Talk:Main Page

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Note that some conversations here have been archived (1), archive (2).

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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)

Surgo here (at work). If I can catch you all on chat I want to talk about this and what we can do to improve matters. 2620:0:1000:3103:CC50:112E:A810:AE93 16:28, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

I can try to be on later, just ping me when it's convenient and I'll see what I can do.

Short of removing the short redirects to avoid the default search behavior or altering the default search behavior to trigger the 'contains' when you don't specifically select a specific page from the suggested list, I'm not really sure what would work well. Semantic search / drilldown probably wouldn't help in this instance, because we don't track what stuff modifies crits. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 17:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

(Edit Conflict!) I'll mention this here since it's pertinent maybe, Special:Search allows searches that don't go to articles and always just produces results, like that "containing..." selection in the scroll down for the regular search box (I also never noticed that's what that was before, so oh man, thanks for pointing that out, that's awesome). I guess going into the Special pages to locate Special:Search is an extra step or two that's less convenient, but still, it's an option. --Ganteka Future (talk) 17:49, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Special:Search linked in sidebar as a stopgap. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 19:11, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

This will do nicely, thank you. I still think a lot of that 4e Index thing is problematic for people searching for SRD stuff but oit not that much of a big deal. --Leziad (talk) 03:04, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

I agree that it's problematic from a search stand point, but I think that applies to all of the edition free SRD redirects as well. When Replace Text is working again, I'll probably go through Special:ListRedirects and migrate a bunch to other stuff. If you want to go through the list already to find the 4e redirects and unlink them manually / delete them, feel free. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 03:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Well, turns out I wasn't able to make it tonight :-/ So, ReplaceText is broken? I'll see what I can do about that. I'll also survey the current search landscape and see what we can dig up. Short of digging up anything, perhaps putting together a brief guide with examples for Semantic Search would get us most of the way there (though that's not perfect). Surgo (talk) 07:02, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

hello i am a noob at d&d

can someone tell me where to begin with this gaem. im lookin for sum books and stuff liek that u no.

so if anyone can suggest me some good resource's id appreciate it

thanks d&d noob

GOOD D&D RESOURCE'S??

If anyone here can provied some good D&D resource's Id be thankful, D&D Noob (talk) 16:49, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Recent downtime

Thanks to whoever it was that texted me the wiki was down (I changed my phone so I'm not sure whose number that was). It was really badly timed since this is one of the few weeks I'm not WFH and wasn't able to get to it immediately. The reason is a bit embarrassing: there was a badly-behaved bot that was scraping the wiki but not rate limiting itself so it was overloading us with expensive requests. I blackholed their IP to solve the immediate problem, but perhaps more importantly I just switched us from Lighttpd to Nginx. Nginx has a rate-limiter module that can limit these sorts of requests, and I'm turning it on so we shouldn't have this sort of problem again. This should also result in a small performance boost because lighttpd is ancient and hasn't been updated to make use of the new PHP cgi methods like nginx has. Surgo (talk) 05:37, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I un-blackholed the IP and the rate limiting is letting us operate through this just fine. Hurray! Surgo (talk) 05:52, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I want to use this occasion to thanks you for the constant support Surgo. Hurray to you! --Leziad (talk) 06:10, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Surgo proves once again why he is the Hero of the Internet. Seriously, if we ever meet I'm buying you dinner. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 07:10, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Sorry about the 502s -- just a couple of teething issues with the new PHP installation. Unfortunately it happened in the middle of the night (for my time zone) while I was asleep and I wasn't able to get to it until after I came to work. - Surgo (not logged in)

The text was probably from me. I sent one early this morning after a reminder from Leziad that the wiki was gronked at the time. I got a reply on the text, so yeah, there's that to confirm. I knew I should have put my name on it. Oh well. Didn't feel like sending a second text with just that on it. --Ganteka Future (talk) 00:30, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Looks like I haven't quite solved those teething problems yet. Sorry for the trouble. Surgo (talk) 16:44, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Seems like the immediate trouble is over but I'm having some issues with Recaptcha that is probably preventing IP edits. Surgo (talk) 08:26, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Creating Account

