Forum:New Features, 23 Feb 2007

We have some new additions today...


 * There is a new special page, which will show you your edit count for the wiki you are on. This is at Special:Editcount. The help page is at Help:Edit count, as always feel free to copy this help page to your local wiki.
 * It's now possible to add RSS feeds from other sites to Wikia. The code is simple: feed URL .  This will allow you to include news feed, blog posts, or other frequently updated content on your wikis.  The help page is at Help:RSS2Wiki
 * Many of you will have seen Wikipedia's donation notice, and that it could be dismissed with a click. This has now been added to Wikia.  The help page for this is at Help:Site notice
 * The user list at Special:Listusers now only shows users that have edited that specific Wikia. Admins have a link to show all users, although there are not likely to be many reasons to see users without edits.  This feature is still being worked on, so may have more features in the future. currently disabled for more testing
 * The default for the top browser bar as been set to " - - a Wikia wiki". On tests, this helped a lot in getting better Google recognition.  Any wikis where this had already been edited weren't changed, and some may want to make changes now  But having "Wikia" in the title seems to be very helpful in getting the site recognised as part of the whole .... which means work on other Wikia wikis will benefit you!

As usual, please let us know of bugs. Those on the mailing list have found some with the EditCount already (it doesn't show on white-on-black wikis). Thanks all. -- Sannse 16:23, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Great job, as always! I have to say that the change on Special:Listusers is awesome: no reason to list ~100,000 users on one wiki, since they've registered acroos different wikis.


 * Dismissable site notice...well, I guess it's a good thing. Personally though I want sitenotice to be always seen, that's why I'm not going to install dismissableSitenotice extension. ;)


 * And that Edit count extension is really funny! Now I have to go around and calculate how much edits I've made on different projects! So nice little tool I'm thinking of installing that on my own wiki too.


 * All in all, great job, thank you very much! :D --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 16:50, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Nice. Now I don't half to use the slow javascript Edit Counter. And copy the code to each wikia I administrate. (I'll delete that js one sometime later.) Though, it's a little sad to now find out that The Gaiapedia has never had over 47 registered users, icluding me, my bots, the MediaWiki Default (setup) user, the old founder, and the vandals. T_T Oh, though it would be nice if the Edit count special page would include the Distinct pages edited, Average edits/page, and First edit that the javascript edit counter I copied lists. Another nice feature would be if just like User contributions, be listed in the toolbox in the sidebar so that you can just go to someone's userpage and click on the link in the toolbox and see their editcount. But it would be nice of the dismiss button didn't create a gigantic gap with my wide messagebox, we could undismiss the sitenotice, disable the dismiss button (For those who use the sitenotice as a way of placing important content in the wiki such as for css alterations to the title, or whatever they use it for.), or the refreshing of the sitenotice could be done simply by editing the page instead of incrimenting another page. But the features are still a nice addition. Dantman (Talk) 18:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks! A couple of questions: how does Special:Listusers differ from Special:Activeusers now? And which special page for admins has the "show all users" option? &mdash;Silly Dan (talk) 19:07, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Special:Listusers gives the sysops the "show all" option (and "hide some" when you click that), yes the new features on listusers does make using activeusers useless for looking for active members, but there is still a difference in the 2 pages which makes it so that Activeusers is still not a good idea for a specialpage to remove. The nice thing about Activeusers is that it also displays a contributions link and tells the viewer the last time that the user made an edit. Since this is usefull we still shouldn't remove activeusers. But if they ever give us the options to view the las contribution a user made, list users in order of quantity and recency of edits on Listusers, and even add the extra basic options for viewing things like talkpages, block pages, and logs. Or at least just the contributions, and talkpages, then activeusers will be something that could be removed. Dantman (Talk) 19:39, 23 February 2007 (UTC)


 * In honour of the Editcount specialpage, and my work on starting up a new set of standard userboxes which will be able to be used on the Wikia Anime Project, I've devised a Editcount userbox. It's located at Anime:Template:User Editcount, though you might want to either mimic the new css standards I'm using to create the userboxes or alter the template after you copy it to include your own methods of userboxes. Dantman (Talk) 16:24, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Bugs
Cool, nice features, thank's. Found one little bug, the edit count takes the point as a comma (or is it the other way round?), if you have 1500 contributions in a certain namespace it calculates the percentage as if you had one and a half.--Rataube 16:45, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * This is fixed -- Sannse 18:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

