![]() StartingPoints Referenced by
|
Guinea Pigs Feedback
Share your thoughts here. 12 September 2002 The syntax for getting paths to link up properly seems very touchy. One has to avoid linking to alias names of pages, also one must adopt the same spacing as in the page name ... anything else? Punctuation? I'm learning this in a hit-and-miss way. Arno: I will check this. Both linking to aliases and independence of spacing should be possible. If not I will fix it (most likely this weekend.) Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Arno: fixed. If you still experience problems, please let me know. 7 September 2002 Moonprince: Novice question here... if there is some place else that explains this already, please direct me, but I didn't find the answer I needed in the Wiki help pages about links/adding pages. I edited the KamiNoItte page, but no link showed up from my name to my personal page. I thought this happened automatically? Or was I supposed to do something to make that link occur? Thanks for bearing with a neophyte. unkx80: You have to add it manually, such as KamiNoItte or Kami No Itte. 7 September 2002 DaveSigaty: Something unusual seems to have happened sometime in the past to HikaruNoGoGames. If you look at the page history, it shows no updates from February 10, 2002 to June 1, 2002. Yet I know that I updated it in the mean time. In particular, I know that I added the one-colour Go game in chapter 120 prior to the time that the Hikaru No Go Gorgeous Character Guide came out in April 2002. I was surprised when Jan added it again but when I checked the history it did not show up. Could there have been a database problem sometime in the Spring? ArnoHollosi: Dave, I checked and to the best of my knowledge we do/did not have problems with the database. Apparently, HikaruNoGoGames was not edited in the period you mention. I find no trace anywhere. You edited several Hikaru related pages in that time frame. One mention of the one-colour go shows up on the HikaruNoGo page itself. Unfortunately, I don't have the web logs anymore to cross-check there. Can't help on this one. 2 september 2002 Dieter: I discovered that at the moment changes are not logged into RecentChanges when the same page afterwards is edited with the MinorEdit checkbox checked. Stefan: That's odd. I did exactly that (change "Yo Kagen 8 dan" to "Yo Kagen 9 dan", and it does show up. Arno: Dieter, the behaviour you describe is highly unlikely. That would imply that the MinorEdit function removes the entry from RecentChanges - howver that is not the case. I cannot reproduce this behaviour. Maybe your browser showed you a cached version of RecentChanges? Dieter: With hindsight it is likely but still rather coincidental that I only changed pages which I afterwards changed with a minor edit while sitting in front of a machine whose browser was caching whereas I usually do not. No big deal anyway. 25 August 2002
SAS: If you look at UndefinedPages, or the undefined page
Arno: I will look into the bug. About refreshing/caching: about 3-4 weeks ago I added caching code, which not only caches on the client side, but also caches the "wiki markup -> HTML" transformation result. The cache is cleared every 3 hours, or when the text of a page changes. Problems arise on pages like UndefinedPages which have a special token that generates output. As the page itself doesn't change (only the output of the token changes - the caching routine doesn't realize that), it doesn't update for 3 hours. This holds true as well, e.g. for the page counter on the FrontPage. The only exception to this is FullRecentChanges. I think that we can live with this 3 hour delay. It saves our small server's precious resources. If SL keeps growing like it did in the past year, we may have to move to another server. SAS: Yes, 3 hours would be okay. I couldn't refresh it even after a couple of days, but perhaps this was a browser problem (although it's one I've never seen before). Arno: fixed. 14 August 2002 What you think about making SL "multilingual"? We have now two pages, which are in german, because they are made only for german readers from KGS (FAQDeutscheEcke and LeereLeiter). I put an english notice at the top but this is not the best way, i think. Maybe it could be made that you have an possibility to give an PageLanguage? similar to the existing PageType? And it would be real great if we can add Pages with the same title but different Language for translations. What do you think about this? --benni
Arno: a multi-lingual wiki is not easy to set up. It would need some tweaking. Furthermore, I reckon that the different language versions will never be in sync. But that might not be a problem. There are some interesting usability questions, such as: how do you edit different language versions, etc. See I'm not sure that SL would benefit from more languages. Eventually, we would have to provide different RecentChanges pages for each language, different search pages, ... essentially separating the two or more language communities. If that is the eventual outcome, why not create a separate german wiki in the first place? And then let SL and the german wiki automatically provide links to the other site, if pagenames match. p.s. If there is enough interest I might be prodded into setting up other language wikis which can easily incorporate into SL and vice versa.
