Site Discussion

I just joined and had a few questions. Are you planning on having this limited to simply canon material or user content as well? Second, which edition of D&D is this being formatted in? Finally… where do I start?

I think it's mostly non-edition specific. I think in articles, it's best to make sure that edition specific information is described as such. This wiki is definitely not limited to only canon material. User content/fan material can go into a variety of namespaces (i.e. folders):
- unofficial:<article_name> - this is probably the place for most things that you'd want to share
- campaign:<campaign_name> - space to use for your campaign, and can contain details about divergences from official Mystara in your campaign
- user:<user_name> - your user page
— Angelo Bertolli 2009/06/12 10:45

—-

I started adding a list of monsters but it occurred to me there should be a template for the actual monster entries. Is there a template namespace to add a monster template? I think this one would work well for us: http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Creature Steve 2009/02/14 11:23

Thanks for the suggestion. I'm looking into a plugin that will do this. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/03/16 22:21

UPDATE: Written a basic geographic entry. There's something weird, though, it changed the "Geography" entry to "Outer World" in the Initial Page… why???

Giulio, 2 june 2008, 10:15

Strange. I'm not sure what it did that. Giampaolo may know–he seems to have experience with DokuWiki.
— Angelo Bertolli 2008/06/02 11:17

Anyway I just deleted it and re-wrote it. :)
Giulio 2008/06/02 11:20

__

It would be very nice to have an entry page structured with "boxes" as at en.wikipedia.org

mostly modeled on that one: today's featured article, did you know, on this day

unfortunately I rather doubt about the possibility of drawing these boxes… hmm… ????

and maybe a smaller upper box with (at the moment), biography/geography/history/magic/religion/science/society :p

I'll give it a try about this at least, then we'll see

Giulio

So, any guidelines on what you do or do not want here (mystara wise I mean). Any guidelines on article format, etc.?

— Greg Weatherup 2008/06/06 00:21

Not really–I think we can worry about format and things after it gets going a little bit. There isn't really a master plan, we'll just see how it grows. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/06/06 08:49

How about anything in the way of goals? How do you hope this site will come to enhance (or compete with or duplicate) the Vaults and/or the Piazza? I'm ready to help-out but I don't know what your aiming for. — Greg Weatherup 2008/06/06 20:40

This was set up in response to the idea of collecting information from the old threads of the Mystara message board and putting them in one place. Other than that, it's available for people to work together on their projects. I also thought it might be a good resource for people to keep their own personal Mystara stuff such as campaign materials, magical items, etc. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/06/07 11:40

Ok, that gives me an idea for something, but it will probably be a while before I can get around to typing it up. Thanks! — Greg Weatherup 2008/06/08 02:16

I'm having trouble with this Duowiki stuff. Why did it add (Town) to Ainsun? And I'm having trouble making paragraphs. Also, is there anything like the Talk pages at Wikipedia? — Greg Weatherup 2008/06/09 01:16

When you link to a page, it will pick what it thinks is the title of the page to show. Your first "header" on the page was Ainsun (Town). What really gets confusing is when you change it and you don't see it change right away: the system caches things for 5 minutes. You can force a recache by resaving it (maybe with a small change?). For Talk pages, just click the "Discussion" button at the top. That's what we're using now. You can check the Formatting Syntax page for more details. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/06/09 07:58

By the way, we don't have to follow Wikipedia style. I think putting your own personal notes or statements at the beginning of your articles is just fine. Most other Dokuwiki sites simply place comments at the end of each page in their own section and don't have discussion pages.

Ok, thanks. (Don't know how I missed that "Discussion" Button) — Greg Weatherup 2008/06/11 00:55

Ok, more problems now I tried to edit Clan Everast and now the text keeps winking back and forth between normal and white (and white text on a white background doesn't show up too well!), what did I do that is causing this??? — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/24 02:07

Not sure what's going on. Seems to be working for me. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/24 11:48

Maybe its something with my display settings then, because now when I go there all the text from the line that starts "And Duris…." and below doesn't display unless I highlight it with the mouse. Is anyone else having probelms with that page displaying completely? — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/25 02:54

I have that issue too. First noticed it on the "Recent Changes" page. Doesn't happen on every page–mostly only with lists or bullets. — Roger Girtman 2008/07/25 11:57

I'm still running Firefox 2 on Linux. What are you guys running? I doubt it's a display setting thing, something may be messed up. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/25 12:06

IE 6 on Win XP. I just checked and it does display a-ok on Firefox 2 — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/25 14:46

