User talk:Sean Colombo/Archive/2009 March

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Song Of The Day

In view of a discussion over at Admin Portal, I have added an additional parameter to the Template:SOTDNom which enables people to select a "preferred date". I hope this won't present difficulties to ÜberBot? ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 04:43, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

Neato. Actually it won't be a problem for ÜberBot yet because we don't even use the Template:SOTDNom template yet anyway ;)

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:53, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

duplicates

There are duplicate items showing here: [links to Nicola Hitchcock], The duplicates also have a weird sort order in the Song fLetter categories. ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 22:31, 21 February 2009 (UTC) the suspects:

That's pretty weird. Not sure what to make of it. -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 22:51, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

The duplicates all have some weird character tagged on at the end of the filename that gets ignored when you actually click on the link (e.g. http://lyricwiki.org/Nicola_Hitchcock:Because%E2%80%8E). — 6x9 (Talk) 23:25, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

The unicode value of "e2 80 8e" stands for the "Left-To-Right Mark". Dunno why that would be on a title (or anywhere on the site honestly, since it's Left-to-right by default).

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 23:33, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Dunno where it comes from, but I've seen it fairly often in album templates, tagged at the end of the cover image's filename, like here. Must have happened somehow when selecting text and then copying & pasting it…? — 6x9 (Talk) 20:25, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

just to be certain 6, is that the same character in the lyrics of This Mortal Coil:'til I Gain Control? I copied from your ref page above ∃cho⚡ierr∀ (☏) 21:07, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean… I don't see any non-ascii characters in those lyrics (or anywhere on that page). The character looks like this: " ‎ " and it's visible (at least on my browser) at the end of some of the links on the what-links-here page you referenced above. — 6x9 (Talk) 21:33, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

I'm just gonna assume that this was bad data (like someone pasted it in by accident from their clipboard or something). Not sure what (if anything) we should do about it?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 18:01, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Nuke them, I would've done it from here If I could, or redirect them to the good pages ∃cho⚡ierr∀ ( ☏ • ⎋ • ⌫) 18:19, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Deleted the messed up Nicola Hitchcock pages. Unfortunately, since the Unicode doesn't show up right in the mysql client, I can't do a regex and catch all cases of that character. :/

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 18:42, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

That's what I was trying to do with the bot, is there no way to represent that character in Terminal/Python? ∃cho⚡ierr∀ ( ☏ • ⎋ • ⌫) 19:23, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Dunno of one. :-/ -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:06, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I've got an idea

I don't know how easy it is to make a list form special page, but I was hoping I could convince you to fashion a new one for me. I'd like to be able to see a all articles of a category in a list form like Special:Deadendpages or what have you. The existing category sort system is just too unwieldy for categories with large numbers of members. So: what I'd like to see would be something like Special:CategoryList/Songs L or Special:CategoryList/Requests for Deletion.
Thanks
King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 03:11, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

I'll second that. I don't know if I understand you correctly, but I often look at such pages with the intention of resolving errors on these types of pages. However the lists take far too long to load that I am forced to abandon this idea. ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 15:42, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

Special page lists take a looong time to load, but once you have them, you've got 50 to 5000 (depending on your settings) articles, and a counter so you know the exact number. From my experience, it does not matter if you are loading 10 or 5000, it always takes a long time.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 20:43, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

once you have them, you've got 50 to 5000 (depending on your settings) articles,
and a counter so you know the exact number I'd love to know what settings you use, as it doesn't matter how I do it, when I press "back" it still takes just as long to reload. Counter? Please explain. ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 08:14, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

It's a url trick: [1], where it works for any special page list, limit can be from 1 to 5000. I have a bunch of these bookmarked for quick access. As for the reload every time, I don't have the same experience. I dunno why that wouldn't cache...

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 13:48, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

Think I understand..I changed the 5000 to 2000 in the URL. So does that mean they all load in one go and in theory should cache for quicker access? ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 15:38, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

Possibly, but I've never been able to notice any difference for load times.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 16:00, 23 July 2008 (EDT)

Special Pages

Ok, I think I am going to throw this one out here again. I've got some ideas for new special pages, mainly to do with organizing categories.