The sign up page appears to be borked, with people unable to input the captcha. Anyone know how to fix this? --Ghostwheel (talk) 06:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I've pinged Surgo about this. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 19:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Fixed. The people behind ConfirmEdit extension CHANGED A SETTING VARIABLE'S NAME, thus breaking everyone who used ConfirmEdit. WTF. Surgo (talk) 01:06, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

help needed

So I am working on a project called project fire emblem D&D it is meant to be a mix of Fire emblem and D&D but currently nobody is helping so if you would like to join —Preceding unsigned comment added by XX the memenist Xx (talk • contribs) at

You should probably make it a sourcebook instead of haphazardly creating random pages in the main wikispace. --Ghostwheel (talk) 22:37, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Captcha Problems

Someone in the IRC channel is having problems signing up due to the captcha. Here's what he's saying: reCAPTCHA shows a check mark, but the website says "Incorrect or missing CAPTCHA."

Anything we can do to help him? --Ghostwheel (talk) 16:48, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Ugh I saw this a bit after I went away from the weekend. Taking a look now... Surgo (talk) 18:33, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

You've gotta be kidding me, those jokers at MediaWiki changed variable names again. Alright it should work now. Let me know immediately if it does not. Surgo (talk) 20:34, 14 August 2016 (UTC)

Now a user is having trouble with e-mails. First he got a message that his e-mail contained an invalid character, and after that he received the following message: "Unknown error in PHP's mail() function." --Ghostwheel (talk) 05:25, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Email should work now. A system upgrade moved the location of the program that sends the emails. Surgo (talk) 04:43, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

@Surgo: I think they don't like the REcaptcha software, hence the variable name changes. Better to just use a simple math formula like "What is 12 + 80". You can pick two digits at random or cycle through a pre-made set of them. Cedric (talk) 18:19, 9 October 2017 (MDT)

I don't think that would work. Bots can read text and do math just fine, it's why most captchas use distorted text in picture files, or images of things robots don't inherently understand like "what are dog faces"? -- Eiji-kun (talk) 18:57, 9 October 2017 (MDT)

Math captchas like that haven't worked in over a decade. The anti-spam systems we have right now are working fairly well, why are you suggesting a change? Surgo (talk) 23:48, 9 October 2017 (MDT)

Cedric is a bot confirmed.  ;P -- Eiji-kun (talk) 08:33, 10 October 2017 (MDT)

Math captchas have worked. How is a bot going to know that an arbitrary string of chars is a math expression? Give me a break. Just do something slightly unexpected and a bot will get tripped up. Stop harassing me. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.75.118.194 (talk • contribs) at

You are factually incorrect, as at one point we had math captchas and they are useless. If you don't want to be confronted with captchas when editing, register an account. Surgo (talk) 16:55, 1 November 2017 (MDT)

I'm telling you it's not working! I've had to give up on edits because after about 50 (50!) f*cking clicks it wouldn't accept or verify. IT'S F*CKING ABUSIVE. 68.189.225.65 15:36, 28 November 2017 (MST)

You should have led with that, rather than just bringing it up now. Simple solution for you: log into your account. We know you're Cedric. So just log into Cedric and edit as Cedric, not ips. Surgo (talk) 15:40, 28 November 2017 (MST)

Oh, and BTW, this captcha system SEEMS to work because it keeps vandals AND EVERYONE ELSE from saving anything. So how would you ever KNOW?

Hi Cedric. You have an account here. A simple solution was given to all of your captcha problems: log your ass in. Surgo (talk) 23:18, 21 June 2018 (MDT)

Publicity

If someone wants to put a word in for us here, I think it would be a good idea. I plan on doing it myself when I get home, but that will be in a number of hours. --Ghostwheel (talk) 14:02, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Our image--we really need to work on it :-/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ghostwheel (talk • contribs) at

Radical ideas: what if we change our domain name? And we could move all the homebrew content to the new domain name, but leave the SRD and OGL material on this domain name. It would solve most of the complaints, I think. Then when people say "D&D wiki suckz", we can reply: "Yup, it does. Take a look at our wiki: we actually curate it and have the concept of authorship". --Aarnott (talk) 00:21, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

To what, something like... dnd-homebrew.com or somesuch?

