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Guinea Pigs Feedbackupto 2002
   

This is a repository for some of the Guinea Pig Feedback from the end of 2001 up to the new year. It has been copied, not edited in any way, from GuineaPigsFeedBack.


Dec 28, 2001 - 16:00 GMT+8

unkx80: Hi Arno and Morten, when I try to view some of the old pages (i.e. those pages whose version aren't the most current), I get an error message "Image file missing!". Examples are phpwiki:?PGB131:v4, phpwiki:?NamelessTesuji:v7 and phpwiki:?BigQuestionMarkProblem8:v17. Can you please fix this? Thank you.

I hope I am not asking too much, but I guess it would be nice if there is some feature in SL that can detect incorrectly formatted diagrams and inform the contributor as he/she edits pages in SL. :-)

ArnoHollosi: I know about that. Actually, it happened by accident. The image files are created when you save a page. To make sure that the old diagrams don't fill up our hard disk the program removes all diagrams no longer referenced by current pages. Thus archive pages contain diagrams which are no longer on the disk. In that case the GoWiki engine gives you this error and prints the diagram as text. I'm not fond of stroing all images ever created on SL. I try to think of something. Maybe I'll create those missing images 'on the fly'. Give me some time.

unkx80: Sure, and thanks again. :-)

Arno: OnTheFlyDiagrams added. This should solve your archive page problem. Added "Preview" too - does this work on all browsers? After you use preview you have to use the back button and save the page. Either Dieter or Stefan once reported that IE does reset the content of the text area. This would of course be rather bad.

unkx80: Right now both features works for me. Thank you again, Arno. :-)


Dec 19, 2001 - 15:44 GMT+1

Dieter: I edited BeginnerStudySection and was confronted with an old annoyance: the only way to prevent text from appearing next to the last diagram is by entering four - symbols. The problem is that maybe you are using those line symbols to indicate a new section in the page while your text belongs to the same section as the diagram. Stefan obviously entered some % symbols to work around this problem, but with screen fitting pages like SL this doesn't work. So, I would like to have another way to end diagram text.

Jan. 5, '02

BillSpight: It strikes me that when you make a new paragraph with two carriage returns, comme sa,

the new paragraph should be positioned below any preceding diagram.

You can use the %s for a new line without regard to the diagram.

Is that doable? Thanks. :-)

[Diagram]
Diag.: Thanks, Arno!


Very nice. :-)


Dec 3, 2001 - 15:09 GMT+1 Stefan: Arno, Morten - NewFeatureRequest?. Is it possible to define an alias for an URL? e.g. "JansteenSite" for the current [ext] http://gobase.org/ Motivation is some of us are adding lots of references to important external sites, and that some of these are at a high risk to change. More specifically I'm thinking of the Mindzine site, with all of John Fairbairn's excellent material. Now Dave and unkx80 have already cleaned up quite some broken links to Jan van der Steen's Go Heaven, but it would be nice if in the future we could change all outgoing links across SL by updating only one alias.

Arno: I'm not in favour of such a feature. It is not intuitive, i.e. if you don't read about it you wouldn't think of it (yes, I know that we have features like that already [1] - something I regret). How often would you use something like this? How many websites (I'm talking about the big ones) do really move? Some of them move maybe once every 5 years. Therefore, if sometime in the future one of the big sites moves and it becomes too much work to correct the links manually, I will do a search&replace directly in the database. I don't see the need for such a feature right now. (Me arguing against a new feature again :o)

Stefan: If you can do such a mass search/replace directly in the database upon request, than that one is covered. So consider this my NewFeatureRequestWithdrawal?. :-)

[1] I guess you are referring to footnodes[2]. I think they are not widely used yet. If you'd rather abolish that feature but are afraid it'll be too much work to keep the pages consistent, I'm ready for some library overtime. --Dieter

[2] Actually not :o) A feature I really regret is the possibility to name links which allow something like this[4] or that[5] or something like DieterVerhofstadt - I'm a hardcore purist[3], I know :o) --Arno

[3] Which reminds me of the quote "Oh, how I hate language puritans ! They never listen to what you say." - "Purists, not puritans." --Dieter

[4] Why do you hate it? Personally I like the flexibility and creativity it gives me to write nicely flowing sentences. (--Stefan)

[5] I simply love this feature! And I use it a lot while I am in SL. :-) --unkx80

5.a? Yeah, what he said. And him too. --TakeNGive

Perhaps adding a 'title' attribute to Wiki links, showing what the target is, would reduce the problem of uninformative or misleading link names. --Matthew Woodcraft


Nov. 1, 2001 - 13:50 PST

Why can't I edit AtariGoAsATeachingMethod?