I don't know how easy it is to make a list form special page, but I was hoping I could convince you to fashion a new one for me. I'd like to be able to see a all articles of a category in a list form like Special:Deadendpages or what have you. The existing category sort system is just too unwieldy for categories with large numbers of members. So: what I'd like to see would be something like Special:CategoryList/Songs L or Special:CategoryList/Requests for Deletion.

I have kind of refined my ideas of what I'd be able to use: beyond showing a category as a special page list (ie Special:Lonelypages, being able to show intersections of categories (Show all pages with Songs L AND Instrumental or Show all pages Show all pages with Instrumental AND NOT Songs L).

Please let me know if it wouldn't work. I'd rather know if it doesn't than know nothing if it does.

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 01:45, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

Just to harp on my old advocacy, Semantic MediaWiki lets you define permanent searches that do such things. --Aquatiki - T - E 01:47, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

Hrmm... a special page like that would be do-able. If we could get it for free w/Semantic MediaWiki, that would be pretty cool too though. For the semantic stuff, one of my main concerns would be making sure it could run almost as fast as normal MediaWiki. I'd like to test the daylights out of it (really wishing we had some extra test-servers right about now). Also, that might have been one of the things that required a version-upgrade - does anyone remember if that's true?

Quick reference:

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 08:43, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

Yes, that is true. Is that a strike against it? SMW, especially with the SemanticForms extension, could cut our work load to a fraction. (Or a least make it all machine/bot doable.) --Aquatiki - T - E 09:10, 31 July 2008 (EDT)

/me dances

@Aq: Yes, that is a strike against, because last time we tried it, the site didn't work for a week (I was on the IRC when Sean logged in going "Shit! Shit! Shit!"). By that he meant that it was scary, not impossible.

@Sean: Wonderful. I await the new functionality with baited breath. Once I get these more powerful category tools I can stop being a counter-revolutionary in the Page ranking camp. I've seen the history channel, I know what happens to counter-revolutionaries!

King_Nee1114 (talk page • contributions • deletions) 01:02, 1 August 2008 (EDT)

... and I thought it was chronic indigestion ... ;-PAquatiki - T - E 05:59, 1 August 2008 (EDT)

I'm pretty sure we don't have to upgrade MW again for SMW. Aren't we at the most recent stable version of MW (1.13.2, close enough to 1.13.3)? Also, to see category intersections, take a look at this extension: Extension:Multi-Category Search. No reason to have to build a whole new special page/custom extension, I think, especially when SMW will make it obsolete. While on the topic of categories, I think we could use Extension:CategoryTree just like all of the Wikimedia family wikis (see it on mediawiki.org). A lot of our major problems here at LW, which take up a lot of users' time and cause the most frustration, are category problems. Also, I'm all for testing SMW very thoroughly before we make use of it, especially checking our planned templates and bot regex code. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 02:36, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

Removing page title from main page

I thought you might find this interesting, if you haven't seen it yet: Removing Main Page Heading (at Wikipedia). Considering that the text of the main page declares that it's the main page, this might give an even better first impression on LW. If this might cause any confusion, there's the link to the main page in the left-hand navigation, after all. I imagine that the "Send to a friend" link might also have to be disabled for this to work, depending on how that link is embedded in the page. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 06:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Neato. I turned it off for now... it seems to have given us about 10 or 15 pixels vertically. Not sure if it looks better or worse. Might be good to move the Send to a friend button somewhere that looks better. Not sure where that would be. Does anyone have an opinion on whether it looks better or worse now (and any suggestions on leaving the STAF button or where to move it to)?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 10:42, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks good from where I sit (Mac, FF3). Since we role our own skin, why not make STAF be in the menu, or the tabs, or in the nav bar (but still yellow)? --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 10:45, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Looks really good to me. I'm with Aqua for STAF - maybe we should move it. I'd like to point out that in the (distant?) future, we might want to put stars for Page Ranking and locks for protection status in the place STAF is now. I think that it's not exactly unsightly to have STAF where it is now on the main page, but it would be cool to move it, if it's not too much work. Aqua's suggestion of tabs sounds really good to me - perhaps a tab to the far right? I don't think I've heard of a wiki adding custom tabs, but that would be really innovative, and could lead the way to adding more later. The nav bar is the left side navigation, right? That would be an easy solution, but I think near the upper right user buttons would be a good place. You could make it look like one of them, but appear to the right, regardless of whether a user is logged in or not. That would seem personalized. Well, those are 2 potentially difficult ideas, but good ones, I think. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 18:36, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

