Minecraft Wiki talk:Admin noticeboard

Interwiki links to the forums
Could we get a set of Interwiki links to certain relevant sections of the forums, like suggestions, Xbox, PE, Pi, support forums, and a topic link so we can link to posts? Oh, and the topic link would need to include a dash at the end if possible, since the forum installation is weird with topic ID numbers. Without the dash at the end of the link, it'll bring you to the home page. 06:40, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Can you provide a set of URLs, and do you have suggestions for the names to use for the interwiki links? 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 07:00, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't know how it would be particularly useful. You have to use the number for the forum sections and forum topics, and you would only get that from the url, so it'd actually be quicker to just use the url instead of the interwiki (since you don't have to remove the rest of the url). –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 07:07, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Post links http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/$1 using 'mcfpost' or 'mcftopic'
 * News links http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/$1 using 'mcfnews'
 * Forum links http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum/$1 using just 'mcf' or maybe 'mcfsection'
 * So, if one were to link to the Suggestions forum, it would be mcf: 1- and the Xbox forum would be mcf: 145-, and a topic example (the Xbox issue thread) would be mcfpost: 1608072-. I don't know if it's possible to just put a dash after the '$1', and if it is, it might break IW links people make that include the topic/section/news title, which is unnecessary in those links anyways.
 * As for your point, ultradude25, I never thought of the IW links to be a time saver. I was under the impression they made pages neater with less space taken up by external links when an often-linked site was given an IW link. In fact, your concern is exactly what we have to deal with for all the twitter links, the word of notch links, and any other link that only uses the "ID" in the url. The bug tracker links are a little easier since the bug ID is also displayed in the page, but I'm not sure how that's different.  19:53, 21 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Well saving space is one thing, although if you're not saving any time, it's only really worth it if you're using the links a lot on the page, bug links and twitter links a pretty common, so they're worth using (although some of the twitter interwiki names are quite long).
 * In terms of saving time, interwiki links are really designed for linking to named things, specifically other wikis (thus the name). mw:Help:Images for example I can very quickly link to while writing a comment because I already know the page exists and I know the interwiki prefix, so I don't even need to stop and visit the page to get a url. This doesn't really work for anything involving numbers.


 * Personally I think some of these interwiki links (ones that involve numbers and don't save any time) should instead be replaced by templates that still give you a useful url. Looking in the references of various pages you see things like jebtweet:211258791257, which isn't a very useful looking url (even worse, not everyone uses the interwiki link, so you have a mess of normal urls and interwiki versions), it'd be nicer if it actually showed the url, but allowed you to still benefit from saving space by not having the whole url on the page. Something like, just about as short as the interwiki link, but would output an actual url. –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 02:07, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Having a template instead of an interwiki link would probably be a little better, considering references being more informative when looking at links. Now that you said what an interwiki link is designed for, the name now makes sense. It's so simple sounding, I wonder why I didn't think of it first. My impression, as mentioned earlier, is that interwiki links were there for linking an often-linked website. Because of that, and in line with what you said, I've been switching every plain twitter link I see into an interwiki link purely for consistency. I also find the references neater when links are trimmed to their necessary parts (I still hate reddit direct comment links since they can't be trimmed) and yes, the interwiki links can be a bit bland. I've been stripping most of them to the numbers, but thinking back to that, they all should really have a title. Not as extensive as what Wikipedia does with their references, but yea, something more than just numbers.
 * Along with consistency and neatness with interwiki links, one of my intentions is to be able to link to the Minecraft Forums within edit summaries, since neither external linking nor templates work in summaries. This is also an extension to what Munin295 discussed about in terms of providing some assistance to those who seem to be lost on the Internet, to put it a funny (hopefully not offending) way. Now, that may not be very effective, since quite a few people don't read notices on top of pages, let alone even see the history pages, but I think having useful forum links in summaries might help a bit, especially to budding editors who do see the histories and diffs.  03:44, 22 January 2013 (UTC)


 * Coming back to this topic, does anyone have an objection to adding these myself? I would like to link directly to the forums in an edit summary instead of the forums article as well as reformatting a few references when I come across them.  05:06, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I don't have any objection, but then again, I'm not an admin. You'll probably need another admin's approval or something. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 05:37, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * You can make the interwikis, but I think it should only be used for edit summaries. Anything else should use a normal link, or (in the case of making refs smaller) a template that shows a normal link. –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 07:06, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Thinking about the templates, I'm actually interested in making these. I'll get to it. I'll also make ones for twitter links. I'm not sure if each twitter account should get one or if I should try to code a catch-all template that handles all known reference links. This'll be an interesting project for me, unless you have already been thinking of making them.  21:34, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Best solution is probably to make a single template that takes the Twitter handle and tweet ID as parameters; that wouldn't be very hard. Maybe have it recognize the accounts of Mojangstas, 4J Studios, etc. and style them a bit differently, so it's more noticeable when people link to fake accounts. -- Orthotope 00:45, 9 April 2013 (UTC)


 * We already have tweet. –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 03:45, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting. I was not aware you made that. I wasn't as active as I would've liked in March. 04:01, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

Blocking accounts due to inactivity
Could the admin of a minecraftwiki (not the english one) threaten me to block my account if I do not make new pages or I do not traduce the existing ones of the english wiki?

