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    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.

2004 January 30

ariel - Would it be possible to change the SL "Search" page so that when you arrive there, the cursor is automatically in the title or text search box and you can start typing your search term straightaway (like on Google)?? <Don't know if this is the right place to ask this question, feel free to move the above text if appropriate..>

2004 January 28

Neil: I just made a change on my homepage without setting a short summary of my change, yet my change shows up with a short summary attached.

(A minute later) Oh, it must be because I was the last person to edit the page, even if it was a while ago.

2004 January 25

geno: For some reason, my posts sometimes have extra line returns added at random locations in the document, locations I haven't gone near in adding my comments. This happened in Why I Hate Komi a few minutes ago, and Hu noticed this problem a couple of weeks ago.

2004 January 23

Kaii: Well I think that if SL had broad sections instead of little sections all over the place SL would be much better. Such as you hit the Joseki link and a list of the Josekis come up and you can pick and choose from there. It would make everything easier to find in my opinion.

If this is already up I cant find if someone can help me do so.

Hikaru79: SL is organized very well, for the most part, it's just a matter of finding the right page =) For your Joseki example, Taxonomy of Joseki is exactly what you're looking for, I think. Then there's other paths like Beginner Exercises, BQM, or Endgame, which are some examples. Paths contain links to all the pages on SL that have to deal with that subject, so if you're interested in, say, the Fuseki stage, go to Overview of Fuseki Patterns. =) But probably the most useful page is the Reference Section-- most of the go-related stuff on SL can be found through here. Hope you find what you're looking for, Kaii! ^_^


When WME-ing a page, I often make a statement like "please recover undesirably lost material from the previous version", making "previous version" a version link. Therefore, it would be nice if the edit window shows what version I am editing.

Dieter

2004 January 12

mgoetze: Since there is a framework in place for linking to other-language go wikis, could you make this available for the Finnish wiki as well? The address is: [ext] http://www.suomigo.net

Arno: I suggest that the admin of suomigo.net contacts me. Is this a wiki devoted to Go?

JanneJalkanen: Yah, it is (and I am the maintainer). However, I am not quite sure what is happening here - are we talking just about InterWiki? links or something else? Feel free to drop me email at [email] mailto:jalkanen+jspwiki@ecyrd.com at your convinience.

    • Dave "Start a double-list" seems to include leaving a blank line between entries. This detracts greatly from the editor usability, especially in long pages like KGS Wishlist. :-(

Arno: true. What to do about it? I think that it's very bad to have illegal HTML. If you can think of something, I'm happy to talk about it.

Dave Arno, I do not know much about HTML but isn't this done in a PHP function in order to generate the HTML? Don't you match the * and ** strings and replace them with tags (<ul>, <li>, etc.)? From looking at the page source at present the function looks like it creates:

For a 2-level list with no empty lines: <ul>, <li> (level 1 item here), <ul>, <li> (level 2 item here), </ul>, </ul>, but

For a 2-level list with an empty line: <ul>, <li> (level 1 item here), </ul>, <ul>, <li>, <ul>, <li> (level 2 item here), </ul>, </ul>

Is it possible to change the PHP function so that it detects when an empty line occurs in the middle of a list and treats it accordingly?

Arno: yes it is possible, don't know how much work it is though. Note that this a large deviation of current practices, where each line stands for its own, previous or following lines are not taken into account at all. I have to ponder this for some time before I decide. A quick workaround is to use comments recently introduced (start line with %) to act as place holders in the wiki source. This of course only works, if you have properly nested lists (there are some pages as well, where this is not the case.)

Froese?: I just want to let you know that there would be some people who would have a look on how to fix such things if the sources were available ;-) For an ugly workaround look at SandBox. Btw, thanks very much for the blockquote change.