A bug on the RSS feed, there must be no white space inside the tags (until it's fixed) -- Sannse 17:00, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * This is fixed -- Sannse 18:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

This is not really a bug, but... at the edit count page in the row where it says the edit percent... it says "100%" at the top which is pretty obvious. – Smiddle 18:13, 23 February 2007 (UTC)

It's probably not to important, but Special:Editcount/Alyssachanpc lists her as having made edits in the NPC Namespace. But that is a technical impossibility, she abandoned the wiki in april of last year and we didn't add the NPC, Item, and Map namespaces untill some time after I adopted the wikia. Though, it's probably a result of moving some of the character pages into the NPC namespace like planned. Dantman (Talk) 18:20, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * For me it says nothing, just 0 and 0%. But still 100% of 0 is the same as 0% of 0. – Smiddle 18:23, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I forgot the w:c:gaia to point the link to The Gaiapedia where I'm talking about it's w:c:gaia:Special:Editcount/Alyssachanpc to see what I'm talking about. Dantman (Talk) 18:29, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Some pages she edited were moved into that namespace after she left. (example). Angela talk 20:26, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Ya, it's inherant to MediaWiki. Though it would be nice if the system remembered something like the name of the page which was actualy edited in the history. Dantman (Talk) 04:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The RSS Feeds do not support unicode. See.
 * I don't see anything wrong with that feed. But it appears that the RSS2Wiki extension here derives from the m:User:Alxndr/RSS extension. So you should be able to use the charset option. Dantman (Talk) 04:35, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * "Abrams? Episode of The Office Airs Tonight", the "?" should be the unicode apostrophe. I tried to used charset=utf-8, but it didn't change anything. --Bp 00:05, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The charset option apparently uses iconv and therefore iconv must be installed on the site using the RSS2Wiki function. Do we know for sure that iconv is installed and active on MA? -- Renegade54 17:09, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem is here in $edits = $wgLang->formatNum( $edits ); $fns = $ns == NS_MAIN ? wfMsg( 'blanknamespace' ) : $wgLang->getFormattedNsText( $ns ); $percent = wfPercent( $edits / $this->total * 100 ); I think you could just move the first line to the bottom. --Bp 18:28, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * The edit count php uses the formatted editcount in the math, so if the number is above 1000, only the digits before the "," are used. See (you have to highlight the text to see it, another problem).


 * This is fixed -- Sannse 18:15, 27 February 2007 (UTC)


 * If the limit of Listusers is not 0 (that is, you clicked "next"), it reverts to its previous behaviour of listing all users. - actually, it seems that it's just reverted totally. Performance issues?  --GreenReaper(talk) 21:11, 23 February 2007 (UTC)
 * I think it's currently disabled, that may be why it's listing them all, unless I misunderstood you. Scott ch 04:18, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * The RSS feed (eg Help:RSS2Wiki, w:c:enmemoryalpha:Portal:Main/Panels/Trekmovie.com) fails to load a signifcant portion of the time. This can be fixed temporarily with a purge: . Possibly a caching issue? --Splarka (talk) 02:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)


 * For the sitnotice, "This notice is only visible to users who have JavaScript enabled". Is this personal preference on a user's computer or something that can be done on a wiki? John Reaves (talk) 05:00, 24 February 2007 (UTC)
 * It's the option in the browser. Some browsers don't even jave JavaScript. Which could be a problem. The message already can't dissapear when someone dosen't have cookies enabled. Shouldn't it be the other way arround where people without Javascript can't remove the sitenotice. It should be visible like before whether or not someone has JS enabled or not, the sitenotice can be excedingly important when something critical is happening to a wiki. Dantman (Talk) 05:44, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

The unannounced new "feature" that is causing major problems
Special:Export and the database dumps, which use the same XML format, now have "

From Memory Alpha, a Wikia wiki. " (on MA, different on different wikis) appended to every revision inside the field. This makes it appear to be literal text added by the user in the field for that revision. The main problem is that bots, like pywikiframework bots and MA's DYKBot, often use Special:Export to grab multiple pages at the same time, instead of asking for "...?action=raw" over and over again, and they can not tell that this was added by the exporter so they make their changes and then post the new version back to the wiki, which includes this appended text, believing that it was already there in the previous version. The operators who watch the diffs generated by the bot have no idea that this is happening, because the diff will not include the added text which it believes not to be different from the previous version.

