User talk:Nephele/Archive-2010-07

Request for account deletion

Hey, I was wondering if you could delete the account Brenman94. I was using this account but have changed my username to the one I use universally on every other site I visit. It'd be appreciated. BrenMan 94 05:58, 7 July 2010 (UTC)

Bound Weapon

Sorry about the mistake, there. The site has been oddly slow for me at times, which leads to it rejecting my session data. My apologies! ~ Midna 21:11, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

admin

how do i become an administrator? Ascaffo 20:21, 1 August 2010 (UTC) Ascaffo

There are few specific requirements for an Administrator, but you can have a look at UESPWiki:Administrators to get a general idea. Since Administrators are also inherently Patrollers, you can have a look at the Patroller qualifications as a start. Probably the biggest thing is that the community has to know you and know that you have the skills required, which typically takes a year or more. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 22:39, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Need something to do?

On the off chance that you're looking for what I think would be about a two-minute project, it would be really handy to have an #isnumeric (or #isnum or whatever) function, or even a convenience #ifisnum along the lines of #ifexpr. If I understand correctly, the function already exists in PHP, so I think it would just be a matter of forwarding the input value to PHP's function and returning the result.

Just to give you context, where I'd find it particularly handy is for parameters that're being passed to CSS where, for example, you might want to interpret "1" as "1px", but if the person passes "1em", you should leave it unaltered. So you could generate expressions like {{{border-width}}}{{#ifisnum:{{{border-width}}}}}|px}}. (At least for this purpose, I'd want "1%" to evaluate to not being a number...something to check.)

If this is harder than I think it is, don't worry about it. I've got a funky workaround using just the Parser Functions extension, though the logic is effectively flipped to "is not numeric". (In case you're wondering, my way is: {{#if:{{#iserror:{{#expr:{{{border-width}}}*1}}}}|{{{border-width}}}|{{{border-width}}}px}}.)

Thanks! ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 18:44, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Thanks

i read your user page and it gave me the idea to also tell about my characters i am new to wiki and my user page well is not the best out there so i am looking at other peoples pages to get a few idea.(Allgreto 15:25, 18 August 2010 (UTC))

Oh, you're around

Sorry, I didn't think anybody would be around at this hour or I would've left the block to you. You may want to increase it beyond 3 hours, though. – Robin Hood↝talk 05:44, 21 August 2010 (UTC)

IP Blocking Question

How easy is it to mass block IP addresses? I'm wondering because there's this dynamic list of TOR exit nodes that can currently reach a given server (link uses IP of content1). I'm thinking that if we have a bulk block list, it might be a fairly simple process to import that list periodically. I've also found a small PHP function that returns whether or not an IP is currently a TOR exit node. Before re-proposing that we implement either or both of these suggestions, though, I thought I'd check with you and see how feasible they are, as they'd probably both require your or Dave's involvement. (Though I suppose the IP-addresses could be done by any Admin one-by-one; not sure if they can do mass blocking.) – Robin Hood↝talk 03:07, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

It's doable one way or another. I did one mass set of blocks a while back, just using regular admin powers, and I could probably find an easier way to do it now. Well, "now" meaning tomorrow.... --Nephele^Talk 05:33, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm a little unclear from your response: are you just going to do the mass block, or should I bring up the idea on A/N? In the end, I think you can probably just do it, as I don't really see anything but harm to the site resulting from waiting for vandalism to happen vs. stopping it before it happens. – Robin Hood↝talk 18:18, 22 August 2010 (UTC)

Real Quickie

It occurred to me after I made this edit that I might've been wrong in thinking that we didn't have those. Is this something that Admins actually do have and it's just the Rollbacker group that we don't have? – Robin Hood↝talk 02:41, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I (and other admins) have the rollback ability, but there's no separate group or right that's assigned. --GK^talk2me 03:45, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Okay, so should I restore the text, then, or leave it out? (Or feel free to revert it yourself if you think it should be restored...I'm good either way.) – Robin Hood↝talk 04:14, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I'd think it should be there somehow, but I don't know exactly how it works so I'm not sure of the wording. --GK^talk2me 03:30, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I'll revert the edit and if there's anything that obviously needs to be changed, I'll do so, but I think I know less than you, so it can stand until someone who's played with it more feels like fixing it. :) – Robin Hood↝talk 03:46, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Blocks