I'm not sure it would make much of a difference, since people are leery about homebrew in general unless we do a massive public campaign, like a weekly AMA, each time by one of our more prolific homebrewers to get ourselves out there and have people understand that we have actual quality control on this wiki. Once we do that, I think we can turn people's perception, and get our name out there at the same time to allow others to speak up and suggest homebrew from us when people ask for something, and also perhaps get more new blood writing content for the wiki. --Ghostwheel (talk) 00:31, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

I was thinking something more clever if possible. Similar to how Memory Alpha is a wiki but the name doesn't outright say "Star Trek". The advantage is that it can be referred to as its own "thing" so people can start forming new opinions instead of carrying preconceptions. Lots of people like the GitP forums and their form of quality control is basically that threads will die with no comments. I really do think that a wiki is an ideal way to distribute homebrew and I think a bit of effort differentiating and maybe a brief walkthrough set of pages on why we think a wiki is a good idea might go a long way. --Aarnott (talk) 00:49, 19 October 2016 (UTC)

This may be a radical suggestion, but what if this wiki shifted primary focus from the homebrew section to the encyclopedia section? Dungeons & Dragons could really use a major encyclopedia wiki, like Memory Alpha is for Star Trek. My suggestion is moving the homebrew content to a "Homebrew:" namespace, and moving the "Canon:" namespace content to the main namespace. In this way, the wiki could fill a need while differentiating itself from Dandwiki. It would also help prevent people mistaking homebrew for official content, and avoid name clashes between homebrew and official content. --Dungeon Master Mimic (talk) 11:30, 24 April 2017 (MDT)

That would be a huge shift, most of the existing userbase are homebrewers so we would need a lot of new blood willing to do all this shit. I am pretty sure each official campaign setting have their own wiki as well. --Leziad (talk) 13:35, 24 April 2017 (MDT)

I naturally like the idea, having been active a lot in the Canon section, and totally agree that something like Memory Alpha would be great to have for D&D! But as Leziad said, that would need a lot of contributors, as there would be lots and lots of work. Most campaign settings have their own wiki, but some are quite small and stagnant or have a different outlook. An overview can be found here. - It may be outdated, but The Great Library of Greyhawk and Planescape Encyclopedia have been down for some time now, so what we could do here might be more rather than less. In any case, the basic framework would already be here as the Canon section. Daranios (talk) 11:35, 25 April 2017 (MDT)

I'm leaning against this idea. This is probably THE best site for homebrew I know and it's got some great creators, and most of the current users enjoy the homebrew. Plus encyclopedias of All Things D&D are out there. I'm not sure if I should link or mention any since our sister site is likely competing with them, but is restricted to just the SRD (d20Srd) but they're out there. I think being the go to homebrew site is a much better goal. - Aeturo (talk) 12:59, 25 April 2017 (MDT)

Now you got me personally interested: I guess you can find SRD at a number of places, but is there a D&D encyclopedia (like Memory Alpha for Star Trek) anywhere aside from what was left behind at Wikia when this site was formed? Thanks for sharing! Daranios (talk) 13:24, 25 April 2017 (MDT)

To be fair it does not need to be one or ther other, it could be an equal focus. --Leziad (talk) 14:21, 25 April 2017 (MDT)

Much of 3.5 isn't fair use to publish yet, which is another reason I lean against it. With the exception of short descriptions of things like we have in our Canon section, Canon:Ronin for example, much of what's outside the SRD we can't publish at all. - Aeturo (talk) 17:03, 25 April 2017 (MDT)

I don't think that's completely accurate. It is true that non-free material must not be directly quoted. But it is possible to paraphrase + summarize source material, as well as recombining information from different sources. Big sites like Wookieepedia, the Forgotten Realms Wiki, and, in the end, Wikipedia work on that basis and I have not heard that they got into legal trouble. So while this issue has to be considered, it would not be a major hindrance. Daranios (talk) 10:31, 26 April 2017 (MDT)

