User talk:Uberfuzzy/Archive 5

New Timeline pages
I wasn't planning to do it, I was asking about changes someone else was making that created red links to non-existent timelines (part of the same issue of having different names for the timeline pages and the timeline link boxes). I expect to spend the next few weeks helping populate the Timerous Deeps and Gorowyn timelines; however, I was hoping someone else would set them up in keeping with traditions. --SwordMage 02:36, 10 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh, and I read over what you wrote about the timelines over on my page and understand what the design is. My problem these days is that the Greater Faydark/Kelethin, Darklight Woods, and Timorous Deep quest progressions don't fit the old model very well (and that model was breaking pretty badly in Antonica). In the last two cases, you are seeing 50-100 quests in a pretty logical progression all within the same zone, but with a much better defined movement from place to place. The problem is that a sidebar with that much information is too overwhelming to be useful (and you will notice that none of these timelines has sidebars).


 * For Darklight Woods and Timorous Deep, I think the best thing to do is just have a sidebar for each grouping of quests (in both cases, the progression takes the character to a camp with a number of quest givers with quests of the same level and overlapping targets, then moves the character on to the next camp). For instance I am thinking that there should be Timorous Deep sidebars for Chrykori Village, Trythec Loft, Pyrrin's Roost and Thulwun Station East, Gorowyn Beach and the Green Overlook, Mok Rent, etc; each one would have a manageable number of quests.


 * Of course, the other solution might be to split the timelines up into these smaller units. For instance, Timorous Deep could have a Chrykori Island Timeline (1-11), Gorowyn Beach Timeline (11-13), and Mok Rent Timeline (14-20). However, even these will be pretty big and I am not sure there is a similar split that makes sense in Darklight woods and GFay.


 * At this point I favor big timelines with localized or theme-based sidebars. I don't know if this is an issue that has been discussed to death or not and want to see what your take on all this is. (If there is a better place to put this discussion to widen the audience, feel free to move it there.) --SwordMage 09:52, 11 November 2007 (UTC)


 * I think you have valid points for all of your thoughts. We already have the precedence for splitting up Timelines into "series" chunks to make them more manageable. And the sidebar will get overwhelming for newer timelines. It wouldn't be that hard to put in at template for a series timeline but what about those that are quite short, perhaps only two quests long? At that point we then have to think about whether or not it's a useful addition on the small said, no? That or we need to simply be very careful about how we group the quests into series.--Kodia 13:37, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree, I was thinking sidebar units that were 10-20 quests long (for instance, combining the Pyrrin'r Roost (2) with the Thulwun Station East quests since you run into them as you are following the transition from Trythec Loft to the station ("War") and they have the same theme (helping with the battle at the station). --SwordMage 17:51, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

At the risk of opening up a whole *new* pandora's box, there's something I've been thinking about regarding timelines. Timelines in general just barely predate my arrival at EQ2i. I've always wondered why we don't call them "Quest Arcs" instead of Timelines. Would it be worth our effort to begin a wholesale transition to the term "quest arc" throughout the site to better describe what it is we're trying to distinguish? Let me know your thoughts. (And Happy Thanksgiving!).--Kodia 15:10, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I am not sure that "Quest Arcs" doesn't paint us into a corner as far as including quests related by time and location in the same sequence. Case in point: the Timorous Deep Timeline is (and I think should be all of the quests that carry a new player from the Chrykori Village beach through to level 20 and the flight to Butcherblock. There are probably 30 or 40 quest arcs within that timeline, most being 2-4 quests in length, with one being the arc from the beach through the first flight to Mok Rent (there is no successor main quest line on the third TD island). At least with a time line we can organize the whole set of 112 quests into a cohesive sequence. This same logic applies to the time lines in Darklight Woods, and other starting areas as well.
 * It seems that with the newer zones (starting in EoF if not before) there is a pretty natural progression through the zones and can be expressed in a single timeline (or a timeline with links to all the arcs, but I am not sure I like that). A good example is the Lesser Faydark Timeline. That sense of flow through the zone would be lost if individual quest arcs were in separate pages. --SwordMage 03:21, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

Quest template (prev/next links)
I almost hesitate to mention this since the QuestInformation template is so massive as it is, but I would love to see a prereqlist= quest list entry similar to the nextlist= next quest list entry. This in not so much because we will see many cases where two quests lead to the same quest (although there are some); rather, it is because we can then hand craft links (to get rid of the (Quest) suffix).