Since you just blocked one about half an hour ago, I'm assuming you're still around for the new proxy and will do that one too. I'm on IRC, and of course monitoring message here, if you leave. – Robin Hood↝talk 20:00, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Well, I'm in my usual at-work mode of checking recent changes whenever I want to take a five minute break, so responsiveness may vary ;) In any case, that one IP is done. --Nephele^Talk 20:29, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

Okay, that works for me. If there's rampant vandalism, I'll block, but as long as it's just these amusing remarks, I'll warn appropriately and leave it for you or one of the other admins to deal with. – Robin Hood↝talk 20:31, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

You know, RH, I am perfectly capable of doing some blocking as well - and I was even on the IRC with you. Ah well... --Krusty 20:36, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

I'm sorry, Krusty! I didn't notice you due to a bug with Pidgin. There's one particular privilege or combination of privileges that Pidgin doesn't recognize, so you appear as a normal user instead of one with elevated privileges. You didn't used to, so I'm guessing it's because your privileges changed recently. Now that I know, I'll know to look for you specifically. – Robin Hood↝talk 21:51, 24 August 2010 (UTC)

No problem, Rob. Just wanted to point it out and luckily Nephele was (more or less) around anyway. --Krusty 08:11, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

SVG Files

I have very little experience with SVG files, but due to the intricacy of Spain's flag, I thought I'd try one out. I notice that other than that, we have a grand total of two SVG files on UESP. Are they resource-intensive to render? Or perhaps more importantly, are they properly cached after rendering, making my previous question more or less moot?

We actually don't have any users from Spain at the moment, so I'll go ahead and switch to the SVG file, since it really won't affect anything, but if there are concerns with using them, I'll just download a PNG file like I've done with the rest of them. – Robin Hood↝talk 06:42, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

For a long time, SVG files were not allowed on the site -- an extra plugin (imageMagick) is necessary to make them work. Off the top of my head, I think it might not have been until we upgraded to MW1.14 that imageMagick was fully installed on the wiki. --Nephele^Talk 14:35, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I'll take my cue from that then. Since Spain's flag is only used on three pages, none of which seems likely to be high-traffic, I'll let the SVG version stand, but I'll try to avoid using them unless absolutely necessary. – Robin Hood↝talk 16:04, 25 August 2010 (UTC)

Roleplaying Template

Okay, I'm confused. It looks like Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying-Fighter is picking up the Meteorologist entry partially, though I'm not 100% sure of that, as it would also display Orc Warrior data, depending on how I modified the catpagetemplate. What was the idea with the #save/#load? Were you thinking that the data might be used elsewhere as well? If not, would we be better just skipping that and displaying the sortkey instead? Thanks! – Robin Hood↝talk 23:47, 27 August 2010 (UTC)

I've fixed the issue, which came down to a pretty minor coding tweak in MetaTemplate.

As for why I'm going through #save/#load, it's because it's the only way to handle multiple entries on a single page. For example, on Category:User Content-Oblivion-Roleplaying, the raw category data only contains one entry for User:Nephele, and therefore only one sortkey. --Nephele^Talk 23:48, 31 August 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I came across a mention of it in UESPWiki:MetaTemplate the next day, I think, and realized that that was probably what you were doing. Thanks for the info! – Robin Hood↝talk 01:05, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Metatemplate Bug, Wiki Bug, or "Feature"?

Have a look at this version of {{User UESPWikian}}. It was bugged for anybody using year = {{CURRENTYEAR}} because apparently the #local inside the #local:pretext was evaluated even when the if= clause evaluated to false. Is it supposed to work that way? – Robin Hood↝talk 03:43, 28 August 2010 (UTC)

If I understand what you're asking, it's a part of how the wiki processes templates and I have no control over it. The wiki software always processes all arguments of all templates. All that {{#if}} does is determine what gets printed out after all the processing is done. All that MetaTemplate's if= clause does is determine whether or not that one MetaTemplate function executes its task after all the processing is done. So in that version of the template, {{#local:noduration|1}} would always get executed -- to make it not get executed, that specific command would have to include its own if= clause -- the existing one only prevents pretext from being assigned a value. It's what I tried to explain here. --Nephele^Talk 00:09, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