Well we already do that in our Canon section, and to give more information (class features, racial stat adjustments, and the like) is prohibited outside of the SRD. Sites like dndtools have been shut down multiple times for offences like that. - Aeturo (talk) 11:32, 26 April 2017 (MDT)

I have strongly supported an effort to grow our Canon section. While we don't want rules or anything outside the SRD that is explicitly related to gameplay, a robust canon section will help establish the wiki as a usefull resource for a broader section of the community. Things such as cataloguing all the modules, and books, along with general encyclopedia entries on places, characters and such would be more than welcome. I see lots of that stuff scattered across sites all over the internet from wikipedia to places such as The Acaeum (which I hope never just dies before its invaluable information can be archived). Long story short - anyone who wants to become loremasters and work on building up the canon section has the site's full throated support and enthusiasm. Regarding copyrights the task for the canon section is to catalog the various publications themselves, rather then copy and pasting the contents of those publications. Again, take a look at the incredible publication information on The Acaeum as an example of what I'm talking about. For the encyclopedia section the goal is to describe the various topics is if they are real and you live in the D&D universe, not to cut and paste the rules for using them. Bigred (talk) 23:07, 27 April 2017 (MDT)

Email issues

While emails should be sending again, we aren't out of the woods there just yet -- Google doesn't like what we're sending and won't send it. Investigating how to fix. It has to do with ipv6 and PTR records, if you care. Surgo (talk) 04:45, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

WOW IT LOOKS DIFFERENT

The new website look is great. Kudos to whoever made the update. --YouLostMe (talk) 18:50, 2 January 2017 (MST)

Helping the Wiki

We are well into the marketing and technical aspects of spreading the word about the site and increasing it's online footprint.

I have a simple request for the admins and other fans of the site.

The single most effective thing any individual person can do from a time point of view is to add a link back to the site in your signature on any RPG or other D&D related sites/wikis/forums you visit. Especially ones that you have a longstanding account on with many, many posts over the years. A simple plain link to https://dnd-wiki.org or linked via | D&D Wiki can be done easily and have a dramatic effect when performed by dozens of people across their favorite RPG sites.

Already done for me chief, but next time I spot us being mentioned on r/dnd I'll see if I can promote a bit. I totally agree that multiple people with links is super effective! -- Eiji-kun (talk) 16:54, 3 January 2017 (MST)

Whitelist

We're starting to get spammed again, how do we turn the whitelist back on? --Ghostwheel (talk) 03:13, 19 May 2017 (MDT)

Undo the most recent change on MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. That will kill all outgoing links except things on MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Surgo (talk • contribs) at

Thanks! --Ghostwheel (talk) 01:49, 20 May 2017 (MDT)

D&D Beyond

Can we get D&D Beyond links white-listed? www.dndbeyond.com/ --Rlyehable (talk) 18:19, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Should be added 👍 --Ghostwheel (talk) 18:29, 17 September 2024 (UTC)

Latest version of Mediawiki?

According to the stats, this wiki is currently using Mediawiki version 1.26.2, but the latest stable release (July 13 2017) is 1.29.0. Should the site keep up with the latest version?

Software Updates

The versions of MediaWiki, PHP, and Apache Server are all a few years behind. With the recent attack, are there plans to upgrade these? --DanielDraco (talk) 18:35, 15 August 2017 (MDT)

In addition, you need a new TLS cert for all of your sites. The old one should be considered compromised. Surgo (talk) 15:24, 17 August 2017 (MDT)

-There are no plans to update MediaWiki at this time. Apache and PHP are both running the latest versions available. There is currently no need to replace the existing certificate, it was not compromised. The vulnerability was within wordpress on another site hosted on the server. - F1rstLegion

Discord

I apologize if there's a better place to put this, but is something screwy going on with the Discord server? I only see myself, Maxim, Ellibu, and Dynobot in the server. Did Discord have a netsplit, or did everyone leave (or get kicked)? Geodude671 (talk) 15:16, 30 December 2017 (MST)

Submitting a race.

Hello, I just made my first race and I was wondering how to submit it, I tried to earlier but I didn't see it in the list for 3.5 races. Can anyone help me?