--BillSpight

11.43 It is OK for me. I think this depends on the browser you use. It is an edit line after all and the page is huge. Some people would just set a limit for the number of symbols and will never allow you to exceed it for safety reasons. This is very popular among amateur programists.

Thanks for the tip. :-) Those darn amateur programmers at Netscape! ;-) Microsoft Internet Explorer worked. How depressing! --Bill

October 31, 2001 - 16:23 GMT+1 --Stefan: You make a good point about the elegant prinicple of linking to a page title, Arno, and if following Yi Ch'ang-ho will get you somewhere, AND it will appear as the page title, we have everything we need without $T.
(And all the best to Morten with the move to GMT+0)

October 31, 2001 Morten: (Dave, you are right - the 'will' in my message was a hypothetical will.) If the page title markup is only used for these cases, in practice it will always be possible to use the page title to link to that page. "Yi Ch'ang-ho", "YiChangHo", "YiChAngHo" and "y i cha-n'gh'o'" will all link to the page called YiChangHo, where e.g. a $T markup make sure that the displayed title is Yi Ch'ang-Ho. The only problems will occur if the page 'foo' has a markup '$T bar', where a later link [!bar] will not link to the page. This we can lock out by ignoring a 'manual' page title which doesn't 'fit' the real page title. (I.e. if the $T defined title, with spaces and '- removed does not fit the real page title, we ignore it). Anyway, I am in the middle of moving from France to the UK; so, like most of the 'real' work on SL, it will be Arno deciding & doing it ;^)

October 31, 2001

ArnoHollosi: it's already possible to have single-quotationmarks in links, e.g. Sensei's Library - we will add "-" too, so that you can use that in links as well (I guess it won't hurt). As for the title: having a different title can be confusing, at least for people who are used to other wikis. The idea that the page title is the one you use to link to the page is an essential feature of wiki. I'm not sure I'd like to break that up by introducing a title markup. We could go for the middle road: the page gets the title from its first "creation link", i.e. if I link to Yi Ch'ang-ho that's the page title. Later, any of the following will link to the same page (but always show "Yi Ch'ang-ho" as title): YiChangHo, YiChAngHo, y i cha-ngh''o' etc. I.e. all "'", "-", and spaces are removed, case insensitive matching for name. How about that?


2001-10-15
AdaGeek:
Why is there no "preview" feature to "edit"? This is the third or fourth Wiki that I have encountered and the others all had one.

I find the lack intimidating.

Currently it would be hard to implement a preview. This is true especially for the diagrams. I will put it on my todo list, but won't give it high priority. Just use "save" as your preview. At least this is what I do. Usually I edit/save pages up to three times, before I leave them like they are. --ArnoHollosi

My memory could be wrong, but I think we actually consciously decided against a preview to make page edits quicker - less buttons to click/confirm. In conjunction with the 'revive' link, you can always 'undo' later. --MortenPahle

What do you mean by the 'revive' link Morten? --DaveSigaty

If you open a page for editing, there is a 'revive' link at the bottom left which revives the old version of the page. It's a bit dangerous, because it can seriously mess up the wiki, but as a sort of 'I didn't want to write any of this' or an 'oops', it'll work. Try it out in the SandBox. --Morten

I guess one of the arguments for turning the preview option down, is that it would give a false feeling of safety to the person editing. Making him save his edits prevents the loss, caused by a sudden connection loss, and also it is better in mitigating the risk of concurrent edits. --Dieter

Usually I do not bother to preview (like now :-)). But when I do want a preview, I use Notepad in Windows. No problemo. --BillSpight

Oh, absolutely. And when I'm really in a hurry, I read the hexadecimal code. Black stone: 58; White stone: 4F; star point: 2C. See ? It's easy. #:-7 --Dieter


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


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



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


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


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


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

Arno: 2002-01-06: shortened GuineaPigsFeedback yet again. Moved some discussion to SGF at SL Discussion, deleted other stuff. Previous version: version204, diff



This is a copy of the living page "Guinea Pigs Feedbackupto 2002" at Sensei's Library.
(C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.