Talk:Main Page

From M3P
Revision as of 11:00, 3 April 2014 by Stephensd (talk | contribs) (patch update)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Much of what's on this talk page is being handled by admins/sysops via the M3P:To Do list. If you see something on here that requires action (rather than discussion) please feel free to add your recommendations on the M3P To Do list Talk Page.

  • Discussions on this page are largely of an administrative nature. If you're looking for a discussion on the contents of the M3P you're probably better off going to the M3P:Community Portal – the place to find out what is happening on M3P.
  • Discussions about basic new user engagement are now being discussed on the Community Portal talk page leaving only preliminary talk about possible action here, as much as possible.
  • Issues that previously discussed on this page that have been settled have been moved to /Settled_Issues.

General Maintenance

1.19.15 has been released. However, the release notes do not appear to address the significant issues that broke our install. For that reason, I'm holding off. There may come a point, when the issues we identified are resolved, when I can roll all these patches together and apply them, but it isn't yet :) Stephensd (talk) 15:00, 3 April 2014 (UTC)


I have, for the current time, rolled back mw to 1.19.12. This is in response to issues concerning use of HotCat and problems with watchlist functions, inter alia. There seems to be an issue with the 1.19.13 patch, which is acknowledged as a bug at Mediawiki Bugzilla (63049) Stephensd (talk) 11:19, 25 March 2014 (UTC)


Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.13 following a security and maintenance update Stephensd (talk) 08:18, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

This update seems to have broken HotCat and article watching. It also seems to have opened a "hole" for a new type of rouge registrations to take place whereby not only the captcha is broken but the new rogue user creates a user page and an article with junk content. This latter issue is less problematic than the first two, of course, because there are only one or two rogue users to deal with per day, whereas the other two functions are central to the way the wiki works. Thanks. --Toni Sant (talk) 10:08, 23 March 2014 (UTC)
I've hacked the Hot Cat Gadget to use the new convention (the gadget is updated direct from Wikimedia servers, instead of on a local copy). I'll check out the captcha and watch code, which has probably been fiddled with by the patch, which I suppose I could look at rolling back, but I've removed the rogue users for today...Stephensd (talk) 22:19, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Doing more digging - seen something which might cause a problem - possible problem with 1.19.13 patch, which I have submitted to MW bugzilla. Will have to see what gives Stephensd (talk) 23:58, 24 March 2014 (UTC)
Thanks! HotCat works again now. --Toni Sant (talk) 11:40, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.12 following a security and maintenance update Stephensd (talk) 12:33, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.11 following an urgent security upgrade (bugzilla) stephensd (talk) 22:00, 28 January 2014 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.10 following security and maintenance upgrades stephensd (talk) 20:23, 14 January 2014 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.9 following security and maintenance upgrades Stephensd (talk) 16:07, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.8 following security and maintenance upgrades Stephensd (talk) 12:11, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.6 following security and maintenance upgrades Semantic MW has an upgrade available (1.7.1 -> 1.8.0) but this can happen in the near future Stephensd (talk) 17:38, 6 May 2013 (UTC)

Mediawiki has now been patched to 1.19.5 following security and maintenance upgrades released yesterday Stephensd (talk) 11:39, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Mediawiki upgraded to 1.19.2 on Aug 31 following earlier migration from 1.15.3 to 1.19.1. Several core security fixes made. Stephensd (talk) 08:34, 31 August 2012 (EDT)

Maintenance templates

We need to develop Maintenance Templates to enable smoother/efficient maintenance. Currently doing this for stubs and clean up notices but we need a systematic way to develop more and use these effectively. --Toni Sant (talk) 10:05, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

• There are now templates in place for Delete and SpeedyDelete marking, as of yesterday Stephensd (talk) 08:34, 31 August 2012 (EDT)


Rogue users?