Ok thanks, I'll go ahead and give it a run on browsershots.org at http://browsershots.org/http://mystara.us/wiki/everast_clan — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/25 14:54

hmm, after playing around with it some more, it seems to be tied to my browser window size. If I have it maximized on my screen, or larger than about 3/4 of the top to bottom size of my screen, the last bit of text goes away, but If I have the browser window at less than about 3/4 of my screen size (top to bottom) then it shows up normally. Very odd… — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/25 17:35

I'm also starting to notice it happening on other pages — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/25 17:53

Since we don't know what's causing it, and it can obviously happen to anyone with the specific settings, I think maybe the ultimate solution is going to be finding another theme. I can't really imagine why the text would be disappearing… — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/28 08:29

Well, so far it [the everast clan page] seems to be displaying without incident now. What about for you Roger? — Greg Weatherup 2008/07/28 17:25

I'll play around for a bit more, but whatever Angelo did, it's fixed. The tweaks to the layout look good too… link colors, the bigger "M", the addition of the nav box and footer–all good signs that we're growing up! — Roger Girtman 2008/07/29 10:01

Thanks. Now I'm trying to get a "Discussion" tab along the top so people can easily find pages like this. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/29 11:44

Greetings,

I might of already asked this before, but is there any way to get it to take you to a random page on the wiki? I could see myself (when I get more time) frequently using that to find random things to update or improve on here. on wikipedia it is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random — Greg Weatherup 2008/11/27 03:47

It's a tad bit more difficult for dokuwiki to implement this than mediawiki because it does not use a database backend, however I did find one plugin that looks like it might provide this: http://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:random_page . I can try installing it.
Ok, there is it on the left. I noticed sometimes it brings up a page that was previously deleted, so I might have to look at the code a little. Otherwise it mostly works. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/11/27 18:23

Excellent Angelo! It looks to be working fine. I hope to frequently use it to help along the wiki. thank you. — Greg Weatherup 2008/11/29 02:04

I've noticed that using the random page function brings up indexes. It would be trivial to change the code so it doesn't land on any page that has the string "index" in the URL… Do you think it would be a good idea to exclude the lettered indices? Maybe it would be a good idea to move indices to their own namespace. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/11/29 12:46

I say keep allowing it to land on indexes. When I used it I wound up at the 'd' index and I got to thinking "what could I add to the 'd' entries?" and then I thought of "Davania!", hence my recent additions. The indexes are always going to need updating and are a quick way for someone to find various things that need updating. I cast my 2¢ to vote to keep it as is. Thanks. — Greg Weatherup 2008/11/29 22:57

Sometime back the random page link started only following pages in the wiki namespace. Don't know why it started doing that all of a sudden, but I had been too busy to comment on it back when I had noticed it. I doesn't appear that anything on your end was chaged so perhaps it was an update to the plugin or some such (I don't know how that stuff works). — Greg Weatherup 2010/02/12 16:22

I did an upgrade of the software, and it seems to be working now, grabbing from anywhere in the wiki. — Angelo Bertolli 2010/02/16 14:59

Same problem still with the 'Recent Changes' link. I think you just need to remove the "wiki/" line in the link. cheers — Greg Weatherup 2010/04/02 17:02

Thanks. I was able to fix it and include some stuff on the server side to make the links prettier. It looks like it is working appropriately now. — Angelo Bertolli 2010/04/02 18:05

1) Minor Edit checkbox? In Wikipedia you can set things to not show minor edits in the "recent changes" lists, any way to do that here? Otherwise what's the point of having that checkbox?

It doesn't seem to do much of anything. I thought it was supposed to let you not need a summary, at the very least. I can't figure out what the purpose is.

hmm…, wierd

FYI, I just noticed something: while all edits show up on the Recent Changes page, minor edits do not show up when using the "List Recent User Contributions" feature. — Greg Weatherup 2009/06/15 21:41

2) Categories. Does Dokuwixi support category tags? If so how do you create them?

A plugin can be added for that functionality, if you think it would be beneficial.

Down the road, I could see it being useful, though probably not so much at this time.

— Greg Weatherup 2009/05/17 01:05

David Shepheard/Big Mac in a post at the Piazza (Here) gave some suggestions for the usage of Namespaces. What does anyone think?

I had though namespaces were the same thing as user pages and directories but now I see they are more like wikiproject directories.
One idea I have would be for a Mystaran genealogy section, for important families of Mystaran NPCs, would that work?
— Greg Weatherup 2008/07/24 01:03

Thanks for mentioning that post. I'm not sure myself how to best utilize namespaces, but what Big Mac said makes sense to me. I think a genealogy would be really interesting especially if we could somehow combine canon and non-canon (i.e. if people have their own character they want to add!) into one tree, but still keep them clearly distinct. Yeah it's a great idea for a namespace.
In general, I would say that I like to err on the side of doing first and organizing later: it's ok to just go ahead and start using namespaces however you see fit, and they can always be moved later. — Angelo Bertolli 2008/07/24 08:06

Thanks for the namecheck!