The tables are automatically generated. Usually just wait an hour and as long as the race has the proper categories (the ones already put there in the preload) and you follow the format, it will appear. Surgo (talk) 18:03, 9 June 2018 (MDT)

SRD5

The SRD5 is finally finished, AFAIK! --Rlyehable (talk) 20:47, 7 October 2018 (MDT)

Server updates necessary

The site software is out of date again. As of 15 December 2018:

• Server is using PHP 5.5.9-1ubuntu4.25 (May 2018). Current version is PHP 5.5.9+dfsg-1ubuntu4.26 (Sep 2018) with security updates.
• PHP5 is end-of-life on 31 Dec 2018. Ubuntu is still getting security updates but is there a plan to migrate to PHP7?
• Mediawiki is on version 1.30.0. Latest version is 1.31 and requires PHP7. Any idea when an upgrade may happen?

For things like that, probably best to leave a message on Bigred's talk page. --Ghostwheel (talk) 12:43, 15 December 2018 (MST)

HTTPS Certificate config

Heyo - As a non-urgent point, the HTTPS certificate for the website isn't properly configured! The site should send its own cert as well as the intermediate CA that signed it, but the site only sends the former. While most browsers are often forgiving about this and tend to work it out anyways, it will be an issue for some users, and certainly for poor wikibot users trying to the use the API! See: https:\\phabricator.wikimedia.org\T211813. Except forward slashes, not back ones - Goshdang spam filter. --SgtLion (talk) 04:06, 16 December 2018 (MST)

Blork. I see it was updated just two days ago. Dang self-made ignorance. --SgtLion (talk) 04:16, 16 December 2018 (MST)

DynamicPageList (Third Party) version

Well, take #2. The DPL third-party version is way outta date; and it's breaking handy regexes like this potential one, stuff like WfMsg not being valid on the latest MW version and such. Updating this would be dang handy~ --SgtLion (talk) 13:58, 16 December 2018 (MST)

I See it, and will turn this over to our programer.

Administrative help

Hello. I'm User:Cedric. Recently, I've been victim to abuse by other folks here with admin rights. After being called a "racist piece of shit" for creating more races that will be more natural fits for Asian or native American players, players from india, African players, etc. I was treated disresectly -- IN MY OWN USER SPACE, by the DELETION of MY OWN CONTENT. The Copyright give me the rights to my content, so this is blatent abuse. That was ORIGINAL CONTENT made for high-schoolers and other that cannot be easily replicated. There was no reason for it, as it was in its own namespace and unlinked by any other content. THERE WAS ABSOLUTELY NO REASON FOR IT. Please kick these people off or do something. I'm very depressed about it and seriously thinking whether life if worth it. Cedric (talk) 13:14, 29 March 2019 (MDT)

The fact that you maintain copyright on your own work does not change the fact that we can delete articles as we wish. The person who called you a "racist piece of shit" was not an administrator. I, however, am (and I'm the head administrator at that). A number of users pointed out -- and I agreed -- that the material could be construed as racist. As a result, I gave you 24 hours to change or remove it -- including some very simple suggestions on how to change it (merely by changing the name). You refused to do this, so I deleted it as I said I would. And yes, there was a very good reason for it -- this site does not endorse things that are racist, a policy which includes deleting them. If you dislike the way your material is received here, perhaps you should find an audience where it might be received better than this site. Surgo (talk) 13:56, 29 March 2019 (MDT)

Inactive admins

Hey, you may want to consider removing the admin permissions from sysops who have been inactive for a considerable period of time, as they present a security risk. The following administrators have not made any edits in at least a year:

• Aarnott and Aarnott Bot
• DanielDraco
• FirstLegion
• Havvy and Havvy bot

Geodude671 (talk) 11:23, 9 April 2019 (MDT)

Aarnott was one of the original three lead admins (Surgo and Tarx being the others), can see why he may be a special case. And Geo makes a good point, a few admins have been inactive for a while.--Franken Kesey 11:39, 9 April 2019 (MDT)

Admin positions are generally lifelong here. We've had admin accounts get hacked before, but generally those things can be undone without much fanfare. Surgo (talk) 16:08, 9 April 2019 (MDT)

Anyone write bots recently?