Here is a list of users currently considered as potential rogues:

If your username is on this list and you want to verify that you're a bone fide user, just let us know what contributions you're planning to make to the M3P, right here on this talk page. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:53, 20 January 2012 (UTC)

I have now added config settings that prevent blocked users form logging in, and require them to have confirmed their email address before being allowed to edit. See [[1]] for details


Have added extension SpamBlacklist, and have begun a local blacklist in addition to the one used by the extension itself Stephensd 15:23, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm. A couple more appeared overnight, so it looks like the extension settings will need tweaking a touch. Done a little more today but will have to keep an eye out... Stephensd 16:25, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

    • I may have found an administrative solution to the rush of malicious account creations. After some hacking about I have installed a new extension which makes purge blocking mass creations so much easier. Together with the other measures in place, we may now be able to get on top of it. I just removed the last couple of days worth of crud in around 10 mins... Stephensd (talk) 19:54, 3 September 2012 (EDT)

OK, more work on spammer accounts. I have just configured the Bad Behaviour extension to query the Honeypot blacklist, added hotmail.com to the SpamBlacklist extension blacklist domains and have looked at slimming down the bannedips list that we were using (mainly by trying something similar in structure but adding as I go). Te original was very effective but something of a memory killer for PHP, so we can't really use that. Stephensd (talk) 14:30, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Patrolling pages?

What does 'patrolled' mean on some pages (bottom right)? I think this has something to do with pages that may have controversial contents but I need to look into it more closely as it's certainly one of the things we need to know about in terms of general maintenance etc. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:49, 26 September 2010 (UTC)

I've looked into this and it seems like it's a relatively newish feature of MediaWiki to enable administrators to mark pages that they look at. This way if admins mark a page as patrolled it means that somebody at admin level has already seen this page. It's probably useful if/when we establish a way to ensure that site admins look at all new pages. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Gadgets

  • From my work with my UG students on Wikipedia I've discovered that there's a whole set of pre-installed gadgets that users have access to as a tab in their user preferences. Twinkle is one of these gadgets, but an even more impressive one is called HotCat, which seems to me like an essential gadget for us provide for all M3P users. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:37, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
  • This requires the Gadgets extension to be installed. The first quick go I had was not a success. All the pieces are there right now, just not switched on. Stephensd 23:16, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Usability

Look and feel

  • Can we revisit the overall look and feel of the wiki? Specifically: choice of fonts for headers and use of red and blue lettering. Also having problems getting bold and italics to render properly on pages - Alex Grech (talk) This appears to be a Chrome/Firefox issue. We therefore need to keep in mind cross-browser matters. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:21, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
Can you point me at some specific examples, please? The skins css is fairly compendious and I'd need to know which styles are being affected to be able to narrow things down a touch. Stephensd 15:14, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Ok, had a look with Toni. Reverted body fonts to Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif to make sure extended chars in the UTF set are in the fonts. This may have been the problem, with embedded fonts not having them all, so font substitution being used to fill. Stephensd 17:21, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Now fiddled with link colours etc. a little more; hope this is more agreeable for the moment, unless there are major objections. Stephensd 22:26, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
All's well for now with fonts and colors. I've sub-headed further discussion into a sub-section right below this text. --Toni Sant (talk) 19:30, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
  • I'd like to look at tweaking the Main page banner a bit. The 'fixed' width causes some problems with rendering on the m3pmobile skin Stephensd 17:27, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Colours

