User:Sovq

About me
Hi! I'm Sovq. The wikis you can see the most of my activity are: I'm also a regular at the Community Central Forum, trying to help other Wikians however I can.
 * Sacred Seasons 2 Wiki
 * Sacred Seasons Wiki
 * Dead Frontier Wiki

I tend to be on the behind-the-scenes side of editing wikis and that includes: modifying styling and functionalities, designing templates, categorizing and organizing content, ensuring everything looks and works as expected.

I use another account, User:Sovbot, to make automated edits with a pywikipedia bot.

My links

 * User:Sovq/global.js
 * User:Sovq/global.css

To-do list for Wikia
This list will include all the problems, oddities and annoyances I had to endure during my history on Wikia wikis. Luckily some of these can be dealt with by modifying Special:Preferences, others with customizing personal .js or .css pages, but unfortunately new users will have to live with them, until they figure out how to customize their preferences. Hopefully some of these issues will be either fixed by Wikia or made just optional and disabled by default for new users.


 * Rich Text Editor It's always been buggy, but since the new Wikia skin was released, more and more wikis are using dark color themes. It such themes editing with the RTE can be anything from annoying to impossible. The RTE changes the page formatting on it's own, uses colors from wrong css classes or uses mixed styles (try to edit a template in a dark-themed wiki), doesn't support a huge number of normal wiki-markup functionalities and in my opinion discourages new users from editing.


 * Add category buttons (CategorySelect extension) These buttons serve one purpose on the wikis I'm active on; make vandalism easier. Contributors who want to add a category won't have a problem with spending 2 minutes to read the help page and adding the category "the proper way". Furthermore, from my experience, it's usually the regular editors and admins that are responsible for the category structure and such users edit in source mode anyway.


 * Link Suggest extension Luckily I disabled it soon after I noticed it, but during the time it was on it would only annoy me; the suggest box wouldn't go away, no matter what I wrote or clicked.


 * Default user pages. By default there is an image placeholder on those, which leads to users adding a number of unrelated, uncategorized and unlicensed images. There are already account avatars - why encourage users to add even more personal images?


 * Default welcome messages These would be fine if, by default, they wouldn't include a link to the edited article. If a vandal creates a rubbish article and this article gets deleted, the WantedPages report will still show that that article as "Wanted" by the vandal's user talk page, unless the talk pages get edited as well.


 * Wanted Pages/Categories/Files/Templates reports This issues is related to the previous one. The reports will show all content that is wanted on pages in all namespaces which means all the personal stuff, which has been added by users, but is unwanted and gets deleted, will show up in the reports making them hard to use or useless. Excluding the user namespaces from the reports would make it easier.


 * Wanted Pages will list a page that turned out 'false' when using the ifexist parser function, making the WantedPages report useless on any wiki using the ifexist function. See bugzilla for details. I know that this is a MediaWiki issue, but I imagine Wikia has the resources to figure out a workaround for it.


 * Create page pop-ups The new page pop-up, by default, lets you chose one of 2 layouts which is useless and leads to inconsistency among the articles. That would be useful if a wiki had a number of pages that use a certain, custom, layout but other than that, I don't see why that should be enabled by default.


 * Image lightboxes File pages contain more info and are much more transparent than the lightboxes and if users want to enlarge the image they can always click on it again on the file page.


 * Upload image pop-ups These encourage to upload unlicensed and uncategorized images in just a few simple clicks! yay!


 * Optional features Read more sections, category galleries, picture attribution etc.. can all be disabled via Special:Contact - why not allow admins to do that themselves through an additional tool (or Theme Designer)?


 * Floating footer When using a browser's search function, the searched phrase will usually appear in the bottom line.. which is blocked by the footer. That means that every performed search requires an additional 'scroll down' to see the word. That can be a real annoyance when browsing through a really long article.


 * Default content on new wikis New wikis always receive a number of project pages, community guidelines and default templates that will never be used and just clutter up the wiki. Small wikis don't need 3 means of marking candidates for deletion. A template for starting a table (Template:Col-begin)? Sure, I guess typing  is hard enough. A Infobox-quest template? I'm sure I can use it on my Healthy Recipes wiki... Let the users create their own customized content instead of suggesting a "standardized" one.