Talk:Main Page

This page is for talking about the wiki as a whole, since it seems we don't know how to use the other pages meant for the purpose.

Old conversations have been moved aside to keep this page less cluttered:

• Talk:Main_Page/2008
• Talk:Main_Page/2009
• Talk:Main_Page/2010
• Talk:Main_Page/2011
• Talk:Main_Page/2012 five years, jesus fucking christ

Problem with images

Whenever I click an image I get a 404 error. - Anyone else got this as well?? Biggus Berrus (talk) 10:46, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Yup, I noticed the same problem. Odd thing is the thumbnails still work. --131.114.119.206

Thirded. thumbnail fullsize --NotBrandX (talk) 14:51, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Well, that's suboptimal. Investigating. --Wikifag (talk) 14:50, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

The image still exists, but the wiki is throwing a hissy fit about them for some reason. Fix might be godawful. Brace yourselves. --Wikifag (talk) 14:58, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

The fix was completely unrelated to that horrendous bombing of the recent changes by maintenance script, which achieved effectively exactly nothing but wasting an arseload of disk space. Problem was to do with browser caching directives; the standard way to specify cache expiry times for static resources in nginx is to catch all URLs terminated by an appropriate file extension, but since mediawiki file URLs are terminated in the same way for the file they're showing, it was catching those and trying to set cache expiry times and things were going horribly wrong. I need to find a more accurate way to isolate the static files. Have reverted to non-caching setup for now. --Wikifag (talk) 17:16, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

You're doing the Emperor's work, son. --NotBrandX (talk) 22:24, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

If you can use regexes or some other kind of rule-based system, maybe you can have it set cache time X for files ending in .png and so on, unless they have "File:" in the name. Alternatively, you could make the rule set the cache time for URLs with "/images/" in them. --Not LongPoster Again (talk) 23:00, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, I've configured nginx with location directives to grab /images/, /skins/ and /resources/, as those paths contain pretty much all the static resources in the form of images and javascript and whatnot that mediawiki wants to serve. It seems to be working fine now, although this latest optimisation does generally introduce the possibility that some people won't notice new versions of images until their cache expires; having images updated with new versions is actually really rare though, so it shouldn't really bother anyone. --Wikifag (talk) 16:07, 21 May 2013 (UTC)

A Potential Page

A few guys on /tg/ want to preserve a Space Marine Chapter their making so that it doesn't "fade away" so to speak. Here's the link: http://boards.4chan.org/tg/res/24009443#p24013730 I told them I'll try, but there's no promises. I don't even know if this is meant to be the place to ask Keeper of the War Angels 4:01, 3 April 2013

You don't even have to ask. See all the homebrew chapters? They got made in exactly the same way as your chapter, and we have pages on them because somebody though they were worth archiving. --Not LongPoster Again (talk) 17:58, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

So does that mean I can go along and do it myself? Keeper of the War Angels 4:57, 3 April 2013

Yes. Again, there's no need to ask anyone for permission -- the whole point of a wiki is that users are free to create and edit pages, so I'm not sure what you're asking about.

Check out the help pages, but especially Help:Editing and the Formatting Guidelines for details on how to make wiki pages. --Not LongPoster Again (talk) 21:47, 2 April 2013 (UTC)

Regarding Tactica

With the new Warriors of Chaos book coming out today, I had a question regarding on how we're going to upload tactics for that book onto here. There are two options:

• Stick to the current model for WFB tactics: update the current pages and get rid of the old stuff.
• Follow the 40k model by copying the old page into a new article and update the current one into the tactica for the current book.

It's a bit odd that we have these different models for the different games. Which one's it going to be? Biggus Berrus 16:39, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

I vote for option #2. Edition changes can really shake up how an army plays (see: Orks from 5E to 6E). --Dr. Thompson 16:30, 2 February 2013 (UTC)

I would like to further suggest that, as more tactica pages get created, we keep up the "Xth Edition Tactics" part of the title, and have the regular "Tactics" link be a redirect to the most current edition (that way, we don't have to change all the links on every other page every time a new edition or codex comes out).

Speaking of "more tactica pages" getting created, we don't have entries for the Elysians, Death Korps of Krieg, Armoured Battle Group, Death Korps Armoured Battle Group, Tyrant's Legion, or Renegades and Heretics. The first four should probably be sub-pages of the Imperial Guard tactics; the Renegades and Heretics can contain all three variant lists (vanilla, Servants of Slaughter, Servants of Decay) since they share most of their units in common (the only differences are e.g. Servants of Decay get Plague Marines, etc.). --Not LongPoster Again 22:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

Alright, I made a new page for the new tactica with working links. Please fill that one in. Biggus Berrus 11:02, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

Frontpage edit request

The front page is locked, and currently has two screens of "news" that is over six months old. Could someone who has TEH POWAH move the 'quick links' and 'about' sections back to the top where noobs will see them without having to scroll down? --NotBrandX 14:16, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

I agree. Old news is old. I think it should be organised as About -> Quick Links -> Conduct in descending order. --Dr. Thompson 14:48, 4 February 2013 (UTC)

