Topic on User talk:Zesty

First a question: Do you know what's up with MediaWiki:Common.css? Are you able to access it? I get a time-out and ominous error message.

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in /home/rimworldwiki/public_html/includes/shell/Command.php on line 472

Secondly, I wonder about feedback to some thoughts or plans for the future. I posted about it in the Community Portal and the Forum. Basically a wall of silence so far :( Yes, it's summer, but I got all excited and hoped for feedback and interaction.

Some of this would involve quite some work, all really, and I am now reminded how tricky it actually is to make a CSS re-design. Awfully much is defined in various hidden default files, and it is based on a light skin, so just about everything breaks. Until I can figure out the tags, how to code them, and make the changes to CSS (in my userspace for now). Wouldn't have got anywhere without looking at and importing snippets from other wikis.

Anyway, I'd love some feedback about these ideas, and whether I should just abort it right away, or actually start plugging away at it.

(Hah, there it is again. Do you know if the spam check where we have to answer rimworld, boomrat, muffalo, etc will always persist? I get it rather often, which has become kinda grating).

Sometimes pages aren't friendly to load, but you can get around it with URL editing. I think it has something to do with page length.

https://rimworldwiki.com/index.php?title=MediaWiki:Common.css&action=edit

Using https://rimworldwiki.com/index.php?title=PAGENAMEHERE&action=edit and replacing PAGENAMEHERE should get you to any page that doesn't want to let itself be 'viewable'. I think it's an issue that cropped up when the wiki was converted to use https instead of plain http.

In regards to switching to Cargo, how much overhead do you think there would be in converting pages using SMW to Cargo? From what I'm reading online, they could run side-by-side, but I'd rather have one running than two. Some use cases can be seen on pages like Lumber and Template:List

Looks like the common page got out of hand after a 50,000 byte edit by one user, adding a bunch of support for 'Glyphicons'. I'm currently checking if we actually need this huge section of code. I'm not sure what it's referring to.

Scratch, see following reply.

Upon further digging, the skin that the wiki uses is https://rimworldwiki.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Vector.css and I'm not totally positive why the Common.css page is behaving so odd. Even with a blanked page, it doesn't want to render.

Using your trick above I managed to load it, maybe because you removed some of the fluff. Just now it loaded when I looked at the AllPages special page too, so maybe it's okay now?

Quite a lot of weird stuff in there though. Crikey. Good thing you got rid of a lot of it. Can't imagine it's very useful. Maybe something that was put in ages ago?

As for Cargo.. It wouldn't be a swift process. Templates would need rewriting, queries re-written, and infoboxes rewritten. Oh, and most pages that use the templates. Much of that can be automated, but not the template rewriting. However, there shouln't be much overhead in terms of page loading, at least if the previous experience is anything to go by. It's best to have both running concurrently, until it's safe to remove all the SMW. Long-term I think it would be a good move, and it would be easier to get an overview of the data and manage it. But getting there is the issue. Not doing a good salesman job here now! :D

To get an idea of what it might look like, here is one of the tables on the Pillars of Eternity wiki, which I worked on previously: Bestiary table (scroll down past the definitions). And here is what is called a Drilldown: Bestiary Drilldown. Looks like the skin is borked, so hard to read, but it's essentially a filtering mechanism. Personally I prefer the tables more though. And you can export the whole thing to Excel for instance (possible in SMW too, but harder to carry out).

It's easier to get a solid overview of similar type of data when one can view it in a traditional table, instead of trying to get to grips with the various properties in SMW.

Oh, and as for those pages you linked: They look pretty complex, with nested templates again, so it's probably not easy to recreate that perfectly - in case that is desired. But one can do so in Cargo as well, by using essentially the same technique of having a template deal with the output of data, instead of one of the automatic processes.

However, if we are to try to get more unified templates here anyway, and maybe deal with the overly complex (and slow!) Define etc template chains, it could make sense to do these things simultaneously.

Sort of independent of all this, do you know if the current templates are using the structure from the game's XML files, and if the data is mostly updated?

If we are to do this, we could make sure the templates (and pages) use the same structure to make them easier to maintain -- within reason. Perhaps the XML files have way more data than we need.

