Help talk:Wiki-style forums

Something in the setup instructions no longer works properly
Please see http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Forums and note the "main namespace" page "FreeCol forum" contrasting with Forum:Help_desk and Forum:Watercooler.

I've just created two new game-specific forums using the standard Help:Forums instructions as exactly as I thought I could. They show on the Forum:Index page; and the pages linked from there have the right headers etc from which one can create separate forum items, such as http://civilization.wikia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Welcome_to_the_alternative_C-evo_forum!&t=20091204051659 - but those forum header pages are in the main namespace, not the forum namespace, and the individual forum item does not link back to its header page, linking instead, as it should, to a regrettably non-existent header page in the forum namespace.

I wonder whether this is related to the change, a few months ago, that strips namespace prefixes from the names in my taskbar - if I was looking at a page called Category:Foo it would show as just Foo in the taskbar and be indistinguishable from the Foo article.

Anyway, if I (a relatively experienced setter-up of such subforums) can produce that error by copying and pasting from the instructions, other contributors probably can too. I've not looked into all of the source code. Is the error there or in what I did?

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 06:33, December 4, 2009 (UTC)

I've corrected the C-evo one (so that it's fully functional for me to advertise it to players) but left the FreeCol one for now (I think). The basic correction needed seems to be that after "Title" you must insert "Forum:" before the name. A user-friendly solution could be to change the template so that the user doesn't have to add that manually. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:31, December 5, 2009 (UTC)

Now been bold and added "Forum:" twice as discussed above. It matches the layout for watercooler etc on the Starter Wikia, so I think it must be right. Check it if you like, experts!! — Robin Patterson (Talk) 03:59, December 5, 2009 (UTC)

New forums up
The new forums are up, should the page say "If new forums are enabled, see Help:New Forums" or something to that extent? Iggyvolz (Message Wall) 01:44, December 6, 2012 (UTC)

Sticky threads - help, please!
I would like to have a few sticky threads on a forum but cannot make any useful sense of the brief explanation.

By "index page", do you mean a page like Forum:Watercooler rather than Forum:Index ?

There's no mention of DPL on my page. Is that referring to the section near the bottom that starts with Topic <th class="forum_edited" ? It has a line " category= ". Do I make a duplicate of the whole table changing that to add the stickied threads category?

Then how do I set up the parameter thing mentioned towards the end?

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 04:48, January 30, 2013 (UTC)

Am I going to have to wait a year for a reply? I hope not.

I just can't understand enough of the last half of the section on sticky threads to do anything. It says:
 * make another DPLforum call at the top of your forum index page to list pages that are in forum "ForumName" AND "Stickied threads". A good idea would be to build into your forum header template something where you could just add |sticky=1 and let the template take care of it.


 * 1) I don't know how to "make another DPLforum call"
 * 2) "at the top of your forum index page" refers to what? Forum:Index or a subforum index page?
 * 3) What exactly is the procedure to "build into your forum header template something where you could just add |sticky=1 ..."?

-- Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:42, January 12, 2014 (UTC) (Administrator on Familypedia - the 4th-biggest English-language Wikia - and a dozen other Wikia sites but a relative newbie in many respects such as DPL and templates)