As a tab

In the navbar

I looked it up and it's not to bad. In Monobook.php it would simply be a matter of addition another element to the $skin array. Adding to the navbar (down the left) is even easier. A little custom CSS in MediaWiki:Common.css would make it yellow and violá, a unique-looking Send To A Friend. --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 19:00, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

All looks good to me. ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 15:14, 2 December 2008 (UTC) P.S. For what it's worth, I prefer the unique tab version.

A really good idea! I prefer the tab as well; that way it's clearer what will be sent. -- 6x9 (Talk) 19:50, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

As a tab, I prefer that it not be yellow. Tabs already stand out, and they're really easy to get used to. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 00:30, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

Added to the nav - just restore this edit and it'll work exactly the same as the button. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 09:13, 20 December 2008 (UTC)

LyricWiki skin

After reviewing MediaWiki:Lyricwiki.css and MediaWiki:Lyricwiki.js, I'm not sure why LyricWiki is the only allowed skin. Is there something I'm missing or something going on in the html that requires using just the one skin and removing the others? If there were complications involved in maintaining them, I was hoping to lend a hand somehow. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 02:35, 11 December 2008 (UTC)

The main reason was that we made a conscious decision to have the entire codebase be easily-upgradable in case we want to move to newer versions of MediaWiki in the future. Doing this means that you can't hack up any of the skins. This site needs those changes for a few things, so we branched Monobook and made our own skin. Some of the things in our own skin are: the changed title-bar, the various types of ads, the Send to a friend button, the Google Site Search box, the LyricWiki Challenge link/box/thingy, the code that inserts the Open Search plugins, and probably some that I forgot.

I never really dug into the other skins to see if they were very good. Nor did I check the database to see how many people used other skins beforehand. Were there specific skins you think we should consider resurrecting branched versions of?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 05:39, 13 December 2008 (UTC)

I really love modern. I'm asking about skins for a few reasons -

It seems that there hasn't been much use of the MediaWiki namespace, where the interface messages are. This means that for any changes to the appearance of the site, you have to do all the work. I can tell you right now that I everything in the righthand column can probably be added to to site as items in the MediaWiki NS, and if we ever want to make the site multilingual, translating everything is a snap. I don't know about the search bar or plugins, but if they're html files, I don't think that should be difficult.
I've noticed that a lot of things have been hacked even before you mentioned it, and that probably makes a lot of sense in many situations. As I'm sure you are more fully aware of than anyone here, this means that all of these changes have the potential of breaking on upgrade, and might have to be re-added altogether when this happens. With more use of the MediaWiki namespace, this can be sharply cut down. For example, the new artist/album/song page templates. The only thing that can be edited directly by admins are the 3 pages in the MediaWiki namespace. If the parser hook (edit) used to create this just called a page in the MW NS instead, parser functions on that page could do all the work, including specifying all other possible blank templates (i.e. certain types of category, etc.)