The news is now new but I've put the quicklinks over it anyway, it will make it more accessible for new users.--Wikifag (talk) 02:27, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Proposal for a new namespace

As we all know, /tg/ loves its quests, but recently people have been making articles for quests and collective games (e.g. Hormissar Gaunt) that aren't even a day old, and I think it might end up cluttering the wiki with quests most people haven't heard about. Thus, I propose making a new Quest mainspace that would function similarly to the Campaign namespace and serve a similar purpose.--Newerfag 22:38, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Or just use the Campaign namespace. The only difference between campaigns and quests that I can see is basically semantic -- quests generally have however many fa/tg/uys are in the thread controlling a single character, as opposed to the one-to-one PC-to-player correspondence of most RPG groups, but otherwise the experience is the same. --Not LongPoster Again 01:23, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

That works too, although it may cause a bit of confusion, since some people still see quests as a gray area of sorts between an RPG and a "choose-your-own-adventure" book. I'll wait for second opinions before moving pages around, though.--Newerfag 02:23, 20 January 2013 (UTC)

In my mind, Quests and RPG games are separate things. I vote for a Quest namespace - the idea of quest threads is a /tg/ tradition, and deserves its' own meta-coverage. --Dr. Thompson 13:59, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

As of very recently I've created a Quest namespace (and a Story namespace while I was at it). The Campaign namespace is marked noncontent, meaning it doesn't show up in counts of legit articles or by random page loading, since it's just intended as convenient accessible storage for people running small games - quests, on the other hand, ideally involve a much larger portion of the userbase and as they run directly on the board they get a lot more exposure and therefore more attention than the campaign namespace was intended for.--Wikifag (talk) 02:31, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

We need a Templates and Infoboxes page.

It's quite difficult to find a particular template on the wiki if you don't know its' exact name. I have to find articles where they're used and look at the source, then search for the name. I think we need a page on the wiki dedicated to listing and linking to the various templates in use, to speed up and smooth over wiki editing. --Dr. Thompson 07:32, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I should clarify: I'd be happy to make the thing, but I don't know whether the wiki wants it. --Dr. Thompson 14:41, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

We've got redlinks to a "Help:Template" page, which strikes me as an appropriate place for such a list (infoboxes are templates). If/when I get around to that page, I'll give it such a list, or you could make the page yourself with only the list, and let the instructions for making your own templates and so on get added later. --Not LongPoster Again 21:22, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I made a sorted list with this. I may make it more useful as a library later if no one else does. I also did not include a few that would not fit in any sort of list.--68.205.143.175 22:19, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

A new item for the neckbeard section

Wouldn't it be nice if we added a link to Dungeons:_the_Dragoning_40,000_7th_Edition there? It's a nice homebrew and it might increase the visibility of the article in the wiki.--190.50.164.16 20:01, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

On the one hand, I'm not sure it's this wiki's place to "endorse" homebrews. On the other hand, we're already linking to AdEva from the front page, so we'd better figure out some principle(s) for determining which projects get a link there. I'm thinking that having a polished rulebook (as both AdEva and D:tD do) is a good criterion (and need not be the only criterion); anyone else have comments? --AssistantWikifag 04:51, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

• I vote against front-page promotion. We need to avoid favoritism, as we're meant to be a (theoretically) impartial wiki. Either we promote them all or we promote none, and promoting them all would reduce the front page to a horrifying slurry. --Dr. Thompson 14:40, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

Fighting the Spam Gods

I've noticed on some of the spam bots that target this wiki, they seem to have no problem bypassing captcha's. Alongside the captcha, how about one of those 'Are you not a robot?' questions, but /tg/ geared? Maybe something like 'Matt _____ is the bane of our existence (fill in blank)' (Ive seen this on some forums, but I honestly don't know if this is even possible with a wiki) Might help cut down the spammers a bit. At least the non /tg/ related ones anyway. --Kerbobotat 00:17, 01 December 2012 (GMT)

• I second this motion. It seems like there's another dozen of those gibberish spam pages each day, despite Captcha.--Dr. Thompson 07:07, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

• Thirded. I'm an admin on another wiki, and I've seen something just like this. (Actually, it was worse- there were literally thousands of spambots; half of them copypasted passages from Twilight, and the other half wrote entirely in Chinese. At least the ones here post spam that makes sense.) The extension needed for the question thing is on this page.

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ConfirmEdit

If you can, try to install the Asirra captcha. It's image-based, so spambots will have a lot of trouble figuring it out.--Newerfag 07:21, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I actually tried to install Asirra before but I couldn't get it working properly. --Wikifag (talk) 03:58, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

The tricky part about anti-spam extensions is the balance between stopping spam and inconveniencing legitimate editors (including anons/IP addresses). The fact that questions cannot be automatically generated is also a hurdle (though if the questions are "niche" enough, that might not be such a big deal). Anyway, I'll email Wikifag about the idea (which should be straightforward, since we already have ConfirmEdit) -- the pace has definitely been picking up of late. --AssistantWikifag 21:42, 17 January 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to have to prompt Wiki Control again regarding anti-spambot measures. The bots have stepped up their game and they've started to shift the spam around using redirects. Has an "are you a robot?" question been implemented? --Dr. Thompson 07:38, 7 February 2013 (UTC)

FYI, the redirects thing is not new to this wiki.