Cordially, --Lazarus 19:40, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Nope, we don't block people for not editing (admins may have their admin privileges removed if they're inactive for too long, but that's for entirely different reasons and most editors don't have to worry about it). =) 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 19:54, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the quick response, so what should I do if I've been actually menaced of being blocked for inactivity by a certified wiki admin? Should I contact a curse wiki administrator? There is some wiki page that says that I can't be blocked for not using the wiki?


 * --Lazarus 20:04, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Could you link to where you were told this? 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 20:19, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Sure, http://it.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Discussioni_utente:Lazarus, translated is:
 * {| class="wikitable"



== Help the wiki! ==

Please help the wiki (and for help I mean you should help to translate all the pages), or I will block your account for inactivity.
 * }


 * --Lazarus 20:31, 15 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Aah, I thought it was on a different wiki. I don't know if Curse has any policy on this, but I can say it doesn't make any sense and is definitely not how the English wiki works. I'll drop Raffox a note. 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 21:10, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Lock Xbox 360 Edition issues
I've been noticing the Xbox 360 issue page is still a little active. 4J isn't on the issue tracker, yet. Last I heard, it is one of EvilSeph's intentions to bring that edition over. Anyways, nobody at 4J is active here, and I don't think they have ever been. There's been a community-made issue topic on the Minecraft Forums for almost as long as the edition has been around, with 4J taking up the last two or three versions of that thread. My suggestion is to lock the Xbox issue page and make some kind of notice or link to the issue topic on the forums on the "View Source" page, like those edit notices or something. 09:05, 21 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Page locked. Meh about the editnotice, I'd rather just wait and see if we get any complaints/questions/whatever on the talk page or elsewhere. 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 09:36, 21 February 2013 (UTC)


 * I figured as much. I've been perusing the MediaWiki site looking at how random parts of the software works, and reading that page I linked in conjunction with noticing the Xbox page got me thinking about how to use the edit notices lol.  09:39, 21 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Editnotices are awesome to be sure; I'm just too lazy to add them most of the time because the relevant pages are so out-of-the-way. =D 「 ディノ 奴 千？！ 」? · ☎ Dinoguy1000 09:46, 21 February 2013 (UTC)

"missing signature" tag on template edits?
Does anyone know why my template and template subpage edits are getting tagged with "missing signature"? Not the template talk pages, the actual template pages. It looks like it's been happening for about a week. I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be adding signatures to templates…

&mdash;Munin295 &middot;  &middot; 03:22, 25 March 2013 (UTC)


 * Because templates are namespace 10, they're being picked up by the regex for namespace 1 (main talk pages), because 10 has a 1 in it. Just need to make it more specific. –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 03:36, 25 March 2013 (UTC)

Request to protect Villager
The page Villager has repeatedly been vandalized by anonymous IPs who ridicule them, menace them and simply do a lot of rather idiosyncratic changes. I think we need to protect this page to auto confirmed users. -- Numbermaniac  - Talk  (C)  00:55, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

What happened to one of the admins?
The admin IKJames seems to have not done any edits since 2011. How come? -- Numbermaniac  - Talk  (C)  04:12, 29 March 2013 (UTC)

Server overloaded?
I've been getting a lot of blank screens and "Server at capacity" messages when trying to save an edited page. This has been happening since at least yesterday afternoon (EDT). Not sure what you can do about it, but it's a problem. --Mental Mouse 15:40, 5 April 2013 (UTC)


 * It happens from time to time. The wiki is not the only thing that Curse hosts and when this happens, a lot of other Curse sites also have issues. In response to the idea that the Schematic template is causing it, I doubt it.  18:28, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it wasn't happening when I was doing other edits, and went away rapidly when I started moving sections to sub-pages. I think I was in fact beating on the server too hard.  --Mental Mouse 21:16, 5 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Curse has been under almost constant DDoS attacks for the past 6 months. We do have mitigation processes in place, so that you will rarely see any serious downtime, but occasionally they still cause momentary blips in our service. It's almost impossible that any type of edits from a single user is going to be at the root of these sorts of blips. The ONLY exception to this is when heavily used templates are changed. This can cause an overwhelming server load while the changes are parsed out to every instance of the template, which is why most of the most heavily used templates are only editable by admins.-- Wynthyst [[Image:User Wynthyst sig icon.png ]] talk  01:26, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Why would someone attack us with denial of service attacks?! -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 02:31, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Human nature. There will always be someone out there with the mentality to perform negative things for no good reason.  02:39, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * It's fun or a test of skill or some other reason. Rcmaehl 02:48, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Seeing some of the vandalism here, I guess I'm not surprised. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 02:54, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * It's likely a test of skill as hackers tend to test their tools on small sites before trying to attack larger ones. For Example, (LOIC TEST) –Preceding unsigned comment was added by Rcmaehl (Talk&#124;Contribs) 02:59, 6 April 2013 (UTC). Please sign your posts with

