Zelda Wiki:Discussion Center

Protected Pages Requiring Editing

 * This section is to be used to request the editing or correcting of a protected page. Requesting this here is faster and more likely to be noticed by an admin. Note to admins: It would be best to never archive this section.

As you may have noticed from the Recent Changes, I corrected many links linking to the Twilight Princess disambiguation page. I'm sort of a perfectionist, so I like to be thorough. It was already agreed upon that fixing these links on talk pages and user pages will help those users to remember how to correctly link to the respective page. There are still four pages left to be fixed at Pages that link to Twilight Princess. The one on the talk page stays because it is clearly said that that link is a link to the disambiguation page. But the rest are protected news pages. 15:15, July 20, 2008 (UTC)


 * The two pages in the category Wiki Exclusives need their links to "The Legend of Zelda series" corrected to "The Legend of Zelda (Series)". 17:39, August 13, 2008 (UTC)

Too many new users sign their posts wrong. They do something like this:
 *  ~ Username

No offense to anyone that has done this, but I'm getting sick of explaining it every time. One solution is to edit this page and add detail instructions on how not to make this mistake. We could use bold letters, underlining, bright and contrasting colors, etc. to make it impossible not to notice it. 22:09, September 21, 2008 (UTC)

Zelda Music Links
Did anyone else notice that nearly all of our links to Zelda music files are dead? This must be do to the recent changes to the Zelda Universe.net interface. We'll have to go through all the music links and replace them with good versions. 00:33, August 5, 2008 (UTC)


 * FRIGGIN' ZELDA UNIVERSE NEEDS TO GET A MAKEOVER AND JASON DECIDES NOT TO TELL US OUR LINKS ARE DEAD ARGHLARGHGAH!


 * Well, if most of the links go to the same place, Jason should be able to help us. I hope. 00:51, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I've already had to do this a number of times in the past. It'll be quite tricky to find all the affected pages. It may be an idea to create a template for "play this song" links - not only would this standardize the formatting, but it would allow pages containing such file links to be categorized if required, making this process easier in future. Matt? 18:08, 5 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Sounds like a plan. 22:37, August 12, 2008 (UTC)

Wait a minute. We don't need to put it in a category. All we need is the proposed template's "What links here" page. Simple· 22:58, August 12, 2008 (UTC)

Fav Icon
Has anyone else noticed that, on subpages, the site's favicon doesn't show up? Why does it do this? I'll tell you why. On the pages that it does show up, the software looks for this file:  http://zeldawiki.org/skins/monobook/favicon.ico . But, on a subpage, it looks for a file like this:  http://zeldawiki.org/ Base_Page_Name  /skins/monobook/favicon.ico . So every subpage it looks in a unique place for the favicon file and it just isn't going to find it. I'm not exactly sure how to fix this. But... ...The favicon will show up on subpages when editing them. This means that the problem has to be in the coding for our site's short URLs. So that is the place to start. 04:17, August 27, 2008 (UTC)


 * I've done some research. This seems to be an issue of our choice to have the article name follow the domain name. I think I have a solution. We need to make a rewrite rule. Here is the guide to making a rewrite rule: Apache Rewrite rules . That will hopefully solve the problem. 04:36, August 27, 2008 (UTC)


 * ...which is also a part of the & problem, which Jason is (supposedly?) getting around to fixing. 12:13, 27 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Just because I said "short URL" and "rewrite rule" doesn't mean that they are the same problem. They are two different problems caused by the same thing. We'll need a different rewrite rule for each one. 14:38, August 27, 2008 (UTC)

It's been long enough. How about we make some rewrite rules. The favicon issue and the ampersand issue are both closely related. But they will each require a different rewrite rule. Since the fixing the ampersand issue will redirect several pages and the favicon issue fix will just change the icon location, I suggest we practice first by trying to fix the favicon issue. Once we have managed to fix that, we should be ready to fix the ampersand issue. Let's not put this off for much longer. Otherwise we'll start to forget what we've already learned. 02:51, October 10, 2008 (UTC)


 * Wait, I see the favicon. Good gosh, dude, how are you having so many technical problems with the site that I can't replicate?? The ampersand issue still stands, yeah, but favicon seems to be a problem for you alone (unless anyone else isn't seeing it as well?). But yeah, I'd fix this but it requires root access, which Jason alone has. We believe in you, Jason! 04:38, 10 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Go to a subpage. Try User:Mjr162006/Gallery. It doesn't show on subpages. I believe I said that above. I explained why it was doing it too. 04:41, October 10, 2008 (UTC)