Fwiffo: You can get around the problem by using style sheets to remove the extra bullet and line. On the <li> element containing the <ul> add "list-style: none;" and on the nested <ul> add "margin-top: -1em;". Or rather, add them to CSS classes that have those attributes. I think this is probably the best solution (though there might be something slightly cleaner than a negative margin). For users who are still using an abacus to browse the web and therefore don't have proper style sheet support it will still have the blank line, but they're used to everything looking wrong by now.

On the other hand, I think this is probably a case where the standard is not the specification and the standard is clearly better. Even in the w3c HTML 4.01 spec, nested lists without an <li> are deprecated - not illegal. Also, even though it's illegal in the XHTML spec, Mozilla in super-strict XTHML 1.1 conformance mode renders them properly as long as you include the </li> closing tags (which IMO should have been required from the beginning). It will usually yell at you in that mode for almost anything that isn't conformant. I would not be shocked if directly nested lists became legal in a future specification - everyone uses them and every browser renders them as expected.

Arno: I try to have GoWiki produce HTML4.01 compliant code. Looking at the spec I don't see where it says "depracted but not illegal". The DTD says: <!ELEMENT UL - - (LI)+ -- unordered list --> which means the one and only allowed child elements of UL are LI. W3C's validator is the same opinion too - it produces an error, not a warning.

Fwiffo: Hmm, I guess I got that impression from the deprecated example on the w3c page - but the buck obviously stops at the DTD. In any event, I think using style sheets is the way to go.

On the gripping hand, working towards being truly standards compliant is laudable. Glorious the day will be when tag soup is a thing of the past, all browsers implement CSS correctly, PNG support in IE isn't broken, we all use XHTML, and browsers actually tell you when you've made an error in your markup. It will surely be the distant future, but we can work to make the HTML we write today forward compatible so our childrens' childrens' children won't have to go back and fix up our crappy markup.

wms: Umm, I sort of hate to tell you how to do things, but I think I do know a bit about internationalization of web systems, and I think that using egp as the prefix isn't such a good idea. With only one other language, it's OK, but if you get 10 or 15 more, it'll be a massive headache to keep all the acronyms straight. I'd recommand you use the ISO language codes, as in [fr:points de depart] or [fr_FR:points de depart]. That way it'll be much easier to remember, is egp the french or the german link? ps - Having a non-English wiki is great! Congratulations, is this the one that Jean-Marc worked on?

Jyem: It is :-)

Dave I would agree that ISO codes make sense when dealing with countries. Some further enhancement will be necessary, however, if there turns out to be more than one wiki in a language. Perhaps SL will have to start an official franchise system :-)

mAsterdam: Congratulations. Excellent work. I like the "Discuter la page" link.

Arno: I guess you misunderstand what the shortcuts are about: one is about "equivalent page in other language". Here the ISO country/language code [fr:] is used. The other is a shortcut to a wiki called EncyGoPedie (short: EGP) which just happens to be in another language. Also not publically announced, you can for example link to Sensei's Tournament Library with an slt prefix: [ext] FrontPage. SLT & EGP are interwiki links (google for it), whereas FR is a language link. On EncyGoPedie you can link to SL with EN as language link, and with SL as interwiki link.

2004 January 6

wms: Arno, think I found a bug. I made a change, with a summary. Then I saw a typo, so I fixed the typo, put in "fix typo" in the summary, and checked "minor edit". Well, "minor edit" worked, since only one change is in the recent changes list, but the summary there is for the minor edit, not for the edit that should appear there! Not a huge deal, but does look like a bug - the "minor edit" summaries shouldn't appear in "recent changes", right?

(Sebastian:) I think this is partly the bug I described below[0104], and partly by design. AFAIK, your changes get saved only once, and the Minor Edit has no use in that case.

Arno: the behaviour changed. The way it happens now is more "correct" as to what actually happens. When you re-edit a page then the previous version is not saved to the archive. If you look at the history of pages you will see that some versions are missing - this is when people reedited the same page multiple times (see WikiNews for example, I'm notorious at that). Therefore the change summary should apply to the final result, which includes your major edit and your minor edit. As Sebastian points out there appears to be a bug that the summary is not always shown. I don't know why that is and have a hard time tracking down the bug.

rubilia: Tank you, Arno, for the big improvement of User Preferences. I like it very much. :-) Also, it's a good idea to be forwarded to there right after logging in (instead of seeing the "you are logged in" message page).