I haven't in ages but I'd like to kill off the Disgaeaverse setting page, which I never finished importing, and everything that it and its subpages link. I'll do it if nobody else wants to, but I figure someone might have a more modern bot framework sitting around (I wrote a bunch of stuff in Perl back in the day and I do not believe it works with the API anymore). Surgo (talk) 19:38, 10 April 2019 (MDT)

Are there not just three pages;

* Disgaeaverse (3.5e Sourcebook)

* Disgaeaverse (3.5e Sourcebook)/Classes

* Disgaeaverse (3.5e Sourcebook)/Races

As those are the only pages that turn up when I run a bot looking for Disgaeaverse things, and the rest of the things that these pages link to seem to be proper classes that we'd want to stick around? Like, I'm sure I could do what you want with this (nodemw is a good framework for creating easy Node-powered MediaWiki bots), but I may not be seeing the scope of this. --TK-Squared (talk) 11:37, 11 April 2019 (MDT)

Accessing Featured Articles from the Homepage

At some point in the past, it was possible to view all the pages on the Wiki that could show up on the homepage under the "Featured Article" header. It looks like that link is gone now. Is there still a page where those are listed, and (if so) is there a way to link it on the homepage? I have wanted to look at that page a few times in the last couple months, but I have never been able to locate it. --YLM (talk) 08:41, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

You can find all articles that could appear in the featured section here. Hope that helps! --Ghostwheel (talk) 09:57, 2 January 2020 (UTC)

That does help. Thank you, Ghostwheel! --162.158.106.81 08:25, 3 January 2020 (UTC)

Left Ads

The advert on the left navigation panel is taking up an inordinate amount of space. This is especially true when viewing the website over a mobile device. 19:05, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Plus they just look like shit on mobile. Surgo (talk) 03:43, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

I noticed the left-side column and had to reduce the scren size to 90% for easier navigation.

{Catgirldreamer3100 28 Feb 2020 10:22 MST}

Un-fuckifying the sidebar

If you're like me or a lot of other people who asked me about this and you think the left-hand status bar is ridiculous, you can use the following user CSS to return it to normal. Only tested on my screen which is 1080p, so you might need to modify it a bit if you have a different monitor. There are all sorts of ways to use user CSS; I use an extension in Chrome called "User JavaScript and CSS" to apply it.

#p-namespaces { padding-left: 0 !important; }
#content { margin-left: 175px !important; }
#mw-panel { width: 160px !important; }
#mw-panel li { font-size: 0.8em !important; }
#mw-panel .portal h3 { font-size: 0.8em !important; }

Hope that helps. Surgo (talk) 04:06, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

Here's an update that includes the space at the top. This works with the Stylus addon and should work with other custom CSS addons too

Or if you prefer Tampermonkey

--Radthemad4 (talk) 07:57, 11 August 2021 (UTC)

On the sidebar

Is there another means to turn it back to normal? I have very little skill with computers when it comes to changes as Surgo provided: this new sidebar stinks. Catgirldreamer3100 {11:15PM 27 February 2020}

What browser are you using? radthemad4 (talk), 28 February 2020

Google Chrome. {6:45am MST 28 Feb 2020}

I installed the extension called "User JavaScript and CSS". I can't link it because we've disabled outbound links on the site except for whitelisted pages for spam reasons. Anyway, once installed, you go to dnd-wiki.org. Click on the extension, then click "Add New" in the tiny menu that pops up. Paste the text into the right-hand side, click save, and then reload dnd-wiki.org. Alternatively, maybe now that I posted this and they see complaints trickling in since I did, the owners will un-fuck the sidebar. Surgo (talk) 15:06, 28 February 2020 (UTC)

I tried to find the "User JavaScript and CSS" and kept receiving warnings of malware and 'not-safe' site-warnings; probably something I'm doing wrong on my part I'll see of a friend who deals with this stuff look at what is going on. Thanks. {Catgirldreamer3100 10:20 MST 28 Feb 2020

I have switched to the 'Monobook' skin (under preferences) until this issue is fixed. Not as pretty, but I can actually read and edit pages. --Rlyehable (talk) 15:20, 9 March 2020 (UTC)

Main Page Borked

Now that I am accessing the site sans adblocker, over here the main page is borked with the oversized sidebar (left), the right side squished in the middle, and the right barren save "This website is completely unofficial and in no way endorsed by Wizards of the Coast. All names, trademarks, and images are copyright their respective owners. Click for full details.". That doesn't seem right.

