Wiki for the forum

[Utsuho Lazy]

It's only me, or we've been getting a lot of spammers recently?

No, that's not only you... Too many spammers indeed. Guess that means our Wiki ranks quite high among the Wikis in search engines?

[wizzardx]

Yet other one:

wiki/index.php?title=The_Nfl_Versus_the_Irs

Thanks; Deleted the page and blocked the user.

It's only me, or we've been getting a lot of spammers recently?

Yes, quite a few
If it keeps up, I may need to look into setting up a capcha for the wiki.

[Utsuho Lazy]

If it keeps up, I may need to look into setting up a capcha for the wiki.

I think you should, if it helps reducing spammers. Personally I don't mind capcha at all, and I know many people won't. In fact, capcha is required by default to post comments in Google blogs anyway.

[aquagon]

Yet other spammer:

wiki/index.php?title=NFL_-_The_Basic_Story&diff=4219&oldid=prev


I agree that captcha for the registration form would be a good day to decrease the number of spammers we are getting now (though I'm not sure about making it a requirement for editing, too).

[wizzardx]

Thanks, deleted and blocked, as usual.

About the capcha, I'll take a look at it soon (hopefully by the weekend). I think it should be fine to have it just for signing up for an account to edit the wiki (the wiki already doesn't allow anonymous editing).

edit:

Also thought I'd mention, that I've just made Aquagon and Lazy into Wiki admins, since they're quite active there (and to save me some work ).

Basically they'll now be able to delete spam articles and ban spammers, or to help organize the wiki if it's needed.

Thanks for accepting

[wizzardx]

If it keeps up, I may need to look into setting up a capcha for the wiki.

I think you should, if it helps reducing spammers. Personally I don't mind capcha at all, and I know many people won't. In fact, capcha is required by default to post comments in Google blogs anyway.

I've setup the wiki capcha now, it was easier than expected .

Basically, it should only affect people who are signing up with new wiki accounts, they will need to answer a recapcha question to complete their registration.

[Utsuho Lazy]

All of the recent Wiki spamming articles have the phrases "Ugg" or "NFL" in them. May I ask that those be banned in some way, so that those spammers can no longer create new articles with those phrases in the title?

[wizzardx]

Yes, that should be quite simple, there's even an extension for it:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TitleBlacklist

And fortunately, mediawiki extensions are a lot easier to install than phpbb3 ones. I'll set this up a bit later.

edit:

I've set it up now. Besides wiki admins, nobody should be able to make articles with titles with "Ugg" and "NFL" in them.

[Utsuho Lazy]

I've set it up now. Besides wiki admins, nobody should be able to make articles with titles with "Ugg" and "NFL" in them.

Thank you

Hopefully this will reduce the number of Wiki spammers we get.

[wizzardx]

Also another wiki update that was made to prevent spammers recently, due to heavy wiki spamming (despite the capcha we added previously):

Any new wiki accounts need to be approved by an ARM admin before they can update the wiki.

All the known wiki accounts belonging to ARM members have already been enabled (but it's possible I might have missed one or two).

If you're suddenly unable to edit the wiki, or if you make a new wiki account and wish to edit articles, then please let an ARM admin know (I've also updated the main wiki page with this information). Basically, just post your wiki username in this topic, or PM aquagon or myself.

And in case you're interested, you can view the list of (known) wiki accounts belonging to ARM members over here:
wiki/index.php?title=Special:ListUsers&group=ArmMember

If your wiki account is not on that list then please let us know so we can add you.

[LoneReyvateil]

I have created an account for the Wiki: LoneReyvateil.

And why aren`t there articles in the help-section? I don`t even know what i have to do, to create a new page.

[wizzardx]

I have created an account for the Wiki: LoneReyvateil.

Welcome to the wiki, and I've added you .

And why aren`t there articles in the help-section? I don`t even know what i have to do, to create a new page.

The first post in this topic contains a link to this guide:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Editing_pages

I've also added some information to the help page on the wiki. That help page, and various others (Community portal, Current events, etc) are part of the standard "new wiki" template, which I never got around to filling in.

[LoneReyvateil]

So, back and I have learned more. At least how to create/format/edit a page. Next lesson.
But comparing our wiki to other wikis, there seems a lot of functions missing/disabled.
*Insert Tablet-function

So the 1 Million-Dollar question: Why?

And why I am the only person that gets wild-code-mashing, when trying to insert this in an article?

{{Infobox
|Box title = Info Title
|Row 1 title = Title row 1
|Row 1 info = Info row 1
|Row 2 title = Title row 2
|Row 2 info = Info row 2
|Row 3 title = Title row 3
|Row 3 info = Info row 3
}}

[wizzardx]

Our wiki installation is mostly a vanilla MediaWiki installation that hasn't been customized much at all, beyond a permissions system for hiding some areas (eg: Arm Game Developers).