Fwiffo: I believe there is a small bug in the new "inline-diff" view. External links seem to be broken (a spurrious </span> gets inserted into the URL). For example, look at link to slashdot in the diff for the recent change to tartrate.

Arno: fixed.

2004 January 5

Froese?: The diagrams in Edit-Preview are totally borken! Often one single vertical run of fields, sometimes randomly placed in a wrong sized table.

Arno: I cannot verify this. Is anyone else seeing the problem? It would generally help if error reports would name a page where the problem occurs and the browser used ...

Froese?: It happens with any page. Choose one with diagrams, click Edit, click Preview. Browser: Netscape 4.7. It seems it's the WIDTH="5%" of the tables. If I remove the WIDTH attribute the diagrams look right (except that the BR in the first TD generates an empty line).

Arno: fixed - it is using the real image width now (in px) instead of percentage.

Froese?: Thanks, working now. Another plead: couldn't you use <blockquote> instead of <div class="indentation">? I know that using <blockquote> for indentation is deprecated in favour to CSS but afaik, all browsers display the <blockquote> correct but a lot do not understand CSS (none of mine, w3m and netscape 4.7). What would be the downside of using <blockquote>? Please, consider it. Thanks.


2004 January 4

unkx80: Bug report on the latest improvement to SL. If the last line is an indentation, then things showed up funny again in IE. This is because the <div class="indentation"> for the last item is not closed with a </div>, which is illegal HTML, as reported by [ext] HTML validator on SandBox.

Arno: fixed. (You may have to force a hard reload to see the change)

uxs: The random joseki page works fine, but when I tried it with fuseki as a keyword, it didn't work. Is that normal ?

Arno: I guess that's because we don't have a fuseki keyword :o) Using opening instead works.

mgoetze: That should take care of almost every wish regarding RecentChanges. (WikiNews) -- not quite, I'd like to be able to ignore all ongoing games...

(Sebastian:) Generalizing this: In the watchlist, assign categories according to page type or keywords. (We're getting close to XPath ;-)

Arno: is anyone actually using the advanced features? If I look at the hitcounter for e.g. AdvancedFindPage then I don't think so. And if I look at how many people are having preferences which are not default values I come to the same conclusion.

(Sebastian:) I do all of the above. Maybe something about the counter is broken? Or maybe there aren't many people on SL at the moment overall? RC is proceeding much slower than usual.

mgoetze: [ext] Apparently, my homepage has a distancce of -1 from the FrontPage....

Stefan: The same is true for Stefan, Joseki and BQM, so this appears to be fairly general.

Arno: I did some backend work as well and forgot to initialize the distances and scores. Done.

(Sebastian:) Thanks for the impressive revamp! I found only some small issues:

  • Diff in in-file view: When there is a text next to a diagram, such as in [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=BQM135&new=8, it is displayed with white font on white in IE 6.0. Workaround: Select the text => then it will remain black.
    • Arno: can't reproduce this. Maybe it is a bug in IE6? Anyone else seeing problems?
  • In UserPreferences, you write: "Name: name the profile. The name appears on RecentChanges." When I first read this I took this to mean that it would appear there to indicate the currently chosen profile. Now I know that it just refers to the 4 links, one for each profile. But wouldn't it be nice if we had some indication of what profile is chosen? Obviously, the current profile serves no function as a link. Make that plain text to stand out as an indication.
    • Arno: current profile is plain text now.
    • (Sebastian:) Thx for fixing this even thought I forgot to say "please" :-)
  • [0104] Short summary is not always filled with last value, (even if there was no change in between). Just happened twice when I re-edited this page. Actually, something seems to have changed. It worked fine for the first couple of times, but not anymore since I reported this bug. It is always empty.

