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Guinea Pigs' Feedback
Keywords: SL description
On this page you can share and discuss your thoughts about SL's technical features. An index for discussions on other topics is at the Library Lobby. 2002, August 17 Stefan: When I block an IP address (guess which one), I get en error message stating that the address cannot be blocked and is probably blocked already. It doesn't appear in the list though. Arno: fixed. Happened when there was an expired block of the same IP address in the database. 2003 August 10
unkx80: Add "Page info & history" into User Preferences, then go to Wiki Fatal Error No pagename passed into pageinfo Small bug here that could be fixed? Thanks. Arno: fixed. 2003 July 31 Frs: Using ">" indents nearby a diagram spoils SL's layout. (See 13X9Game01; nearby move 27.) Can you please bugfix it? Thank you! Arno: that's because the browser does not move a <div> section below a floating table. Any idea how to solve this? I'd rather not do a <br clear=all> before every indented line. Other suggestions? p.s. workaround: add the "super"-linebreak '% % % %' in front of the indented area. 2003 July 28 Confused: I'm a little confused about how RecentChanges and FullRecentChanges work. Could someone please explain to, why the recent changes to the Handicap page show up this way:
* (diff [0]) ..... 213.67.171.45 which indicates that the page has been altered by BillSpight and someone from 213.67.171.45. This is also confirmed by the page history, which gives July 27, 2003 - 20:25 as the date of the changes by 213.67.171.45. However, the edits done by 213.67.171.45 do not appear on the FullRecentChanges. How can this happen? Charles I think 'Full' relates to the inclusion of minor edits. Where a page is edited several times in one day, only the final edit may appear in the FullRecentChanges. Arno: Charles is right. 2003 July 25 Nacho: Is this the place for feature requests? If not, please forgive me (and let me know for next time :)). Anyway, I think it would be nice for us Recent Changes Junkies to have the exact time of a change in the Recent Changes page. I keep forgetting which was the last version of a page I saw, and end up reading the same things again and again... Thanks! Arno: I solve this problem by seeing which links I have visited and which ones are not visited yet. I feel adding the time would add too much clutter to the page. How do others feel about this? 2003 July 23 MarkD: Jason: You can add a link to your KGS rank graph or import it as an image into your homepage at SL. As far as I know there is no way to import other KGS information. That's not SLs fault, but KGS has no interface to support that data export. JasonD: Err, I've just got a question, and this seems to be the place to post it. Forgive me if its out-of-place. Anyhoo, is it possible for me to have my KGS player information directly imported into my SL page? It'd be nice if such dynamic features were there. I'm thinking not, but thought I'd ask. Thanks. --JasonD Bill: With the IE browser, I notice that the seki page text runs off the page to the right, with no slider, so I can't see the final few characters of each line. Other pages do not seem to act like that.
Bill: Possibly. I went there again, with the same result, but removing a carriage return or two in the first couple of lines seemed to do the trick. 2003 July 20
AshleyF Just noticed that character entities don't work within anchors. As in: Arno: true. Actually it would be kind of a hassle to add this to the code. Is this bug a problem? 2003 July 16
Froese?: I've made a new set of the stone inline-images. The originals looks like this
I've found no way to upload the set via the Wiki. It would be nice if someone could pick them from here Arno: uploaded - it took me some time, because I was busy&lazy at the same time during the last month. Froese?: Thank you. 2003 July 11 Deebster: When viewing recent changes, I prefer to read through them in an incremental order, as I suspect many do (as opposed to just reading the final page). Two small requests: Could the (new) text link to SomePage:v1 please?
Arno: done.
Also, when viewing a previous version, could there be a link to the current version? At the moment, the easiest way to do this is to follow the title link (?related=SomePage) and then using the link in "See also: page info and history of SomePage". Judging by how long the ?related pages take to load, they are fairly cpu-intensive, but it's easier for (us lazy) users than editing the url. unkx80: On a similar note, can I ask for the "Page Info" page to be made accessible from the page itself, rather than having to load the "Related Pages" first? Thank you.
Arno: it is already: see the bottom of the page. Alternatively see footnote 5 of UserPreferences (this is new).