Minecraft is a big game, and I would assume a wiki on it would be pretty big. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 03:32, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I mean like small sites compared to something bigger than the site they're testing on. It's likely they're testing their tools for a site larger than minecraftwiki, especially if the DDoS has been getting larger and larger overtime, showing optimization of their tools. Rcmaehl 03:45, 6 April 2013 (UTC)


 * True. There's nothing much we can do, but hopefully it stops soon. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 04:29, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Full of salient points. What?
This picture allows for a better explanation:File:Screen_Shot_2013-04-07_at_3.38.53_PM.png --Signed, Thesmug 04:39, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I have no idea what that is. I don't see anything on my end on that page or that template (Template:Items).  04:44, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Spambot vandalized Template:ItemLink; already fixed. -- Orthotope 05:00, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Oh wow, I even undid that. I didn't even read what the spam was. Didn't connect the dots to that template's usage lol.  05:02, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

Villager
The Villager page has had a lot of vandalism, mainly because they have been ridiculed for their looks. Most of it has come from IPs, and I think we need to protect this page. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 03:24, 13 April 2013 (UTC)
 * Actually I think we should protect all pages so that only registered users can edit them, I know that this causes a lot less edits but the quality will be better I think. Ftwgameshd 10:36, 13 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I can understand the inclination to prevent unregistered users from editing, since there is a fair amount of vandalism from them. Apparently the wiki was originally set up this way, and changing it was hotly debated. The eventual conclusion was that discouraging casual users from making positive contributions is worse than a small increase in vandalism. This also appears to be Curse policy, so it's unlikely to change. -- Orthotope 11:21, 13 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I actually don't like the idea of protecting every page, but I posted this as a request to protect the Villager page. There has been so much vandalism by IPs on that page that it isn't funny. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 01:13, 14 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I do not believe this policy has been fully enacted, either due to unknown issues/reasons or just not getting around to it. Wowpedia has been locked from anonymous editing since its creation. As for protecting the page, it isn't that bad. Several vandalism edits within a day would cause a protection, but there's been less than a handful within the last month.  01:19, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Redirects
When looking through articles, I noticed that there were a lot of redirects. Some of them are because they are wrongly pluralised (ie.   instead of  , but others are to do with a casing issue. For example, an article with one word (e.g.  ), regardless of whether it is capitalised or not, is correctly linked. However when two words are used (e.g.  ) making the 2nd word start with a lower case letter will cause a redirect.   is correct, but   causes a redirect. Simply capitalising and avoiding the redirect is against the style guidelines so using   seems the only way to combat this. Is there a better/another way to avoid redirects with lower case articles?  –  Goandgoo ᐸ  Talk  Contribs  Edit count 13:20, 23 April 2013 (UTC)


 * For the improper plural linking, or any link that could drop the last few characters, those are unnecessary redirects, since having a redirect perform the function of a very simple MediaWiki feature is absurd. If/when you see these redirects, make sure to correct the link and go ahead and mark the redirect for deletion. Also use the "What links here" function on the redirect to find other links. This isn't just for plurals though. That MW feature combines anything not spaced after the link, e.g. Potatoes, Potatoing, Potatonomous, etc., so any redirect you see that contains the intended page name in the first part of the redirect is unnecessary.
 * For the capitalization of multiple-word titles, both instances of linking are fine and the lowercase redirect is good. I understand you are using the green redirect code, so I agree seeing it makes you want to get rid of it lol.  18:17, 23 April 2013 (UTC)

Good IRC Clients
Hi, I was just wondering what IRC clients all the admins (and other users) use. Are there any recommended clients? Minecraft Wiki:IRC suggests using Xchat but that one doesn't seem to be updated since 2010. – Goandgoo ᐸ  Talk  Contribs  Edit count 12:20, 24 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Minecraft Forums has a browser IRC which I haven't tested much. Apart from that, no idea. -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 12:24, 24 April 2013 (UTC)


 * XChat is great client, if you're on Windows you'll want to be getting XChat 2, as that's the free Windows build of XChat. IRC is quite an old protocol, so it shouldn't be surprising that the clients aren't updated much, there can't be anything left to change by now. –ultradude25 ᐸ Talk Contribs 12:46, 24 April 2013 (UTC)


 * I use a modified old version of mIRC myself. I have a valid registration that's paid for, but I have modified .dll files to change some core functions.  04:54, 25 April 2013 (UTC)

tweet vs tweet prefix
What is the reason for preferring the tweet template over the tweet lnterwiki prefix? -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 03:13, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * From the template itself: "This should be used instead of the interwiki links, as it produces a meaningful link, while still saving space." –  Goandgoo ᐸ  Talk  Contribs  Edit count 03:18, 25 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Wow, wonder why I didn't notice that... -- Numbermaniac  - T  - C 06:58, 25 April 2013 (UTC)