User talk:Toughpigs

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• Toughpigs •

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Thanks for your recent edits! I'm Jimbo, your robot wiki representative! We hope you'll keep on editing with us. This is actually a great time to have joined, because we're now fully independent, and working on a host of new features!

We've got a couple of important quirks for a fan written wiki, so let's get them out of the way first.

British English, please

We generally use British English 'round these parts, so if you use another form of English, please be sure you set your spell checker to BrEng, and take a gander at our spelling cheat card.

Spoilers aren't cool

We have a strict definition of "spoiler" that you may find a bit unusual. Basically, a spoiler, to us, is anything that comes from a story which has not been released yet. So, even if you've got some info from a BBC press release or official trailer, it basically can't be referenced here. In other words, you gotta wait until the episode has finished its premiere broadcast to start editing about its contents. Please check the spoiler policy for more details.

Other useful stuff

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• the listing of all our help, policy and guideline pages
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A bit late but better late than never :) Dark Lord Xander 03:19, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Aw, thanks! I appreciate it. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 05:21, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for stopping by

I browsed through the Muppet Wiki site "researching" ways to make this Wiki better. among other things I came across some great screencaps from The Storyteller, one of the best tv shows ever.

it might interest you to know that main character of This Town Will Never Let Us Go, from the Faction Paradox Who spin-off book series has an obsession with Muppets.

--***Stardizzy*** 22:50, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Oh, I haven't read any Faction Paradox books yet. I love Lawrence Miles -- I've been reading the About Time books recently -- but I haven't looked at the FP books.

By the way, did you see that we have a Doctor Who page? I was very excited when the 10th Doctor mentioned The Muppet Movie in "Tooth and Claw"... -- Danny (talk) 01:30, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I actually didn't know about that page. thank you for bringing it up. --***Stardizzy*** 03:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Mediawiki Welcomes

Some things like including a template, when it was added to the user's page it added all the code, rather than just the template. I did try a few different ways of doing this, created special specific templates for the mediawiki welcomes, but it still translated to all code when applied to the user's user page, rather than just the template.

I appreciate the adding automatically function, but not all the people who add the welcome templates are admins, and there are several active members of this community that can often assist new users (just as easily) who aren't admins. Also, the welcomes to unregistered users, many IP users come and change just a few things and not sure if they want to be burdened or care about joining (okay I understand the argument about providing them with the info that will make them want to join), but often it seems not. --Tangerineduel 14:09, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm trying to figure out what the problem was with templates... You should just be able to copy and paste all the code into MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user, and it'll show up in the welcome. You don't need to create a special template for it. I'll play around and see if I can figure out what happened.

If you want, you can assign a particular person to sign the welcomes, or put several people on. The most important thing is that people feel appreciated for their contribution, and connected to somebody who can help them out. I've seen a lot of IP users signing up on various wikis because they've gotten a welcome while they're still on the site. Not everyone will want to, obviously, but there are lots of people who just don't know that they can.

I'll look into the template thing; let me know what you think... -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 23:38, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Okay -- I tested it out, and it seems like it works fine... I signed in as a test user, made an edit, and I got a welcome using the Doctor Who template -- User talk:Dannytest14. Am I missing something? -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 23:46, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

My issue wasn't really with it 'working' it was with the neatness and simplicity with which it functioned. Currently when we place a welcome note on a new user's talk page all they get is: {{Welcome|User:Username|--~~~~}}. With the mediawiki welcome implemented system you get 1300 or so worth of characters and all the associated wiki markup that makes it work. The reason I created the template and tried to implement it on the mediawiki welcome was to get rid of all the source stuff. It's all a bit messy and needless, plus I think a new user seeing all that on their talk page might be a little bit perturbed, welcomes should be short and simple, 1300 characters is a little bit daunting. --Tangerineduel 13:02, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

You know what? You're completely right, and I didn't realize that was a problem. I'm really glad you pointed that out! I'm gonna go see what we can do about that -- I'll check back with you when I have a good answer. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 01:32, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Did you ever find a way to address Tangerineduel's concerns with this?
czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 21:29:32 Thu 26 May 2011 

We (at MA) found a nice workaround for this one. Check out this page... at the top specifically. It's a bit ugly but works like a charm. -- sulfur 22:49, May 26, 2011 (UTC)

Thanks!

Thanks, I kinda thought I was just adding my voice to the pot. The 36,000 edits thing, I hardly ever actually take note of that number. (Last time I looked and thought about it it was 34K)

As I said I'm all for helping new users, but those new users do (eventually) become regular users of the site, and some things are learnt by doing, not by having several helping hands along the way.

I learnt this stuff through doing, making mistakes and working it out from how one thing leads to another, my worry is that having all these assists for new users in place prevents some of the learning of the wiki/system through which all this operates occuring. I know there's a balance to be sought between making it super-easy for people to jump in and edit and allowing for more complicated things to be done. Just seems a lot of the new user stuff often seems to ignore the complicated things.