3 August 2002 SAS: I suppose it's futile to ask, given the reaction to my earlier request for ampersands, slashes and parentheses, but just for the record I would like to be able to use quotes ("), question marks (?) and exclamation marks (!) in page titles. In CrosscutThenExtend and CrosscutExtendWordingDiscussion I've had to resort to putting the title in the page text itself in order to write it in a way that makes sense. Arno: I'd like to hear comments from other people.
MortenPahle: In general: If it's a feature which may benefit a few pages after we have > 2200 'normal' ones, I tend to think a wiki engine update is not warranted. By-the-by, on the 'supposed futility' of your suggestion, I disagree. All comments and suggestions are welcomed and will, given the necessary participants, be discussed and considered. The fact that not all suggestions are taken up does not mean that future ones will not be.
Arno: Ok, added ".," to possible title characters. We are careful in introducing new characters, because we might need some characters for future extensions of the wiki engine. SAS: Thanks. 02 Aug 2002 TakeNGive: AtariGoAsATeachingMethod -- several lines seem to be cut from the end of the page in IE5 ... is there a maximum number of characters allowed in a wiki page that includes diagrams? Arno: Fixed. This was a bug in the caching routines I added recently. Should work now. 29 July 2002
AvatarDJFlux: Some time ago I set a password (which of course I promptly forgot...) for my WikiName. I did this from the computer at work. Then I noticed that if I edited anything from my computer at home my name didn't show up... Arno: sorry - was away for some days. The whole point of setting a password is of course, that noone else can use your name without the password. That's why your name no longer showed up at home, because you didn't set a password there. And after clearing the password at your work computer the same happened there. SL checks if the username is associated with a password, and if so, checks if the passowrd is there & correct. If not, the username is removed and not displayed. Password and username are stored in our db and in your cookie. Unfortunately, I can't tell you your password, because I store it encrypted in the database, without me (or anyone) being able to decrypt it. I have just deleted your user entry in our database, you should see your name again. Note: it is no longer password-protected. Set a new password if you like. You have to set it in both your locations. 20 July 2002 SAS: Only hyphens (-), apostrophes ('), and spaces ( ) are stripped out of page titles. But I've come across cases where it would be useful to strip out slashes (/) and ampersands (&). For example, Tengen/Tianyuan Match and Toyota & Denso Cup - currently I can't do these titles as I want, and the links are awkward to type. Stripping parentheses would probably be useful too. Arno: Hm. I don't see much difference between slash and hyphen. Is Tengen-Tianyuan Match much worse than the version with a slash? I'm not a fan of using ampersands instead of "And" either. What do other's think?
July 13th, 2002 KarlKnechtel: Reading through the BeginnerExercises series has got me thinking... is there any way we could have new PageTypes for problem/solution collections? It'd be similar to a Path, but with each problem also linking to a correspondingly named solution (and maybe also discussion) page, and solutions linked back to the current problem, as well as the previous and next. Just tossing out an idea :) Arno: certainly possible. We would need standard names then, like "Solution" and "Discussion". As this is already best practice it seems feasable. How do other deshis feel about this? I just browsed through some BeginnerExercises - jumping from problem to problem is easy as they are part of a path, after looking at the solution one needs to hit "back" on the browser and then one can proceed to the next problem. Karl's suggestion would eliminate one click and might be more intuitive for people who visit SL for the first time. OTOH it adds yet another feature. Comments? Morten: We can already intelligently guess the next problem page. E.g. Next problem?. Sometimes it might be a good idea to add links to other (similar) problems as well - this will have to be done manually. The value of an extra feature seems small. Maybe we should try to suggest the above as best practice instead of changing the backend? July 11th, 2002 unkx80: Hi Arno, version 482 of the SandBox produced the following error message:
