Doom Wiki:Central Processing/2011

The brave new world of independent hosting

Hello all.

Sorry to be the bug in the raspberry here, but our separation from Wikia has given us a few extra to-do items (mostly for admins).  Ideas I've had so far:

Real-world issues

1. Designate one or more users who know how to contact the server maintainers offline, in case of a prolonged outage where they are unreachable in the normal manner.  (I have nothing against Manc and I respect the longevity of his contributions to the community, but he is a human being like everyone else.)
2. Offsite backups.  Even downloading the MediaWiki dump once a week is better than nothing [1].  I've just learned how to back it up myself, using this.    Ryan W 23:09, 22 September 2011 (UTC)
3. Review licensing notices to make sure our wiki-to-wiki copying practices are still justified, in the absence of standing Wikia directives.  (Not a discussion about whether CC-XYZ or GFDL is better — that's for later.)

Vandalism, spam, and all that

1. Identify at least one admin who can perform range blocks competently, and knows how to deal with collateral damage.
2. Be vigilant about keeping Doom Wiki:Administrators accurate and up to date.  In particular, we should try not to run out of active admins — we will be responding to attacks far more often, and without the automated reversion tools that Wikia's janitors use.
3. Consider reinstating Special:ProblemReports.  Requires the ProblemReports extension which is no longer supported.  The server admins have had more than enough trouble configuring extensions that are *supposed* to be compatible, so I assume this is off the table.  It wasn't used much anyway, and it's easy enough to post a question on a talk page.    Ryan W 17:25, 18 September 2011 (UTC)
4. Consider semi-protection of Entryway (by far the most frequent target of junk edits).  Two months after the relaunch, and no vandalism on Entryway.  Consider the subject dropped for a while.    Ryan W 23:31, 5 November 2011 (UTC)

Bureaucratic mop-up

1. Create Doom Wiki:Departure from Wikia (or whatever) to explain the reasons for the fork.  This should include instructions for migrating an account, resetting preferences, etc.  IMHO it should also advise editors not to spam the old site or otherwise create fanfare.  OK, I made a stab at this.  If you were involved in the migration, I would love it if you fact-checked.    Ryan W 11:38, 20 September 2011 (UTC)
2. Remove links/references to Wikia from Entryway (including the transcluded parts), templates, and policy pages.  Already done during "power user" cleanup period.
3. Deactivate mirrors of Wikia's help pages.  (As a short-term fix, Wikipedia's tutorials are probably OK to link.)  Already resolved during "power user" cleanup period.
4. Remove references to Wikia policies/help pages from system messages.  Already done during "power user" cleanup period.
5. Disable hardcoded shortcuts like [[w:, [[w:c:, and [[mw:.  This will create broken links, obviously, but that is preferable to letting new users click through to the Wikia content and become confused.  (As a bonus, we might finally eliminate the colon bug.)  Already resolved during "power user" cleanup period.
6. Change the default skin!   :D  Already done during "power user" cleanup period.

Other

1. Possibly reach out, off-wiki, to inactive longtime contributors and notify them of the fork.  (Even active editors do not always read Central Processing or dwforums.)  See reply to Janizdreg below.    Ryan W 02:56, 24 September 2011 (UTC)
2. Set up a widget allowing users to donate toward hosting costs.  Done by Manc shortly after the site opened; Monobook users have to switch skins to see it.
3. Fix the robo-generated meta keywords and other SEO "enhancements" made by Wikia over the last 4 years.  Meta keywords were apparently removed during the migration, page title has been changed, and major sites (other than Wikipedia) basically link here now.  IMO this is no longer a front-burner issue.    Ryan W 18:30, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

I regret the appearance of volunteering other people's time, but I cannot do all of these things myself as I lack the required technical skills.  Hopefully the first two lists, at least, are non-controversial and people can agree they are needed.

Ryan W 02:46, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

The old wiki is still edited. What about copying revisions made after fork (if the article wasn't edited here)? Admins have a better way to do this (Special:Import), which preserves edit history without having to do too much work. I don't know how important it is to preserve the edit history, though.

An example: the Game Boy Advance article is edited there. Maybe the editor is unaware of the existence of DW forums (console ports is a niche topic). The editor is an unregistered user, which makes it impossible to contact him other than by posting to his talk page. Should we notify him of the new wiki? If yes, edits made already should be copied here. PolicyNonsense 11:30, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

I made a new topic below for import suggestions.