2004 January 1

Bob McGuigan: How can I make the symbol for an empty point on the board marked by a circle or a square appear in a comment, not on the board? If I want to refer to a marked stone in a comment I can write WC or BS but simply writing C or S for an empty point doesn't seem to work.

DougRidgway: Also noted by SnotNose on 12 Dec. I'd like to see this too.

Bill: I see you've taken care of it. Many thanks. :-) And Happy New Year!

2003 December 31

SGBailey: Anyone know why when I click on a link (such as StartingPoints) in the yellow side bar, I go to that page but without the yellow sidebar. The sidebar info appears at the bottom of the page instead. If I follow a different link, it appears to usually? get it right. (added by Stefan)

TJ: I had this happen, but darned if I'm sure what it was. Could it be that your preferences are set to receive pages as text only instead of default?

On another note, I went to test this theory, and discovered that the field where I used to enter my password has vanished, to be replaced by an email field. Before I go enter my email, I thought I'd ask:

  1. does SL have a privacy policy, or will my address be sold?
  2. is my handle here no longer protected from someone else changing preferences or using it to add things under it into RecentChanges, since it seems to no longer be password protected?

Just like to know what's going on, sorry if I just missed the announcement about the removal of passwords; if I did miss it, someone just point me at it, please. Thanks!

Arno: the password field has not vanished. It is just not shown when you are logged in - press "Logout" on UserPreferences and you will see that you can enter your name&password. Your handle is still protected.

The email field is there for future features such as being able to reset your password by email. It is an optional field (just like every other field on preferences). And no, SL does not yet have a privacy policy regarding preferences data. I think it's unlikely that I can retire by selling (as of today) 33 email addresses. Anyway, if you can point me to an comprehensible policy statement I will include it.

mdh:I tried logging into SL last night from a new computer. I tried to log in and got a strange effect. After I put in my id mdh and my password, it said that mdh did not exist. It still works on my old computer where the cookie keeps it logged in. Any ideas?

Arno: mdh, you didn't set a password for your name. I.e. on your old computer you just set your name, but no password. That is why no account on the server was created. Which in turn is why you cannot log in with a username&password as the account does not exist. Either just set your name on the new computer or create the account. In the latter case you will then have to (re)login from your old computer too.


2003 December 30

Arno: one of the suggestions was to add a javascript counter on the editpage so that one sees when the 10 minutes are up. I've coded something, which works in Mozilla & Konqueror, but apparently doesn't work in IE. I could need some help, as debugging javascript for IE on my linux machine is next to impossible. File: [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/files/js-counter.html. As the discussion is not of interest for others I suggest sending me an email: [email] ahollosi@xmp.net.

Arno: thanks to Ashley & Sebastian who helped solving the problem. Counter will go live soonish.

2003 December 27

unkx80: Whenever my browser is pointing to a page that is a Path, the links in my bookmarks on the left side will become part of the path. Is this an unexpected "feature"? Thanks.

Arno: fixed.

mgoetze: Speaking of features... the change summaries which can now be written for Recent Changes should also appear on the Page Info & History pages...

(Sebastian:) Speaking of changes: When viewing a diff, the paragraphs before and after an inserted paragraph are displayed to give context information. This is a nice feature. Unfortunately, when one of these paragraphs contains a minor change then it is abbreviated to less than a line. Please display the whole paragraph in that case. (Example: [ext] http://senseis.xmp.net/?diff=LongBambooJoint&new=40, where Bill's paragraph is shortened to "have the play at b".)

Arno: I don't think I will fix this. The reason the paragraph is shortened is because soemtimes only 1 letter (correction of a typo) is done in a 9 line paragraph. What we can talk about is if a little bit more should be shown of the paragraph.

(Sebastian:) Really not? That's a pity! If x is the inserted paragraph, then the diff shows x-3, x-2 and x+1 fully, but only a shortened version of x-1. This seems arbitrary to me.

But thank you for all the other changes!

