Talk:About IFWiki

This is a talk page relating to the IFWiki:Community portal content page. Older discussions can be read at IFWiki talk:Community portal/Archive 2005 to 2019.

Proposed upgrade of MediaWiki software in 2021-22

David Cornelson suggested I add a page about my suggestion that the software behind this site be upgraded, so here it is: IFWiki:Proposed upgrade of MediaWiki software in 2021-22. Perhaps we could discuss it there. Thanks. Jonathan (talk) 11:34, 9 December 2021 (UTC)

Job queue problem

The various choice-based games were added to Category:CYOA by Template:CYOA, i.e. {{CYOA}} was added to all the games' pages.

We changed Template:CYOA so that it would add pages using it to Category:Choice-based instead.

The expected behaviour is that, once the CYOA template was changed, a job would be added to MediaWiki's job queue for all 145 pages that call that template, and that the pages would be automatically recategorised. It's described in the MediaWiki job queue manual page: "When a template changes, MediaWiki adds a job to the job queue for each article transcluding that template. Each job is a command to read an article, expand any templates, and update the link table accordingly. Previously, the host articles would remain outdated until either their parser cache expires or until a user edits the article."

A couple of days later none of the pages have automatically been recategorised. Five of them were recategorised by me doing a null edit on them (i.e. opening the page for editing and saving having made no change).

Some problems/solutions that come to mind:

1. It is possible to run the whole job queue at the command line - but we don't have shell access.
2. Something might be causing a problem in the queue. We might see an error at the command line when running the job queue, or might see something useful in the job table - but we don't have access to the database.
3. The job queue might be running too slowly. It would be good to check the value for $wgJobRunRate in the config file, LocalSettings.php - but we don't have access to the files.
4. I didn't notice the size of the job queue increase when I edited the template (though to be fair it's higher today) so maybe the jobs weren't created. I can't think why this would be though.
5. There is a script that can be run at the command line that would rebuild everything including categories.
6. Without access to the server:
   1. We could just wait until the job queue runs down to 0.
   2. We could manually null edit the 140 remaining pages. Though that doesn't address the underlying problem.

What do we think? Jonathan (talk) 09:59, 10 December 2021 (UTC)

It does seem to be a problem with the job queue not running, or running at glacial speed. Still only 7 pages have moved to the "Choice-based" category (probably all edited manually). But on my copy of the wiki on a different server, after a few hours there were 42 pages there. After running the maintenance script to clear the job queue, there were 127 pages. The 24 pages which remain in the "CYOA" category weren't categorised using {{CYOA}} (mostly they weren't games at all) so will need to be recategorised manually. It can be sorted out easily enough :-) Jonathan (talk) 14:47, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Proposed new icons and genre changes

Robin Johnson has started a discussion about this at IFWiki talk:Genre#Proposed new icons and genre changes. I'm adding the link here to make it more visible (to visitors or those who've watched the Community Portal page). Jonathan (talk) 14:37, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Copyright discussions

I've started the IFWiki:Copyright discussions page and a discussion about it at IFWiki talk:Copyright discussions. Jonathan (talk) 14:38, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Adding a favicon and potentially a logo

I've just noticed that we don't have a favicon here. Usually it'd be based on a logo, but we don't have one of them either (though the textual image in the top left is familiar and distinctive). Robin Johnson, you're artistic! Would you be able to come up with something? :-) Jonathan (talk) 14:20, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Hmmm. A quick attempt at a logo type thing. Not particularly inspired, but then we're all about text...

I also made a favicon to go with it (the same rounded square shape, but with just ">i" in it) but am having trouble trying to upload it: "Could not create directory "mwstore://local-backend/local-public/6/62"." Robin Johnson (talk) 22:01, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

I like how the > reminds you of a parser game and a few of the words being bolded reminds you of a hypertext game. bg (talk) 22:07, 15 December 2021 (UTC)

Ha, I didn't think of that but happy to take credit for it! :-) I'd consider playing on it and making them look even more like hyperlinks, but having an image on every page containing things that look like hyperlinks but aren't is probably not great design. Robin Johnson (talk) 10:27, 16 December 2021 (UTC)

Add information to game/work pages using IFDB's API

The Interactive Fiction Database has an API that would let us add information to game pages straight from that website.

We could have a template that adds an infobox to the relevant page.

If we were to do that, which information should be used? You can see what is available by looking at this result for Ballyhoo. Jonathan (talk) 06:58, 17 December 2021 (UTC)

I think a good infobox would have the cover art, title, author, publisher*, development system*, platform*, year, and genre(s), then a link to the IFDB page. (I've used "*" where this field doesn't seem to be in the metadata (yet?), at least not for that example). Then the entirety of the IFWiki page text can be used for writing about the game, not cataloguing it. (I've posted longer thoughts around this recently.)

Would it be possible to use year, publisher, and genre(s) to automatically add categories to the page too? And genre(s)/awards* to add icons/ribbons? Robin Johnson (talk) 11:42, 17 December 2021 (UTC)