I would say people still editing the Wikia wiki should be notified of the fork where possible, as spreading awareness of it on the grassroots level is an important part of the migration process. The person in question has also contributed plenty of valuable information and should be among the very first to be invited over. Especially considering the fact that his/her IP address could change at any moment and he/she might very well eventually get frustrated with Wikia like we did. -- Janizdreg 20:55, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

spreading awareness . . . on the grassroots level   I took it upon myself to reach out to 6 departed regulars: Illdo, Insertwackynamehere, Kyano, Shidou, Splarka, Zaximus.  This is a completely subjective list and I have probably forgotten somebody.  As far as I know, everybody left on good terms.  As a rule, admins are/have been highly active elsewhere in the Doom community (I am the exception), so if Quasar can't find the missing ones, I sure won't.    Ryan W 02:56, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

Glancing over the user list at the old wiki (the one here is near useless) I found some others that might be worth getting a hold of: Doomknocker, Ashley Pomeroy, Mithran Denizen, Mega Sean 45 and Ixfd64. All seem to have a good amount of constructive edits (glanced over their edit history) and have visited the old wiki in the past month. Nuxius 09:12, 24 September 2011 (UTC)

FPShax/doom WTF?

What is this page - [[FPShax/doom]] - about? A dead website, which isn't even to be found anywhere in the internet archives. The page is included in various categories, to which it not belong. To be honest, i would like to call a vote for deletion.--Cybdmn 21:56, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Looks deletable to me. GhostlyDeath 04:04, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

To me too. --Gez 10:34, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Need to answer a "captcha" question for links?

Special:Preferences tells me that I'm in the "Autoconfirmed users" group, however I still needed to answer a question (which replaces captchas here) to modify an external link. ???

Hmmm.  Try logging out, dumping all cookies for doomwiki.org, then logging in again?

Possibly external links are purposely harder to use, now that we don't have Wikia's battalion of anti-spam tools.    Ryan W 22:46, 7 September 2011 (UTC)

I'd like to know if it's temporary until the wiki is properly configured. On other wikis (I think) autoconfirmed users don't have to solve a captcha every time they add a link. PolicyNonsense 10:47, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Derivative works on the iPhone

There are some games, using the Doom Classic soure, which are not covered here, or just mentioned an a side note. The question is, how do we handle this stuff? There ist Hacx Classic, which is mentioned in Hacx. Hell On Earth and Doomsday are mentioned in Freedoom without names. Doomsday II: Legions of Hell and Dooms Knight, are not covered, both use Freedoom ressources, but with new maps. Bastards, the game using various ressources from community projects, as mantioned here, is not covered.

So how should we cover all these stuff? Just add new entries for the missing games, and improve the others in the sections, where they are mentioned? Or add new entries for those games too, and redirect to the main articles, where they are mentioned? --Cybdmn 08:03, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Create a whitelist of 'good' sites which can be linked to without captchas

I propose to add some sites to the whitelist of sites which can be linked to without solving a captcha, and to add at least the following sites to it:

• doomworld.com - there's a lot of links to idgames database and forum
• zdoom.org
• doomedsda.us

Ryan W seems to suggest that it's preferable to be a coder to add entries, but this whitelist suggests otherwise.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by PolicyNonsense (talk • contribs) .

Probably would be better to encourage users to use the templates, such as the DW forums template and the idgames template to link to the doomworld forums and idgames database, respectively, without having to solve a captcha. It should be possible to create ones for the ZDoom wiki, forums and the doomedsda demo database as well. Nuxius 07:17, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Nope. It doesn't matter if you use the template - you have to solve captcha all the same. PolicyNonsense 07:26, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Ah I see that you're testing templates. I'm sure that I had to solve the captcha when adding a link to Phobos: Anomaly Reborn article. I just tried editing your sandbox page to add a link - captcha appeared. Maybe you are free to add any links? Can you try? PolicyNonsense 07:35, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, that's interesting, as I did not when I tested it. Perhaps I have a higher level of group rights here than I thought I did. To be honest, the way the whole Group Rights list is set up here makes it a bit of a confusing mess. Too much redundancy along with some rather odd "right" organization.

Anyway, in that case, then yeah, I would agree that we need a whitelist. Nuxius 07:44, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, I see while I was making my post, you figured that out as well. Nuxius 07:46, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Nuxius, I totally agree about the redundancy.  (Happened because there was no overall plan; individual MediaWiki developers added new flags one at a time.)

PolicyNonsense, there may well be an exception for edits in your own userspace.  But I do see one definite problem: new accounts are not being assigned the "doomer" group by default as was intended.