Case in point: Poaching the Poachers and Report to the Primary. Currently I could fix the Followed by entry in the first to get rid of the (Quest), but not the Preceded by entry in the second. --SwordMage 21:46, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
 * done. its called prelist --Uberfuzzy 06:43, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you. --SwordMage 08:25, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Oh, I would do it if I could, but in your copious free time would you update the description of prelist= in the documentation section on the Template:QuestInformation page (still reads like nextlist). And you might add to both the secondary use of turning "Curious Ore (Quest)" into "Curious Ore". --SwordMage 18:38, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I gotcher back. ;-)--Kodia 19:04, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
 * Thank you both, front and back.--SwordMage 19:12, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Category sorting
I've come here from Wikipedia, where  is a mainstay. I'm adjusting to how things are done here, and in some cases I agree with different category sortings in the same article (Category:Ancient Teachings Recipe Books sorted by recipe name, for example, once I figured it out). I do NOT agree that single letters should be the rule in ANY category sorting.  As categories get larger and more categories come into existence, it will only breed confusion  - Category:Userboxes, the M section being a prime example of the budding problem.

Template:User Conn Nutmeg is the only location template that doesn't spell out its state in the template title. I added Connecticut to its category sorting in an effort to keep it with Template:User Connecticut. I made an error in logic. My bad. J a n z e- N e k  ComsCons 01:28, 20 November 2007 (UTC)


 * At the risk of sounding reactionary, I don't see that, in general, we have a problem needing a solution. Part of the reason I say that is that I don't think category lists are as important a component of our Wiki as they are in Wikipedia -- from what I have seen, most of our information tends to organize in tree form; I haven't found myself searching categories very often, if at all, when the alphabetic ordering (what I assume you mean by single letter sorts) isn't adequate for my purposes.
 * I find special indexing pages (Wizard) a more useful construct for things like expressing concepts like spell families. And our quest timelines (Antonica Timeline or Timorous Deep Timeline) are another example of this (they give us a way of customizing the presentation to the needs of the specific timeline). --SwordMage 04:08, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Me 'n' my Idiocy - Oops!
Sorry about the mess I made with the collection quests - I'll try to pay a little better attention to what I'm doindg, as well as fixing my mistakes!

Please be patient, it's this crappy north-coast weather!

UPDATE - Okay, I think I've fixed my errors - feel free to use the cattle prod now.


 * Can it be a really big cattle prod?;-). No worries, mate. We have info. More info than we had before. And we have you to thank for it, so thankyou kindly, sir. That was a lot of work and we appreciate it. I've not reviewed everything, but regardless, we have information we didn't have before.--Kodia 03:19, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

All*Cats errors
Sorry about that Equip/Equipment thing - I really have no clue what I'm doing here, so if you see anything else I'm messing up, please let me know!

On a side note, I saw on your user page you're from Cleveland - I'm originally from Akron. =)

Eavie
 * its quite all right, thats why i said something, now you know :) alot of things are around here are kinda complex unless someone explains them. no worries. --Uberfuzzy 13:16, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Looking for a Critique
Just curious to see what a 'master Template crafter' like yerself thinks about my first attempt. I only want to see if you think I am doing this right, and what tips you can give me to correct any errors you see. Thanks!

Leading Article resolution
I take it from some of FzyBot's latest actions that a decision has been made on the Leading Article issue. If that is the case, it might be worth you and K making an official pronouncement on the subject for the edification of your adoring subjects.--SwordMage 03:06, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Working on it! I needed to get some chores done around the house first and make a pot of coffee. :) You should see an announcement within the hour.--Kodia 17:20, 1 December 2007 (UTC)

