Talk:Main Page

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To Do

Moved to JoCopedia:To Do

To Do (old)

Archived.

Time Zone

  • Lex, I think the time zone reset with the move: It's currently 9:15 PM EDT, and "This Day In JoCo" already says April 23rd. --MitchO 21:15, 22 April 2008 (EDT)

Community Stuff

Hi all! I'm Ceridwyn over on the main site/forums btw! Thought I'd sign up and offer my wiki-help where I can. I was a contributor on Uncyclopedia for a long time and wanted to suggest a couple community type things that might be useful/fun here. Feel free to tell me no way!

  • Forums. I know we have forums already but wiki specific ones would help keep things on track and more focused, particularly if users sign up here but not on the main site it will make more sense to them
  • Welcoming Committee. On Uncyc this is used to welcome new users who sign up on the site. All that is required is a welcome template and users who peruse the Recent Changes and spam the template basically. The template both offers a friendly welcome and points users to useful guides (wiki editting, etiquette etc) which can be the Wikipedia ones if needed as well as points them to things like the forums, irc channels etc. Could even be changed regularly to highlight the pages which are being particularly focussed on at the moment (the ones on the main page) - Although I see Bry is diligently (as ever!) doing this already!
  • Proofreading Service. Admittedly, this is more a concern for a bigger wiki but it could still be useful. It would be a category or page (or both) where users can nominate a page that needs a once over for spelling, grammar, punctuation etc. Some of us are that way inclined but aren't as big on fact checking or content writing. It would give people like me a good way to help with the quality of the site. The way it works on Uncyc is a template is added to the page in question which automatically adds it to the category. Users who want to help spellchecking visit the category page as well as the main proofreading service page and can see what pages need help, as well as browsing via Recent Changes or Random Page. They fix it up, remove the template and slap a Been Proofread template on the page's discussion page. A simplified version would work just as well while the site is smaller :)

I'd like to offer my services where I can to help setup/maintain some of these suggestions too, obviously! I can also link examples from Uncyclopedia (and probably Wikipedia) if anyone would like to see how these work. Most of them have a page dedicated to them in the special wiki namespace like this, or this

Feel free as I said to tell me to poke my nose out! ;P Percephene 03:29, 23 April 2008 (EDT)

Hey Percephene, great ideas there! There's no need to be afraid to suggest things, since day one I've been wanting someone with proper wiki experience to contribute. In relation to each of your points:

  • I think the forums can wait, I'm of the opinion that talk pages are fine for now. But we could one day have wiki-specific forums.
  • The welcoming committee is a great idea, and I'll create a WikiProject page for it right away.
  • This is another great idea, that might go to either a WikiProject page or a Project page. Feel free to create something along those lines, too.

This means I'll have to dig the Community Portal link back out onto the sidebar again soon, doesn't it? :P Anyway, thanks for the ideas and the help you've offered to put into them. --Lex (talk - contribs) 17:40, 23 April 2008 (EDT)

Indeed, the first thing I looked for when I loaded the page was the Community Portal :P It's quite handy! I agree with holding off on the forums for now. I'll go and sign up for the Welcoming Committee right away and will make time to create a Proofreading Service later on! Thanks for the positive feedback :D ~ Percephene ~ talk contribs 11:50, 23 April 2008
Great ideas, Percephene! I just want to mention that in the meantime, pre-proofreading service, the WikiProject:Lyrics is largely a proofreading task too, for those who are interested.
(The "wiki forums" idea makes me a little nervous, just because I think a community like JoCo's might not be big enough yet to split into separate ecosystems like that. I understand the concern about having to log in in different places, but what about creating a forum category for JoCopedia talk? Then we could still keep all the community discussion under the same umbrella, an umbrella for which I have ban rights, obviously.) --The monomaniacal forum admin 00:23, 24 April 2008 (EDT)
For me its more the concern that the community over at the forums is fairly small and tight knit and to direct all traffic to those forums, the current "ecological balance" (for want of a better phrase ^_^ ) might be ruined and I wouldn't like to see that. That's why I suggest a small forum based, in time, here, purely for wiki related discussions. Bear in mind there may be many users who sign up here who don't join the forums, and vice versa. I think its important to keep them distinct but as I said, its only my suggestion :P Thats my 2 cents. (Equivalent to roughly 1c US :P ) ~ Percephene ~ talk contribs 07:34, 24 April 2008

Updated Song Format?

