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10/10/2001

When a page is a recursive alias to itself, or references any such page, it can't be edited. Try A3, for example. When this is fixed I'd like to test A1->A2->A3->A1 :-)

--jvt

Actually, you can edit it. It just takes some URL editing. [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?edit=YourPageHere

--StormCrow

I know. That's how I made these test pages. The weird thing is: it was impossible to change them (there was always a message about someone else having modified the page before me). Actually this happened because of the 'Automatic' setting of Internet Explorer! Definitely a dangerous setting.

--jvt

Actually, I was thinking about denying people to create two step aliases (a1->a2->a3), i.e. only direct aliases would be allowed (a1->a2). Do we need multi-step aliasing? Considering the implications on future database layouts it seems an unnecessary obstacle. For casual visitors a1->a2->a3 is the same as a1->a3 anyway.

I have disabled multi-step aliases now. --Arno



10/10/2001

When doing a full text search with results, the following warning appears above the results list. --Dieter

Warning: Missing argument 2 for makepagehash() in /home/ahollosi/senseis/lib/mysql.php on line 87

Oops. I missed that in my tests, when I did the alias update. I shall fix this tonight. --Arno

09/10/01

On other Wikis, they often have several indexes - sort of various contents pages which give various different ways of 'entering' the wiki. What are your thoughts on Wiki Indexes?

--MortenPahle

6 oct 2001

BIIIG improvement, that alias option. Footnodes also warmly welcomed. One question: suppose someone thinks initiative is a synonym for sente and creates an alias. Later someone else disagrees, for some reason, and wants to create a separate initiative? page with references to sente. Can we undo aliases ?

--DieterVerhofstadt

I think yes. [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?edit=FarmersHat

--unkx80

unkx80 is right. Just edit the page and set its pagetype to something other than 'Alias'. Aliases are stored and treated just like regular pages with the exception that they fetch their content from the page they are referring to. The only drawback right now is that if you link to FarmersHat (which is an alias for TheFarmersHat) from e.g. SandBox, then SandBox will not be shown as referring link in TheFarmersHat. I will correct this in the future, but for now aliases are good enough. --ArnoHollosi



5 octobre 2001, 19:06 GMT+1

Arno, is there a way to jump to a section on the same page, like in html ? I know the best thing is probably to create separate pages, but in BasicInstinct I am tempted to make it one long page. --Dieter

Not as of yet. Actually, I thought about implementing footnodes, which are part of many other wikis and kind of useful. These footnodes could be "misused" for your purpose. Maybe I implement them today. I'll keep you informed. --Arno



Question Is there a file for typesetting go diagrams in LaTeX ? Please reply here or on my wiki ([ext] http://www.weaki.org) escape?

There are several. I saw one once which took input as ascii diagrams rather like the ones used here, but it's more usual to take input as sgf. See [ext] http://match.stanford.edu/bump/sgf2tex.html for one example.

-- Matthew Woodcraft


What do you all think of implementing a sort of <BR Clear="All">, either as part of % % % (e.g. %%&) and/or as part of ---- (e.g. ---&)? See e.g. Other corner plays for somewhere it may be useful.

--Morten

Ok. I have added clear=all within the style-sheet for every <hr>. --Arno


Also, could it be made possible to specify that a part of the text should come under rather than next to the diagram? Often, one will have some text that is specifically about 1 diagram, and other that is more general. For example, in my joseki pieces, I'd like to have the 'bottom header' under the last diagram rather than as a second paragraph next to it.

One possibility to do this could be to use $$ without any further text for this purpose - introducing an empty diagram.

