User talk:Quasar

This is my user talk page. I am an admin and bureaucrat user so I can help with many problems. Feel free to post here to contact me.

Older discussions

 * User talk:Quasar/Archive - 2005-2013
 * User talk:Quasar/Archive 2 - 2014-2015

Pending edits
I came across a few pages with pending edits from several days ago. The Recent Changes page (when expanded back to mid-January) also shows at least half a dozen unchecked pages. Is that intentional or did these fall through the reviewing cracks? --Xymph (talk) 03:16, 1 February 2016 (CST)


 * Unchecked pages are ones that no one has felt confident to review yet. Pending ones may have slipped through, or, we were waiting for somebody who might be able to verify them and such a person has never showed up. Marking a revision as "approved" is basically our stamp that we think it has at least a modicum of accuracy and completeness, and adheres to most if not all editing guidelines. Sometimes it's a matter of not having had enough time to get around to them also. --Quasar (talk) 09:31, 1 February 2016 (CST)

Hell
You sent a message saying that Hell is a place name and therefore should be capitalized but on the article of the Baron of Hell, Hell is not capitalized?


 * That was a unilateral decision made back in 2008 by an admin who is no longer a contributor to the site; nobody ever got around to reversing it. See Baron of Hell (Doom 2016) for a more recent example. --Quasar (talk) 12:26, 12 April 2016 (CDT)

Why hasn't it been moved yet? How would one go around moving it? --SuperShotgunPenguin (talk) 10:10, 13 April 2016 (CDT)


 * I opened a discussion on Doom Wiki:Central Processing with that goal. We try to establish consensus before doing these sorts of major changes. However nobody has replied to it so far. Sometimes the operational status quo here is glacial in pace. Believe me, I get frustrated with it as much as anybody. --Quasar (talk) 10:28, 13 April 2016 (CDT)


 * There is also a technical reason: FlaggedRevs prevents moves after a page has been approved. (Here it doesn't matter, I suppose, because retitling a core article would have incited discussion anyway.)    Ryan W (talk) 18:40, 13 April 2016 (CDT)

Shovelware covers
Feel free to use this picture if you think it'd fit (the pics already uploaded are smaller in resolution, but I don't know whether it's because they had that size on the source or because they were downsized before upload). That was a scan I made myself because the photo I first made with a potato had awful glare. --Gez (talk) 15:55, 5 May 2016 (CDT)


 * Sure. I've been focusing on the 110 relevant images from addoncollector.spielepedia.de which has recently disappeared off the net to get started, but it's possible that better images of some of the ones it had exist, and I also neglected to check the Internet Archive's collection which has a few too. We can hit those afterward I guess. I'm still only a bit more than half way through the AOC images x_x --Quasar (talk) 20:36, 5 May 2016 (CDT)

Wanted to let you know you can use content from our wiki
We at All The Tropes have the same license you guys do, so if you want to use content from us (TV Tropes has a license that is incompatible with yours), please, feel free, we have the same attribution requirements. In fact just made a page on the latest Doom using content from here with the origin of the content used from here attributed in the page history. Arcane (talk) 18:31, 14 May 2016 (CDT)


 * Thanks for the heads up :) --Quasar (talk) 19:03, 14 May 2016 (CDT)

Content question
Hi Quasar:

Would like to help updating contents specific to the latest DOOM game (2016).

Will there be copyright issues if contents are copied directly from the in-game Codex?


 * Limited quotations and excerpts, with proper attribution, are OK, but copy-pasting entire codex entries doesn't fall under . There are a couple already on the wiki but these need to be rewritten in our own words ASAP. I would encourage you to work as much content as possible into articles as paraphrased prose rather than dumping in material wholesale, as there is no uniqueness and, people can already read that material in-game anyway. We seek to offer commentary and exposition on the material here rather than repeat it exactly. --Quasar (talk) 01:50, 23 May 2016 (CDT)

Thanks for the reply, will paraphrase.

I've read the policies on capitalization for the site and I don't really agree with them, for example the link under monsters/enemies: "Hell knight" honestly looks like it could be improved by capitalizing the first letter of the second word. Same goes for "Quad damage".

I've looked online for capitalization standards but am unable to find a reputable one.

I'd like to know if this can be changed? For aesthetic purposes.


 * You would have to bring that up on Doom Wiki:Central Processing, but I'm pretty certain that it won't achieve consensus, as we spent the last ~7 years slowly converting to a literary convention where only proper nouns are capitalized, so that this site is more like an encyclopedic work than a game's instruction booklet. Games frequently follow an Every Word Capped for Nouns convention; even the original Doom instruction manual did this, which is why, back in 2005, this site started out doing the same. But then we realized that when you're reading an article and you run into this:


 * The Super Shotgun is a stronger form of the Shotgun distinguished by having two barrels. It uses the same Ammo and is good to use against Zombiemen.