For those who may have missed it, new user Wesley worked on a more "Wiki-looking" Song template on The Future Soon page. Check it out, as I think it looks great and would love a possible discussion about Wiki-projecting a plan to update all songs like that. --MitchO 10:11, 27 April 2008 (EDT)

Agreed, that does look really good! Nice work Wesley! ~ Percephene ~ talk contribs 12:00, 28 April 2008
I'm pleased by it -- offhand, I might like the "Live Performance" section to be a subsection of something else, but I'm not sure what of. Maybe as a subsection of "Trivia"? I guess there are songs for which "Live Performance" wouldn't be appropriate, and I feel that for most songs, it might not be all that interesting or illuminating a section. Even discounting those objections, I'm not altogether comfortable with "Live Performance" as a full section, but I'm not sure I can explain coherently why -- it grates on me a little, that's all I know to say. I'm happy to stick with it if everyone else disagrees with me. --Bry 21:25, 27 April 2008 (EDT)
No I agree with you Bry :P It does feel ... awkward somehow. I think Trivia would be a good subsection if applicable but should not be there unless there is something in particular to be said about it. Like for instance the discussion about MFP played live on a Zendrum (what even is that?) from the forums, that might warrant a tasty tidbit in a Trivia > Live Performance section. If thats what you meant? ~ Percephene ~ talk contribs 03:02, 28 April 2008
I agree--one of the "main headings" of a song shouldn't be its live performance. I'm picture a heading such as "performance notes" (hopefully something less pretentious) instead, where things like instrumentation and things are described. Then, the demo version and the live version can be subheadings. — Wesley | 20:14, 6 May 2008 (EDT)

Old SongNav?

Seems obvious, but I just wanted to ask and confirm: Now they're using the modified Wesley song box, shouldn't we go ahead and delete the SongNav template from the top of the song pages? --MitchO 21:38, 2 May 2008 (EDT)

Yup, it's been done for a while, but never noticed that I haven't replied here. (Just typing this so we know that this section's archivable :P — Wesley | 20:14, 6 May 2008 (EDT)

Getting fancy joco: to work with song pages

Instead of using %20, use the plus sign

[[joco:songdetails/The+Future+Soon | The Future Soon]] becomes The Future Soon

(Lucky fluke that JoCo's site supports old-skool replacing of spaces with plus signs.) — Wesley | 20:10, 6 May 2008 (EDT)

OK, then why doesn't the Register link work? register doesn't turn into register ?
...and this is why testing is important, boys and girls. You're right: those question marks and equals signs make the link explode. So for song info pages and blog pages, the joco: links will work, but it won't work for everything. (I'm assuming you meant that link just as an example, but if you really needed a link to it, you could just use Special:Userlogin/signup though.) — Wesley | 23:01, 7 May 2008 (EDT)
Great, now I'll have to spend my lunch break modifying songlink fields so I can update Template:SongDetails. heheh. --Lex (talk - contribs) 05:23, 8 May 2008 (EDT)
My robot friend would be delighted to help :P (You do mean "change %20 to +" right?) — Wesley | 05:33, 8 May 2008 (EDT)
Well, I wasn't going to ask, but now that you offer... go for it. Let me know when it's gone through all of the song pages, so someone can update the template. --Lex (talk - contribs) 05:36, 8 May 2008 (EDT)
Alright, the changes are done. I'll be spending the next while looking through some of the pages to make sure the bot didn't break anything. (Re Your Brains spontaneously exploded under the weight of a few French letters, for example.) — Wesley | 05:59, 8 May 2008 (EDT)
And the SongDetails template is changed over as well. Hope I'm not taking too much of the joy of tinkering with JoCopedia out of your work day, though. — Wesley | 07:09, 8 May 2008 (EDT)

(restarting all those indents, but this is still a reply to the above) Don't worry, I have other things to do with the wiki that I can do at work. Editing the php files is a pain, but I managed to give the bots a couple extra rights. Will post in the relevant talk page. No abusing, ya hear? --Lex (talk - contribs) 07:19, 8 May 2008 (EDT)

{{LOCALMONTHNAME}}_{{LOCALDAY}}

Is there any reason these wouldn't refresh properly? It's 8:30 pm on May 11th, and I still see May 10th's info on the Main Page. :( --MitchO 20:31, 11 May 2008 (EDT)

And of course, once I added the code here, it refreshed. WTF?
I still seem to see this somewhat regularly ... I come to JoCopedia for the first time in a day, and I still see the previous day's TDiJC and SotD. It seems that it changes once I do an edit?! Very odd and I'm wondering if other people are seeing the incorrect dates also. --MitchO 19:09, 17 May 2008 (EDT)
Hmm... most likely (though I'm not sure) something to do with caching -- either the old date, etc., is still in your browser cache, or the server-side cache hasn't been refreshed. (See Wikipedia:Purge -- short version: pages get rebuilt when they are edited, but if you're changing a template that's included on the page, without touching the page itself, the wiki doesn't always realize it needs to recreate the page.) I'll stick a "Refresh this page" link awkwardly at the bottom of the Main Page, I guess -- next time you see a problem, see if that fixes it. --Bry 20:02, 17 May 2008 (EDT)
Yeah, I've been trying to mess with Firefox's cache to see if that does it, but nada. BTW, just F5 doesn't do it. the Refresh doesn't seem to stand out, it's fine. Thanks. --MitchO 22:31, 17 May 2008 (EDT)