In any case, there is some background info here: Gamepedia policy thingy. I was active over there at the time, and it was quite amazing the amount of issues SMW caused for them. The entire network, meaning every single wiki, could go down for hours on end because one of the larger wikis carried out maintenance on the SMW database. Which eventually led them to effectively banning SMW.

And here is a brief migration guide that is useful to refer to: SMW migration guide.

Since I've done this once before, I can do a lot, but it would of course be excellent with some help as well, as it's not a small task. And I hope to be able to use much of the code I wrote for Pillars. Templates and infoboxes can probably largely be re-used.

You both seem pretty confident and up to the task. I checked the thread linked to the Ludeon forums, and the reception seems pretty positive to the new design possibility.

I'll install Cargo along side Semantic MW. Hopefully we can transition to where we don't need SMW, but they seem like they can run alongside each other for now. Apologies while I brick the wiki a few times during installation.

The install for Cargo is partially complete. I'll take a look at the CSS issue a little later.

I'm just waiting for some assistance from Tynan to run a script that Cargo needs before it's up and running. I'll let you all know as soon as it's ready to use.

Thanks, that's excellent :) You may want to use the latest version though. I looked at the special page, and looks like v 2.0 is installed.

I think we're on a slightly order version of MediaWiki. I'll look into updating it all when I have some extra time this week, hopefully.

Please check if Cargo is working in the meanwhile. I think Tynan has set up the databases it requires, but I'm not 100% sure. Let me know if it's not working yet.

Good to be up and running again :) Admittedly I've not set up extensions myself, so not sure how much there is to consider. However, from the extension page they have listed Mediawiki 1.23 as the requirement, and we have 1.31 here, so I would think that should be okay?

No big deal though. It can be done in time. I'll set up a template and see if it works. Probably won't be able to actually create a table, IIRC that requires admin privileges, but the rest will hopefully work. Will let you know if something looks wrong.

I crudely copied in a template and some data. Was told the table isn't created yet, which is normal (now). Then went to the Cargo tables special page, and was met with an error message of the not-very-clear type :D

[XSvgkay9M1XcXnXTt9GyHAAAADM] 2019-07-15 02:10:25: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError"

Think it is possible to change some setting so that error messages make more sense. If that hasn't been set yet, maybe it will help. That said, I remember seeing such error messages before, though I have no idea what it means.

Found this under common problems:

   If you see an error message that looks like "A database query error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software.", you should add the following to LocalSettings.php, so that the page displays a more helpful error message:

$wgShowSQLErrors = true;

   Similarly, if you see an error message like "Fatal exception of type MWException", add the following to LocalSettings.php for a more helpful error message:

$wgShowExceptionDetails = true;

The wiki got stuck during the required update.php run to set up the 2 DBs that Cargo requires to run. I think that's what's causing that error.

However, I'm a bit stuck. Tynan said he tried running update.php, but it asked for an updated version of Composer. He tried updating that, but update.php is still asking for an updated version of Composer. Along the way, the wiki was accidentally bricked for a bit (hence the downtime).

I'll admit that I don't have tons of spare time to figure this stuff out, but I'm trying my best. It's a bit tricky however, since I've only got FTP access to the wiki at the moment (no terminal). Any suggestions would be appreciated, I'm not the most experienced with these plugins.

Unfortunately I don't have experience with doing this directly, as we never had access to that on Gamepedia (the staff there do it, for security reasons). However, the main developer Yaron Koren is very active on the extension talk page, so you can try to ask him directly there. I won't be able to help with this Composer issue and such anyway :-/ I recently asked him something there, and he replied quickly. There are some other very knowledgeable people too, who may also be able to help out with installation and setup questions.

Hi. Were you able to try some more on this? I posted about it here, but ofc I'm just an intermediary, so if something is incorrect, please add to the topic. Would be nice to get this sorted out.

Also, do you know if it would be possible to give me the rights to create and recreate tables? It would make things easier, as from experience this needs to be done rather frequently when testing out templates.

Oh and would it be possible to avoid the incessant "what is the name of the game this wiki is about?" questions and suchlike? Pretty please. It's starting to drive me up the wall =) After well over 1000 edits I should think it's fairly clear I'm not a spambot.