Also, appending the text like this is just a really really bad idea. The appended data is not literal text in the revision and should not be included in the structure. Data about the source is already included in the exported XML via the structure.

--Bp 23:49, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

New extensions or just my head?
So, Wikia's MediaWiki got upgraded from 1.7alpha to 1.7.3 and GiveRollback was added, correct? Or at least that's what is says on WarWiki's version page.

A few questions for now:

1) "Give Rollback, Allows local bureaucrats to give rollback permissions to a non-sysop user, by Rob Church" I'm a bureaucrat on WarWiki, but permission is denied to that special page. A bug or something?

2) Why not upgrade to MW 1.9.3? :) --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 20:45, 27 February 2007 (UTC)


 * See Forum:New Features, 27 Feb 2007. You may have to logout/login to access the Giverollback page. --Splarka (talk) 00:34, 28 February 2007 (UTC)


 * Getting to 1.9 is a bit harder, though we're trying that out on a test site this week. Angela talk 23:08, 28 February 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh this is so exiting news for me, as i'm waiting for dynamic page list 2 and other features/functions that are only available with 1.8 i think but 1.9 is great ^_^ --Cizagna (Talk) 18:07, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

Requesting or proposing new features
Is there a particular place to request or discuss proposals for new features? I'd like to ask about creating RSS feeds. As I understand it these are currently available from recent changes and new pages listings, but it would seem to be a good thing if there could be an editable page (on each wikia) which could be an RSS feed to others (including of course other wikia). On Sustainable Community Action I do a sort of weekly summary on two pages: sca21:What's New and sca21:Current events, just by way of some sort of example. I'm not suggesting anything more complicated than a standard sort of format - heading with link to article, followed by short para with further detail, but couldn't something like this be useful for sharing a digest of a variety of things such as new articles, significant changes to articles or sections of a wiki, news items, events, etc? Philralph 15:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Change to sitenotice
The sitenotice has always done odd things on sites which add icons to the upper right corner of the content area. But they do something worse now. Checking out w:c:gaia:Item:Vial of Unknown Liquid will give you an example. As you see the icon covers a portion of the dissmiss link. There are 2 possible source code changes which could fix this.
 * 1) Place a div outside of #bodyContent which also encompases the .firstHeader which the title is inside. And give that div a style="position: relative;"
 * Or, move the .firstHeader inside of #bodyContent (simple case of moving 4 or 5 lines upwards.) And give #bodyContent a position: relative;
 * This will make it so that corner icons never clash with the sitenotice and always stick where they're located (they are supposed to be located in the same vertical space as the title). But I'm still for the opinion that the dismiss script shouldn't create the sitenotice box but instead reuse the code already placed inside of it:

var element = document.getElementById('siteNotice'); element.parentNode.removeChild(element);
 * Because many wiki use the sitenotice for very important site wide messages and using javascript to create them could make users who don't have javascript enabled do things which could cause them to break rules or do harmful thongs on the wiki. Javascript should only remove content. Using that method code would actualy only half to be removed not added.

The revised page would look roughly like this. The script would be moved below the sitenotice instead of inside. The code which created stuff to have javascript insert the sitenotice would be moved into the sitenotice itself. The dismissNotice inside of "if (cookieValue != siteNoticeID)" would be moved outside and that if changed into a statement which will call the dismissNotice function if the cookie tells it to do so. The width of the sitenotice box also shouldn't be 80%. Using 100% will make that box fill as much of the sitenotice as it can without destroying the dismiss button. But using 80% creates a large block of whitespace which ruins the old way of sitenotices in which you could use wide boxes. --SITENOTICE-- [dismiss 


 * 07:36, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion - a new extension
As I've previously said, these new extensions are great. It's good that Oversight is only for staff since otherwise there could be some serious problems with users misusing it.

This popped into my mind a couple of minutes ago: would it be reasonable to install Bad Image List to Wikia? I think that it could be a good idea, for example if there's a copyrighted image that the copyright holder has allowed to use on only one page and so on. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 14:21, 11 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I think the uses for this may be quite limited on Wikia. Unlike Wikipedia, where they have explicit images that can only be used on certain pages, we wouldn't have explicit images at all.  and if we do have semi-explicit images (on or more "mature" wikis for example) then they are OK for any page on that wiki.  Possibly this would be needed more if we have a shared image system like Commons at some point.  I think copyright can be dealt with via notices.  But it's certainly one to keep in mind for the future -- Sannse 12:33, 16 March 2007 (UTC)