July 1, 2003 Hu: I propose that a comment format, visible only when the page is edited, be introduced into Sensei's Library and would like to read discussion about it. When editing a page, I sometimes want to leave a note to the deshis about my reasoning for doing something. To leave a Messages to People Currently Present in the Library is often overkill, and that page could easily get bogged down with such messages as SL grows. For example, there was an editorial comment on the new William Shubert page about free software (or not). Since this had been addressed on the client page, I deleted it. I would have liked to be able to leave a brief note there saying that. In a few cases, I have left a note on a page in the text, including a request to remove the note when it has been read. A comment would be more graceful and just as effective for a deshi. -- Hu
David: I have also wanted to be able to put comments in pages.
Wikipedia seems to address this with
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If comments are adopted, they should be kept simple, for the sake of
the editors and developers of this wiki. I propose that a comment be
any line that starts with a single '%' (it must be only one '%' to
keep from interfering with the line break syntax).
Hu, I understand your edit. I
added the "but non-free"
comment only to complement the "and Free" comment in the
previous version. You are right that this
is discussed sufficiently on the referenced pages, so I have removed
the original comment also.
June 26, 2003
GoStone: would anyone like to comment on the thread in K5GS about creating a Go discussion forum?
Charles Well, I know what the wiki theorists say about 'thread mode' and 'document mode'. Where it might not apply to SL, is that we rather like signed contributions, because of the huge difference in levels (about 30 stones) of those who post here. By the way, we like that too. But the way it works out is that people sign and put their level on their home page, rather than keep repeating it (I wrote a page about this at Meatball,
So, I think I'd ask in more detail about the advantage to SL expected to accrue here. GoStone The utility of Wikis and discussion forums overlaps but neither is a subset of the other. A wiki builds up a static body of knowledge (in the sense that once well-written it remains as a reference) where a forum is more dynamic and temporary. A forum would be more suitable for blogging, playing games, forking discussions, making announcements. All the advantages of rec.games.go plus much more. Community moderation, web-based, diagrams, personal diaries/blogs etc. Integrating it with SL would allow common syntax, user-ids etc. and a one-stop shop for user-generated go content. It would increase the sense of community. Charles On the face of it, I agree with about 50% of that. We do for example have go blogs. We have games, but the support for those perhaps could do with some beefing up. The bit about community is important, for this wiki as for any other. But what is a little special for SL is the group of a dozen good amateur players who provide much of the technical content. A high proportion of that content isn't in fact rendered down. I don't know which way things might move in the future; but the current formula has definite attractions. By the way, there has been talk in the past about 'reference back end', but it seems inconclusive up to this point. GoStone SL is already doing a brilliant job. This feature would only increase its range and flexibility. I can see the cause for concern. A change like this would have the potential to radically alter the dynamic of the site which sounds risky when it currently works so well. Especially risky when you have personally made such effort to help make SL the success it is. Nevertheless I know that you are also a contributor to rec.games.go, the gotalk mailing list etc. and I think you would find a Scoop generated go-forum a natural and positive additional resource. Rather than losing community and content to the forum, the forum and the wiki would help generate content for each other; the forum providing commentary, the wiki summarising debate. The more closely linked they were the easier to flip between, and even copy and paste etc. Charles Trying to look at this the other way round - the Front Page here can claim to be minimal to do the job at all. So there must be plenty of scope to develop it, in several directions. Perhaps something that gets done once only, really. I think many here might inwardly groan at attracting some sorts of traffic (rec.games.go's more interminable debates, server trash talk and snidery, people whose only interest in go apparently is in skanking anime). My ears would prick up at any way to improve SL navigation - the ongoing problem. Or hypotheses at where this all leads. My guess is 20000 pages in 2007, and then exhaustion sets in. GoStone Well it's a fair point. I rarely bother with rec.games.go anymore, and I usually find it a fairly depressing experience if I do. By strange contrast I find kuro5hin.org quite addictive. There is certainly a lot of 'trash-talk' and a fair bit of snidery. But the out-and-out flame wars never seem to happen. And when debates become