Could this wiki use the extensions found on TMBW?

tmbw.net (The They Might Be Giants wiki, This Might Be a Wiki) has an amazing setup, allowing users to track which shows they've been to, song themes, interps, tabs, etc. Take a look at their list of add-ons. Maybe talk to their admins to see what can be implemented here. It's an incredible community. Just don't ask for their theme. —Fitch 03:47, 7 September 2008 (EDT)

Just want to say, how much do we want to copy TMBW and how much do we want to go our own way? Yes they have a great setup over there but do we want exactly the same setup here? Just something to think about. --BenS 07:42, 7 September 2008 (EDT)
Well, when we first started JoCopedia, we used TMBW as a guide a lot. If you go back to our conversations, you'll almost always see a discussion about how they do it, what they do and how we can change. The difference is, I don't think we're as a moderator group are as comfortable with extensions and such yet. We're learning as we go. We're also starting to finally grow into our own direction ... see Ben's Songs by Concert bot as a great example. Having said that ... if you have any specific examples of what you'd like to see us add, go ahead and mention it; the Mod's board is probably a better place for the conversation tho. --MitchO 14:00, 7 September 2008 (EDT)

I swear to god "First of May" has inspired me to lose my virginity on May 1st. Thank you, Joco, for inspiring me. I was also high as shit when this decision was made. Maybe when I'm sober I'll regret this.


Spam on this Wiki

I notice that there's a lot of spam flooding in. I encountered this myself, and I'm not clear if it's automated or not, but when I turned on capcha using (in LocalSettings.php):

require_once( "$IP/extensions/ConfirmEdit/ConfirmEdit.php" );
$wgCaptchaClass = 'SimpleCaptcha';

The problem stopped. Why they're able to bypass ReCapcha and not the SimpleCaptcha that comes with MediaWiki, I have no idea, but I thought I should drop a line, here. -Ajs 22:41, 1 May 2011 (EDT)

logo type thing

hello, jonathan coulton people! while browsing this particular wiki my eyes often fall upon the jocopedia logo (this guy). i hope not to offend anyone (sincerely), but it is perhaps not the most appealing/topical/current sort of thing? ANYWAY after some brief discussion with ant i made this thing and i will leave you fine folks to interpret this information as you desire. (feel free to ignore me.) -apollo (colloquia!) 17:04, 7 October 2011 (EDT)

Pretty!! I like how it models the art from the new album. Fresh face for a fresh new album? --BlueCanary 20:32, 11 October 2011 (EDT)

This wiki is under attack

Something needs to be done to cut down on all the spam! VectorSpace 07:17, 11 May 2012 (EDT)

Songs

For the songs link, I think it should like to the song category, and there should be a separate link for discography. The thing 17:14, 18 May 2012 (EDT)

How to get rid of these spambots

There is no denying here that spam is a serious problem. However, we don't really have much tools to fight it other than admins/moderators deleting and blocking pages. Here are some ideas I have to protect against spambots, which mostly come from other wikis I edit:

  • While one wiki I edited was faced with a spambot wave, they solved the problem by restricting the right to create pages to autoconfirmed users. This will still enable spambots to create accounts, but it would stop them from making pages.
  • Another wiki I frequent combats vandalism by using Special:CheckUser to block the IPs that are the source of the spambots. This only slows them down, and it doesn't appear we have the Checkuser extension, so we need to install it to make this a viable solution.
  • A third option we have is to change the way we prevent spambots from making accounts in the first place. Currently, it appears we have a CAPTCHA. I've been reading up on anti-spam features, and it seems that Extension:Asirra, an extension that changes the spam prevention feature to ask a person to select photos of cats, appears to be much more effective than a CAPTCHA.

AirCon 08:16, 28 January 2013 (EST)

i'll look into asirra. we have a "stop forum spam" extension configured right now, which is what TMBW uses (TMBW is relatively spam-free), but it's currently broken. i'll try and figure out what's up — brad and scarface should be able to fix it. i did intend to change the user rights as well on a large-scale, i have quite a few changes in mind — including autoconfirmation — so i'd like to go over those on the forum or something before implementing them. i'll post there today or tomorrow to see what everyone thinks. forgot about that! – apollo (colloquia!) 19:25, 2 February 2013 (EST)
Bump. I've been reading up on more spam-stoppage features, but because this wiki seems to lack in all the fancy extensions, they're all pretty much useless. So, what I'd like to know is: Who has the power to install new MediaWiki extensions, and who has access to the LocalSettings.php file? And where can I find these people? We can't delay this kind of stuff, the sooner we fix this, the more likely people are going to come back and contribute more. AirCon 09:26, 17 March 2013 (EDT)