Jeez, Ando. What is it? Twelve times (I don't know, but it feels like it!) or so that I caught you "missing" vital info that lays a mere paragraph or two above? You have got to shake this habit. It is getting to be rather embarrassing. :P Oh, and you might want to hang around for a few minutes after you edit. You always seem to "make an edit or two then run". You can't really be sick or that busy all the time. You have being doing it every time you edit for months now. If you can't stay and wait after an edit then just add "got to go!" to your last edit to a talk page. I'm just saying. I tend to catch your edits right after you make them and then respond, but you "run" and I have to wait a long time for response. I always have ZW.org recent changes reloading constantly in the background whenever my PC is on. So I'll probably catch your talk page edits right away, within a few minutes during the afternoon for sure. So try to stay for five or ten minutes if possible! Now! To business! We should definitely try out fixing the favicon issue first. If we mess up the first time then the consequences are minimal. But messing up with the ampersand issue will really mess things up for anyone trying to get to those pages. If we can successfully fix the favicon issue, the ampersand issue will be easy. We're going to ask Jason to try to make some time to do this. I'm not sure how long it'll take, but I'm guessing that it'll take somewhere around twenty minutes to an hour (depending on our luck). 06:44, October 10, 2008 (UTC)

Gallery
Are the new galleries going to be changed? The new ones don't look as good as the original, and the text on the current ones are too light anyway. 11:34, 2 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Nope. I'm afraid the consensus among the staff is that the new style galleries are preferred. Also, I can't see any problem with the text? Were you talking about before they were changed to blue from the default white/grey? 09:38, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Categories and Sub-Categories
They're a mess. More to the point: What determines if an article is categorized in a category in addition to that category's parent category? There are things like Category:2D games and Category:Enemies in The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which are, but then Category:Forests, which aren't, and even ones like Category:Mario and Category:Villages which are sometimes. So, is there standard, or have people just been shoving these randomly together? (The latter seems more likely, honestly.) --Douken 04:50, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * Good question, and yeah, it's just been up to the discretion of the editor. We should decide what to do, though. In my opinion, adding something to a category and its parent category... kind of defeats the purpose of having the sub-category to begin with. I vote that all offending articles have the sub-category's parent category removed. All in favor? 17:47, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * That sounds better than any alternatives I see, but this would mean... quite a bit of work. If this goes through, we should probably conform most of the category descriptions, as many of them are either vague or unspecific. Whenever reasonably possible, I believe "This should list all  found  ." or something like it should be used; it seems to be the most professional and specific phrasing currently used. --Douken 19:42, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * I'd actually be inclined to suggest that we do the opposite. Let me explain why I think it's important that (in most cases) articles have both the parent and sub-category. Using only sub-categories greatly restricts the ability of less-knowledgeable users to browse content. For example, I want to find a Person, but can't quite remember the name - now I also need to know what game(s) they appear in. Or even more simply - I want to be able to see all Places in one list, rather than being restricted by what type/classification of place they are. To me, it's just making things less user-friendly for no discernible benefit (I haven't seen anything above that justifies why it needs to be done). Also, most articles currently have both categories - this would be a LOT of work... 21:07, 14 September 2008 (UTC)


 * If someone can't identify the name or game of a Person, they'd still have to scroll through 377+ articles in Category:People in hopes of finding a specific one? I can't reasonably imagine anyone that casual about this series would be that patient/desperate to find the associated article. Ando's way should be done because it's much more efficient and reliable to have it set either one way or the other, and because categorizing everything in Zelda into Nintendo, and everything in Nintendo into Video Game Companies doesn't sound practical.  It's also less confusing Ando's way, if you ask me.  --Douken 21:42, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Loading Times
What is up with the site? Things have been getting slower and slower to load for months. I just had to wait three hours for one page to load. No it is not my connection any other website loads normally. Are we reaching are maximum bandwidth? We have to fix this now. If we just keep shrugging it off, people are going to get angry and frustrated and we'll lose members and many thousands of viewers. Are reputation will also be hurt, bad. We need to find out why the loading times for all our pages are so slow and fix it. 21:47, September 21, 2008 (UTC)