2003 December 24

TJ: I originally thought that the watched pages highlighting was a silly idea, but I'm finding myself using it more and more, and now like it enough to ponder an expansion. How about highlighting anything with your signature attached to it in RecentChanges? In effect, have anything you contributed to that day show up highlighted in RecentChanges until the next day? That way, us junkies don't have to keep looking for our signatures or remember the name of pages to check if anyone answered/argued with us on a given subject until the timestamp changes.

(Sebastian:) This is a good idea, but it would mean for some deshis that almost the whole page would be highlighted. It could be an option, and/or it could be only bold and not highlighted.

BTW, the yellow highlight looks good, and I have another related wish. This is probably hard to implement, but, goodness, this is Christmas eve, after all ;-)

Highlight recent changes (and show diffs) in the viewed document (in normal, full view). Ideally, there would be a pair of buttons that allows to move the reference time.

---

(Sebastian:) Move the summary box to the top, next to the minor edit check box. In order to fit it on one line, you may want to cut "don't log it to RecentChanges" because it's in the MinorEdit page already, and reduce the caption "Short summary of change" to just "summary". Maybe, if the summary box has no function during minor edits, disable it.


Bill: Letters do not show up well on diagrams. It would be nice if they were bold. Also it would be nice to refer to Wa just like we do to W1 or WC and have little stones appear.

Merry Christmas!

2003 December 16

uxs: Smallish request: would it be possible to add a timestamp to each line in RecentChanges ? It would probably help for confused people like me to keep track of what I read before.

Arno: yes, but I don't know if the list is still readable then. I will have a look at it. There are other ways of visualizing what you have read as well.

2003 December 13

(Sebastian:) Just a small question: What happens with the requests that Robert Pauli deleted yesterday? Will they be forgotten?

Arno: I looked through them and noted down the most important ones.

2003 December 12

SnotNose: I'm wondering if there is a way to indicate un-lettered, marked empty points with an in-line symbol. For example:

[Diagram]
corner


I keep writing "the circled point" or "the squared point". Can I do something more elegant as I can with WC, BS, etc.? I haven't seen any reference to such symbols so maybe they're not implemented.

Robert Pauli:
(Late) thanks for the rounded (or curved) board corners, Arno! Really love to see them.

Regarding your work on linear boards, however - those intersections separated by empty space - I hate it completely. My wish is a straight (horizontal or vertical) line with hoshis on it:

 *
 *-*
 *-*-*
 ...

X-mas next, may I add another wish? I'd like to have everyone being able to store his/her preferences on SL! It could go like this:

Login Dialog:

  • user name (text, as allowed in [...])
  • new name (check, avoids typo accounts)
  • password (blind-text, disabled if new name)
  • auto login duration (number of days, 0 = once-only)
  • login button

Each login writes a cookie with some random, say, 20-digit number identifying the hardware. Nothing else should be in the cookie to prevent it to be faked (and to avoid having to repeat preferences on several machines)! A mapping in SL from hardware ID to user ID including the expire date then takes care of auto login.

Anyone logged on can then enter his/her

Preference Dialog:

  • all the usual entries
  • save button

and define his/her password, among others.

Arno: hm? What is the difference to the current behaviour?

David: I request that all new SGF files generated from diagrams contain a PL property in the root node. As it is now, an SGF file generated from a diagram without numbered moves always has Black to play. The SGF generated from a diagram with numbered moves and White to play correctly has White play the first move, but a go client still says "Black to play" at the root node.

2003 December 10

mgoetze: Keywords don't seem to do much of anything so far. How about giving them a function by expanding the random page feature to let me go to, e.g., a random joseki page?

(Sebastian:) Good point. Another way to use them would be for the Recent Changes / Watchlist - such as: "Highlight all paths" or "exclude all ongoing games from display".

2003 December 8

rubilia: Arno, the login/userpref pages now are even better than what I was dreaming of one week ago :o). Has been pretty much work, supposingly. Thank you!