  • Could we find some alternative colour to green for roll overs? We still have too many different font colours, which are potentially distracting.Alex Grech (talk)
The header font has been chosen to sit better with the logo and colours. I'll have a look at the hover and active link colors though.
Other than these, the colours are basically, grey, black and red. For now, ,this fits with the general scheme of things, I think. The external (blue) links are more difficult to sort out - the settings I'm applying in the skin don't seem to be doing what they should be. Stephensd 15:01, 16 September 2010 (UTC)
Right now, links are in red, but when a link page is visited, it reverts to black and bold text. Could we indicate that a visited link page is still a link page by, say, underlining the link (as is the case in Wikipedia)? Some users are not realising that some bold text actually represents a link. --Alex Grech (talk) 15:37, 21 September 2010 (UTC)
As it is, the navigation menus (and toolbox)on the left is a bit confusing. Could all the text in the menus be black, and only turn red when either it is rolled over by the cursor (momentarily), or when that particular page is clicked and displayed; ie. if page 'Main Page' is displayed, then the corresponding item in the menu (Main Page) changes to red for as long as that page is displayed...or become underlined for that matter. Tony Grimaud(talk) 18:15, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
I agree! It's time for us to revisit how we display links, hovers, and visited links. --Toni Sant (talk) 19:36, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
I fixed the link colors by switching the visited and hover colors in the various css files. There's quite a few of them! This should make things a little less problematic in the foreseeable future. --Toni Sant (talk) 19:30, 14 November 2010 (UTC)
Still not convinced the link colors are right the way they appear now. Grey visited links are rather confusing. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:14, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Consistent names for talk/discussion links (pending)

  • Another thing that we should look at is the talk/discussion issue. The button at the top of the page reads 'discussion', however, when this button is click, it takes you to a page saying: 'Editing Talk:The Artiste's Name'. This is a bit confusing too. Is it possible to change this to always read: 'Editing discussion:The Artiste's Name'? This way, there will be more consistency. Tony Grimaud(talk) 21:05, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
Ah, yes, consistency! I've noticed this somewhere else too...can't remember where now. But yes, we need to keep this in mind as we move along. --Toni Sant (talk) 06:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Help section (pending)

How do we improve the help links? --Alex Grech (talk) 08:25, 16 September 2010 (UTC)

Tony Grimaud is now looking into this and has started by seeing what we can adapt from Wikipedia as a simple set of help pages to get us going. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:46, 16 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm also adding new stuff as it becomes available...but we obviously still need to do a lot more here. --Toni Sant (talk) 15:04, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Categories (pending)

We going to need to look at the taxonomy of categories sometime soon as things can easily get out of hand if we allow this to slip from the top of our agenda as more new entries are made. In the process we should also be keeping an eye on Special:UncategorizedCategories / Special:UnusedCategories and Special:WantedCategories --Toni Sant (talk) 13:46, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Another interesting thing to consider: How to sort the Categories list at the bottom of an article. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:08, 6 October 2012 (EDT)

Calendar of Events (pending)

there is a need for a calendar of events...so as a quick fix for now, we created pages for Music Events in malta for each month, day-by-day, there is October, nov and dec for now. we are working to find a better solution for this...perhaps one as in wikipwedia watch this space . Tony Grimaud(talk) 13:18, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

This issue is going to generate quite some talk so I suggest we discuss what to do and how it's going to work on at M3P_talk:Current events. Eventually we'll also action whatever needs to be done on the To Do list --Toni Sant (talk) 13:31, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Technical Considerations

Facebook integration

We need to add a FB like box to the main page and/or to the landing page but first we must install this widget to enable the inclusion of the iframe. Width, height and connection number may need to be adjusted too. Here's the code for the M3P FB like box:

  • installed Widgets extension, and have created Widget:Iframe container page Stephensd 16:36, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=151613981521442&width=570&connections=10&stream=false&header=false&height=165" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:570px; height:165px;" allowTransparency="true"> </iframe>

Integrating FB ID login on the wiki is (as per Ds' suggestion) via the FBConnect extension is probably also a good idea. --Toni Sant (talk) 10:33, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

  • I'm tracking this via its home page and twitter feed and will go ahead once the ext seems stable enough for use. It may not be too long Stephensd 16:39, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

User Group Rights

On Tuesday 31 August 2010 Toni Sant (talk) locked unregistered user access to:

  1. Create discussion pages (createtalk)
  2. Create pages (which are not discussion pages) (createpage)
  3. Edit pages (edit)
  4. Use of the write API (writeapi)

See Special:ListGroupRights for current rights. Amendment made to includes/DefaultSettings.php --Toni Sant (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2010 (UTC)