 * You speak as if we haven't discussed this.
 * Believe me, something like this will be talked about on the staff boards, and has been. Jason hasn't actually commented on what he thinks might be the problem, though, so I can't say I have any news for you. Still, though, three hours? I've had some slow loading times but... dang. At what time was that (might be good to get an idea of the average speed at various points throughout the day). 00:10, 22 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It might just be me. But it seems that many of us regulars most likely will be unable to donate. I guess Adam could, I don't know. I'm fairly sure no one here under 21 has a credit card, or at least they shouldn't!! Let alone PayPal. So, this $3000 will get us a year? At this rate, I'm not sure how many years we can maintain it. When I think of it, $3000 seems a little too much for a year of a server that would suit our needs. That's $250 per month. That is a very expensive sever. I think some of us should go server hunting, find a cheaper one that will give us what we want. And someone get Jason to give us the specs of the new server he is planning to get. That way we can find a better one. $3000 a year just isn't realistic. There is just no way we could possibly maintain that. We need something better. 07:01, October 10, 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, we didn't really have a choice but to go off a get this server. Those crashes were getting bad. It was almost to the point where I feared that people wouldn't be able to donate at all. But in my current run of redirect fixing I've notice that loading times have not improved much, if at all. Un-cached or newly edited pages take ten to twelve seconds to load at minimum, up to a minute at most. I've got a fast connection and a fast PC. Some other people should report their speeds as well so we can get a better idea of how speeds have changed. 21:39, October 14, 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, it took me about a minute just to get on this page, and another page I recently visited said there was a missing parserfunction and that the "mysql server had gone away" (seriously). 22:16, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Ditto what Markol said. I got the very same error moments ago. --Felicia&#39;s Champion 22:18, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Hm, well I haven't gotten the errors -- I've actually noticed a marked increase in loading times. :/ Took me 4 seconds to load this page, and I'm averaging about 6 seconds per page, 10 if it's particularly slow, as opposed to the 45+ seconds I was getting before. I did notice a small period during the day (lasted maybe five minutes) wherein the loading times seemed to revert to their slower selves, but it resolved itself. I would like to know if we have caching enabled on the Wiki, though. It's DEFINITELY off on the main page (the RSS extension forces that), but what about on other pages? 22:59, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Japanese Names
Thanks to the work of Js06, we now have a vast number of pages with the Japanese name for the subject on the page. But I think that is looks too weird. Earlier on, I proposed putting the Japanese name for the games in the page's infobox. At the time very few character pages had the Japanese name. No that is different. I now propose that we move all the Japanese names on the site to the each respective infobox. It would not be hard to edit the templates to allow this. But it would take time to move everything. Everyone else okay with this? 20:52, October 2, 2008 (UTC)


 * Holy crap, how'd I not notice this until just now? ...
 * Uh, anyway, it could work, I guess. I honestly don't think that the Japanese looks too weird at all, but maybe I'm alone on that belief? What are everyone else's thoughts (considering that it will be a transition that will take a bit of time, we shouldn't do it too lightly). 04:40, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Sidebar Changes
I've got a few idea for moving/changing things in the sidebar. I'll list them out.
 * 1) Remove the Main Page link. The logo is sufficient for that.
 * 2) Replace the All Pages link with Categories.
 * 3) Remove the Pieces of Heart link altogether.
 * 4) *The links on the "Hyrule Castle" and "The Heart Container" pages are sufficient for this purpose.
 * 5) Add links to the Featured Article and Picture pages under the "community" heading.
 * 6) Move the toolbox above the "the masterminds"
 * 7) *This is mainly for making page maintenance easier. I'm not sure if this one would be practical though, due to its changing size depending on which page your at.

Everyone okay with at least some of these. That last one I really don't know about. It'll have to be based on the community opinion. Bye the way, when the logo was gone for me (Yes, Ando. IT WAS GONE! REALLY GONE!), the link behind it remained. So that would always work as a link to the main page. I don't know if we'd do all of these. But they are all just ideas I had. Let's decide. 01:08, October 16, 2008 (UTC)


