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Revision as of 16:25, 16 March 2015 by Tarkisflux (talk | contribs) (Posting for Leziad about Search Issues)
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Use this page to discuss design and content changes to the main page, as well as general wiki business. Other wiki discussion can be found at Community Portal.

Note that some conversations here have been archived (1), archive (2).


External Links

So, I'm liking the complete lack of spam pages right now. Blocking every link is working, but it's not a good plan going forward. So here are a few of the options we have, and I'd like to discuss them with people because that's what I do I guess:

  1. Back to the way things were. We leave it locked down for another week or 4, and then open it back up and hope spammers have given up on us. It works for email to go dark for a couple months (at least, it used to), but we're not entirely dark and and not an email, so who knows.
  2. Keep it locked down, start using the whitelist. Yes, we have a whitelist.... that I and everyone else seems to have completely forgotten about. This is an admin (regular, non-bureaucrat admin as far as I know) editable list of sites that will override the blacklist. So we just add sites to it as needed or requested, and the external linking party continues without spam... probably. I have already added GitP to the list, which also allows through things like GitP's Homebrew Forum.
  3. Keep it locked down, don't use the whitelist, use interwikis for external linking instead. Interwiki links work differently than normal external links, and permanently fix the initial text of a link. You can just declare in the interwiki table that when someone puts gitpthread:<thing> in a wiki link, that it gets replace with http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?<thing> as an external link. Example: [[gitpthread:193515-Orc-Goblinoid-Resources]] --> gitpthread:193515-Orc-Goblinoid-Resources. This option would be better locked down than the whitelist and also forces bots to use internal wiki style links (which I've never even seen), but it's also less flexible for users and I'm not even sure if non-bureacrats can edit in new ones (I'm the only person who even tries as far as I know).

I think that the whitelist is probably the best bet, as it allows the most flexibility in use and for the most people and is backwards compatible with existing external links. Any opinions on the matter? - Tarkisflux Talk 01:25, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Eiji has been unable to reply to this post, because blacklist issues. If you're not eiji and reading this, please try to reply to this post even if you have nothing to add at all. If you can't let me know on my talk page. Thanks - Tarkisflux Talk 09:24, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
Should option 3. already work? I have just tried to add a new interwiki link (with forgottenrealms), but cannot save it. Hmm, and how would I get to the whitelist? Thanks for letting me know. Daranios (talk) 17:49, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
Option 3 does already work, we would just need to add new interwiki abbreviations for anything else we wanted to link to. I tested it after you did the FR interwiki link on a publication a week or so back (which was after everything was blacklisted). Nothing has changed since then, so you being unable to add a new interwiki link is weird. There may be existing http urls on the page that would throw an error though. Were you seeing a blacklist error when you tried to save?
As to the whitelist, you can find it at Mediawiki:Spam-whitelist. Add each url you need for linkage to the next open line. Please make them as complete as possible. - Tarkisflux Talk 23:17, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it is really quite weird. Adding a link at Canon:Phlogiston now worked fine. I do get a blacklist error ("The text you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a blacklisted external site. The following text is what triggered our spam filter: / "), however, when I try to add the same interwiki link phlogiston at my user page. Daranios (talk) 11:03, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
You have existing links your use page that can no longer be saved under current black/white list conditions, and those would trigger no matter what changes you tried to make. Should add some of those to the white list. - Tarkisflux Talk 18:07, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
So that was the problem. Thanks, now it works, and I know how to expand the whitelist as needed! Daranios (talk) 21:51, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Blacklisted links

Did we make you tube a black listed site for out going links? Ive used you tube videos as link for examples of what I was referring to and I went in to update some broken links to videos that had been taken down and I got an error about it not being able to post due to a black listed website in my changes. When was this change made, and why? The-Marksman (talk) 21:29, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

We moved to an "approved link" rather than a "not blocked link" setup a few months back when I blacklisted everything to deal with spambots. We've since been adding things to the whitelist as needed / requested. Youtube seems like one I should have already done and just forgot about, so I have done it. Sorry for the invoncenience. - Tarkisflux Talk 21:14, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! :) The-Marksman (talk) 21:29, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Posting for Leziad about Search Issues

(This is Eiji, the following is posted for Leziad. Are we running into whitelist issues? He kept running into them with this, but I wasn't able to locate why. And I'm able to post just fine, sooo....) -- Eiji-kun (talk) 05:51, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

(I fixed it. There were some unwhitelisted things. Since I was meaning to archive stuff anyway, I manually parsed through it for links.)-- Eiji-kun (talk) 06:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Maybe im missing something but the search function is pretty useless when you want to find particular material. By example I was trying to search for feats that affect critical hits, so I type 'critical hit', I am redirected to the SRD Critical Hit. So I try again just writing 'critical' and I am brought AGAIN to the SRD critical hit. This happen constantly, sometime redirecting me to some 4e useless reference list. Since the feat page is so bloated actually finding feats good for you is a chore and in the case of high-level feat you need to know how to expand the list.

That 4e index (linking it through one of those handy redirect!, when you reply you will see the absurdity), I went ahead and looked what redirected to it, here some golden examples: arcane, divine, lightning, martial, thunder, stance, charm, zone, ranged and more. Seriously, if you use those terms alone in the search you will end up on this index. This make it very hard to find material that directly affect stances, martial maneuver users, divine feats and a load of other things through the search function. It not an SRD page that explain rules or something, no, it a list.

Again maybe im missing something here, but sometime our search function is borderline unusable. Even when the use of redirect is acceptable it still somewhat annoying, take Sneak Attack by example. It link to rogue, that useful if you need the rules for sneak attacks or if you need to make a link to sneak attack. However it not all that much harder than writing [[SRD:Rogue#Sneak Attack|Sneak Attack]]. With that said, redirect like that I accept because they do become handy, so is critical hit. But critical still linking to critical hit and arcane redirecting a stupid list is perhaps a bit overzealous on the redirect? </rant>--Leziad (talk) 06:59, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

The built in search (as opposed to semantic searching, which is a whole different thing), strongly favors page title matches over page text matches. You can override that by scrolling to the bottom of he suggested list and selecting the contains part, but it's non-obvious most of the time. You can also just not use the whole word and not select a completion suggestion.
But the larger problem there is that single word redirect pages are aggressively selected for in searches, and they link to specific things rather than defaulting to the 'contains' search. Just removing these redirect pages or moving them so that they include an edition tag at the beginning would probably help. Things which are not edition specific should probably not redirect to edition specific pages. 'Dex' as an SRD redirect is pretty poor, but '3.5e Dex' would probably be fine.
If you wanted to search for pages that had a specific property set to Arcane (or whatever), you'd need to use the semantic search. Or the semantic drilldown that we haven't even looked at since early wikia days. It's a whole different problem. - Tarkisflux Talk 16:25, 16 March 2015 (UTC)