 * That it is not only grammatically incorrect in English, but it is also harder on the eyes than the appropriate:


 * The super shotgun is a stronger form of the shotgun distinguished by having two barrels. It uses the same ammo and is good to use against zombiemen.


 * It is particularly illustrative if, we dispense for a moment with the game-specific nature of the text and imagine instead writing this, on a site like Wikipedia:


 * One will find that many Zoos have Lions, Tigers, and Bears. When fed, these Animals are often tossed a Chunk of Raw Meat.


 * Only in languages like German is capitalization of all nouns considered proper grammar. Hope this helps with why we made the change-over. Note a lot of articles on this site still haven't been converted, like most of the Heretic and Hexen articles, and this is just from A. lack of time and B. reduced interest in those games as compared to Doom here. --Quasar (talk) 09:35, 24 May 2016 (CDT)

Quasar, a final question:

If a screenshot of ingame material is taken, which license do I file the image under?

I'm thinking of adding images for the weapons section.


 * For Doom 2016 material, you'll need to avoid the license picker drop box and instead enter the following text into the image description box, after any description for the file itself:


 * --Quasar (talk) 11:26, 24 May 2016 (CDT)

Hi Quasar: Is there a naming convention for images? So far I've placed the sigils for Rune Trials under RuneTrials_.png. Do we have to add an identifier for Doom 2016 to avoid possible conflict with earlier uploads?


 * If a conflict happens when trying to upload a new image, the wiki software will prevent the upload (you have to go through a special "upload new version" method to actually overwrite an image). In general it's not required, I've just been doing it so that the names are more descriptive (because for example Imp.jpg could be from anything, while Doom16Imp.jpg is very obvious). There are no set conventions other than to have a descriptive name (ie. not something like 20160527_0001.jpg) --Quasar (talk) 09:17, 27 May 2016 (CDT)


 * OK, noted. I've just added a Supplies page. Help check if the tables look too confusing; I've tried my best to compress them to look as tidy as possible. --VyRianS (talk) 09:19, 27 May 2016 (CDT)


 * There's nothing wrong with the content per se, but I had planned on and have already extensively wikilinked to Armor (Doom 2016) and Health (Doom 2016) to cover information on these items in-depth. It is not our usual thing to lump together multiple different topics into a single article. --Quasar (talk) 09:34, 27 May 2016 (CDT)

Hey Quasar: I've placed average damage values for enemy attacks. So an attack that does 22,23,22,23,22 ... is stated as "22.5". In fact most of the values seem to be fractional. Is it better to round each value up?


 * I think it's good for now. We still seem to be learning stuff about damage formulas in this game; maybe eventually we'll be able to look at the scripting and find actual formulas and the such, who knows. --Quasar (talk) 09:16, 1 June 2016 (CDT)

Good news, The Nexus Mods is archiving the Filefront archives
Nexus Mods is in the process of archiving and transferring all the files held by Filefront to their own servers, which will include all downloads they ever hosted, which means the Doom files there will be preserved at a new home. :) Arcane (talk) 17:29, 25 May 2016 (CDT)


 * Good to hear. --Quasar (talk) 21:27, 25 May 2016 (CDT)

Warning, Monaco does not work well at all in MediaWiki 1.27
In the event you were planning on updating DoomWiki to 1.27, discovered Monaco has several PHP issues regarding certain classes in the skin and sidebar PHP files, effectively breaking it.

The conflicts appear to be related to how the classes in question use depreciated or removed methods in 1.27, but I'm not proficient enough to further look into the issue. Arcane (talk) 05:04, 29 June 2016 (CDT)


 * I'll have to do my usual analysis and testing before I consider the upgrade; I already brought the git HEAD revision up to compatibility with 1.25, but obviously that's now out of date as well. We're getting woefully behind here because I am lacking support from the server owner currently. --Quasar (talk) 06:15, 29 June 2016 (CDT)
 * Good news then. If it will work for 1.25, it works fine on 1.26, so you aren't that far behind. My version is basically yours with some tweaks (excised most of the Wikia button look for stock skin compatibility for personal preference/just-in-case sanity checks, added the Vector button circular bullet points with square dots as fallback mode), so if want to, rip off anything I did as a base for any improvements. Arcane (talk) 09:43, 29 June 2016 (CDT)

