names that are ever revealed in game, the disambiguation is not really needed. So Composite Bow Quest would become Composite Bow Quest.

1 will be much easier to do, but I am leaning towards 2. Unfortunately, if we go with 2 we not only have to rename the page but also fix every link to it. --An Adventurer 11:00, 9 April 2009 (CDT)

It has to do with reserved characters (internally the wiki will transform them, but on the forums it won't make that translation automatically). One way around it is to post the link as it appears in the path bar at the top when at the actual page which uses the character codes instead of the actual characters (post translation).

For example http://asheron.info/~asheron/index.php/Composite_Bow_%28Quest%29 will give the correct link when posted.

I'd favor #2 as well, we could just leave most individual pages for now since they will redirect with the move, and when I'm updating the old items with scripts I can add a filter that will catch quest names and change them. --Tlosk 14:56, 9 April 2009 (CDT)

Template Revision Progress

General Issues:

  • Updating all templates for next release of Wiki Swiss Tool.
  • Moving from format heavy page templates to variable based page templates (will aid data entry speed and provide flexibility in updating formatting in the future).
  • Live images fixed to not overlap in small browser windows and not appear at all if no image specified.
  • Move template links listed below up the chain as progress is made.

NPC Template

Revised and Reviewed: (final inclusion candidates)

Under Review: (Updated and needs improvement feedback, sign the end of each template once you have reviewed it and have no further suggestions.)

Under Revision: (Currently being updated.)

Needs Revision: (Not currently being worked on.)

Needs Creation: (Does not exist in any form yet.)

Instead of making a unique template for rares, I added an optional line to the {{Intro}} template. Adding Rare Number = makes a link displaying the rare number on the far right. For example, Mirrored Justice.

I was able to construct the Armor Template so that it can handle all the different types of armor, so the clothing, robe, masks & guises, and shields have all been folded into a single template. --Tlosk 11:26, 19 February 2009 (CST)

I'd like to bring spell templates back into discussion. Currently we have some copy/paste tables that I put together, but no wiki templates. And the tables were pretty much just my work without much input from others.

The current copy/paste table template is here: Standard Spell Template with examples here: Armor (Spell) and here: Blood Drinker (Spell)

One important thing is recently someone (I am blanking on who it was) harvested all the spell data from the .dat files which gives us categories and spell difficulty and other information we may not have had. I think some of this could be added to the templates. I think difficulty would be a great addition. So I think there is still room for improvement on both the Standard Spell Template and the Cantrip Template before we possibly turn them in to wiki templates. --An Adventurer 11:11, 12 May 2009 (CDT)

Yeah that list is really cool, especially with all the creature only spells. But the stacking info is invaluable, that stuff was a major pain to track down and test in game for all the combinations. I've got a few ideas I'm working on and will post them as soon as I'm done.

Archived Forum Posts

See Talk:Forum

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