Doom Wiki

Quasar said:

I think we need to let some trusted editors into the "playpen"

The problem is, to get a logo or at least text onto every page to reflect the license requires modification of the skin itself, which is a VERY large and dense php script.

Janizdreg has done a lot of work on the skins, and is one of the trusted editors who has already volunteered to help with the cleanup. If anybody sees him on IRC, could they please ask him about this?

Gez said:

I'd volunteer to help, but I don't like Monaco. :p

Well it's only the default, out of half a dozen skins that seem to be available ;)

Unfortunately my PHP skills are extremely limited, so I can't really help with tuning Monaco. However, I'd love to help out with the general cleanup tasks at hand, so if someone can provide me access to the site and my wiki account, feel free to drop me a PM or query me on IRC with login instructions.

I'm glad that this is still in the works. I feel like a traitor when I'm forced to visit Wikia.

Janizdreg said:

I'd love to help out with the general cleanup tasks at hand

Me too!

Quasar can authenticate me this way: PM me here and describe a trivial gnoming edit that needs to be done on the Wikia site, and I'll log in one last time and do it.

On a semi-related topic, if anyone happens to find a suitable mod for blocking wiki spam, please let me know. Currently using ConfirmEdit with ReCaptcha on the Legacy Wiki, but it's apparently completely useless at blocking spam.

Hopefully you won't be plagued with the same issues on the Doom Wiki there. :/

The Doom Legacy wiki is back? I got a revert to do on the SLADE wiki.


Anyway, good luck with the spam fight. The ZDoom wiki went through such an ordeal recently, and the problem was eventually solved with the TitleBlacklist extension since spambot-generated usernames followed a pretty obvious model.

Status update:

• Problems with the Cite extension have been solved by changing the order of require_once calls.
  
• Hopefully all LMP and WAD files have been successfully imported from Wikia, albeit not without tripping over a MediaWiki bug
  
• Various other small revisions and fixes have been done.
  

Personally I think it's about to the point where it can open now. The only problem is that Mancunet is experiencing some weird load issues and keeps experiencing what's effectively downtime even though the system is running - kinda like it's DoS'ing itself. We at least know the server could use more memory - it only has 1 GB currently. I am looking toward Manc to get a quote on what it would cost to upgrade the memory at least, if not also the processing power if that's possible and intend to make a large amount if not the majority of the purchase with my own funds.

Glad to hear it, and I appreciate all the work going toward the wiki. I can't even stand to visit the current Wikia site anymore, let alone be bothered to do any editing.

If more funds need to be raised among the community, I could probably be persuaded to part with somewhere between $20.00 - $80.00, depending on how poverty-stricken I remain in the coming weeks.

I'm glad to see this is underway: since Wikia started changing skins and adding all of those "community" features (ACHIEVEMENTS?!) I've been finding the Doom wiki among others to be increasingly painful to access. I'll gladly help out with infobox formatting and the like once the database transfer is complete.

By the way, I personally miss the days when the Doom wiki used the old Wikipedia default skin (Monobook). Either that or its successor would be the best theme to use, IMHO. The brown/beige color schemes are okay, but I think using them is almost satirical in a way when we have, err, more colorful games such as Heretic and Strife covered on the Wiki which pervade a more vivid atmosphere whenever I think about them.

StoneFrog said:

By the way, I personally miss the days when the Doom wiki used the old Wikipedia default skin (Monobook). Either that or its successor would be the best theme to use, IMHO.

I thought about this when Quasar talked about the disappearing copyright notice.  The problem is that many Doomers are VERY picky about skins.  People have been known to choose a DM port based on the background color of its forums.  Therefore, I didn't dare to suggest turning off the affected skins for a couple of months (Monobook, which I use also, would have been on).

Quasar said:

and intend to make a large amount if not the majority of the purchase with my own funds.

I'll cheerfully contribute to this too.  (Heh, but it can't be done through a site widget if the new site has to stay down until this is fixed... hopefully Manc et al can invent another method.)

Xeriphas1994 said:

The problem is that many Doomers are VERY picky about skins.

Yeah I hate to say it but dark-colored forum skins give me a "dead community Web 1.0 site that hasn't been updated in fourteen years" vibe sometimes. :P

I am pretty sure we're opening with Monaco as the default skin. But as mentioned numerous times, both Monobook and Vector are available, as well as some other default MediaWiki skins I've never tried to use. All one has to do is log in and set their default skin, and unlike on Wikia, this isn't going to be getting reset or forced to change every few months because of some hairbrained stupid-ass idea some neophyte fresh out of design school got wedged up their nether regions.

StoneFrog said:

Yeah I hate to say it but dark-colored forum skins give me a "dead community Web 1.0 site that hasn't been updated in fourteen years" vibe sometimes. :P

Heh, I love seeing ancient forum software. The only forums that give me a bad vibe are "Hey look I can install phpBB with the default skin and all three registered users will love it" forums.

Another point to consider is that the doom wiki at wikia is still being updated, and thus is diverging from your snapshot, and the doomwiki.org content is therefore getting increasingly stale as time goes on.

There isn't anything I can do about that. Users were advised that edits after February cannot be imported, and as of right now Mancunet is going under the knife so to speak in order to hopefully stabilize the server. It's been regularly descending into unusability for not entirely understood reasons (though Manc heavily suspects MySQL is the true culprit).

Even if it had been opened last month, it would have been unusable most of the time.

Jon said:

Another point to consider is that the doom wiki at wikia is still being updated, and thus is diverging from your snapshot, and the doomwiki.org content is therefore getting increasingly stale as time goes on.

"Stale" is overstating it a bit IMO.  At the pace we work, how much *usable* content do we typically accumulate in a 6-8 week period?  I don't agree with the poster who said that 50 percent of our articles are vanity bios, but I've kept an eye on the recent changes page and the only thing we've really lost so far is Ducon's new image collection.

Once there is actually a new site available, I'd planned to suggest reaching out to longtime contributors off-wiki, in case they don't read Central Processing or 8-page forum threads.  And of course, if any editor disagrees with me, they are free to root through the Wikia log "by hand" (using the query technique given above by spicyjack) and transfer any interesting additions, provided they include attribution.

Xeriphas1994 said:

Once there is actually a new site available, I'd planned to suggest reaching out to longtime contributors off-wiki, in case they don't read Central Processing or 8-page forum threads.  And of course, if any editor disagrees with me, they are free to root through the Wikia log "by hand" (using the query technique given above by spicyjack) and transfer any interesting additions, provided they include attribution.

Yes. Once the server is stable I would like to see it open very shortly thereafter, if not to the general public then to the "elites" at least for some much-needed cleanup work. Amongst things that are painfully needed is a redesign of the main page, because we no longer have Wikia's main page columns extension obviously. Thus the layout is completely busted.

What's the status of the project? I see doomwiki.org is still not accessible for the public.

I don't know. I asked Manc if was possible to add a login that would let us admit administrative users by invitation so they could help finish the cleanup and redesign process without risking enabling the full wiki without having the spam add-ons fully configured yet, and I didn't get an answer.

At this point, that is basically all I am waiting on. There is nothing else for me to do right now.

EDIT:

A new thread has been started as the project has resumed. The wiki will be opened temporarily to power users and admins for the final leg of cleanup, as I had hoped, and then we should be looking at opening probably during early to mid July. Please see the new thread for further developments.

For what little it may be worth, Quasar, I think you have been both dedicated and reasonable throughout this whole process, always putting the integrity of the reference material first.