Basically at the moment, it's mainly a very rough area where members can dump stuff in a way that's a bit more easy to organize than forum threads, and not like a regular wiki (very user friendly, nicely styled, consistent formatting, good organization and categories, a lot of readers who regularly tidy articles and contribute, etc).

We don't really have any bells and whistles beyond the very basic stuff that comes with a standard MediaWiki installation, because there hasn't really been demand for it (very few people actually edit the ARM wiki, in practice).

I think that those extra edit buttons (insert table, etc), are either customizations on each wiki, or are a feature that only newer versions of the software come with. I haven't spent time researching it yet, and didn't notice the missing button until now.

That said, it's pretty simple to add the wiki code for a table, even if there isn't a shortcut button for it:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Tables

And there's also a couple of examples of tables in our sandbox wiki page:

wiki/index.php/Wiki_sandbox

But if you really want a button to click on, then I'll look into it. For instance there's this guide over here that I found for customizing the edit buttons:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Cu ... it_buttons

And about the Infobox code you're struggling with, I think that's a more advanced feature known as Templates.

Again, not something that's built into mediawiki by default, but which needs to be added by users/wiki admins. There's more information about this process at these links:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Templates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Infobox

The second link also shows the code for the Infobox template, but actually Wikipedia has hundreds of other Templates.

As far as I can tell, the Template system doesn't do anything which regular wiki code can't do, it just saves a bit of typing, especially if you want to include the same type of stylized box or message on a lot of different pages.

Basically, it's a more advanced "Power User" feature for editors that do a huge amount of article editing, and want to keep a consistent style across the wiki.

But again, our wiki is barely used, and there's very little demand for this type of feature (which also looks kind of complicated to setup and to understand). Are you planning on doing a lot of wiki editing that would benefit from this feature?

[LoneReyvateil]

I intend to make tablets for my conlang-site, but since I got help from KK, this problem isn`t actual more.
Sorry, that I didn`t answer earlier, but I have seeing your answer first now.

[wizzardx]

Ah, okay then

Again, our wiki is used a bit differently to most - rather than being on one specific subject (and then focusing on one page per character/item/etc), it's a bit more of a (somewhat disorganized) general dumping and collecting area for our forum members hobbies, that doesn't have any central theme or styling that we want every page to try to follow for consistency across the entire wiki.

Well, if there's any single template/infobox theme that you'd really like, please point me to it on another wiki, and I'll see if I can add it here too (in theory, all that's needed is for a wiki admin to edit an article with a special title, to enable the template for all the other users).

[wizzardx]

I've added one or two things for the wiki:

1. Rich text editor.

When you edit wikis, you now have the option to use an MS word-like interface, for formatting text. What's particularly nice even for experienced wiki editors is the table-editing function, since wiki table editing can be really annoying to work with by editing wiki codes.

To use it, just edit any wiki article, and then click one of the "rich editor" links over the text box area.

You still can't paste tables into the wiki from spreadsheets, but for that you can use this website:

http://excel2wiki.net/

2. Sortable table columns.

Well actually the wiki supported that all the time, but you need to add an extra option into the wiki code, "class="wikitable sortable".

What I added is an example of that to the bottom of the wiki sandbox:

wiki/index.php/Wiki_sandbox

I'm not sure how useful people will find these, but it does make the wiki a more viable alternative to say Google Docs. For instance the ARM game project might find these useful for storing and editing item tables and so on.

[ilutiern]

Uho uho~ Thanks very much!
Finally, no more stealing code from other people's pages manual table making /shot

Though honestly the sortable table looks too complex for my poor brain, it looks to be pretty useful for ARM Game, as you said. It would take a while to sort everything out though, what with all the junks we have there XD

Thanks for installing these additions, Wizz!

Edit: And because I'm an expert at shamelessly stealing code from other people's pages, here's a template we're using for ARM Game characters' pages which is totally ripped off from our favorite Ar tonelico wikia page of Lyner. Thanks very much to the person who made the original template orz

It makes the pages look a liiiiittle more organized than before. You can see it in use here: wiki/index.php/ARM_Game_characters/Winoc

Mm, to be honest I'd prefer a different color to go with this wiki, but lack of color coordination makes that difficult. So if anyone thinks of a better color for the table, please replace the color codes in the template with it (as long as you don't go trolling us with neon green/pink color schemes).

[wizzardx]

Glad you like those changes.

Actually I was testing something for work on the ARM wiki, but I thought others might find it useful .

For sortable tables, I guess you could just copy that one out of the sandbox and then use the table-editing function to customize it further.

That's a nice template. Though it does look a bit out of place on Winoc's page, with the rest of the article still being a bit disorganized .

I did try playing with the color a bit (over here), but the white text has too high a contrast on dark backgrounds, and would be harder to read on a light background. I have about zero graphic design skill

Maybe you can point to another wiki/website to stealborrow a color scheme from?

[ilutiern]

Graphics design is pretty hard, huh
Unfortunately I don't know of any places with usable color schemes at the moment orz
Thanks for the help, though