Discworld & Pratchett Wiki:Mended Drum

I didn't get a confirmation e-mail, although I seem to have an account. Did anyone get the e-mail? --Old Dickens (talk) 16:00, 27 September 2012 (PDT) It works now. --Old Dickens (talk) 18:50, 29 September 2012 (PDT)
Oh wow...I just noticed that this version can display the ampersand in the title! --Old Dickens (talk) 16:32, 27 September 2012 (PDT)

Spam here already! How do they even know it exists? --Old Dickens (talk) 09:16, 6 October 2012 (PDT)

Funny thing I just discovered, I can prevent new users from creating new pages. They will have to wait a set number of days unless they confirm their emails. Now i just need time to implement it. --Osiris (talk) 11:03, 6 October 2012 (PDT)

Is it not written: "We live and learn"? --Old Dickens (talk) 20:56, 6 October 2012 (PDT)

Strange goings-on back at the original wiki: no editing, apparently. A sign of progress, I trust. --Old Dickens (talk) 18:33, 7 October 2012 (PDT)

He backed up the site and sent it to me. He disabled edits because any new edits wouldn't get moved over to the new site --Osiris (talk) 20:14, 7 October 2012 (PDT)

...and it's driving the spammers MAAAAAD! Over 250 today and the day's not over. I don't feel up to that; I hope there's some way to purge or re-start the user list. --Old Dickens (talk) 14:42, 9 October 2012 (PDT)

I wouldn't bother, none of those new users will show up here since they're not included in the database backup that Sanity gave me. --Osiris (talk) 22:13, 9 October 2012 (PDT)

We now have the best part of a thousand spammer accounts arranged in one long neat unbroken list. I'm wondering if there is any way of simultaneously highlighting and deleting them all with two or three clicks of a mouse? (Select all to a certain point on the list and then hit block and delete, ideally, once each..) This would be so satisfying.... AgProv (talk) 11:12, 13 October 2012 (PDT)

On this wiki a spammer has to pass two steps before they can make an edit. First they must pass the capcha, sadly some to them can do that. Second they must verify their email address, very few seem to be able to pass that second test. I wouldn't worry too much about deleting spam accounts. I plan to develop a script that will run monthly to clean them up. Basically, any user which hasn't confirmed their email after 30 days gets deleted. --Osiris (talk) 12:04, 8 November 2012 (PST)

Oh. It was sort of fun shooting them individually, seeing the terror in their beady little eyes... --Old Dickens (talk) 14:37, 8 November 2012 (PST)

Feel free to shoot away, just don't worry if you miss. --Osiris (talk) 13:39, 9 November 2012 (PST)

Starting over

The notice at the top isn't available for editing or I'd fix the spilleng; anyway, there are some more bits missing:

• discussion pages
• categories (the list is there but not the page itself, heading and comments)
• The de: links (The Czech version seems to be gone anyway)
• and especially the wiki.lspace link

Other questions:

• Will there be a custom skin, wallpaper?
• Why is my ISP address different?

If there's a chance of losing any of this material, might we know what so we could download as much as possible while it's available? I've done my own stuff and some bits of history but there are many discussion pages I'd hate to lose, back issues of the Mended Drum, etc.--Old Dickens (talk) 15:35, 15 October 2012 (PDT)

I do have everything, i just need to get it working properly. RL issues have gotten in the way. I wouldn't edit this too much since I may replace quit a few pages. Also, the cabal will be updating the wiki.lspace.org link soon. --Osiris (talk) 19:15, 15 October 2012 (PDT)

BTW The spammers can create users all day long but they cant post anything without email verification. --Osiris (talk) 20:06, 17 October 2012 (PDT)

So one verifies his email, WTF! --Osiris (talk) 10:36, 18 October 2012 (PDT)

Amazon Outage

Since this website is now hosted on the Amazon Web Services cloud, any outage to Amazon will affect us. Hence the brief outage today. I don't think Amazon is back up to full capacity yet though since the server is still super slow. --Osiris (talk) 19:44, 22 October 2012 (PDT)

Spam Accounts

Hopefully, ReCapcha will continue to block the creation of spam accounts. It's been 15 minutes and no new accounts were created but I was able to create a test account.