(Sebastian:) A new request that is unrelated to the new features. Scenario:

  1. Sebastian starts editing a page.
  2. After maybe 10 minutes, Hu starts editing the same page. He does not get a warning, because apparently Sebastian is being treated as an "escaper" already.
  3. When Sebastian ends his editing, he sees a red alert, saying "someone appears to be editing this page. You may want to back up" or so. Sebastian is a bit annoyed, because he thinks that whoever is editing the page must have seen an alert like "Sebastian is editing this page, please wait" before he started editing. Thus ...
  4. Sebastian hits "OK".
  5. Sebastian checks back in and it appears that nobody seems to be editing the page.
  6. Hu now loses his changes and has to repair the page.

This actually happened, and we talked it over on KGS and concluded that this must have been the way it happened. (Hu removed his comment, but it still appears in the RecentChanges comment - another reason for keeping the summary box populated, but this is not my point now.) I would like to request this scenario to be mitigated. Possible elements of a solution:

  • Increase the 10 minutes
  • Sebastian gets a message with a warning before he's been timed out, similar to the one in KGS. (As mgoetze pointed out, this may be not feasible, because there is no easy technology to implement this. Java would probably be overkill, and there seems to be no equivalent to ASP pages.)
  • When Sebastian ends his editing, he gets the name of the person currently editing it instead of the anonymous message.
  • Explain that this may occur because the second editor started editing after the timeout (so that he/she wasn't aware that user was editing it already). Next ...
  • Sebastian gets the chance for a little chat with the other editor. A real chat window may be hard to implement, but a plain message to the other editor, saying "Sebastian (and link to his email) would like to save his session. Agree? (Yes) (No)."

There may be better idea to fix this, but please do something about it, because such situations can be very upsetting for all parties.

Hu: I am not mad. I have forgiven Sebastian, even though I am not entirely convinced that events unfolded as described. Perhaps Arno's log will reveal the exact timings. Current safeguards may be sufficient, if the lack of complaints is any guide. It is also unclear if there is a ten minute boundary whereby currently-editing status times out. SL is not a real-time server, so popup message boxes are not likely, nor are chat boxes.

Sebastian: Yes, thank you, and sorry about the misleading wording in my scenario - I changed it.

unkx80: My suggestion: Click the Preview button every now and then, it will reset the 10 minutes.

Arno: if edits were lost then someone has "deliberately" deleted them. Apart from the red warning SL takes care that two successive saves don't succeed. Instead you get the "Problem: concurrent updates" screen. (As I understand it that is what you got, Sebastian) From that screen you have to go back and RELOAD the edit page screen otherwise the saving will not succeed. Once reloaded the edits of the other author (in that case: Hu) are in the edit box. So how can these edits be lost? E.g. if you (Sebastian) just did a copy&paste of the whole content instead of re-applying your edits. There is nothing SL could do to prevent such edits. Note: I'm not accusing anyone here, this is just the way I think things went. If this was not the case please tell me.

@Sebastian: in order to clarify: step 3 - what is "end editing"? Did you press "Save"? What "OK" button?

s: Yes, "Save" is what I meant. Sorry - this is hard to repro on your own.

As already mentioned: hitting "preview" once in a while resets the counter. Maybe increasing the time from 10min to 15min is good too, but doesn't solve your general problem.

Sebastian: Yes, it probably was the "Problem: concurrent updates" screen. Unfortunately, I don't [ext] exactly remember the steps, but they seemed very straightforward at the time. I certainly did not press or hit any button or key that said anything like "delete". I am curious myself what exactly happened, and I would be happy to reproduce this scenario in the sandbox, but it takes two to tango. I offered this in the chat yesterday, but there were no takers.

There was one element of highhandedness on my part, which was when I decided "Whoever is editing this now must have known that I was editing this when he/she started editing. Therefore, I won't bother trying to find the diff myself - I'll just take the simple route". I now know that this was a wrong assumption, I am sorry about the trouble this caused and my feedback is intended to avoid this trap for others in the future.