I thought that might be the case, though I couldn't remember where I'd come across mention of it before. Now I remember! :) Thanks! – Robin Hood↝talk 01:06, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Creating Accounts for TOR Users

Sorry to give you more work, but.... I had been thinking of adding something to UESPWiki:Contact to the effect that TOR users could not create accounts while logged into TOR, and would have to log out of TOR, contact Dave, use the forums, or ask a friend to create the account. But looking at the page, I can't really see a good way of fitting that in there, and I realized that it would make a lot more sense to put it into the "Your IP address, xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, has been automatically identified as a tor exit node. Editing through tor is blocked to prevent abuse." message instead. I'm pretty sure that message is part of TorBlock itself and therefore only accessible to you or Dave. – Robin Hood↝talk 23:34, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

It's processed as a standard Mediawiki message, and therefore can be edited by any admin: MediaWiki:Torblock-blocked (it's a redlink because currently it's using the default text). It just comes down to what exactly you want the revised message to say. --Nephele^Talk 00:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay. I don't terribly think something that trivial needs community consensus on what it should say, so if you or another Admin wants to update it to indicate how TOR users can create an account (see my initial post), that'd be great! – Robin Hood↝talk 01:12, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've edited it. Let me (or anyone else who can edit the page) know if there's anything that needs to be tweaked further. --GK^talk2me 03:19, 1 September 2010 (UTC)

MetaTemplate Suggestion

Please could you make a change to allow the #load function to follow the Special:MyPage link? Or some other way of finding a user's homepage that #load can use? At the moment, variables #saved to a user's page can be #loaded normally if the full pagename is provided but come back empty if Special:MyPage is passed as a source.

My reason for asking is that, combined with the wiki implementation of the health/magicka calculator that RobinHood has been writing, this could be a way of doing the NPC generator that we used to kick around as an idea. A user could use a template to #save data for their current character to their userpage, then each NPC page they visit could show real values rather than a somewhat impenetrable formula. We could even do something analogous with Leveled Lists, although that will probably remain an impossible task given the size and interconnectedness of the lists.

Thanks. rpeh •T•C•E• 18:53, 7 September 2010 (UTC)

I've been working on a completely different way to handle user game data -- and the approach I'm taking has the advantage that it can be extended to users who don't want to set up a user page, or even anonymous users. So I'd prefer to keep focussing on what I've been doing rather than branching out into other alternatives. --Nephele^Talk 00:56, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Request MetaTemplate and UespCustomCode extensions

Good day. I make the Russian version UESPWiki. Adapted templates do not work without the MetaTemplate, also does not displayed correctly the content of some articles, which uses expressions and magic words. Also, I have installed the expansion UepCustomCode (link in talk page), but not sure that this latest version. Can I get these extensions? --Ruesp 21:44, 11 September 2010 (UTC)

Random Late-Night Idea

I was just looking at the Active User list, and I had two ideas that I thought might be fun to have available if ever you feel like it (though I see no urgent need for them if you don't):

1. Allow the list to be filtered to recently active users, either as defined on Special:Statistics or by activity within a user-selectable number of days.
2. A list similar to Active Users, but of Oldest Users, in the sense of how long they've been editing the wiki. To avoid a list where the first page or two is almost entirely composed of users we haven't seen in years, you'd probably want to default this to filter to recently active users, as in idea #1.

Of course, the problem with idea #2 is that I think I'd be second only to Daveh on such a list (I beat you by a few hours)...making me both the second-oldest active user in terms of age and in terms of wiki editing, I think. I feel old now! :Þ – Robin Hood↝talk 06:51, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Since the behind-the-scenes work is primarily about the SQL, which I'm quite familiar with give or take a few MySQL syntax differences, I decided that I could do at least that part of this myself. As a first step, I installed the Active Users mod on my test wiki and modified your installation instructions based on my installation experience. Can you give them a quick once-over and make sure I haven't made any major mistakes. Given that it now works on my test wiki, I'm assuming I've done all the right things and that my instruction changes are also correct, but I thought I should double-check with you. – Robin Hood↝talk 05:11, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

Okay, here's the underlying query for #2, which inherently also addresses #1.