interminable, they are at least hidden inside a diary which you can easily ignore, and which will pass out of view fairly soon. I think this is the key. On the usenet it is easy to get hold of the wrong end of an argument because you often only see the tail end. So the embers of long dead arguments get fanned back into stupid life by late-comers. A Scoop site doesn't work like this. Also you wouldn't get spam or cross-posting from other newsgroups. I notice, in any case, that there are 212 SL pages that explicitly refer to rec.games.go. June 25, 2003 Dieter: I'm not in favour of the new feature to link to footnodes from outside that page. It complicates WME. If a WikiMasterEditor decides that a page has to be split up into several pages then footnodes constitute obvious separators. But relinking will prove to be a tedious task. Or am I missing some workaround ? DougRidgway: It seems to me that internal links would make a WME easier, not harder. If page P links to page Q, and you're splitting Q into Q1 and Q2, then knowing what part of page Q page P is referring to helps you figure out whether to change the link to Q1 or Q2. Dieter: I see now what I may be missing. If a page P refers to a footnode within a page Q, will P then be listed among the pages referring to Q ? Charles Currently, it seems not. See for example the uchikomi #2 link from jubango handicaps. Perhaps Arno can look into this. Arno: fixed. June 21, 2003 Dieter: Arno, what's the feasibility of doing searches on shapes ? Arno: To be honest: I don't know - maybe I'll find time this summer. Currently I'm writing an NNTP interface to SL (instead of [or should I say before I do] an RSS feed). I got sidetracked which resulted in a large refactoring of the code - still testing. June 11, 2003: unkx80: Seems that the domain xmp.net went down again. I wonder whether it is a good idea to bookmark the alternative URL http://senseis.hexdust.net/ ? Arno: I don't care if you bookmark it, but please don't link to it from a webpage. I plan to set up my own DNS servers - however that change may take a week or so. unkx80: Point taken, thanks. June 8, 2003: Charles Arno, thanks for the very useful change to AdvancedFindPage. What is the smart way to interchange a page title and an existing alias name? Arno: rename the alias page to a temporary name, rename the page to the original alias name, rename the alias page to the original page name. Even if the backend tells you to be careful with links etc. it should work. Charles Yes, that works, even if it feels unnatural. Thanks. June 2, 2003: mAsterdam: Hi Arno. A header with just a link doesn't render properly anymore? It did just a few days ago. (For instance the 'eye space' header at Priority. BTW1 Thanks for the keyword change. BTW2 Thanks for the goban :-) (Later) Aah, new text formatting rules. A space between the exclamation mark and the left texthook does the trick. May 28, 2003: Grauniad: What about a "software" keyword? This would describe many pages that don't fit under any other keyword. (Or has this been discussed before?) Charles: My feeling is that software isn't a concept with a direct relation to go. mAsterdam: Neither are Rules, Question?, Culture and history?, Proverb, nor Opening, Middlegame and Endgame or even Attack and defense, Tactics and Problem - they could relate to a lot (of games). I don't know how many pages relate to Software - Go-software, of course. If it helps it helps. Software as a keyword fits nicely with Book, Equipment, Clubs and Places?. Charles Of course I'm arguing otherwise: go rules are integral to go. Discussion of go software seems to me to be mainly about software. Dieter: Agree with mAsterdam. I vote for the keyword software or otherwise computer. mAsterdam: Oops. I just wanted to refute the 'direct relation' argument. In order to be in favor of a keyword software I 'ld want to know how many pages would benefit. I would not mind, though. Charles The same kind of point is mentioned below (April 23). Dieter: mAsterdam: that's why I made both statements. Charles: how can you dismiss a Software keyword when we have a Books keyword ? Charles Firstly I'm entitled to an opinion - am I not? [1] Secondly, if people discuss software in the usual terms, it's more like discussing the way a book is bound than its contents. Thirdly, could the book keyword be Books&Publications? Dieter: It would be difficult for software to compete with books in age. I don't think that's a valid argument (but I respect your opinion etcetera). There are books about Go, collections of games, problems or theoretical works. There is playing software, collections of games on disk, online problems and problem solvers, tutorial software and so on. There is so much of it and it is so easily distinguished that I think a keyword can be useful. "I want to know about all existing Go Software" looks like a valid question to me. "I want to know about all theory" is too broad and "I want to know all about rules" too narrow: a path can suffice. That's my opinion. Whether it is respectable, I leave for others to judge. mAsterdam: My keyword votes:
Grauniad: A "name" search for "program or software or database or server or client" yields 39 pages. That's not as many as I expected. But given our interest in using computers to discuss go, in using computers to play go, and in defining go precisely enough so that computers can play go, go-related software certainly seems important to SL. I agree with mAmsterdam that (go) software is as natural as (go) books and (go) equipment for describing SL pages. Arno: summing up I see that the majority would like to have "theory" and "software" keywords and do away with "Attack & Defense". I suggest that someone looks over the ~30 pages having the "Attack & Defense" keyword, before I remove it. (Done. Charles) Would it be a good idea to have "Rules & Theory" instead of "Rules" and "Theory"? Bill: Please, no. I'd rather do away with the Rules keyword than combine Rules with Theory. They are not entirely separate, as theory is based on rules. But, then again, so are Joseki, Tesuji, L&D, -- i. e., everything, since the rules define the game. For that matter, do we need a Theory keyword? Other keywords seem to cover it. Arno: I changed the keywords. If it doesn't turn out well we are still free to change them again - I assume that a wiki has to be in a permanent state of flux :o) ad [1]: removed some argument (and counter-arguments) wether another argument (and its counter-agruments) can be argued to be rude (or not). Arguing arguments is best left to email, don't you think? DougRidgway: To follow up on the May 16 comment, I think numbers larger than 10 should be available. 13 or 20 move sequences aren't particularly rare or unreadable, and may be easier to read than splitting up the diagram. Also, in presenting games, it's nice to be able to use the move numbers from the game itself, even if you're only showing two or three moves. Give authors all two digit numbers, I say, and let them decide how to use them. Charles On the other hand writing too densely is the first hurdle to get over, in becoming a go author. May 16, 2003: BobMcGuigan: Is there any way to get numbers higher than 10 on stones in diagrams? If I am illustrating a 13 move sequence it would be nice not to have to use two diagrams.
By clicking on a diagram I can download an SGF sequence for the moves, but is it possible to go the other way around and upload an SGF file to make a diagram? Thanks.
DougRidgway: How do the back links ("Referenced by:") get made? Dieter: The page called "miai", will be referenced by this page as soon as I insert this hyperlink: miai. However, not all referring pages are shown at the left of the referenced page, only the ten (or so) most popular. David: It looks like the SGF file associated with a diagram is not updated when the "a at b" information in the title is changed, but not the diagram itself. See the second diagram at Sagari Example 2? for an example. Arno: yes, it's a known problem. I intend not to fix it right away, because the fix requires more time than you would think. As for now, the workaround is: change the diagram, save, change the diagram back to intended position. May 12, 2003: Nico: I cannot see any Chinese nor Japanese characters on my brand new Mozilla 1.4b. I only see '?' instead of the unicode character. See Japanese Go Terms for an exemple. May 8, 2003: Dieter: A bug or so it seems: when typing square brackets around a dash in the edit field, a > sign is displayed instead of the dash. E.g. Shuwa-Shusaku. Arno: ?? don't see anything but the dash. Anyone else? Dieter: From my workstation I don't have it either. From my portable I do have the >. Must have something to do with IE I guess. unkx80: (IE user) I also see only the dash. May 4, 2003: DougRidgway: Feature request: enable links (and perhaps other markup) in diagram captions. See Sandbox for a (nonworking) example. And another, if it isn't there already somehow: traffic stats, so I can see if anyone is bored enough to read my blog. Arno: I deliberately haven't enabled links and markup in captions because .. well they are captions. If you have to say something about the diagram say it in the text outside, not in the caption. Or am I seeing this too strict? Could you name two or three examples where you can't live without links in captions? DougRidgway: For the figure in my May 2 blog entry, "Igowin plays atari" is a good title. However, I'd really like to link it to the proverb BeginnersPlayAtari -- some readers may not catch the reference without a link. Other caption link examples, off the top of my head: "Position taken from Guan Zi Pu", "A Taisha variant", "Black gets a ponnuki", etc. Italics: "Taken from Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go", "The French would call this un shicho belge". Bold: "a bad move". Arno: ok, enabled links and emphasis markup in captions. May 3, 2003: Nico: Doesn't the Front Page lack and deserve a nice picture of a real-life ongoing game? Definitely more attractive. May 1, 2003: IwaHanako: When you make an edit to a page that is not allowed, the box showing the text in the case the browser has thrown away edits, has all literals ('"\) slashed. Arno: I cannot verify this. Is anyone else seeing this problem? April 25, 2003: Fhayashi: Could there be a "bookmark" link on the left to automagically put a link to the current wikipage on the left? Arno: I'll think about it. April 23, 2003: DougRidgway Two questions: 1) Is this the place for dumb questions? 