AutoImage by LootDB
I tried adding the in-game link for an item instead of uploading the image to give the AutoImage by LootDB a try. But something is wrong or I am doing it wrong. Check Arcane Gauntlets of Clouds please. Anyway, it looks it's an issue with items with a - in the link.
 * no, its not you, or the itemname. i've talked with the admin about that issue. it does that when his system hasnt generated an image for that item yet, or there was a problem getting the item data from the game. its going to happen on new stuff for a little while after they get added. we're working on the code to get them fixed sooner. this was meant to be a last resort fall back anyway. --Uberfuzzy 12:25, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Man, you are getting me crazy. I can upload the images, but I thought you guys wanted to save on web space. Now, this "was meant to be a last resort fall back"? I don't submit any info if I don't have the screenshot to be sure of what I am updating, so I can upload it. Maybe I should, since some effects are missing in LootDB. Again, that could be the same issue with the links. --Ahrien

ok, a) i think i fixed that problem with the link code images making bad links to lootdb. i think

b)let me reexplain, what i meant by "was meant to be a last resort fall back" was that the system checks to see if you told it to use an image, if that fails, it looks for PAGENAME.png, if that fails it looks for PAGENAME.jpg, if that fails... before now, we would have nothing at all, NOW tho, if the item code is in, it tries to get it from lootdb. we decided to do it like that, at the lowest priority, to not waste any images we already had, and to save some bandwith on lootdb's end (i'd like to state for the record, that this whole thing was HIS idea, not mine), also, because we have item codes for alot of older things, but no images.

c) we cant stop users from uploading images of examine windows, its just not possible, plus we need it for alot of things still (i'm almost done with the new equipment template i swear). but we want to make it easy to get the information in as many ways as possible. you could get the itemlink for something through various ways, and just submit a stub page with it, and be done. someone else can come along and start the template, using the itemlink and it'll pull from lootdb, saving you the trouble of going in game, using the link to bring up the window to get the data. --Uberfuzzy 18:57, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

What happened to this functionality? It's no longer working... It was very useful, even if in some cases the image was not showing the effects the item might have. --Ahrien 09:06, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I believe this is part of the same problem that's making our location links (The Loc template) not work too. wikia.com problems higher up the food chain and i believe they're aware of it.--Kodia 11:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
 * actually, no, its not connected, this time it was me forgetting to re-add the code that makes that work. it got reverted back when i installed the new equip template. fixed now. --Uberfuzzy 19:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

About the Robot: shield patch
Looks like now all shields can be used by All Adventurers. Check Flesh Protector for instance. Any chance the classes that can use a Shield will be shown properly? Is "shown" an english word anyway? -- Ahrien, 07/12/07 11:53 UTC
 * blast! i knew i forgot something. i'll have that fixed shortly. and yes, its an english word, i think. --Uberfuzzy 14:44, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * ok, done (i hope) --Uberfuzzy 15:26, 7 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes it's a fine proper bit of English. ;-)--Kodia 20:32, 7 December 2007 (UTC)

Blue sparkly image
Hiya - Demos here. I just uploaded the file 'BlueSparkly.jpg' for you to use. Enjoy!

D.--Piqat 04:21, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

Coding Question
I have a headache now from trying to figure this out, so I'll ask you:

When creating a Template, is it possible to make one of the user-defined variable be a number that defines the number of rows that a displayed table will have?

Okay, that may not have made sense, so let me give you my example: I would like to have a template for Tome Collections. I want the information to be displayed as a table. Since these CQs have a varying number of pages, I would need a varying number of rows for this table. I want to make one of the user-entered parameters be the total number of pages required, which would define the number of rows the table would have, then have the parameter for "members=" be setup to automatically know how to divide the info up into the table. For instance, I want 5 columns: Page#, way of obtaining (shiny, body drop, or clickable location), whether or not the page is NO-TRADE, and a Notes column (for LOCs and such). I wanted to see if it was possible to have the info be enetered as one line per page, seperated by a pipe or something to specify what goes in what column. The only problem is determining how many pages total there will be.

If this makes no sense to you, ignore it. If it does - TELL ME HOW! LOL!

Thanks! --Melf 01:19, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
 * hmm, kinda makes sense... show me what you would want the template call to look like, and i'll tell you if it CAN do that. --Uberfuzzy 01:56, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

Adding Tempsig to Templates
How do I add {/{UserTempSig|userid=gsp8181|username=gsp8181}} (Without the slash) to Template:User England without it showing up in the template on pages?