To-do list
It's been a long time since any progress was made on these topics; are they still on your to-do / to-answer list? Can you please attend to them? --Xymph (talk) 16:09, 4 August 2016 (CDT)
 * Doom Wiki:RFC/Maptabs template, try "minor adjustment of 'dw-tabimg' padding to 0.4em".  And "I presume that each skin has its own .css file (so far I saw only Common.css), so if the 'border-radius' property is moved out of class 'dw-tab' into the Monaco skin .css (and perhaps other skin(s) where rounded corners don't look out of place) but not the MonoBook skin; then the corners will remain rectangular in that skin."
 * Doom Wiki:Central Processing, "the templates would have to be changed to use a CSS class. We'd then define that class to apply font-size: smaller in Common.css, while leaving it normal in Mobile.css - this allows the two to present differently depending on the view being used."
 * Template_talk:Doom_II_1-11, "Given that both Final Doom IWADs use the same sky-based structure, shouldn't their map templates be adjusted the same way?"


 * Always, but promising any kind of time table right now is difficult due to all the obligations I have. Thanks for summing them up in one place though, so they're harder to forget about. --Quasar (talk) 16:35, 4 August 2016 (CDT)


 * That was another goal indeed. One more:
 * * Updating map captions may be a job suitable for QueryBot. And similarly, replacing Things or Statistics sections for all stock maps once enough consensus has been reached in the main discussion that DMMPST is ready for that. Can you assist with using QueryBot for these edit sweeps? Or where can I find information how to prepare this myself?
 * --Xymph (talk) 05:01, 17 August 2016 (CDT)
 * It's possible, but it's a pretty major investment of development time. QueryBot itself is just an account; the logic that drives any action it takes is written for a custom JavaScript embedding I've created called vibconsole, which has a MediaWiki REST API library which I also wrote from scratch. It uses the login API to acquire the QueryBot account's credentials, and then performs whatever processing I've programmed it to do for that task; there's no form of AI or automation. In other words I need to be very careful when doing things like map article edits that whatever regular expressions or other pattern matching logic I write doesn't hit false positives. There is also a major roadblock that may apply to some articles in that MediaWiki requires a multi-part POST operation if the article size exceeds the standard POST limit. I've never had to deal with that case yet and haven't written any code for it, accordingly. The earlier task I did (recategorizing several hundred images) had no risk of running into that limit because image articles are so small. --Quasar (talk) 11:01, 17 August 2016 (CDT)


 * Thanks for the info. I previously wrote that I intend to replace/add to stock map articles using DMMPST output, but those alone (including Master Levels) already total around 290 pages, and then there are all the megawad series and other map pages. That number of manual updates is very tedious, something I'm not looking forward to at all, and so a development effort to perform this via your tools may still be worthwhile. Also, if ever a decision is made to alter the Statistics sections and DMMPST supports that, then re-running the edit scripts would allow to apply such changes rather painlessly.
 * I'm not sure what the standard POST limit is here, but Statistics sections for big maps (and for Hexen with its five Things tables) can go up to 9+ KB, so that is most likely too much and multipart POSTing will indeed be needed. I do have a little experience with that though.
 * Is your tooling able to do section edits like we do via the website? Then just replacing existing Statistics sections with newly generated content would bypass the need for complex regexs.
 * In short, I would certainly like to investigate feasibility of this approach further, before dismissing it and diving into a very tiring and time-consuming manual process. Can we discuss this further outside the wiki, e.g. via email? --Xymph (talk) 05:03, 19 August 2016 (CDT)


 * It turns out that the predicted 8KB limit doesn't really exist. :) Last night I successfully tested section updates via regular x-www-form-urlencoded POSTs (the Wikimate framework) up to 32KB. I quit there as I don't really care to know what the real limit is. Just a little data point. --Xymph (talk) 06:39, 5 October 2016 (CDT)


 * Upon reading that again it seems like the multipart MIME just achieves a more efficient transfer for large data and is not a strict technical requirement, so this makes sense now. --Quasar (talk) 09:42, 5 October 2016 (CDT)

Why a custom QueryBot?
Ryan W pointed to the for MediaWiki. May I ask why you didn't apply (and perhaps slightly customize) one of those for QueryBot work, and instead choose to roll your own scripts which have limited accessibility due to the technical foundation (SpiderMonkey, Core) they require? Would our upcoming effort to replace Statistics sections be easier to accomplish via one of those existing bots, perhaps? --Xymph (talk) 12:43, 11 September 2016 (CDT)


 * I just started out working with what I had on hand. If you'd like to try out pre-existing tools, I have no objections. Let's just make sure everything is thoroughly tested before setting it loose at large ;) --Quasar (talk) 15:14, 11 September 2016 (CDT)