 * 1) Sure, I could deal with that
 * 2) Ditto
 * 3) Mmmm, not so much. After all, if I want to get straight to Pieces of Heart, I have to take that extra step. Perhaps not "wiki-destroyingly bad" or anything, but I'd be mildly annoyed
 * 4) YES. VERY YES.
 * Eh, it kind of removes the focus on the actual owners, doesn't it? They help keep us going, and so we shove them to the bottom? Plus, what you say about its size change is pretty crazy. Sometimes it shows two links, sometimes ten. Could be fairly disorienting. I like the idea of having those links closer to home, but I think that the negatives sort of outweigh the positives. 14:47, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Changes to the Recent Changes
Anyone notice how the 14 days and 30 days links do not work in the Recent Changes? It is because our settings have the Max at 7 days. The setting to change is $wgRCMaxAge. No doubt Jason will have to do this. The setting is in seconds. I think we should set it to thirty days. That is 2592000 seconds. That way at least the day links all work. There are other problems. Can we get that go button to be on the same line instead of a new line? Also we should remove the part about hiding logged-in users, anons, and bots. Those are irrelevant here. We might want to add the "hide patrolled edits" back. That might still be there for you admins. But it'll help out us auto-patrol people since it'll hide all our edits. We patrol edits too you know, even if we can't mark them as such. It is annoying to have to type it in the URL to hide them. 05:07, October 16, 2008 (UTC)


 * They don't? Are you sure it's not just because the 500-edits-displayed limit is reached even with 7 days so you don't notice a difference? Granted, I didn't count the results (500 is a lot, and it's early in the morning), but I'm pretty sure the 500 max is reached within 7 days usually.
 * "We might want to add the 'hide patrolled edits' back."
 * what. You had this?? I never had it before I became a sysop... Is it a side-effect of the auto-patrol setting?? Weird. But yeah, I still show it. The rest of what you said is really mostly aesthetic fixes, but yeah, they're still good ideas -- I'll toss 'em at Jason, I guess. 12:04, 16 October 2008 (UTC)


 * No, I had "Hide patrolled edits" long before I had auto-patrol rights. It went away after the upgrade. I have my recent changes limit at 1000. I think it can go higher too. 13:50, October 16, 2008 (UTC)


 * Wow, really? I never saw it until after I got sysopmagics. Maybe I'm just unobservant.
 * Also, I thought that even the manual settings for the recent changes display capped out at 500. This is news to me. :O I'm gonna try bumping it up and see what goes down. 14:47, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Database Error
Sometimes when I load up the recent changes, I get a database error. It has been happening about once or twice a day for the last week or so. Here is what the message is:

Database error -- From Zelda Wiki.org Jump to: navigation, search A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "LinkCache::addLinkObj". MySQL returned error "2006: MySQL server has gone away (192.168.0.2)". Anyone got a clue what this is? 20:51, October 26, 2008 (UTC)


 * Bye the way, I have the recent changes set to auto-reload every minute at all times. If I'm at my computer, I'll catch it. I haven't heard of anyone else doing this so that is why I caught this. But to confirm all this, all you have to do it do like I do and keep an eye on it. 20:56, October 26, 2008 (UTC)


 * Every minute? Really? I've got it going every five... Hm, whatever. But okay, to test this out I've set it to constant one-minute reloads, so we'll see what happens. 21:03, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I have proof!. It just happened again. This time I took a screenshot. Just give me a second to upload it. 21:10, October 26, 2008 (UTC)

Here it is. See? 21:14, October 26, 2008 (UTC)


 * You... speak as if I don't believe you. :P I think I might test this out later as the site's running a little too slowly for me to really be able to effectively patrol running on one-minute reloads. (Sure enough this error will be dependent on site traffic.) 21:28, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, to be perfectly honest, you did not believe me when I reported the last few problems, besides loading times. (LOGO!!! It really was gone! Favicon, but that was just a misread on your part.) 21:35, October 26, 2008 (UTC)


 * Er, I never said I didn't believe you regarding the logo, only that I couldn't replicate it and found it odd that you and everyone you knew were having the same problem that I couldn't see. :P The Favicon, eh, I got confused and forgot what "subpage" meant; but I certainly never thought you were lying. 21:47, 26 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Regardless of the intention of your remarks to those issues, there was a distinct tone of disbelief. My theory is that this is due to your tendency to rush edits and then leave. Just a theory. 22:28, October 26, 2008 (UTC) Yes, this entire post was sarcasm. Intended to let everyone blow off some steam.


 * It is getting worse. I'm getting it about five times a day now. The site was down for about an hour this morning. Perhaps it is time to inform Jason. If no one hasn't already. 20:55, October 28, 2008 (UTC)