BTW: You shouldnt see a capcha if you have an account and have confirmed your email. If ReCapcha continues to work well, I may allow anonymous edits again. Next item on the TODO list. Image files... --Osiris (talk) 20:17, 26 October 2012 (PDT)

It seems about 99% effective so far. --Old Dickens (talk) 16:09, 27 October 2012 (PDT)

Files Work Again!

FYI: Pictures are back to working again. Also, sorry for the outages, first a slight hiccup because of a hurricane and then I got called away while in the middle of upgrading the hardware profile. --Osiris (talk) 22:09, 2 November 2012 (PDT)

External Links Work Again!

...you might boast about these things a little. --Old Dickens (talk) 20:45, 3 November 2012 (PDT)

The link from Doubleday's Terry Pratchett site is still wrong, though. --Old Dickens (talk) 09:55, 10 November 2012 (PST)

Moving In

So are Talk pages going to be uploaded or are we starting anew?--Zdm (talk) 23:25, 5 November 2012 (PST)

Eventually, I'm having a small problem bringing up the copy of the system that Sanity gave me. That combines with real life considerations means I havent had the time to spend on it. --Osiris (talk) 10:40, 6 November 2012 (PST)

I was just worried about what might happen if I created one and then the old one was added in later. --Zdm (talk) 14:56, 6 November 2012 (PST)

Keep a copy. I've made a couple of new entries, but on the basis that they might disappear. --Old Dickens (talk) 15:03, 6 November 2012 (PST)

The dense Cloud seems to have lifted; I've had smooth communication for a while now! --Old Dickens (talk) 17:41, 6 November 2012 (PST)

I increased the size of the server and fixed an email issue. --Osiris (talk) 18:37, 6 November 2012 (PST)

Excellent, I had an issue with saving edits take five minutes and then fail to save but that no longer seems to be happening. I am also really glad that we have the little signiture button on the top of the editing screen again, it is really convenient. --Zdm (talk) 21:52, 6 November 2012 (PST)

Hello

I just wanted to introduce myself; I'm Joe, I was kind of active on the old wiki but since the wiki's been refreshed I'm going to try and be a lot more active! If there's anything I can do to help ten please drop me a note! --Krysophrase (talk) 03:58, 7 November 2012 (PST)

It is good to see that people are making their way to the new wiki, also, what was your name on the old wiki?--Zdm (talk) 07:41, 7 November 2012 (PST)

I was called ArchchancellorJoe on the old wiki but I decided to change to my general internet name. -- Joe (talk) 05:39, 9 November 2012 (PST)

Blocking IP's

Please do not block IP addresses. This site is now behind a load balancer so the site sees everyone coming from the same IP address. The load balancer was necessary to avoid having to have the Cabal update domain records when I resize the virtual server. --Osiris (talk) 13:18, 18 November 2012 (PST)

Quick question:

Is anyone else having difficulty uploading files (jpeg artwork) or is it just me?

Also, I may be slow on the uptake here and I'm sure nothing's actually been lost, I'm sure the Main Page on the old site said we had over 3,000 articles/entries. This one tells me we only have 1,707. But nothing of primary importance seems to have been lost? (All the Discussions, yes, but rather lose those than the main entries.) Is it just a different way of counting things? AgProv (talk) 14:36, 1 December 2012 (PST)

I noticed that too. My thought is that it comes from losing the discussion pages and most other special pages such as the Catagory pages. Also it appears that not all pictures transferred correctly, many of the ones with symbols such as 'Ã' seem to be giving errors.--Zdm (talk) 15:07, 1 December 2012 (PST) (Also is anyone else unable to paste text into the editor?)

Yep, I get a "Fatal exception of type UploadStashFileException". I mentioned the wonky counter before. (I just pasted the error message there.) --Old Dickens (talk) 16:37, 1 December 2012 (PST)

My recurring error message is Could not create directory "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/a/a3". AgProv (talk) 07:49, 8 December 2012 (PST)

Try now. I changed something and managed to upload a file. --Osiris (talk) 08:06, 8 December 2012 (PST)

Hey, thanks! Works perfectly, although the artwork (just a bit of amusing whimsy. Is Matt Smith still around?) came out a lot bigger than I anticipated! AgProv (talk) 08:38, 8 December 2012 (PST)

I would also like to see the Small Gods Question talk page fixed even if the other talk pages aren't. --Zdm (talk) 19:42, 1 December 2012 (PST)

I wasn't aware of that issue. I'll try working on it tomorrow. --Osiris (talk) 20:39, 1 December 2012 (PST)

1,524 articles today, despite having added at least twenty. Most strange! AgProv (talk) 01:43, 8 December 2012 (PST).