Also, trying to create a new totally empty page (i.e. one that contains no characters at all, including spaces) generates the error message:
Saving an existing page but to make it totally empty in the edit causes the page to be unchanged, but RecentChanges marked it with an (diff [-74]) entry (the Test page). May I ask, are these bugs? Thank you. Arno: you may ask :o) The SandBox problem is caused by the line with '************'. That line creates a list, however a rather deep sub-sub-sub-.....-sub-sub-list. There is an artificial depth limit (10-fold nesting) for sublists in GoWiki. I forgot that when this limit is exceeded rendering of the page stops. Rather it should just not display the line or give an error in that line only. I'm going to update this. About the "empty page" problem: that looks like a bug. Creating an empty page does not make sense and should cause a proper information message. Removing all content from an existing page is not useful either. At least some information should be there, e.g. "page deleted". Stay tuned. unkx80: I see. Thanks. =) Arno: list-nesting fixed: shows error message inside page (see Sandbox version 482). Creating/deleting pages with empty content: text "No content" is inserted instead of showing an error or warning message. June 17th, 2002 alter Pedro:Can we make HTML comments on the edited pages? I couldn't find anything about that, and i think it would be a good feature to have. What do you guys think? Arno: why would you need HTML comments (e.g. <!-- comment -->), i.e. data that doesn't appear on the final page? As for embedding HTML in the pages I quote from TextFormattingRules:
alter Pedro: my idea was to have notes about future stuff to put on the page and notes to editors -- which don't really need to appear on the final page Stefan: In that case, don't be shy and put it on the page anyway. I marked many a page with the equivalent of a post-it note, as a reminder for future work or ideas to further develop pages. Sometimes I got really lucky and somebody else did the work for me :-) KarlKnechtel: I've noticed several static pages on SL like PagesByDistance which represent compilations of SL statistics. Is there any way that such pages could be made to update automatically? Even if the functionality were not available to the general public, it would be nice to see such pages always current. It'd have to be done something like how MostPopular is done, I guess - in the code. unkx80: I quote from Arno from the PagesByDistance page itself:
This should explain why. =) June, 15th, 2002
Schmorp: Thanks for fixing the & problem. As for entities: the encoding of a page is totally independent of the characters. XML (and thus HTML, but also earlier SGML-based HTML versions) is always Unicode, regardless of the encoding of the page (encode something in UTF-7 and be astonished that browsers have no problems displaying the page ;). AFAICS, all newer browsers actually do display correctly, except netscape 4 (which is old) which only displays all characters in utf-8 mode, which is due to a font limitation under X11 (no idea about windows), and opera, which gives a shit to I18n. ns6, mozilla and ie all work fine. Test it yourself on June 14th, 2002
TimHunt: Arno, look at
SAS: Another example: Arno: Hm, let's see:
Does this work for most people? HolIgor: Looks correct with IE6 under Windows XP. Empty squares with IE5 under Windows 95, but I don't have Asian fonts installed on that computer. Question marks with Netscape under Linux. The worst case. ChessWhiz: All I see are some black blocks. (I'm using IE 5) rmsp: Looks great, Arno! I'm using OmniWeb 4.1b7 and IE 5.1 in Mac OS X. Looks ok in both. unkx80: Looks excellent on IE 6 on Win2k, but the Chinese Qi is the wrong word? Should be this 棋. Think I'll re-work the Chinese Go Terms page soon to convert it to a form where everybody finds it easy to edit. =) DaveSigaty: In win95 I only have support for Japanese and Korean installed so the Chinese does not display properly. Both IE 5.5 and Opera 6.03 display them the same. BTW, is there a way to input the characters in hex? JWPce gives the unicode that way.