-- AndreEngels

You can use a horizontal ruler (------) for forcing text below a diagram. --Arno

No, that does not work. If I put in a horizontal ruler, the ruler and the text below it are still put next to the diagram. -- Andre

Odd - it works with every browser I use (NS4.6, Mozilla, Konqueror). Which browser are you using? (If you have a look at the HTML you see that at the top there's a style sheet defining <hr> to do a "clear left". --Arno

I use Netscape Communicator 4.7 for X-Windows. I normally surf with stylesheets disabled, but that appears not to be the reason - with stylesheets on, I still get the same problem. --Andre

I assume that you have Javascript turned off? NS doesn't do style-sheets unless javascript is enabled. Anyway, SL is now inserting a <br clear=all> in front of every <hr> (----), so it should work with your configuration as well. --Arno

Yes, that would explain it. I have standard JavaScript turned off - there are many sits of which the JavaScript tends to crash my browser. Thanks for solving the problem! -- Andre



DaveSigaty: Morton, Arno - help! I posted this same message on OngoingGame. I redid/reduced the archive pages (they are sitting at the bottom of OngoingOneMovesOnetoTen). But I did not know whether there would be any problem if I deleted the path aready on OngoingGame and substituted another. Is it that easy? The new pages are not yet set as path pages. If you could move them or let me know that it is OK, I will make sure that we don't lose any new analysis added on the old pages over the next few days.

Paths are just another way of linking to pages. If you remove the path links in OnGoingGame then you do just that: you remove the links to the pages. The pages themselves are not affected. So there is no problem when you delete the old and add the new links. --ArnoHollosi


I noticed that there wasn't much flexibility when listing the pages in a path. (for example you can have some random words point to a subject) Is this a necessary parsing evil? Perhaps it could get tacked waaaay down on the wish list?

Aside from those gripes, SL is wooonderful. A great learning tool. --FCS

Path's function by marking links with "[>". The program logic then parses the page and generates the path in the order the pages appear on the page. You don't have to put the links into alist or whatever. So, what else would you like to see? --ArnoHollosi


BTW, i love the new "minor edit" check box. Now i can fix those absolutely insignificant English spelling quirks without feeling like an absolute jackass about it... -- TakeNGive (11k)

I find the newly implemented "boxes with arrows" top indicate links outside SL very nice.

By the way, the letter U in unkx80 is not meant to be captialized...

--unkx80


SGF, SLF and Java:

a couple of suggestions:

  • one idea might be to allow the inclusion of the problematic java applet in pages. if a page source includes an SGF record, your parsing engine would embed the applet and pass the SGF to it. this is really quite easy to do, and i can help you if you wish. obviously, diagrams are better than an applet in most cases, but it might be an idea to start off a section with a sample problem.

-- adum

What about hyperlinking the diagram images to an sgf file? This would be great for all of the examples that say "try it out for yourself". It could be easily done with the AW and AB tokens of sgf.

-- SifuEric

That could indeed be a good idea for users who want to try out in an SGF editor. Like you say, just putting the position (and static markup) into an SGF file is easy. Putting a sequence of moves (1-10) into the file is also possible. I will have a look at it. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this? -- MortenPahle

TakeNGive: I think most browsers can be configured to invoke your favorite .sgf editor ([ext] Jansteen's SGF - WWW suggestion), or maybe to call something like the Good Shape applet generator (at www.playgo.to/), or something like the one at Go Problems . com. It might be a good idea -- sometimes it's a pain to "edit" then "cancel edit" the wiki page just to copy-n-paste the diagram to WinMGT; and the limitation to ten numbered stones is sometimes frustrating. So, it might often be nice to link to the .sgf file (which would be on our own web- or ftp-space, i assume? xmp.net doesn't want us all uploading weirdly named .sgf files, do you?). But, this is another level of complexity and technical expertise, kind of getting away from the poetic simplicity that is Wiki. And, if the .sgf files i contribute are hosted on my webspace, how are the rest of you folks going to edit them? It's a nice option, maybe, but i'm not sure. What do others think?

ArnoHollosi: we will add SGF files of the diagrams themselves Really Soon (TM) (which will solve the copy-n-paste issue). I'm not in favour of allowing arbitrary SGF files (not connected to diagrams) - this would deter from the discussion on the pages - I'd like to keep wiki as simple as possible. But far more important: you can bet that these SGF files would be constantly broken. As maintainer of the GTL I see every day how buggy SGF editors are, especially if they are dealing with variations.