AFAIK only the database admins (Quasar, Manc) can change such group rights.    Ryan W 19:00, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Apparently any admin can do it. :p --Gez 19:00, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Any admin can edit the page, but knowing regexps is not a requirement for adminship.  If everyone knows them but me, good; it should be no problem to keep the list updated.  It is however misleading to say any admin can do it, especially as we acquire new admins.

In this case, at least one important refinement is needed: [2].  A lot of my email spam used to look like that.  If I had created the page immediately, I probably would have missed it too.    Ryan W 19:17, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Leftover links to wikia.com

These articles still link to Wikia sites, but I'm not sure how best to replace them (or whether replacement is even a good idea):

• Chex Quest Wiki: Chex Quest Wiki
• Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch Mega Man 8-Bit Deathmatch Wiki
• Vagary: Quake Wiki
• Wiki: SLADE Wiki
• Wolfenstein SS: Wolfenstein Wiki

Ryan W 18:40, 17 September 2011 (UTC)

Quake too, although I suspect these links may have to remain. If the most accurate and up to date resource for any given subject happens to be hosted on Wikia, we can't really expect to mirror everything and have it on this wiki unless we vastly expand our scope. While we have a basic summary of other games like Quake, due to their connection with Doom, we're probably never going to include anything as comprehensive as an entire wiki dedicated to that subject. - DooMAD 10:44, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Sure.  I brought it up in case people know of any good non-Wikia resources.  (For Slade and MM8BDM, few options I suppose.)    Ryan W 16:19, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

The suggested rule against linking to The Site Which Shall Not Be Named was meant, in my case anyway, to mean the Doom Wiki as it is still hosted there, and not to other wiki resources. I would strong urge and prefer the use of alternate resources where they exist obviously, but we should not butcher articles just to get rid of these other-wiki links in the meantime. -Quasar 18:06, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Timeline#2005: Another one with a wikia link. I guess there's historical reasons to leave it be, though. --Gez 19:44, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

Other community wikis

Took it one step further and purged the ZDoom wiki of about 50 links (mostly via templates) to the old site, heh. - DooMAD 22:30, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I was planning to do it as soon as the wiki would officially open; however the wiki decided to open while I was without Internet. ;) Also changed the link on the frontpage of the SLADE wiki; even though that one is itself on wikia. --Gez 18:36, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

List of content to import

If you spot content worth importing over from Wikia, please list such things under this header. This way the admins have a handy list to refer to for doing clean imports with preserved edit histories, which regular users cannot do.

Uh, Special:Import works by page title not by editor.    Ryan W 21:36, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

You can always check their edit history though. Listing just this user's account instead of every page they have edited helps keep this list less cluttered. Nuxius 07:28, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

• I would say all edits by the user 108.13.114.253 are useful and should be imported here. -- Janizdreg 20:55, 18 September 2011 (UTC)

Game Boy Advance, I guess.

Genealogy

Before I make any further edits along this road; I noticed that the genealogy boxes on many port pages include "Strife" as a predecessor. AFAIK, the Strife source code is lost and all Strife-supporting engines have re-implemented it. I think it is misleading to include strife as a predecessor in a genealogy chart for this reason and it should be omitted. Similarly, an explanation should be added to Category:Strife ports. Thoughts? Jmtd 12:54, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

Disagree in the cases of ZDoom, SvStrife, and in particular, Chocolate Strife. All three derived their Strife support from direct reverse engineering. For the latter most, pain-staking effort was made to recreate the original style of the code as well as its behavior to the most exacting standards possible, to the point where demo compatibility has been attained. The Chocolate Strife source is, for all intents and purposes, the recovered original source code. The output of the IDA Pro disassembler is sufficiently like the original code in most cases to enable this claim IMO, even though many necessary translations were made after the decompilation. The only things inexorably lost are original function and variable names, and comments - though it is unlikely the code was well-commented in the first place. At the root of the issue is the definition of inheritance, and at no point have we said that inheritance necessarily requires source code in the first place. Binary code is another form of code that can be inherited from just as validly, IMO. -Quasar 17:56, 20 September 2011 (UTC)

I have reverted the change to the ZDoom article, mainly because it broke the formatting of the genealogy table, and because I'm not getting any response to my comment above -Quasar 16:35, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

I'd tend to side with Quasar here. --Gez 18:42, 21 September 2011 (UTC)

I agree with Quasar as well. Nuxius 03:14, 22 September 2011 (UTC)

Reverted the Vavoom article as well, then. --Gez 10:38, 28 September 2011 (UTC)

