User talk:Justincc

Hi Justin, Is your email really 'AT googlemail DORT com' .. or should that be ... DOT com  ?  :)

--Mstram 14:16, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Hi Mstram. 'Tis a somewhat feeble attempt at a little extra bot confusing obfuscation :) - Justincc 14:48, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

My Links

Foundation

Status Page

Hi Justin,

You've deleted the the page Status, however, there are 42 other pages that linked there. Many of those pages had breadcrumbs referring to the status page. So what to do with those? Where should they link to now?

BTW, it's nice to know that you can delete pages. You may want to have a look at the To Delete category, there are many pages in there that should be reviewed and deleted.

--Fritigern 04:27, 22 December 2010 (UTC)

Hi Fritigern. From my brief look at it, many of the pages that the status page linked to were very out of date. The ones which aren't or have some semblence of usefulness or already linked elsewhere, I think. My intention was to come back on Friday and chase down the subsequently broken links, but I probably should have the left the page intact until then, at least (I'm too used to quickly editing the wiki because few other people are doing it!).

So I've restored the page for my now but my intention is still to come back and delete it on Friday (and chase down the broken links). But if you have any other ideas (e.g. whether it should be retained) then I'd be very pleased to discuss them.

Thanks for pointing out the "To Delete" category. I hope to get the time to go through that on Friday too.

Thanks for your editing btw - it's really nice to have someone else looking at this stuff too.

--Justincc 01:10, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

I think it's a very common mistake for an editor, an even for a Wiki sysop to overlook the "What links here" link on a page that he/she wishes to delete. That link showed me that many osfunction pages link to Status

So what would i do about this? Hmmm... I am not sure. I would probably (because other pages depend on it in one form or another) do a complete rewrite of that page, making the info more current, though since i am basically just a "dumb end user" (tongue-in-cheek very much intended!), i wouldn't know the first thing of what the status really is.

As for my editing, it really started because i couldn't easily find the info that i needed at that time (i can't remember what it was, just that i couldn't find it ;-))

One thing that i really would like to see on the wiki, is more information in layman's terms. A lot of the documentation was written by devs, and i know that it can often be hard for devs/coders/techs to translate their jargon to something that non-coders can understand too.

One example of an article that i find confusing is Wifi, see also the discussion page of that article. Another one would be the one about NINJA Physics.

...Which brings me to something that i hope you can find the time to look into. The wiki's search function doesn't seem to work properly. As in that i would enter "ninja" (all lower case), click "search", and expect to find the NINJA Physics article listed as one of the search results. Instead, it comes up with nothing. Even when searching for "NINJA Physics" (using the correct case), the search results remain empty. This happens with all other search terms as well. The "Go" button does work though, as long as the search term is entered with the correct case.

This search problem really is a problem, since it makes the wiki not searchable, and therefore makes it less useful for end users. OS is a complex piece of software, and it is not always 100% clear why things goes *beep* instead of *ding*, or how to do this or that... :-)

--Fritigern 02:24, 24 December 2010 (UTC)

I had a look at the "What links here" for the Status page and I see what you mean. As far as I can tell, pretty much everything linked off this page is out of date or unmaintained. But it's too much of a Sisyphean task for me right now to clean up all the inbound links so I'll have to leave as is.

I went through the delete category and deleted all the pages except Wikistructure.

I agree with you about the information, but to be honest there's very few of the developers who write any kind of documentation at all. So even getting the tech heavy stuff is quite a rarity, let alone things more understandable by the layman.

The search on the wiki was recently updated by Teravus - it wasn't working at all before. So it might be worth leaving him a note about the current problems. He is also on IRC on and off.

--Justincc 00:29, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Awesome! I will leave Teravus a message after the holidays, or at least after Christmas :)

As for the WikiStructure article, i see it contains the templates that people can use when editing the wiki. This includes the {{delete}} template, which is only there as an example. I hope to go over more articles in the new year, in order to tackle this, and other similar problems, and other confusing stuffs.

Oh, I've started to make some changes to the Wifi text, hopefully making them easier to read for laymen, (for instance, instead of saying something like "wifi interacts with OpenSimulator's code base", i chose to have it say "wifi uses OpenSim's built-in features". It's not the exact same thing, but it is easier to understand.
Alright, i'm gonna make it Christmas at Fritiville, thanks for cleaning up the deletable articles, keeping the wiki clean will make everyone happy :-)
--Fritigern 21:48, 25 December 2010 (UTC)

Proposal against spam (having new sysop)

I feel that we have many spam pages these days(I can't concentrate on revising and creating articles due to that). I've came up on the quick-and-dirty idea of redirecting the spam page to another page, which introduce OpenSimulator Project, but it is not the complete solution(we can't delete the pages or images, ban user nor block account creations). Actually you are busy with codes, and I don't want you to take the time to kill spams on the wiki instead of adding new features, fixing bugs and applying the patches(by me lol).