As for the 10 move limit in diagrams: it has its benefits as well. Diagrams remain readable. It's exhausting to read a diagram with 50 moves in it, no? What do others think about that issue?

DieterVerhofstadt: Not only that, Arno, but you'll have to introduce special characters to stretch beyond 10. Again this goes against the idea of keeping it as simple and intuitive as possible. The 10-limit has only drawbacks for the contributor, who is forced to make it more readable to the readers. Not really a drawback.

TakeNGive (11k): How about putting a .sgf validator on the GTL and SL sites? A webpage with a form where we "paste" the game file, and when we press "submit", the validator reads the file, and outputs a page with any illegal or deprecated code flagged (and maybe a brief explanation of what's wrong).

There is an SGF validator at [ext] http://www.red-bean.com/sgf/sgfc/munch.html - SGFC is the "official" SGF syntax checker. But I don't think that it would make things any better. Although SGFC can fix many errors on its own, you have to have knowledge of SGF to understand what you are doing. And I don't think that people have that kind of knowledge. Also, let me repeat this, I don't think that allowing posting of SGf files would benefit this site. It would split up the discussion between SGf files and the text on the page. I don't think that this is a good idea. If you like to provide gamerecords as SGF just put them on your site and link them from here. --ArnoHollosi

I just noticed that the sgf's of the diagrams has been implemented. This is a nice feature and really helps with analysis. Well done! Note however, the generated files seem to have a bug in translating letters in diagrams. The letter 'a' seems to be replaced by another letter. --DaveSigaty

Thanks for the validator link, Arno. I agree that posting SGF files here would probably be contrary to Wiki simplicity. -- TakeNGive

About letters in SL-generated SGF: it is not a bug in the SGF file, but in MGT. For example if you have two letters 'a' and 'b' it will be coded as "LB[lb:b][pa:a]". MGT interprets this as "LB[lb][pa]", (letters following ":" are ignored, they are assigned automatically in alphabetical order). It could be fixed in most cases by keeping the alphabetical order of letters (unless the first letter is not 'a'). Another suggestion: it would be nice to add PL[W] or PL[B] to the setup according to the first player. --jvt

I think you can turn off the automatic letter assignments in WinMGT. I'm pretty sure that it is a checkbox in the "options" or "preferences" dialogue box. --TakeNGive



AOK now. Thanks, Morten. :-)

-- Bill Spight


Stefan:
I can't make the 'Life and Death' path work for the last 3 added items (CombFormation and the likes). I have looked at HowPathsWork, but didn't find the answer.

Pardon my ignorance, but I want to properly learn Wiki with a minimum of 'learning by thrashing around and messing the place up'.

MortenPahle:

Hmm. Normal links recognise the [often a long title|!pagename] syntax, but for 'pathlinks' the added '>' seems to make the parser confused. If you look at the other links on that page, you will see that we have sort of 'given in' and just used the normal [!>pagename with many words] syntax. I will have to have a closer look to see if this problem can easily be overcome. (As you can see, there's a similar 'bug' with the way the '!' is used to ignore links.)

ArnoHollosi: I have fixed the path bug. To Morten: '!' only acts as "ignore link" if the next word would really be a link, e.g. !Word is not a link, thus the '!' remains, but TwoWords would be a link and '!' in front of it prevents this (and is thus not shown).



I created the SnowhiteInTheDarkWoods page just by writing [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?SnowhiteInTheDarkWoods in a program which interprets hyperlinks and then clicking on it. So after all there is a backdoor through which you can create pages without referring to them elsewhere on SL.

DieterVerhofstadt

You could also have done the same just by editing the URL location in your browser to a non-existing page. It implies that if someone wants, they can through a script create many new SL pages without any content.

However, unless something is actually written in them and saved, the page is not actually created or added to the archive, so there is no real danger there.