...aka the Fred Colon Memorial article counter? --Old Dickens (talk) 05:34, 8 December 2012 (PST)

How about 4,208. Apparently, Sanity had this setting configured differently. --Osiris (talk) 07:27, 8 December 2012 (PST)

4,208 now... hey, that's an interesting plug-in! AgProv (talk) 07:47, 8 December 2012 (PST)

It seems pretty clever; it doesn't include any redirects or other extraneous pages that I can see. It matches the count in "Oldest pages". --Old Dickens (talk) 16:19, 12 December 2012 (PST)

It's a kind of Magic --Osiris (talk) 21:49, 12 December 2012 (PST)

Lspace Skin

The old default skin is available in your preferences area. I haven't forced everyone over to it because it needs a few fixes in the sidebar. --Osiris (talk) 11:21, 2 December 2012 (PST)

It only works in the preview, though; I can't save the setting. In fact, I can't save any setting. --Old Dickens (talk) 11:40, 2 December 2012 (PST)

I get a message saying my changes were saved but nothing actually happens.--Zdm (talk) 13:37, 2 December 2012 (PST)

New Rant

It seems slightly odd that absolutely no one from the foundation of the wiki remains active (except perhaps Death, who remains at the German Discwiki). OK, DaibhidC has chimed in a few times; not really active. The denizens of afp who thought it up in the first place have been conspicuously absent. The few of us on the staff now have remained since the second generation, but it seems we dwindle and rely on AgProv's input more than ever.

Why do we:

• not attract more useful contributors?
• not retain useful contributors (we've had many come and go)?
• not attract better illustrations, as AgProv just mentioned?

The current rough look and missing pieces of the wiki are another hindrance but the problem goes back years. Many of us have done good work over several years to produce a comprehensive and often amusing source of information but we seem to lack something in marketing.

One on my issues is that for some reason I always expect a small group of new contributors to join after Terry publishes a new book but for some reason they never materialize. Another thing is that when one searches 'Discworld wiki' we are pretty far down on the list, even lower then another wiki that has only 500 or so articles. This may be partially because of the site move but it defiantly isn't helping us. --Zdm (talk) 22:22, 14 December 2012 (PST)

I don't find that problem with searches. If you Google the characters in the current 'Recent changes' this wiki comes first or second, generally. Major characters and names with other Roundworld meanings will have more competition and may push us down the list. Googling 'Discworld wiki' shows us on the first page, following only Wikipedia. This is part of why I wonder about the shortage of contributors. --Old Dickens (talk) 07:54, 15 December 2012 (PST)

TODO List

I should have some time to work on the wiki here in the next week since I'm off work. Of course, that can change at the whim of the lady and kiddo. So what's the top items you think are missing and that i need to work on? --Osiris (talk) 23:47, 22 December 2012 (PST)

I am still unable to save any preference changes and I would like to see the Small Gods Question talk page restored. Those are the only major thing I can think of right know. --Zdm (talk) 00:05, 23 December 2012 (PST)

The only thing that comes to mind is (perhaps selectively) restoring the Discussion pages, if this is at all possible. Currency, Sock Under The Mattress, and the one about everyday economics of Ankh-Morpork, all had interesting discussions going and additional notes, as I recall. AgProv (talk) 03:37, 23 December 2012 (PST)

• ALL the discussion pages
• Page histories
• Other language links (de:)
• The Help namespace (mostly Help:Editing)
• Whatever is wrong with the templates. Anyone who knows how could do these, but I don't know why the old ones don't work.
• A minor oddity: the contributors appear in code, or just as the universal IPA in the Gallery of new files, although they're correctly identified in the individual File: pages.

And what have you done to the poor spammers, by the way? There don't seem to be any legitimate sign-ups either. --Old Dickens (talk) 07:30, 23 December 2012 (PST)

Also it would nice to have the old Mended Drum archives back. --Zdm (talk) 09:32, 23 December 2012 (PST)

I have those myself. I can put them up again if Osiris can't extract them. --Old Dickens (talk) 10:10, 23 December 2012 (PST)