One thing I think that might be useful for a namespace is a 'products' namespace. If you had one of those, you could add one page per Mystara RPG module, novel or whatever. That way, when you want to mention the product (maybe in a citation or maybe in a 'further reading' section) you can link to products:Isle_of_Dread or products:X1 or something along those lines. You could even put the novels separately, so that you could have a link to novels:Son_of_Dawn or (again) something along those lines. — David Shepheard 2009/04/30 17:10

Is there any way to set it up so that if a link is on a page within a namespace, and can't find that link within the namespace, it will default to the main wiki? I'm trying to find a way to link from My Birthright Alfheim page to a related entry on Ainsun. Right now I've got it as an external link.

While trying to make this post, I see that it is also a problem trying to link from a talk page to an article…

— Greg Weatherup 2009/05/11 17:51

Just use a blank namespace, e.g. you would use Ainsun. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/05/11 18:51

oh, I see so its: openbracket openbracket colon filename pipe displayname closebracket closebracket, all without spaces. A quick test show's it works (of course I see I also accidentaly deleted the link I was working with in my last update anyhow). Cool, now I can link in all kinds of things. Thanks as always Angelo! — Greg Weatherup 2009/05/11 19:26

I think the front page should be changed to include things such as "news" from other sites. Maybe even the latest posts from the Piazza.

Almanac

Others

• An error occurred while fetching this feed: http://heroesonly.com/feed

When you changed over to the new, more basic address, I don't think everything made the move. If you go to Site Map and click on any of the things like 'talk', 'user pages', 'genealogies', etc., nothing shows up anymore. — Greg Weatherup 2009/03/16 18:09

Weird. All the pages are still there. For example Alphatian ruling and noble families still works. But I don't know why it's not coming up on the index. I also did an upgrade of the software, so maybe I need to see if they have had any problems with this. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/03/16 21:34

I changed the theme temporarily, took a look at the index page, and it was working fine. When I switched back, it started working for me. So, I can only guess that there is something going on where it is unable to load some kind of javascript. It looks like I'll have to look for another (maybe better) index feature that I can use. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/03/16 21:56

You have a wiki:site_notice page and a wiki:copyright page that appear at the top and bottom of every page on the wiki. They have not yet been created and it might be worth putting something up on them. I think I've accidentally tried to edit those small bits (instead of the proper page) several times. Maybe if something was there, it might help me realise that the edit links were only for a header and footer. — David Shepheard 2009/04/30 17:11

Actually, it seemed just as confusing when I had them created. That's why I took them off. I'm not sure what to do short of trying to hack this theme. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/05/11 19:06

Here's an idea I had, what with the end of the month coming up. Would it perhaps be a good idea to pick a page of the week or of the month (one currently not existing or one currently in Stub form) and post it over at the piazza or the MML, inviting people to help make the page? A sort of article improvement drive? Try to get more people involved in helping out over here? It could keep the wiki in people's mind, and allow people who are afraid of writing wiki's to contribute (maybe so we can eventually persuade them to try it directly). What does any one think? Good idea? Horrible idea? — Greg Weatherup 2009/05/30 05:52

Greetings. We've now got an article for the Kingdom of Norwold (looks good btw Roger!) at "norwold" and one for the Empire of Alphatia at "alphatia". A thought (long term planning here) occured to me. Do we want to save the addresses "norwold" & "alphatia" either for aritcles about the region of norwold and the continent of alphatia, or else as disambiguation pages, and move the current articles to something else (like on Wikipedia it would be "norwold (kingdom)" and "alphatia (empire)" - though I'm not sure what the doku wiki standard is)? Or just eventually develop the existing pages to include sections for both? thoughts? — Greg Weatherup 2009/11/27 15:12

I don't know if this helps with how to organize documents, but in dokuwiki each article is literally just a text file. So, the page alphatia, is just alphatia.txt. Then you can also create directories by using a namespace. So you can further create alphatia:weapons which gets stored as alphatia/weapons.txt. It's really all well organized as a directory tree. I doubt we'll have nearly the level of name collisions here that they do on Wikipedia. I would say give the URL "alphatia" to the most common usage of it. — Angelo Bertolli 2009/11/27 16:16

How can I find out how many articles are in this wiki? I'm used to them just saying it on the main page.

Welcome Riddly, It's shown on the Statistics page, currently type=pages pages. I suppose it would be easy enough to add that one piece of code to the main page if others feel it would be a good addition. — Greg Weatherup 2011/01/25 18:32