--Morten

Well, I could easily prevent this behaviour. Actually I think it is *very* bad, because once the page drops off RecentChanges, it won't be linked from anywhere and people will only find it through the search function. Which means most people will never visit the page again. I don't encourage this type of creating pages at all. Think of the over 1000 pages here all being created like this. And none of them linked. --Arno

When I read about this I thought it was a nice capability which I did not know about previously. The reason I thought it sounded nice is that I recently lost some work when I found myself editing a page at the same time as another user. Contrary to expectation, in Internet Explorer 5.5 on Windows you do not recover your work if you hit the back button to return to the edit page. IE automatically refreshes the page and you end up editing the new page. So I thought that the ability to create unlinked pages as a first step would help when initially creating large(r) pages - with the minor edit box I can keep them off Recent Changes until I am ready. I can see the point about having a lot of unlinked pages lying around though. Is it possible to make an automatically generated 'Unlinked Pages' page similar to UndefinedPages? --DaveSigaty

Ouch. Sorry to hear about that. I have now changed the "concurrent updates" page to include the text of your changes. This should solve your problem on IE.

There are other ways to prevent this problem as well:

  • the page could be locked for 15 minutes if someone presses "edit". But that could be dangerous, as some web-spiders follow every link and thus would lock all pages when they run across SL.
  • Instead of locking I could add a warning to the edit page, if someone pressed edit (And did not save yet) within the last 15 minutes. (I guess I'll implement this next).

About "Unlinked pages": yes, it would be possible, but it is quite expensive to compute with the current database schema. I look out for these pages every now and then. Right now there are not too many of them. --ArnoHollosi

For your first suggestion, I totally agree - just try going to [ext] Google and search for "unkx80", with the option of displaying all results (i.e. not to allow Google to omit similar results found in the search), and you know what I mean. SL is heavily spidered, man!

I would vote for the second suggestion. :-) --unkx80

I think the warning could give a lot of false positives. I frequently hit the edit button in order to copy something from one page that I am going to use on another. Additionally (maybe more often :-) hit 'edit' in order to add something to a page and then decide it really isn't worth it or doesn't really fit the discussion or the page. The 'cancel' button gets a workout on my machine but also I often just hit the back button. I don't think that you can pick up the latter, right? --DaveSigaty

I didn't think of that... but it's only 15 minutes, right? :-) --unkx80

It seems that the number of browsers this is a problem for is limited - most browsers nowadays do remember the text in the box if you press 'back'. (I thought that even on IE it was a user-selectable option) Also, concurrent edits don't happen that often that it's worth bothering users everytime they edit a page. Howabout just changing the 'Page has already been edited by someone else' page to also include the text (or maybe just a diff) that the user just wrote but couldn't save? That way everyone can copy it, even without using the 'back' button.

--Morten

I was using IE 5, then IE 5.5, and now IE 6, and I don't have this problem. :-)

On closer inspection I guess when you go to menu: Tools > Internet Options..., under the General tab, under the Temporary Internet Files box you click on the Settings... button (this brings up another dialog box) you have Every visit to the page selected. Am I right? If so, I think changing the option to Automatic does the trick. Then if you need to be absoulte sure of having the latest version of the page just hit the Refresh button.

Hope this helps. :-)

--unkx80

Actually that is what I thought would be the behavior because my browser setting is on "Automatic"! And usually this seems to be the case - the browser does not reload the page. However, most of the time the page hasn't been edited in the mean time. The one case that I am sure someone else edited it, the page was reloaded. I do not know how IE's "Automatic" setting works but if you read the help on it, it seems to adjust itself based on experience. Does it somehow test the pages in order to gain that experience? I have no idea.

In any case it happened to me once. I think the idea of putting the diff on the warning page sounds like a nice bit of added insurance. Actually SL is the one site I feel like having my browser set to "Every time" on so that when I go back to Recent Changes I know that I am absolutely up to date :-) --DaveSigaty

Then Dave, I'm sorry, I don't know exactly how it works either. But I'll agree that the warning page will still be useful. :-) --unkx80



2001-10-02 DaveSigaty: Did user preferences stop working yesterday on RecentChanges?

I have done a WikiMasterEdit of this page and stored the old page in OldGuineaPigsFeedBack. Unsolved issues and recent postings remained here. Non-technical stuff moved back to MetaDiscussion. --DieterVerhofstadt



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