I seem to have gone from thanking you to making a critical commentary of things...I should work on that. --Tangerineduel 14:58, February 15, 2010 (UTC)

No, that's cool -- that's the kind of question that we're asking ourselves all this time.

I learned how to do this the same way that you did, messing around in the code and figuring out stuff one step at a time. That works really well for a particular kind of person -- someone who's got a lot of patience and is willing to put off doing cool things while you're learning how the interface works.

The problem is that there are a lot of people who don't like learning systems, but who would be great at making wikis. I have friends who know a lot about the Muppets and would be super helpful to me on Muppet Wiki, but they tried using it once, couldn't figure out how it worked, and went away. So I lose their knowledge, because they don't like learning systems. So the challenge for us at Wikia is to figure out how to take some of the "system" away, so that people can concentrate on adding information and pictures.

It's kind of like the difference between an automatic transmission and a stick shift. I learned how to drive on an automatic, and I have no idea how a stick shift works. The people that I know who drive stick tell me that it's much more powerful, and you can do a lot more if you drive stick. But I've been driving automatic for decades now, and I get everywhere that I want to go. I won't ever learn how to drive stick, and I don't miss it.

My dream for Wikia is that someday new people will get the "automatic transmission" version. They'll be able to make fantastic wikis without ever looking at wikicode, or even knowing that it exists. You and I will know that there's a lot more power if you know how to edit wikicode, but they won't care, and the bottom line is that we'll have more great wiki editors. We're not there yet, but that's what we're working towards -- a world where absolutely everybody can participate on a wiki. More contributors, more friends, more cool stuff on your wiki. Sometimes the new stuff works, and sometimes we have to go back to the drawing board, but that's the direction we're going. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 15:33, February 15, 2010 (UTC)

Chat logs

Hiya :) Thanks for your speedy reply. Cutting and pasting of chat doesn't really work to create readable logs. Check out the cut and paste I did earlier today. As you can see, it's unsatisfactory in several regards. Most obviously, it doesn't preserve line breaks. But it also doesn't preserve any wiki-links, which can be quite important if you're using chat to discuss policy changes or ways to edit specific articles.

The biggest problem I see, however, is that it depends on the user deciding what she will cut and paste. This means that a conversation could be totally misrepresented when "preserved" on a page. In fact, it could just be wholy re-written and passed off as a genuine record of a conversation. By contrast, genuine logs would potentially be verbose, but they would be unassailably accurate. And okay they might be long, but they could be easily searched for key words. Besides, there's no "magic" about the 24 hour time period is there? Logs could be set in 1 hour increments or 4 hour or whatever length the programmer wanted.

It's already inconvenient to cut and paste. We're going to have to put in line breaks and wiki links to make them readable. The fact that logs might be long or unruly is therefore of secondary concern to me. I'd rather know that I'm dealing with genuine logs — that I'm privy to the whole conversation.

So, although I understand your response to my request, I don't think that your suggestion actually addresses the concerns at the root of my request.

I still think we need logs that:

• are automatically generated
• output in a readable format that requires no formatting by the user (so, line breaks/bolded user names/wiki-links)
• output only upon request (that is, a wiki page isn't created automatically, but is generated only when an admin requests output for that day/daypart.)
  czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 16:10:45 Fri 15 Jul 2011 

Those are good points! Thanks very much for your thoughts; we'll keep working on stuff. Let me know when you've got more ideas! -- Danny <staff /> (talk) 17:21, July 15, 2011 (UTC)

Your input is needed!

You are invited to join the discussion at Forum:Can we disable visual editor please?.

czechout<staff /> ☎ ✍ 07:14: Wed 21 Dec 2011 

Christmas cheer

Happy holidays!

As this fiftieth anniversary year comes to a close, we here at Tardis just want to thank you for being a part of our community — even if you haven't edited here in a while. If you have edited with us this year, then thanks for all your hard work.

This year has seen an impressive amount of growth. We've added about 11,000 pages this year, which is frankly incredible for a wiki this big. November was predictably one of the busiest months we've ever had: over 500 unique editors pitched in. It was the highest number of editors in wiki history for a year in which only one programme in the DWU was active. And our viewing stats have been through the roof. We've averaged well over 2 million page views each week for the last two months, with some weeks seeing over 4 million views!

We've received an unprecedented level of support from Wikia Staff, resulting in all sorts of new goodies and productive new relationships. And we've recently decided to lift almost every block we've ever made so as to allow most everyone a second chance to be part of our community.

2014 promises to build on this year's foundations, especially since we've got a full, unbroken series coming up — something that hasn't happened since 2011. We hope you'll stick with us — or return to the Tardis — so that you can be a part of the fun!

Spoilers

Hi please be sure to carefully read through Tardis:Spoiler policy and Tardis:Where spoilers are allowed thanks Shambala108 ☎ 00:00, 24 July 2022 (UTC)