Can you please install the Page Forms extension? It has a very useful #arraymap function that is good for converting various output. As you can see from the test page here, it looks a little wonky without it. That is supposed to become a list (ul). It is useful for quite a few other things too, but I've only used it for #arraymap previously. It works with both SMW and Cargo btw, but I've never ventured into the actual Forms part of it. Seemed easier to just deal with wikitext, oddly enough.

Data like in the test page is stored in Cargo with a separator (e.g. ";" or ","). #arraymap is then used to turn those separators into an unordered list (or anything really). Easier than having to deal with regex or something heavy like that.

Well I definitely appreciate you guys taking the time to try to improve the wiki.

Being honest, I'm just not very knowledgeable about how to run a wiki technically. I'm not actually spending time editing it so I don't know the user needs, nor do I really know what Cargo or SWM even are. Call it rational ignorance - I'm trying to focus my time on game development stuff.

If there's anything I can do to help you, though, let me know. We've also got a web dev who goes back years called Hypolite (aka Ben Lorteau) who I'm happy to contract to help you guys out with this. He can work whatever command line magic is required.

I also agree that the spam protection should probably go away after enough time. Anything that makes editing annoying for no reason we want to reduce.

Anyway, basically just let me know what you'd like me to do. I can't help manage this process or make technical decisions about it but I'll definitely help execute. You both know my email.

That is a wise decision. We are definitely glad you focus on the game :)

From my point of view, what I would like to see happen is installation of the:

• Cargo 2.2 extension
• Page Forms 4.5.1 extension (read more about this one, and it could potentially be very useful for setting up the actual pages as well as the already mentioned #arraymap function)

I don't know the technical side and what would needs to be done to get them installed and set up correctly. However, if Cargo was tried to be installed via Composer, that actually isn't necessary, and from what I gather Cargo isn't (well) supported through Composer. So I would suggest to try to install Cargo the old-fashioned way. Maybe that requires access to command line? I'm not sure. All I can really do is read the installation help page.

Noticed this line, which may be important. With both Cargo and SMW, this needs to be set, so SMW still works properly:

$smwgEnabledCompatibilityMode = true;

Maybe that is already set, though, since SMW currently works on the wiki.

Have family visitors currently so won't be very active over the next few days. But if I can help in some way, just say the word and I will try.

Thinking about trying to set up a wiki locally just to see what it's like, but need to figure out what I would need first to set it up (I have a Linux system).

Otherwise, it would ofc be great if this command line wizard can help us out.

(And since I just got the question once again (probably due to external links), I would *really* appreciate not having to answer these darned security questions all the time)

Hi, apologies for taking some time to get back to you.

I've installed Page Forms, should be up and running as is. That compatibility like has already been set in the LocalSettings as well, it's just that Cargo's DBs need to be set up eventually (above mentioned Composer / update.php stuff).

I'll email Tynan, maybe Ben and his command line wizardry can get Cargo's DBs set up.

Hi, and sorry for the late reply. I've had a family visit for about a week. Thank you for installing Page Forms.

After some troubles here and there, I've installed mediawiki locally, and now also with the extensions we have here (give or take). Cargo 2.2 is installed and seems to be working, though I'm yet to create templates and such as the entire wiki empty. But I don't get any error messages when trying out the Cargo special pages, and I see cargo_tables and cargo_pages tables inside the main wiki database when I log on with phpmyadmin. The update.php script ran without errors, so I guess that worked out.

Not sure how this would be done without root access, mind you. What I did was to download the extension from github and then extract it in terminal (I have Linux Mint) with a tar command. Then put that under /extensions and rename the folder to Cargo. Insert the installation line in LocalSettings.php and then run the update.php script.

Don't know if this helps given we are on different setups (and I used MediaWiki 1.33), and I have root access since this is just a localhost wiki. Didn't use Composer either as I've never used it before and it looked to require quite a bit in the dependency department.

I'll try to export some pages from the RimWorld wiki and see if I can get something done locally instead. That way I don't have to worry about mucking up something, and won't have to struggle with captcha questions nor user right restrictions. Will try to rewrite some templates (if I can export->import and get it working decently enough) and fiddle about a bit.