IE for this one. I use chrome with adblocker at home. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 04:20, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Safari & Problems

The site won't load in Safari after a recent update. It's sounds like its a thing about the site loading, then loading more, so it tries to refresh, which can occur with ads. So, unless I install an adblocker, I looks like I cannot access the site in my main browser. There are probably fixes for this, but I don't know what they are. Is anyone else having this problem? --Ganteka Future (talk) 20:04, 26 March 2020 (UTC)

Big Ads

So, some new advertisements have been added to the site, and they take up a significant portion of space. I was curious how much! I took a screenshot at fullscreen and dragged it into photoshop and did the math based on pixel-goodness. Here are the tantalizing and delicious results. For my monitor, wiki content is reduced to 31.25% of the screen, while advertisements take a hefty 68.75% of total screen space. I already can't use Safari anymore because of the ads (it continually loads ads so much that the browser thinks there's something wrong with the website and forces it to reload, which reloads the ads, preventing it from being usable). If anyone else has input on this, I'd certainly be interested in hearing about it. Because 68.75% of the page is ads. 68.75%! ... --Ganteka Future (talk) 15:50, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

I recommend leaving a message here... That's about all we can do. --Ghostwheel (talk) 15:53, 21 May 2020 (UTC)

Removing some community links

While the Facebook page is run directly by BoLS, neither the discord server and IRC chat are. The moderation standards are different between the site and them, leaving me very uncomfortable leaving them as listed officially. Thus I plan to remove them from the sidebar. Surgo (talk) 21:35, 23 October 2020 (UTC)

I've popped into the IRC chat, but I haven't really seen anyone there in a while so I think it's fine to remove that.

However, I think that the Discord server increases community engagement; even if the moderation standards are different, it doesn't make it a bad thing, since I've talked to a few people in private who had a question or who didn't understand the way the ratings system works, and I cleared up the questions they had which caused them to continue visiting the site and increasing page views rather than simply leaving.

It's a good community outreach method that costs nothing; even if you might not agree with the moderation standards, it still has a purpose that it serves, one that is good for the site as a whole, and it seems to do it well. --Ghostwheel (talk) 08:29, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

If there's going to be an external user-focused chat site linked here, it needs to (a) have the same moderation standards and rules that the wiki does, and (b) preferably be run by the actual owners. If they want to link a discord like they do their Facebook, I am not opposed. Surgo (talk) 22:43, 24 October 2020 (UTC)

Licensing

The licensing at the bottom of the page is confusing. You have both the CC-BY-SA badge, but it also states the wiki is copyright BoLS. Perhaps the wording needs to be changed? I.e. that the name D&D Wiki and its logo are © BoLS, but the content is CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted. --Rlyehable (talk) 00:47, 8 July 2021 (UTC)

Nice website lol

Excellent formatting you've got there. --Foxwarrior (talk) 03:25, 13 August 2021 (UTC)

What are you talking about?? It looks great to me!

5e-2024 Nomenclature

Any discussion on what we, as the wiki, are going to refer the 2024 revision of 5th edition? 5.5e? 5.24e? 5e.2024? 5e/24? 2024e? something else? And the SRD5 revision in 2025? SRD5.25? SRD5.24? SRD25? other?

Is there any community consensus for this, elsewhere on the internet? Surgo (talk) 03:28, 28 May 2024 (UTC)

I have not seed a community consensus for this. --Rlyehable (talk) 13:58, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

I have started to use (5e24) as a suffix to page names for the 2024 release of 5th edition. --Rlyehable (talk) 18:16, 17 September 2024 (UTC)