Contact page and emails

  • We should probably avoid exposing email addresses as these are routinely harvested for spam! A work around is to have them obfuscated through javascript (extension?) or simply use an online contact form where no email address appears in public. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
  • The Contact Us link on the front page currently points to my personal online contact form. We obviously need to amend this soon. --Toni Sant (talk) 12:06, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

URLs and Permalinks

  • Can we activate redirection for non-CasE-sENsiTive titles? This is available on wikipedia - so, is it a configuration option in MediaWiki? - Toni Sant (talk)
Action on this question has now moved to the M3P:To Do list#URLs_.26_Permalinks_.28ongoing.29. --Toni Sant (talk) 17:51, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Emails generated automatically by the system still indicate the webmaster address from spettaklu.org. We should probably change this to something more appropriate either using m3p.com.mt or identifying spettaklu.org more clearly with m3p on the email address itself. --Toni Sant (talk) 09:38, 3 September 2010 (UTC)
I think this has been sorted...but I'm not 100% sure. --Toni Sant (talk) 17:51, 20 October 2010 (UTC)
  • Can we make all external links open in a new tab or window by default? --Toni Sant (talk) 16:33, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
  • I'm thinking that further discussion on the next two sub-sections (naming conventions & refering pages) belongs under help. Let's see if anyone comments about this and/or moves them in the coming days. If not I'll move them myself. --Toni Sant (talk) 17:51, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Naming conventions

We need to ensure that names of people who are known by nicknames follow this format: Firstname "Nickname" Surname. All variations on the name should refer to the page named this way. This should probably also be on a Help document in relation to style that comes as a linked document from the editorial policy.--Toni Sant (talk) 12:35, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

We also need to look into a naming convention for gig reviews to enable disambiguation for page that bear the same name as an artist page or similar. --Toni Sant (talk) 12:38, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

I am planning to pay some attention to this issue in the coming weeks. --Steve Borg (talk) 12:36, 28 February 2012 (UTC)

Refering Pages

Is there a way we can direct a search made about a person known by slight differences in their name to the same page? As it is at the moment, say; "Tony Grimaud" , "Grimaud", "il-Grimaud" ... they all would point to separate pages. at best, it tells you that no page had been found. moreover, it encourages you to start creating such a page. This produces undesirable multiple pages for the same person/entry--Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:56, 7 October 2010 (UTC).

My first suggestion would be that we grab the contents of the Wikipedia page on redirects and start adapting it for our needs. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:19, 7 October 2010 (UTC)
I have been trying my hands at refering pages with some notable success! :) ...Now i would like to share this info with the rest of the world...where would be the best place to write this, ie in the Help pages?...is there an admin login to do so--Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:56, 8 October 2010 (UTC)?
A help page on this topic would be helpful for other editors seeking to create internal redirect pages. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:03, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Signature

Could the signiture function be disabled when editing the main pages ... as it is in wikipedia? Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:35, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

This probably needs an advanced version of the editing interface to be enabled through an extensions. So, it's probably one to discuss with Darren. --Toni Sant (talk) 16:22, 15 October 2010 (UTC)
I'm actually rather keen to get an automated version of the signature in place too for all new users, but perhaps this is a default function in more recent versions of MediaWiki than the one we're currently running. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:03, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Search Options

Can we look at the search options with regards the Go button? Maybe renaming it to "Go to the Page" or something similar to indicate exactly what it does. Then again, do we really need it? --Tony Grimaud(talk) 12:44, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Google Search

It appears that the wiki is not being indexed on Google and search results only return the current landing page. I'm not sure why this is as we've never really discussed it properly at any level, so I'm just leaving this note here for now rather than add this as an item on the To Do list page. --Toni Sant (talk) 13:03, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And the rest...

Removed these three links from the Getting Started section on the Main Page because they may be confusing to people visiting the site for the very first time.

We probably need to keep these handy somewhere eventually, but I thought I'd just dump them here for now.--Toni Sant (talk) 11:05, 2 September 2010 (UTC)

And a few other things we need to emulate/adapt:

--Toni Sant (talk) 20:18, 3 November 2012 (EDT)

See also