I know that different skins lay things out very differently. Even if it's too much trouble right now to focus on getting them to work, using the MW namespace more might make other things on the site work with less trouble. -♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 23:41, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Would you mind setting $wgAllowUserCss and $wgAllowUserJs to true in localsettings.php? I'd like to try and figure out how to add the stuff added by hacks into the interface messages. ♠team a ‹_talk•ctrb› 21:43, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

Partial Transclusion vs API

So I've tried over on the Admin portal and the community portal, but no one's gotten back to me, and since you know loads more about the API than I do, I'll ask you. If we were to change album pages to have >onlyinclude< around the track lists, the artist pages could be drastically simplified. Supposedly, this'll break the API. Does this mean this is a forbidden idea, or could we change things? This could revolution artists' pages! ;-) --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 08:11, 8 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm for it at some point in the future. So only include is an actual tag? (At first I thought you meant include only but that wouldn't work) -- Humbug 07:00, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

The main reason we don't do that isn't just the API... It is also (possibly more so) because the artist pages would then be pretty unaccessible to anyone who isn't in our highly wiki-literate nerd-elite ;). Normal ppl tend to be pretty confused by transclusion. If a new user were to arrive at an artist page and click "edit" to try to add a song and just saw a bunch of inclusions they might get scared off.

Def still something to think about though. Maybe we could make an extension that would keep the links in album-pages, but would have an extra "edit" button so you could edit the album listing directly from the artist page?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 19:18, 9 November 2008 (UTC)

A lot of wiki's have short style guides when you go to "edit mode". I think the general level of complexity here is quickly making that necessary, even if it's just a link to the help pages. If someone isn't familiar enough with wiki mark up to recognize a template, perhaps they shouldn't be editing the page to begin with!

It would greatly simplify the amount of work we do, reducing the number of places changes have to be made. I thought we could make a template, perhaps {{Transclude Album}} which could take the album name and year as parameters (with an optional third parameter of the album art image link). --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 01:42, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Is this not the same then Aqua: {{List album}}? As I told Pathoschild back in October, it would be good if we could use it.(Or indeed something similar.) ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 13:22, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, that's basically what I'm talking about, a few changes aside. --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 16:28, 10 November 2008 (UTC)

Realized this has been sitting here for a while. To recap where my thoughts are on this: transclusion is pretty complicated for beginner users to the point that almost nobody who isn't a programmer would even start for long enough to learn. In regards to the "perhaps they shouldn't be editing the page to begin with" I don't think that's a path we should head down... lyrics have extremely broad appeal and hopefully the site is accessible enough that the vast majority of users that come to the site could edit it. The more accessible, the better :)

Of course, if/when we go Semantic, we won't have to worry about this at all because the discographies will be auto-generated or something, right? :P Now even I'm harassing me to add SMW.

Durp dee durp,

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 08:14, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Orphaned pages

Remember to look into seeing if the only-redirected-to pages can be added to Orphaned Pages. The one person I talked to in #mediawiki (don't remember who it was) also seemed a little surprised that those aren't considered orphaned, but didn't know how it could be fixed (or even if it could be easily fixed at all).
-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:44, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

After looking at the code, it appears that only-redirected-to pages shouldn't be considered Lonely as-is. Talked to User:Kiefer and we're not sure that this was ever actually the problem or if it had just been a little while since Janitor had run through.

We're currently keeping an eye out to see if something like this happens again, but we're pretty sure that these pages were Lonely to begin with, so we don't expect this to be an actual Lonelypages problem... just a problem where we need to figure out how to run Janitor more often.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:40, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

6 times 9

Excuse me, I don't know if you are the owner of this wiki, but the user 6 times 9 blocked me without consulting why I did what I did. I didn't know I was breaking the rules. Then he deleted my page, TheThingy, for no apparent reason. Please do something. I'm The thing by the way. 74.67.93.68 20:51, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

A reply has been placed on User_talk:6_times_9. Kiefer talk contribs admin 21:10, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Stepping Down

Hey Sean, Aquatiki here. I kind of put myself on leave two months ago when my duties got ramped up at work. It appears now that the changes are permanent and that my life is forever different that before. I used to have a job where I would sit around for hours on end in the middle of the night, with nothing but time. But now, I'm perpetually busy and not in possession of much free time. I think it would be the responsible thing for me to step down as an administrator. I can certainly help out if we ever go Semantic, but I'll never have hours and hours per day again, so I won't ever contribute like I used to. Maybe I don't need to be demoted, but if the administrator count is kept at a certain number, I should not be counted in that number. Sorry to let anyone down. :-( --Åqüã†ìкí ƒ_Δ^Σ¶ 05:53, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Hey Aqua,

Sorry to see you go :( I hope the new job is fun and exciting though! I really don't think it's necessary to take off the Administrator flag even if you will only be on rarely/almost-never.

