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Share your thoughts here.
--MortenPahle, ArnoHollosi


Wiki is an outstanding application and it seems it was easily extended to manage a Go site.

  • A non technical point that disturb me is the name LibraryLobby, the word Lobby is not a word with a good background... Could it be Library Discussion or Sensei Discussion

i like this idea a lot. well implemented, too. a couple of suggestions:

  • give people at least the option to enter their name/handle on each edit. that way, looking at the diff history (CVS driven?) you can see who did what.
  • 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

Names can be set via UserPreferences now. --ArnoHollosi


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


I have already sent some things by email, but I now have a few Keywords I would like to see added:

  • Rules
  • Shape

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

Keywords added. 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


How do you delete a page once you create it? I created one page before I found the information somewhere else. --DanNotestein


Hi Dan.
Actually, there's no real way for you to do this. What you can do is to delete the links you made to the new page, that way it will be in essence no longer visible. If you send us an email we can perform the actual 'deletion', but there's no real need to do so.

--MortenPahle


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


It would be nice if there was an "intermediate" difficulty added to the list of page keywords... people are really hesitant to jump to "advanced" yet some things are clearly not beginner subjects.

Also, 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


JanDeWit writes: Out of curiosity, when did SL start? I figure it must be the beginning of November 2000 (digging around for the page which changed the longest time ago).

Do you know what (kind & amount of) people lurk here? It would be nice to lure them into contributing (both for theirs and the site's sake!)

MortenPahle: Hmm :-) For the records, I will try to put some things up on SLHistory.
About who goes here, that is a question we will never really know the answer to. You can see many of those who post here from their HomePages, but not all. In this respect, SL is even more anonymous than Usenet. We don't have a visible hitcounter, but server statistics show that there are around 600 pages served each day - last week around 300 distinct hosts were served. As noted before - the most popular page is by far the RecentChanges page - followed by StartingPoints and OngoingGame.
As for getting more people to contribute - that may come with time. There are times when even I don't feel like I have anything to contribute with...
One thing we were hoping for but which hasn't really happened was to attract some discussion like on rec.games.go here - that is what other wikis are full of. But it may happen in time.
Then again, OngoingGame was something we didn't foresee :-)
In short, SL will morph into whatever it becomes - SL 'belongs to' all of its contributors.
This is going a bit off-topic - add your thoughts to MetaDiscussion or FutureOfSL :-)


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, can't they? Or maybe to call something like the Good Shape applet generator (at www.playgo.to/), or something like the one at Go Problems . com (which is giving me fits lately, for some reason). 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 almost 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.


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.

However, these few days, as one of the RecentChangesJunkies, I noticed that the RecentChanges page don't seem to work properly. It contains lots of duplications, making the RecentChanges list unnecessarily long. Can the people maintaining SL please fix it? Thanks.

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

--unkx80

unkx80, It is actually done on purpose and has been announced by Arno on the WikiNews page. He asked to give our opinions in the MetaDiscussion. Strange that you missed it, as a RecentChangesJunkie # : - 7

--DieterVerhofstadt

Dieter is right. Also look at this suggestion - is this more readable? --Arno

Ah yes! The format suggested above is much better. Thanks! I guess that because the RecentChanges page got so cluttered that I am not able to keep track of which pages I have visited correctly (sometimes I rely on the colour of the link - visited ones give a purple colour instead of blue).

--unkx80

I also think that the suggested format above is an improvement and should be tried. --DaveSigaty

I like it, too. :-) -- Tom Bueno

And a vote from Dieter

Stefan thinks it's grrrreat!


ArnoHollosi said earlier,

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.

This give me an idea. 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).

I'm not a programmer, and i don't know how easy it would be to do this. Maybe you can use some code from goproblems.com -- before a problem can be posted, it has to go through a check.
--TakeNGive (11k)

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

SingingPraiseToTheLibrary. --HolIgor

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. (The SGF brackets are interpreted as links. Sorry, I don't know which escape character to use.) --jvt

Use two [[ in a row, jvt. I've corrected your text. --Arno

(the below is moved from MetaDiscussion)

Is it just my browser, or does the SqueezeTesuji page really run too far to the right to be completely readable? For info I am using Micro$oft Explorer under Window$ 95 here.

--$tefan

It doesn't wordwrap for me with either Internet Explorer or Netscape.

-- Bill Spight

The text which is not wrapping is (for those who know HTML) <PRE> formatted text. By default it does not wrap since it is preformatted. It was my intention to make this text stand out, since it is a note outside the actual text on the page, so I used the preformat method (which on SL is invoked by starting a line with a space). Knowing it wouldn't wrap, I inserted a hard line break, but on narrow windows (800 pixels or less) the lines are still too long - hence the effect as we see it. One way out of this is to use the ';:' as described at the bottom of TextFormattingrules for comments like these instead. I have changed the SqueezeTesuji page to reflect this.

--MortenPahle

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.)

(the above is moved from MetaDiscussion)



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