 * just put it inside the area, the problem was that the  on your user page was not wrapped in    so it was getting included there. --Uberfuzzy 17:01, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Coding
You da man!--Melf 10:38, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Recent Template Changes
Did you want to announce in the news panel some of the recent template changes or were you waiting for a big push to announce everything at once?--Kodia 13:51, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Just got your email. Will add shortly (after last holiday shopping).--Kodia 14:49, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Flags Field
Oh. I did not know this. Yet another of my obsessive/compulsove traits shining through! --Melf 06:03, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Vespid
Image uploaded as set by your parameters.

Question?
How do I add a redirect to a page? (i.e., I want to redirect the search "Recipes" to the existing page "Recipe Books")
 * note the : at the start start of the 2nd example, it makes sure its a link TO the category and not add the page to it. very important
 * --Uberfuzzy 02:21, 31 December 2007 (UTC)
 * note the : at the start start of the 2nd example, it makes sure its a link TO the category and not add the page to it. very important
 * --Uberfuzzy 02:21, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

AFK until Sunday afternoon
I completely forgot to tell you this but I'll be afk until Sunday afternoon. Cooking an authentic medieval feast for 200 of my closest friends on Saturday. :)--Kodia 15:43, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Back now. Survived. Need a massage and a bath. :)--Kodia 18:55, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Biting Newcomers
I recently noticed that you were rude to me on another admins talk page. I had left that message there in faith that the admin would return and answer my question per the text that was on the template at the top of the page I'll answer messages posted here as soon as I return.. One such as an admin should know that newcomers need to be shown the policies of the wiki. You are an admin and such act as such. Please take the time to read the following page. I think it could be of great use to you. Thanks.  ✬Dillard421✬ (talk • contribs)  09:29, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * look, i'm sorry you took it as rude, but i didnt know if maybe you had missed the afk banner at the top of her page, it has happened in the past where users ignore the "i'm going to be on vacation for 3 weeks" message and left notes to admins and got upset when they didnt answer.
 * thank you for that link, i've never actually read it before. it was very enlightening. i've never actually spent alot of time on wikipedia other then for school assignments, so i've never stopped to read all their policies. we do things very differently around here at eq2i. we're very lax on policies, infact, we're only now begining to draft official in-writing ones. PLEASE feel free to get in contact with kodia when she returns to discuss how you can be of help, i'm quite sure she could use the input.
 * i cant tell you to stay or go, thats your decision to make. i would hope you would stay and contribute more, but if you feel that you opinion of this site has degraded because 1 wiki page had some grammar you didnt like, then maybe this site isnt for you as there is alot of that. then again, you could stick around, put this behind us and help make it a better place.
 * --Uberfuzzy 10:57, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Dillard thankyou for pointing out that link again. It's always a good read. But keep in mind too that the "assume good faith" factor of wiki editing goes both ways. Merely pointing out that the message at the top of my talk page was big doesn't mean he was immediately saying "and you should have noticed it" or even that he was being rude. He merely stated that it was there. Would there be another way that might work better for these messages to appear? Would changing their color to a color other than gray make it easier for them to see? Would there be something else we could do to make them more obvious? We'd like to make sure our messages are seen and if you missed it, we'd very much like to make sure that people don't miss them in the future. How can we improve? We can only do that if we have some ideas from people who find things frustrating.--Kodia 19:00, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

File List
Those eqipment icons reminded me of something. Before the move to Wikia, it was possible to search for files in the File List. It made it easier to find duplicates of images or to find out if an image was already uploaded. Is there any possibility we could get this feature back? :) --Airlyth 09:36, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
 * was it just as search by name? or did it do something else? i'll pass it along to the wikia techy people tomorrow and see if they have something we can use. --Uberfuzzy 09:40, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I think it was just search by name. --Airlyth 09:57, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Guidelines Starting
First one is up (Categories), as the base info. I'm still combing through my Notebook of Doom (TM) but I though I'd specifically point this out so you could comment just to make sure I don't miss any info I might have buried.--Kodia 19:11, 10 January 2008 (UTC)
 * where should i leave comments?
 * Come chat on IRC with me (or AIM), send me email, or you can leave comments here. I'm not sure which place will work best for you.--Kodia 19:26, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

One thing I'd like to be sure we cover in that link are the way categories are currently structured and why we structure them that way. For example, we have list-style categories and we have maintenance-style categories. Do we want people to know about these another general styles of categories we have so they better understand them? More thoughts as well but I'm trying to figure out how to state what basis we have right now best for people.--Kodia 19:55, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Where can I obtain a RoK item...
Ok, there is something weird I have found checking my logs.