When I posted before, I emailed Wikifag about it with a couple of sample questions; he said he's working on it. He mentioned that he's got some other wiki maintenance tasks on his plate, including a software update; it may be that he will implement QuestyCaptcha during that downtime. --AssistantWikifag 19:14, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Twenty-eight updates in the past ten hours. Eighteen of them were new spam, spambots making accounts, or admins deleting spam. [sobs internally] --NotBrandX (talk) 03:36, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

As of just about now I've switched our captcha implementation to QuestyCaptcha and given it a couple of questions easily solvable from info on the front page. I'm slightly wary of making any questions that a newcomer would find harder to track down the answers to because I'm hopelessly inclusive, but we'll see how it goes. Questy will be great as long as nobody specifically targets our site.--Wikifag (talk) 03:58, 11 March 2013 (UTC)

One-hundred and fourty-five updates in the past twenty-two hours; none of them spam or spam-related. Tears of joy are streaking down my face into my neckbeard. --NotBrandX (talk) 01:25, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

I too am overjoyed. Thanks for implementing Questy along with the rest of the overhaul, Wikifag. --Dr. Thompson (talk) 05:56, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

Works great. Though I was way overthinking the "What does /tg/ stand for" question. Biggus Berrus (talk) 11:27, 24 March 2013 (UTC)

Edits for language/swearing

I've noticed lately quite a few incidences of unregistered users replacing or deleting "offensive" language (especially the word fag/faggot). Thus far I have mostly refrained from reverting the edits; the word doesn't offend me personally in the context in which it is usually used but apparently someone feels it is worth their time to remove it whenever they see it. What is the consensus on this, should we support this "cleaning up" or revert it back to the original text? --Sonicology 20:59, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

• Whilst on the one hand the removal of particular offensive words doesn't really hurt anyone, this isn't Wikipedia. With the mountains of NSFW images and badly written but strangely boner-inducing fapfics, deleting words like 'faggot' seems utterly redundant, and ultimately is just editing for the sake of editing, which, IMO, should be prevented. But of course I'm no authority on the wiki so don't just take my opinion on it as the only one there is. --Luigi 00:03, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
  • My position on this is that if they're deleting it to improve the readability of the article then go nuts. If they're on some moral crusade and are just eviscerating articles without rewriting them then they can kindly go fuck themselves with a chainsword. --Petro 00:58, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
  • Yeah pretty much what Petro said, could you provide one or two examples of the language removal if you would be so kind Sonicology? It'd be good for us to see exactly how he's changing the articles. --Luigi 01:24, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Sure, it's kinda hard to find them sometimes because they get buried under other edits but here are a couple of recent examples: [1] [2] --Sonicology 10:08, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Thanks for those, yeah it seems as though he's just removing the rude language for the sake of the rude language, he doesn't make any efforts to clean up the rest of the article or improve anything else. So yeah, as Petro said, they can go fuck themselves with a chainsword. --Luigi 13:11, 2 February 2013 (UTC)
    • Looks like we are in agreement then, if I see these kind of edits again then I'll revert them. --Sonicology 08:34, 3 February 2013 (UTC)

Homebrew Roundup 2: The Revengening

A while back I tried to clean up the homebrew section but it's grown so massive and unwieldy I didn't end up accomplishing much beyond updating some links and generally flailing around. I think we really need to discuss a better way to organize them as a whole. For one some things just need to get fucked. I know notability isn't a big thing here but some articles have absolutely nothing beyond a one sentence blurb saying, "/tg/ talked about this at one point!". If we can't find any info on those we should just clean them out since they aren't really adding anything of value. Beyond that organizing the remaining brews into fully functional games (Adeptus Evangelion), Mostly finished games (VeloCity) and settings that either have minimal or no effective rulesets (CATastrophe). It's already set up this way in theory but it nobody really bothers to upkeep it. --Petro 20:18, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Additionally how would people and by people I mostly mean User:Wikifag feel about hosting copies of homebrews here. It would make 1d4chan a better resource and elminate the scourge of broken links. On the other hand keeping them up to date would be a major PITA and the bandwidth issues could be prohibitive. --Petro 20:23, 9 February 2013 (UTC)

Engine Heart

Hosting local copies of /tg/'s homebrews is something I used to do myself, but I lost a bunch at some point and then I've not been particularly active and didn't pick it up again. But what I have done in the last day is configure the wiki to enable PDF uploads and added an extension to thumbnail them so they can be treated like images in most respects. What would normally be full-view is instead a link to the PDF entire. I uploaded Engine Heart as a test - see right. But basically, now there's nothing to stop anyone from uploading the PDFs themselves, and them slapping them on the appropriate pages.--Wikifag (talk) 02:13, 12 March 2013 (UTC)

Spambots post below this line, plox

SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM! SPAM SPAM SPAM SPAM! LOVELY SPAM! WONDERFUL SPAM!