I bet if Fritigern become sysop, this kind of problems will be solved quickly. He always patrols on OpenSimulator wiki, finding spams and taking the action against them quickly. Thanks

-- Makopoppo 11:19, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Great idea, Makopoppo. In fact, I made both you and Fritigen sysops. If you don't want the bit then please tell me. Justincc 20:09, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, Justincc! I'll clean up piled spam images gradually. -- Makopoppo 23:54, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Brilliant. Many, many thanks for your help - it's really appreciated. Justincc 23:55, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Woot! Thank you so much Justin! I will do my best to be a great sysop!!! --Fritigern 21:24, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Upgrading The Wiki

Hi Justin. I know this kinda sounds like nagging, but i really think that the wiki could benefit from an update to the most recent release of mediawiki.The wiki is running v 1.13, but the current version is 1.17, with 1.18 just around the corner.

Pros:

• Better anti-spam tools
• Additional CSS classes, allowing for example the hiding/showing of sections, making for cleaner looking pages.
• Out-of-the-box LSL source highlighting
• Fixed various vulnerabilities
• Auto-completion in search box
• Better WYSIWYG editor, it no longer replaces wiki markup with HTML code.
• Since version 1.16, it is possible to update MediaWiki by running a web installer, making upgrading less of a hassle.

Cons:

• Since there's been a large gap between versions, immediate rollout would be a bad idea. I would stringly suggest a parallel database+folder containing a snapshot of the wiki, and all of its files/articles. Then testing the new version, making modifications to the wiki's skin to accomodate for the new version, as well as finding bottlenecks with changed configuation parameters, and whatever may come to light, If resources permit, i would even suggest running the two versions in parallel on the same server, making the transition from 1.13 to 1.17 less painful.
• There have been changes to the database format. So database will need to be updated, which may require the wiki to be offline for that period. Versions of PHP and MySQL are still within system requirements.

General: The current version of the Opensim wiki has support for SVG graphics. However, the version of ImageMagick which is currently installed on the server does not. For example, the file Image:Template-info.svg is a valid SVG file, but does not display because ImageMagick is unfalimiar with the format and displays an error message instead.

See also the release notes for 1.14, 1.15, 1.16 and 1.17 for more info on the changes and improvements between versions, as well as the upgrading manual.

Would you please consider this? And if you lack the time, perhaps someone else will be able to do this. First person to come to mind would be Makopoppo, if she has time.

--Fritigern 12:01, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Not only do I lack the time, but any time I spend on this is almost certain time that I don't spend on fixing OpenSim, which is by far my most valuable contribution. The problem is that changing things on the server is sensitive as well. Let's keep thinking about this over the coming weeks.

Sorry if I was a little short yesterday - I get like that when I'm tired :). If upgrading would help fight spam then do please tell me it's really important.

Hi Fritigern. coyled upgraded mediawiki to 1.17 last night -- Justincc 09:06, 20 October 2011 (PDT)

That's absolutely awsome. I hope this will give us some respite from the waves of spam that we've been getting. But even if it picks up again, we will have the framewirk that allows us to install the extensions that we may need to prevent the spam more effectively.

--Fritigern 00:31, 21 October 2011 (PDT)

Proposal for introducing some extensions

Hi, Justin. Thank you for upgrading wiki software:) It enabled us to introduce a lot of useful extensions rather safely. Just for reference, SecondLife wiki enables some other extensions though I doubt if we need all of them. Still, I want to use following extensions soon.

• Variables - enables the syntaxes like somevalue
• Delete Page Permanently - removes malicious titles of spam pages from recent pages list. Only if you take regular backup of wiki

Could you enable them, at least Variables extension, whenever you have time? Thanks.

-- Makopoppo 17:51, 8 January 2012 (PST)

Hi Makopoppo. Our sysadmin (Dave Coyle [coyled]) has some misgivings about enabling the delete page permanently extension, but there's no problem installing the variables one. Hope this is okay. Hoping to do this tomorrow, please poke me if I forget!

And thanks for all the work you do on the wiki!

Also, it might also be worth asking on the opensim-dev list in future, since I regard this as a dev issue. I should have put my discussion with Dave on there as well but forgot this time. However, as a great wiki worker, if you want to just message me directly then please do! -- Justincc 16:12, 12 January 2012 (PST)