June 11th, 2002 Schmorp: It's impossible to generate ampersands (&) correctly, as they aren't correctly quoted when editing. As a sidenote, it would be cool to be able to enter real, unquoted entities, so one can add kanji characters here and there ;) Arno: Fixed. About Kanji characters: this would mean that the page had to be encoded in UTF-8, no? Some browsers (especially older ones) do not understand that and would mess up the page I assume. Show me an HTML that has Chinese, Korean, and Japanese chars on it using entities and I'll think about it. June 7th, 2002 DaveSigaty: What do people think of Ongoing Game 3? It is set up as a significant departure from OG and OG2. I propose that it should be renamed and that the "Ongoing Game..." title should be kept for our "standard" rengo format (even if we indulge in a special event such as a New Years game from time to time :-). HolIgor: The format of that game is usual. That's just an attempt to introduce coordinates in the diagram. The attempt failed. And that's the question worth consideration. Is it possible to produce a special kind of goban for the games? Sometimes I miss the ability refer to a move as P17, for example. Arno: coordinates are now possible (note: I still prefer using letters instead of referring to positions, but we will see how it turns out). I think the OngoingGame pages should only be used for rengo games. The rules at the top don't make too much sense (or just repeat the current best practice). Maybe we should set up a page called OngoingGameRules?? I suggest changing OngoingGame3 according to the SL style that has eveolved over the past. StormCrow: The autogen'd diagrams that show up when you do a preview don't show the coordinates yet. June 5th, 2002 ChessWhiz: When browsing the TeachingGames, I noticed something that's rather interesting... some game comments run down the page, and others run up! For example, in TeachingGame44, the latest move is at the top of the page. However, in TeachingGame66, the latest move is at the bottom of the list of moves for that diagram! Do we need to set a standard and WikiMasterEdit the game pages so they all run the same direction? BenShoemaker: I would love to improve the way the comments are associated with the games. I broke the game up into boards with 10 moves each, but there are still quite a few (too many?) comments per board. Using 1 board per move seems like a lot of overhead though... It would be nice if there were a slick way to associate a comment with a particular move, and have the page automatically break the game into chunks based on the comments. At the very least, I would be happy to conform to a standard so that reading a teaching game page would be simplified. Arno: how could this standard look like? How would you associate a comment with a move on the board? May 31, 2002 Arno mentions mirroring problem on WikiNews DaveSigaty: Arno, maybe it is time to update SLSnapshot for people who want to download SL? MrKoala: And maybe you should also put a link on the first page saying "Don't use mirroring scripts. Mirroring is bad. Keep out. Go there." and put a link to the SLSnapshot page, shouldn't you ? Arno: new snapshot online. I don't think that it will keep people from mirroring though. The first snapshot didn't deter them either. Oddly enough people don't learn it: there's a user from Italy whose script got blocked about 10 times. You would think that he realizes by the 3rd time that he should change his behaviour. And then there is this clever guy from Germany who tried to mirror SL, but had a bug in his script and downloaded the FrontPage about 80000 (in words: eighty-thousand) times, before realizing his error. Caused a meager 600MB of traffic, which our host has to pay. Apr 25, 2002 Scartol: Is it possible to change the font of the text-edit box? Editing diagrams would be so much easier if I could make this box a monospace font. For that matter, doing all my SL business in a mono font would be ugly, but certainly more practical. Yet it doesn't appear to be an option in UserPreferences. How come? Arno: Netscape, Mozilla, and Opera let you set the font that should be used for the editing box. I assume that's true for IE as well. Whichever of my browser I tried they all show the edit box as monospace font (maybe I set their preferences?). Anyway, I have now inserted a fixed style: courier font. That should solve the problem (verified on Mozilla & Opera). About your other problem:
MetaDiscussion currently has more than 32K text. Maybe your browser does not allow more text in a single textarea? I know that Bill reported problems with pages > 64K, of which there is only one: AtariGoAsATeachingMethod Apr 23, 2002 TakeNGive: I am perpetually perplexed about family names and given names, and not just when looking at Asian names (one successful American actor is named Phillip Michael Thomas, for example). Someone mentioned a way to make this clear -- simply listing the family name in ALL CAPS. Unless someone objects, I'd like to start arranging the NamesInGo page with family names capitalized, maybe early next month. Feedback? Also, what shall we do with names that properly could be listed in more than one place? Sunghwa Hong could go under Canada or Korea; Janice Kim could go under USA or Korea; Michael Redmond could go under Japan or USA; Go Seigen could go under China or Japan. Advice? MrKoala: I suppose it should be OK to put the names that can be listed in all the places they can be listed in, since they're going to be linked to the proper pages. Maybe put a skilful header explaining why some names are in different places. Maybe also add information about why a name is in the "Japan" section by adding the role this (wo)man hs played in the country. About