PS: I like the "@someone" convention you're using. It makes it easy to see when someone talks to you, especially in fast-paced chat rooms. :-)

Tim Hunt: one simple partial solution would be a JavaScript? countdown of the 10 minute deadline on the edit page, to remind you when you need to preview.

RafaelCaetano: The Brazilian go wiki displays such a countdown by default. It uses [ext] MoinMoin.

2003 December 7

Hu: What does the P-red-dot symbol on the Recent Changes page mean, and the off-kilter red and black symbol (might be meant to be some kind of eraser) mean? I suppose the house symbol means home page.

Hikaru79: The symbols next to the updates represent the Page Type. Like you guessed, the house is a Home Page. The two stones are ongoing games. The "P" with a circle next to it is a path. I think that's about all of them.

Arno: there's one more type: alias

(s:) "Nice to have" request: When re-editing a page, keep the summary box populated with the last summary. This way, users can modify it or add to it.

Arno: yes, I've that already on my todo list. But I wanted to roll out the new stuff this weekend.

Hu: How about having the first 50 or so characters of the comment appear as a column in the Version History of a page. It would be easier to find significant changes that way. Also please put "toggle watch" on the Diff page. I don't know what s (Sebastian) is suggesting because it doesn't seem practical as it would mean copying the comment from the Recent Changes list, and the later change is more significant at the time of the edit so it should be prepended if at all.

Arno: good idea about history page. I will add this too.

2003 December 2

unkx80: I would like to know, whether there is a way to change the user password at SL? I only see a way to set the password at user preferences, but once it is set, it cannot be changed. Thanks.

Arno: no there is not. Currently all that is possible is that I delete your account and you "register" again. I have already written a new account handling, but it is not yet live on SL ...

unkx80: Yet another bug report on full text search, sorry. Entering a search text with only one character (matching "[A-Za-z0-9]") fails too.

Fhayashi: Not sure if this is the expected behaviour for the new diagrams, but... The old diagram frames were the size of the diagram itself. Depending on the size of the browser window, there could be text to the right of the diagram. The newer diagrams have frames that are as wide as the browser window, so no text can be to the side of the diagram. Either way seems fine, but is this the intended effect? I am currently using Mozilla Firebird.

2003 November 27

rubilia: Since some people use various computers to access SL, some of which are even public ones, they have to log in (and, actually, out, too) every time they come here. I wonder if there is any reason not to provide a simple login/out page. (Or am I just missing it?) It feels quite irksome to me to have to redefine the personal preferences each time again and again. Couldn't they be stored at SL?

Stefan: But if you do that, what about the majority who always access SL from one, maximum two but usually the same machine? The login/out would actually increase the hassle for them.

rubilia: Why that? I don't ask for a no-cookies solution, but for separating the login from the user's preferences.

Stefan; Oh, I see. I misunderstood. Sorry for my thickness.

Stefan: wms posted the following question to MetaDiscussion, which I want to replicate here to make sure it's picked up: "wms: I have a question. Why is it that an apostrophe in a page title turns into a capital letter in the URL? It's very disturbing to programmers who expect a capital letter to denote a new word! See KGS Beginner's Room (which becomes KGSBeginnerSRoom) for example, but there are several more like it. It seems just stripping the apostrophe would be a better choice."

2003 November 4

SnotNose: When adding comments to pages, are there tricks people have for remembering or quickly finding the names of other pages so as to include them as links? The best way I know how to do this is to open a new browser and look for the page (sometimes using the search function). One way to make this easier is if there were a quick search-like function on the edit page. It would need to return results right in the edit page and not mess up the edits already done. (Is this clear or too vague?)

Arno: I have been thinking about that already. I'd like to have something like this myself.


2003 November 2

Hikaru79: How come there is no Text Formatting Rule to make text and diagrams centered? I have found dozens of cases where this would be extremely useful. Is it because the Wiki engine does not support this, and it would be extremely hard to add the feature, or is there some disciplinary issue with it? :) Thanks in advance.

