User talk:Xymph

Welcome
Thrilled to have you contributing here. I have given you "editor" status so that your changes will automatically go live w/o waiting for review, as I trust and respect your long experience in the community in regards to the "deep history" from the 90's. I've done my best trying to document that stuff, but a first-person perspective is always going to be superior. Happy editing ;) --Quasar (talk) 11:32, 29 January 2016 (CST)

Re: Welcome
Thanks, that's very kind, as was your presidential reference when creating my steward page. :-) I have some prior experience editing a simpler wiki (TrackMania) but am new here, so you may still want to keep an eye on my edits for a while, in case I make an accidental faux pas against content policy, style, or somesuch.

I'm not sure how long I'll be active here, but for the time being I won't run out of pages to read (and perhaps contribute to). ;)

Btw, is it possible to tie this Xymph page to my Frans_P._de_Vries one somehow? --Xymph (talk) 13:21, 29 January 2016 (CST)


 * Your person article is considered the encyclopedic one about you, while User:Xymph is free for you to use to describe yourself in whatever terms you like, without restrictions on content above our terms of service (you might see User:Quasar versus James Haley (Quasar) to see the difference). If you would like for your person article to be named Frans P. de Vries (Xymph), like most other person pages, I can do that as a move and leave a redirect in place. At the time I created your article I wasn't aware that you had a handle. --Quasar (talk) 13:31, 29 January 2016 (CST)


 * Ok, starting to get the hang of these discussion pages. Yes, then please rename my person page, thanks. --Xymph (talk) 16:15, 29 January 2016 (CST)

Archive links
Hello! Wow, lots of mop-up; I like it. :D

I think you have changed a few external links referred to here. Are you doing this systematically, and if so, would you mind dropping a note somewhere when you finish? I'm planning to scan a database dump to find removed links, but if I do that right now, I'll waste people's time if some cases get fixed by you simultaneously. Hope that makes sense, thanks. Ryan W (talk) 17:20, 9 February 2016 (CST)
 * Hi, you're welcome. :) No, the method to my madness ;) is not related to that list. Rather I went back to pages where I fixed archive links earlier the old-fashioned way, after Quasar showed how to use the template. I may fix more archive links as I encounter them, but am not specifically looking for the Romero ones. Are you saying this will be addressed a more systematic way? Then I won't bother. --Xymph (talk) 02:27, 10 February 2016 (CST)


 * Please don't stop fixing links if that's what you want to do right now. My idea wouldn't make changes, only define the scope of the issue (addressing is a longer-term prospect, to judge by Quasar's example suggestions).  By "systematic" I just meant "intended to eventually encompass all topic areas/categories".  If you don't have a to-do list of pages left to check, then I guess I can proceed.  Thanks.    Ryan W (talk) 06:27, 10 February 2016 (CST)


 * Been here less than two weeks – I don't have a to-do list. ;) Mostly I'm reading up on historical stuff that I know about, and try to contribute/fix what & where I can. I am also using search and Linksearch when I encounter one bad link to find related others. Considering the size of the wiki, I'm not sure when I'll be done with that.
 * Btw, why do you like nbsp's so much? :) Or are they inserted automagically somehow? --Xymph (talk) 06:56, 10 February 2016 (CST)


 * Gosh, no one's ever asked me that so calmly. :>   I think it started because I had never edited a wiki before and wanted every post to be perfect; the sentences just looked jammed together on the screen.  (I've since been assured the latter indicates senile dementia ).  Nowadays I think it's an anti-gestalt exercise, forcing myself to reconsider each sentence individually so I don't copypaste them into drivel.  The extra spaces are for discussions only, never "reader-facing" content.
 * And you're right &mdash; a link often implies the use of similar links in related articles! That sure wasn't the case when I joined.    Ryan W (talk) 18:04, 10 February 2016 (CST)

Itty-bitty formatting
I understand. No really, I do, :) because when writing plain text (e.g. emails) I also use double-space after sentences, for much the same reason (and the --uniform-spacing option of ). But elsewhere that is frowned upon (e.g. Word squiggles them) or has no visual effect (HTML), so I don't bother. While we're deep into formatting nitty-gritty, I also noticed the lack of '--' in your signatures. You don't use the easy button? --Xymph (talk) 03:08, 11 February 2016 (CST)


 * IME the ease of those buttons is outweighed by the tedium of going back and forth to the mouse each time and targeting. (I'm no doubt in a small minority; some contributors have used mouse-aim in FPSes every day since gastrillation.)  My browser not supporting them until 2011 may also be relevant.  If I start misspelling stuff like  and not catching it in preview, I suppose I'll reconsider.  :>
 * Much bigger tangent: OMG THANK YOU for dmpsmu. I'd never have beaten Doom II without it!    Ryan W (talk) 10:13, 11 February 2016 (CST)


 * Gotcha. And you're welcome, it was a lot of fun learning PostScript and developing that tool. Btw, what tool is used to create the maps in this wiki? --Xymph (talk) 13:13, 11 February 2016 (CST)
 * If I may intrude on this conversation, most of the maps were created with omgifol, though a few of the more recent additions were created with SLADE 3 (e.g. File:ETERNAL_MAP33.png). --Gez (talk) 14:42, 11 February 2016 (CST)


 * It's worth mentioning before getting excited about SLADE that you need to adjust some well-hidden power user features in it before its images will be acceptable for use here (some recently were uploaded w/o these settings tweaked and the maps are problematic as a result and will have to be replaced eventually). They are: the background color must be changed to #ffffff versus the default of transparent, and the line thickness must be increased by a factor of at least 3 to render acceptable scaling. I did request that the defaults of these be made wiki friendly in SLADE, but apparently that request was either rejected or is stuck in the program's long release cycle somewhere. --Quasar (talk) 16:46, 11 February 2016 (CST)
 * I don't see this request. --Gez (talk) 04:12, 12 February 2016 (CST)

Deleting pages
Hi again. We're always grateful when people want to help with something boring and tedious :> but in this case deletion is one of the tools reserved for administrators. If and when you feel you have a good grasp on what kinds of material belong on this site and what don't, and you run across a less blatant case, you have the option of tagging it for deletion, or even for speedy deletion if it seems to fit one of those descriptions. (Today's example would have been wiped out immediately by any admin who logged on, I think.) HTH. Ryan W (talk) 17:59, 15 February 2016 (CST)


 * Thanks for the explanation, shortly after blanking it with my comment, I realized it was a rights issue. And that's fine, good grasp here I have not yet. ;) --Xymph (talk) 03:01, 16 February 2016 (CST)

Archive links
For the most part, the latest revision is the best, but, make sure that when dealing with citations in particular, that the cited material is actually appearing in that version; if not, finding the latest version where it still appeared (via bisection if necessary) is the process I usually use. You also need to avoid any entries that redirect, throw the user to a non-working age page or user login prompt, etc., but I figured that's probably already implicit in what you meant by working anyway ;) If you find any created by me that didn't use the latest version, there was probably a reason for it. --Quasar (talk) 09:33, 16 February 2016 (CST)


 * Thanks for the additional context, I'll keep it in mind. --Xymph (talk) 10:30, 16 February 2016 (CST)

Rollback
My apologies, once again. In view of the recent spam crisis I've been experimenting with phone edits, so as to be able to check in more often. It is clearly out of control though -- even in my most active period I didn't need reversion once in every three contributions! Won't happen again. Ryan W