2) Is there a way to make HTML tables? Some pages, eg ChineseGoTerms and TableOfNotchers seem to particularly lack their absence... unkx80: I think the answers are: 1) Yes. 2) No. Arno: no tables (and I have very strong feelings about that one: simplicity of the text markup etc. - I don't intend to reinvent HTML around here) DougRidgway: I'm all for simplicity, but some material is best organized as a table, and faking it with monospaced text can be problematic (i.e. ugly, hard to read, hard to maintain, less simple...). Perhaps the simplest way to implement would be to allow some HTML through? When I want a table, I'd be willing to write HTML to get one... And, while I'm whining, how about a Theory keyword? Arno: allowing HTML is a big "no". Parsing it for correctness and making sure that every tag is closed so that markup doesn't spill over to the rest of the page would be a pain. Furthermore, where does it stop? Before you know someone is asking for Javascript, because it is really useful to make interactive diagrams (e.g. RuleOfCapture could really use an animation instead of using 3 diagrams, don't you think? And don't forget all those problem pages). The line has to be drawn somewhere - for me tables are beyond that line. Anyone else for the Theory keyword? p.s. as for ASCII tables being
DougRidgway Thanks for listening about tables. I'll see what I can do with plain ASCII. Another question: would it be possible to allow through hex character references as well as decimal? So that 断 works as well as 断? Seems like hex is popular for character references.
Charles I don't know about a Theory keyword - too vague, too off-putting? I wondered about Study as a keyword. It might be a good principle that keywords make sense to someone with a very basic knowledge of the game. Actually that doesn't really work right now, in a few cases: but we can't really do without Joseki, Ko, or Tesuji. The keyword that I like least is Attack&Defence: I think in one way or another this is covered by Tactics, Strategy and Middle Game, and perhaps not much would be lost by distributing all its uses. DougRidgway Pages that (to me) should have a Theory keyword: Pattern Language, You cut I choose, Combinatorial Game Theory, Dieter's Ideas on Go Theory, just about everything under Speculation, etc. It would cover both technical research (provable but perhaps useless results) and philosophical musings and generalities. Arno: I have renamed the 'places' keyword to 'clubs & places'. So far we have (not counting myself) 1 pro / 1 con for the 'theory' keyword. And 1 con for 'Attack & Defense'. More opinions? Stefan: Against both as keywords. Charles explained why. Charles I don't want to come across too negative about Doug's suggestion - 3 million page views doesn't mean that SL can become middle-aged, complacent, and resistant to change in ways some people might find useful. I think what is meant is Abstract Theory. This is an attractive aspect of go to many, though that's not a reason in itself, otherwise we'd already have a Hikaru keyword. At Go Theory it talks about 'scientific go theory', but I don't see that WaveFrontAnalysis is somehow scientific while a joseki that has been played 10000 times by pros isn't.
DougRidgway: I was once a theoretical physicist, so I suppose the theoretical vs. applied dichotomy seems natural to me. Most of the material here is applied: how to play the game better, and most of the keywords rightly subdivide the different categories of application. For those few of us interested in such things, a keyword to demarcate theoretical topics and put off everyone else might actually be helpful. Otherwise, what keyword would you use for something like my purported For me, theoretical is a concept orthogonal to scientific: there's plenty of theoretical nonsense (my iterated ko taxonomy is probably an excellent example), as well as applied science (such as Charles' well-tested joseki example). April 11, 2003: Migeru: How do you revert a page to a previous version? I tried to do this for Front Page but couldn't. Dieter: Only librarians can. If they remember their password ... See levels of access. Done manually. Please revive V172 some librarian who remembers his password. Arno: everyone can revive the version of the previous author (which is enough to recover vandalism or accidents). You need to set your wiki experience level to "SL deshi" at UserPreferences. Then you will see a link below the text box when editing pages which says "Revive previously archived version". Click on that and you get the version previous to the current authors changes - i.e. the last change of the previous author. Then edit or just press save. Dieter is referring to librarians who can revive any version of a page. I.e. Dieter could have revived version 38 of FrontPage if he remembered his password :o) 2003-04-15
JanneJalkanen: Any chance for an RSS feed now that Go Teaching Ladder has one? I'm getting seriously addicted to checking all of my sites through Arno: chances are good. Should be able to add it within the next weeks. This page has been pruned and master edited several times. Old versions:
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