the ALL CAPS thing, it is common use to put the family names in all caps. Though it is also common use to put the given name before the family name (except in Japan, where the family name preceeds the given name, e.g. "Shind?Hikaru") and should normally be enough. Another thing to take in account is that transcription of japanese words is usually lower case for genuine japanese words (hiragana syllabs) and upper case for (the numerous) foreign words (katakana syllabs), so it might lead to misinterpretation. But for the sake of comprehension, it might be a good idea anyway. Apr 21, 2002 Arno: About three months ago, we introduced that super-linebreak (4x%) which forces text below a diagram and the horizontal ruler (4x-) lost the ability to force text below a diagram. After three months and some checks, I'm convinced that we should partially undo this. I.e. keep the super-linebreak, but the horizontal ruler should have the ability to force text below a diagram again. I found no case where this might cause problems. Seeing 4x% in front of every 4x- just does not make sense. Opinions? (If there is no outcry I will change the behaviour accordingly). Dieter: Hello Vienna. Here Brussels. These are the votes from the Belgian jury. We approve. TakeNGive looks around Seattle and sees no objections. Apr 8, 2002 BenShoemaker I'm sometimes using IE6 or IE5.5 and had problems with "Preview". After modifying a page, clicking "Preview" shows me what my changes will look like. Great. But when I click "Back", it resets to the original content of the page. Instead of "Preview", I now use "Save". However, the other day I created a page, and mistakenly tried to change the Title (oops!) which created an error when I clicked "Save" and when I clicked "Back" to fix it, all my work was gone! Is there something I can change in my IE configuration that will fix this situation? I will try to take more care in the future, but it doesn't hurt to ask. Arno: I just tried with IE6 and can't reproduce this behaviour. Strange. I'm not sure what could cause this. Does anyone have an idea? If possible, I would like to fix this behaviour. Arno (20 Apr): I have redone "Preview" - you should no longer experience any problems. Mar 8, 2002 Gorobei: What am I doing wrong? I created a page named GradedGoProblemsForBeginners, editing the title to add spaces between the words, saved, but no spaces. Dieter: I think you didn't adjust the pagetitle in the appropriate box. Maybe you edited the title in the textbox. I adjusted it now for you. Arno: no, actually it was a bug that affected non-admins. Thanks for pointing it out, Gorobei. I have fixed it. Gorobei: ah, cool! I thought I was going insane. Is there any philosophical/Wiki reason why pages become unretitlable after the first edit? I've created a few badly titled pages in the last couple of days. Arno: sort of. I don't want to overload the edit page. Imagine your first visit to this wiki and the edit page sports some 20 option fields. Not very encouraging, or is it? Every text box or option more discourages people to change things (actually, I was not too happy about the three choice boxes on the right hand side, but I learned to live with them). I think that adjusting the page title is an "advanced" feature. Currently there are three user classes for SL: admins (Morten and me), librarians (another handful of people - not allowed to delete or lock pages), and the rest (not allowed to rename pages, revive old versions, or adjust page titles). I agree that adjusting page titles might be an innocuous feature regular users would like to use as well. Maybe I add a setting to user preferences where you can set your experience level - if you set it to "experienced" then you are allowed to adjust page titles or other innocuous features. Or, maybe you advance to "experienced" after a certain number of edits or creation of new pages? ;o) (just kidding) Jan 6, 2002 - 16:05 GMT +1 Jan de Wit: When I tried to add a bookmark I got a page saying:
WikiFatalError?
Invalid admin password.
Please go back and correct it.
But as I type this, Arno has fixed it already!! Now I've become an admin?? Arno: you're no longer an admin. Sorry Jan :o) Silly me, doesn't know the difference between '==' and '='. Jan: That's what you get for using an untyped language... Anyway, thanks for my fifteen minutes of fame :-) Jan 6, 2002 - 13:05 GMT +1 Jan De Wit: Preview seems to work OK for me (IE 5.5 on Win'98). Great work, Arno! Tomorrow I'll try it out on Netscape 4.78 on Solaris... It works! By the way, on the editing page, the background color differs slightly from the color of the box around the Save, Cancel and Preview buttons. I noticed it on Win'98 too but ascribed it to the dirtyness of my monitor. It's not very important, but it not esthetically pleasing either :-) Arno: I am most ashamed for providing you with a less than excellent experience. I shall wallow in pity until this unpleasing sight has been exterminated. Jan. 5, '02 BillSpight: Again, I was unable to edit this page with Netscape. I know that, in a sense, that is Netscape's problem, but it still bugs me. unkx80: I have used Netscape 6.2.1 on Windows 2000 to add this line. No problems, though. Bill: I'm stuck with 4.7.2 by my ISP. :-( Jan 4, 2002 - 22:45 GMT+1 Jan De Wit: Minor feature request: could the Minor Edit checkbox be moved closer to the Save button, please? I find myself scrolling up and down the editing page rather a lot. And logically related elements should be IMHO be grouped together. TakeNGive seconds Jan's motion. Arno: done. Previous chatter on Guinea Pigs FeedBack Up To 2002 This is a copy of the living page "Guinea Pigs Feedback" at Sensei's Library. (C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0. |