Strange amounts of vertices in DOOM map articles

Hello! For map articles, there's a map info section which gives general statistics about the levels in question. I've noticed that the amounts of vertices for the stock maps are regularly higher than what some of the level editors give (DCK and Doom Builder, for instance). The amounts of things, linedefs, sidedefs and sectors, however, do match. For example, the maps in The Shores of Hell have the following information applying to vertices (first comes the current WIKI info and then DCK's / Doom Builder's):

E2M1: 371 (327), E2M2: 1.352 (1.352), E2M3: 874 (810), E2M4: 1.054 (909), E2M5: 1.235 (1.109), E2M6: 967 (886), E2M7: 1.626 (1.451), E2M8: 216 (186), E2M9: 160 (150)

The DCK information in parentheses is from the maps of Ultimate Doom v 1.9. All of the previous figures that currently are found in the articles were brought by user Cyb (the figures made their way into the article with the opening edits, long ago) with the exception of E2M2's figure that was changed to 1.352 by user Ryan W. https://doomwiki.org/w/index.php?title=E2M2:_Containment_Area_%28Doom%29&diff=next&oldid=37029 (Cyb's original figure for vertices was 1.537.)

I wonder if Cyb is still around so that he could comment on his source material (I really am new here, so I don't know any of you or the community history of this WIKI). Otherwise, given that the information is false, I may be permitted to change it to that of DCK's? I'd love to. :) Comments on this case? --Jartapran 01:32, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Wow, thanks for examining these articles so carefully!  Cyb hasn't edited since 2006 so I assume he's gone for good (his twitter feed looks current though).

In theory, we should not be relying on utilities that are never updated, because there is a greater risk of stumbling over a large bug.  If anybody wants to fire up DB2 or DeePsea and run these again, I'll certainly endorse that.  Bonus points for counting them by hand in E2M9 just to make sure.  :D   I would do it myself but my virtual Win98 box just blew up.    Ryan W 03:30, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Hey, Ryan! I ran Doom Builder 2 and counted by hand the vertices in E2M9 and E1M8. For the former, I received 150 vertices and for the latter 264 (went the process through twice, just to be sure). It reads in the article that Phobos Anomaly would have 328 vertices, a figure that once again is higher than it should be. The map in the article is absolutely identical to the 1.9. version I have. I really can't tell where the extra 60 vertices could reside. I've downloaded Pascal vd Heiden's Statistics Plugin for DB2 and received the following information about E1M8: Things: 126, Vertices: 264, Linedefs: 333, Sidedefs: 511 & Sectors: 74.

Then again, where could have Cyb got the vertex figures? He couldn't just have made them up from somewhere. In any case, it seems that the vertex information is incorrect at the moment whereas other data is as it should be. I'm not sure how you treat plugins (such as the one I linked to you) as providers of information but this one seems to work, at least for the Fortress and the Anomaly. If you're unable to use DB2 or DeepSea, I hope there could be some other user who would have an access to them. It would help to verify the content I've written. Could you, Ryan, still give your opinion about plugins for updated editors? --Jartapran 04:54, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Sounds like you're making good progress.  The only thing I can think of is that Cyb used the DOS package, but I can't believe 10+ maps were changed between releases (myk, are you here?).  I have never used DB2 so someone else should answer that, but in principle the counting procedure can be double-checked, since the source code is available...    Ryan W 06:48, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

The entire question is whether you're tallying the vertex count before or after node building, since whenever a pair of segs is created from a linedef, a vertex is added. Map editors silently delete vertices that aren't attached to a linedef, so when you open a map in a map editor, you don't see all the vertices created by the node builder. Note that the easiest way to count vertices on a map is to just look at the size of the VERTEXES lump and divide it by the size of a single vertex. This gives you the total, nodebuilder vertixes included. --Gez 10:58, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Cyb's formula for the vertices, indeed, was Vertexes lump / 4 (E1M8: 1.312 / 4 = 328 & E2M9: 640 / 4 = 160). Went through test calculations in WinTex. Guess it's the best way to express the vertices of the maps so we'll let them be the way they are. Thanks for bringing that up, Gez. --Jartapran 13:57, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Changed E2M2 aricle to use total vertex count for consistency (see Gez's comment above). PolicyNonsense 12:32, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Attempted an explanation in the Vertex article, in case the issue resurfaces.    Ryan W 21:48, 30 December 2011 (UTC)

Nice work! Thanks, everyone. --Jartapran 22:55, 30 December 2011 (UTC)