(Sebastian:) Once you start implementing html functionality, it would be hard to determine where to stop. Why not right-aligned? Why no aligned diagrams (a request I supported earlier)? Why no different font sizes and colors? Why no tables? What you can do on a wiki is necessarily always a compromise. FHayashi had a point when he said we should focus on the content.

Arno: can you name some examples, where having centered text is absolutely necessary? Wiki syntax does not support all HTML syntax on purpose, because of simplicity.


2003 November 1

Bill: Request: Let the creator of a page edit the title. Why not? :-)

Darron Shaffer: This might be problematic if there are links to the page that might be broken.

Bill: Of course. However, renaming is not allowed, even if the page has just been created and there is only one link.

I know that you can copy the contents of the page, create a new one, and paste the contents there. However, it may be easier and less error-prone simply to edit the title and repair the links.

Sometimes you create a page, and as you are writing it, you realize that a different title would be better. Sometimes it only becomes clear later that you want a different title.

For instance, when I created the Infinitesimals and Numbers pages, I did not envision that a lot of discussion about Combinatorial Game Theory would ensue. If I had, I would have named my original pages Go Infinitesimals and Go Numbers or the like and devoted Infinitesimals and Numbers to the theory alone, leaving the other pages for the application to go. That would have been a clearer structure. To make such changes now would be a large job. However, I think it would be easier if I could do some renaming.

Charles Renaming is restricted to Librarian-status people - presumably because sorting out the backlinks needs to be done and requires a responsible attitude. Bill, if you have a list of pages to rename I'll do it for you. Or you could apply for the step up to Librarian, with a request to Arno and Morten (which I suppose should be done off-site by email).

Bill: I'm taking a look at the links to see which ones should refer to CGT infinitesimals and numbers and which to infinitesimals and numbers in chilled go. Then maybe I'll ask you to do that, Charles. Or maybe I can handle it myself by copying. Thanks.

Bill: What if the creator could rename the page if it had only one link? As a rule, that would be the one she used to create the page in the first place. That would make the job of creating pages a little easier. Power to the people!

I did a little experiment and found out that copying a whole page can be done with little chance of error by going to the edit page, putting the cursor inside the edit window, clicking on the edit tab of the browser (IE), and clicking Select all, then Copy. (When I first tried that, some years ago, I did not know about placing the cursor inside the edit window, and selected the whole edit page.) That makes it easier to create a new page and transfer the contents of the old page to it. :-)

Arno: I think that renaming pages is a sensitive function: for one thing, the action is (currently) not archived anywhere and it does not show up anywhere, thus a vandal could create havoc quite easily. But even well meaning users could do quite some damage by renaming pages that are linked from the outside. One incident of that was BasicRulesOfGo getting renamed to RulesOfGoIntroductory, not taking into account that there are at least 20 webpages out there directly linking to that page. One could go as far as saying that renaming is not a wiki thing. I like the idea that pages here have a "permanent" name and URL. Apart from typos I don't think that there is much need for renaming.

2003 October 25

HolIgor: Is it possible to indent some of then diagrams a little? I fell that shifting variations a little bit to the right with respect to the main line would be most aestetic and semantic, whatever.

(Sebastian:) Good idea. I sometimes wanted this for diagrams that appear in indented text. Ideally, it would support all levels of ;:

Arno: ;: is not the way to do it. The HTML spec is very clear on it that one should not use <dl> lists (;:) or <blockquote> or something similar for indention. The only correct way to indent is using CSS. This is what ">" does. I have been thinking about ">" being more generic so that it can be used in front of any other syntax. It is on my todo list but my job keeps me quite busy at the moment, so I don't know when I will add it.

2003 October 17

Tim Hunt: Thinking about Page Churn, how about adding a "page of the day" link to Recent Changes that is the page that was edited least recently at midnight at the start of that day. This could go just under the date heading, or at the end of the list of changes that day.


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This is a copy of the living page "Guinea Pigs' Feedback" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2004 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.