I have always thought that the named drops are exactly the same that the regular mobs drops, at least in the RoK open zones, but so far I didn't have any prove of this.

This migth have been because I was only updating in this wiki the drops from the nameds, paying no attention to the many treasure chests I get on a regular session. But today I found that the same Legendary item dropped from 2 nameds in Fens of Nathsar, so I went back to my logs and double checked the treasure loot.

Following is a couple of items I have found...

[Fri Nov 23 16:20:03 2007] You loot \aITEM -249976073 401901105:Arcane Band of Mirrors\/a from the Treasure Chest of a Gra'al Shul coercer in Kylong Plains (-1,515.44, 10.75, -162.68). [Sun Dec 02 15:36:12 2007] You loot \aITEM -249976073 401901105:Arcane Band of Mirrors\/a from the Treasure Chest of Purplequill in Fens of Nathsar (429.84, -42.77, 1,075.62).

[Wed Nov 21 22:59:42 2007] You loot \aITEM 1701493698 -588386258:Arcane Mantle of the Soldier\/a from the Ornate Chest of Widow Mistress Xalthera in Kylong Plains (376.13, 31.51, 183.69). [Fri Dec 07 14:21:45 2007] You loot \aITEM 1701493698 -588386258:Arcane Mantle of the Soldier\/a from the Treasure Chest of a crystal tender in Fens of Nathsar (-702.55, -32.96, 212.13).

The Arcane Band of Mirrors dropped from a treasure chest from a regular mob in KP AND from a treasure chest from a named in FoN. The Arcane Mantle of the Soldier dropped from a treasure chest from a regular mob in FoN AND from a ornate chest (but there was a legendary item in it also) from a named in KP.

So, the Obtain field from this last item, that now reads Obtain: From the Ornate Chest of Widow Mistress Xalthera in Kylong Plains.

should read Obtain: From the Treasure Chest of mobs in Rise of Kunark Zones.

How can I enter this "Rise of Kunark Zones"?
 * welcome to the wonderful world of sony's idea of expansion-wide loot tables, as if the zone-wide loot tables were bad enough to deal with.
 * try this for now

From the Treasure Chest of mobs in Rise of Kunark Zones
 * the dropped item template has many shortcoming we never really came across a good workaround or good code for, and then RoK happened and made things worse.
 * actually in general, RoK has been quite a pain around eq2i, many thing had be changed (blue stats, the whole zone/region issue, and now cross-zone loot drops)
 * --Uberfuzzy 15:57, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

"The" Feerrott
Well, I guess I learned my lesson on this one - no more Zone name changes. Too much work (for you!). --Melf 12:06, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * eh, its not that bad. i learned how to do alot of it when i moved Zek. and like alot of things i do, everytime i do it, i learn how to streamline the process down. i took better notes this time, and i'm working on a way to neerly automate the whole process.
 * in align with the edict "match the game" we DO plan on "fixing" all the zones eventually, we just didnt realize what that entailed with zones, so we put it off for a little bit.
 * next time, just drop me a line if you want/need a zone changed. or even start making a list of ones youd like to see done first.
 * --Uberfuzzy 12:13, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * LOL! I have already started a list!
 * --Melf 18:22, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

Template question
Evade still shows "Scout Evade spell line", no idea where this is linked... Actually it is a Brigands spell (added info in their spelline template) --Alinor 13:27, 14 January 2008 (UTC) nvm, found it. --Alinor 13:31, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

no23
I thought about adding it to the current version, but I wanted to change the color a bit (that black was glaring to me, heh) and then the text. Also, I converted it to be more modular -- I felt adding all the new fields to the current one would bloat it quite a bit. I have no problem with adding no23 to the current one. Do you want me to use the original one (and not the "2") to keep things 'consistent'? (But TBH where I'm looking at Warden Spells, the effects weren't even on them). --Lordebon 18:37, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
 * actually, go ahead and keep using yours doing what ever you were doing. i've got some other things i need to work on today. i'll try to get around to making the changes to the spellline stuff today/tomorrow. --Uberfuzzy 18:46, 14 January 2008 (UTC)