Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-653063-20150218021309/@comment-653063-20150306004842

Well crap, because I just hit send on a message to the Staff. * head in hands *

"Also, you seem confused about mediawiki" - YES. At this point, it's safe to assume I'm confused about EVERYTHING. Every time one of my questions gets answered, either from you or TableWiz, it seems like I end up with at least two more. If I'm lucky, the new questions are about something else.

By the way, have I mentioned yet how glad I am that you haven't thrown me out on my ear yet? I know I come across as... angry, in these posts... and to be fair, I am .... soooo frustrated. I wrote my first HTML in 1997 -- so I can't be a complete nub -- and the part where I keep having issues this tiny... it makes me feel stupid, which is painful, and then I write all snippy and mad.

"Quite frankly, I've seen a lot of users not actually referring to the help pages for help" Ughhh I know. That hacks me off. I mean, sure, I have SO MANY QUESTIONS. But: I've read so many Helps here, and MediaWiki, and Googled SO MUCH. I keep thinking, "This site has been around for so long, there are so many users, surely I can't have a unique question that's never been thought of before, right?" And to be fair, about, hm, 8% to maybe 10% of my google searches (I prefix everything with 'site:community.wikia.com' or at least 'site:wikia.com') do turn up previous Forum posts. About 5-6 of those threads have been helpful to me, either to the question I had at the time, or to a question I previously had that I'd abandoned hope of finding an answer to.

I feel like I'm throwing darts in the dark. Return to: 'makes me feel stupid, makes me snippy.'

"I never really bothered to look for such trivial formatting tweaks." I can mostly understand that. I mean, who would think "sure, lets have a leading whitespace, but have it come in the middle of the line of code, and this will mean 'open pre-tag'." If you want a pre-tag, just... write a pre-tag. Who needs to be so.... trivially finicky? So yeah, I get it. But my problem is, I'm doing this accidentally, and nothing is telling me why. (I've got a problem now where I'm getting a paragraph tag to show up that I don't know if I'm doing something to cause, or what... trivial formatting, for sure, but how do I make it stop?)

And I think what's really ganking my chain about this whitespace-pre-tag thing in specific... I feel like I've put TONS of 'whitespaces' in, in tons of other places! Tons of templates, tables, pages... places where it didn't do this. Why is this whitespace so different?

I dunno... maybe I did manage to ask a unique question. Hah.

"About Help:Magic_words, I don't see an issue with linking to the mediawiki page. The full list states the mw version the magic words are compatible with. Wikia's current mediawiki version is 1.19.23," - ohhh.... so I need to possess the datum "Wikia is at a certain version number," and then look at the things on that MediaWiki list that conform to that version number, and then the MediaWiki list is correct? Fully? Ok well, now I feel like a bitch. *sigh* Plus 1 experience point, I guess.

So... the whitespace-pre-tag is not documented, or at least not documented where someone who's been here much longer than I have has seen it before. That does make me feel significantly less ... distraught. Crazy. And, I am listening to what you and TableWiz say. Thank you for your patience and your help. Someday maybe I'll... either figure this all out and stop having questions, or just give up. I dunno; I'm very stressed about this now. Probably I should just take a break from trying to bash templates into submission.

Thanks again, seriously.