You're definitely not "letting anyone down" though... we appreciate all of the time you've spent over the months (years at this point?) and we definitely understand that things like feeding your family have to take priority over your volunteer work here.

Hopefully we'll still see you on occasion (even if you just stop by to say hi or make a pitch for SMW ;)).

Best of luck with life and your new job changes and thanks for everything you've done here!

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 16:25, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Aqua, I'm sorry to see you go. You've made a lot of positive contributions to the wiki and you've always been a nice guy. Good luck with the new job duties. I hope it is a good move for you.

Sean, it seems appropriate to bring this up at this juncture. Shouldn't team a and Mischko also be either demoted or placed on inactive? Neither one has been contributing lately or been in contact with yourself or any other admins. Just a thought... RainbowDragon talk contribs 16:47, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

MW 1.14

User:Humbug just noted that a stable version of MW 1.14.0 is out now… so when will you upgrade? :-) (If you do, make sure to set $wgRestrictDisplayTitle to false, and I'm sure Red will declare her undying love for you. Actually I might as well…)

Also, is there a chance of you installing this extension? It would be dead useful in weeding out duplication of information across the various templates. Actually, with this one and CategoryFunctions we could make page ranking pretty much automated (no more editing talk pages after filling out some parameter), without installing Semantic. (But don't tell Aqua!) — 6x9 (Talk) 01:43, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

I forgot to mention, Sean told me about it :P. I do like the idea of those two extension. (Sean has said that Semantics might not scale well to LW's size. Same problem maybe?) Looking forward to it! ♫ LYRIC-Humbug^words♪_deeds 01:56, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Making a list of reasons to upgrade: :) LyricWiki:Community_Portal/Upgrade#Reasons_to_Upgrade_to_1.14 ... I figure that's the best way to make it so that at some point I just figure it's better to risk the breakages and just do the upgrade.

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:36, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Special:ImageList

~~Another weird page..It is displaying extremely oversized for me.There is also~~ Where is search box..? ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 00:43, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

So the help page is cool, that's good news... is the Special:ImageList still messed up for you? Search box still missing?

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 02:18, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Yes search box is still missing ♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 02:43, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Your interwebs are crazy! What version of FireFox do you use Redxx? -Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 21:15, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

She uses FF2. Might be time for an upgrade maybe? Though she can catch stuff that other FF2 users would see... ♫ LYRIC-Humbug^words♪_deeds 07:38, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Humbug. Yes I do use version 2. I updated to 3 a while back and some of my fave scripts/extensions stopped working so... Anyway >>> screenprint.

♫_♫Яєd_xx_♪♫♪_♫♪ ^Actions _Words 04:24, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Ohhhhhhhh, I thought you meant the search box that's in the left hand column of every page. I'm assuming you mean that there used to be a search box on the File List itself to search the files. Did there used to be a search box there? If there was, I think they took it out (it was probably too painful on servers in general or something). There isn't a search box on the wikipedia page either and they're usually running the most recent version of the MediaWiki code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles .

-Sean Colombo (talk|contribs) 17:51, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

I seem to remember there used to be one… but at my age memory isn't too reliable :-) Anyway, with both Special:Search and Special:PrefixIndex allowing for searching within a certain namespace only, we've got that pretty much covered anyway. — 6x9 (Talk) 18:18, 28 March 2009 (UTC)

Sean Colombo 15,148 edits since April 6, 2006