Having worked my way through SiteStats.php, I realized that that list of active users was based on Recent Changes, which would inherently involve a join, almost certainly slowing the query down. Since I believe performance is a fairly high priority in a wiki environment, I opted not to do that and instead go for a single-table approach. The HAVING clause is what implements the date limitation, and I believe it would work equally well in the current Active Users query. Right now, all the date math is coded into the query, but it would almost certainly be faster to do it in PHP prior to running the query, instead. The important part of course being the MAX(rev_timestamp) > ' TIMESTAMP_formatted_date '.

As you can see, I've included first edit, last edit, and edit count, but you may want to trim those off if the query's too expensive.

Lastly, MySQL is not something I've studied extensively, so you may want to play around with the query and run timing tests to see if different approaches would work out better. It was suggested in a post I read that counting a secondary unique index might be the fastest on InnoDB, so that's what I've used, but there were a lot of caveats to that including the whether or not another column was used in the query or not. So if you're worried about it, try COUNT(*) vs. COUNT(rev_id) vs. COUNT(rev_user), and if you're really feeling masochistic, you may want to play around with timing the existing HAVING clause vs. actually doing the join to recentchanges or a self-join/subquery approach, etc. Anyway, on with the query as it stands now:

SELECT rev_user_text, MIN(rev_timestamp) AS FirstEdit, MAX(rev_timestamp) AS LastEdit, COUNT(rev_id) AS EditCount
FROM revision
WHERE rev_user > 0
GROUP BY rev_user_text
HAVING MAX(rev_timestamp) > DATE_FORMAT(NOW() - INTERVAL 30 DAY ,  '%Y%m%d%H%i%s')
ORDER BY FirstEdit

– Robin Hood↝talk 04:57, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Active User Status

As far as I can remember (About 3 months), you are third at the active users list. You say you are second because the user at the second place, is not actually a user but rpeh's bot right? --Rigas Papadopoulos 17:00, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

You can look at it in several different ways, really. Some people would look at the bots as totally separate, where others would add up the totals of both. In my case, I would at least add up my current account and my former account and consider those to be one user. If you totalled bots in there as well as alternate accounts, I think the Top 5 would look like this instead at the moment (assuming I didn't make any typos anywhere and that nobody has alternate accounts that I'm unaware of that would move them onto the list):

1. Rpeh/RoBoT has 117,158 edits.
2. Nephele/NepheleBot has 62,101 edits.
3. TheRealLurlock has 31,081 edits.
4. Eshe has 12,827 edits.
5. RobinHood70/Joram/HotnBOThered has 10,455 edits.

– Robin Hood↝talk 05:18, 27 September 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! --Rigas Papadopoulos 08:36, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

Fort Grief

Verification on Fort Grief has been done and everything seems to be in order on that page. Only thing is there are a total of 3 Kurdan Hunters on the inside (in the little info panel you don't state how many you just say Kurdan Hunters). Otherwise the page is okay and no longer needing to be under-cleanup. Darkcaptain3 23:58, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Table Captions

Sorry to add this to the current list of posts on your user page, but I think you're the only admin who can fix this (besides Daveh). Captions for wikitables seem to collide with the actual table, and are a little off center: example:

Caption

Header	Header
Cell	Cell
Cell	Cell

See how the caption seems a little bit too close to the table? I doubt it's just a problem for me (I'm on Firefox now, but when I noticed the problem about a year ago I was using IE 7), but I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to affect tables with other classes:

I think this problem occurred back when you changed the default table back in 2007. I know that caption is rarely used with tables, but it would be nice for the tables to be fixed to avoid future problems. -- Jplatinum16 02:14, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

I Don't Know How Much It's Changed But...

Since you're the one that made the Roleplaying Template could you take a look at this discussion and see what you can do?--Ghurhak gro-Demril _{or TAO}^Yes? 21:34, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Just to follow-up, this issue has been resolved by changing the template to remove the header. – Robin Hood↝talk 18:25, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Vampires

hello I just was looking for someone familiar with Oblivion to discuss an interesting theory I have been working on. In some Vampire caves located out of cities there is a possibility that you could be bitten if you stay in an Inn. I have only tested this twice, it takes time for it to happen. Being sure I haven't battled Vampires I slept in an Inn it took a while but eventually I contracted Vampire disease. I wanted to know if this is something new or if you may have known this. Sorry you might think this is some what random. I chose to ask you about this because you seem some what of an extremely active user. So just give me your imput, ok. Thanks! AscaffoAscaffo 22:15, 2 December 2010 (UTC)