Transformers Wiki talk:Community Portal/Archive16

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Script-style quotes

There seems to be some disagreement on whether script-style quotes should have quotation marks or not. Personally, I strongly favor including them, for two reasons:

Visual consistency. There's no reason not to have all the quotes in as similar a format as possible. Having some with quotation marks, and some without, in the same section, seems like needless variation.
It's... well... it's a quote. We're not writing a screenplay; we're quoting something someone actually said. And a quote gets quotation marks.... fullstop. -- Repowers 21:18, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm afraid I disagree. They're simply not necessary, and they clutter the page.

And, regardless of whether we decide to use double-quotes, can we put a stop to script-style where the quotes are are in double-quotes and italicized? {shudder} JW 21:21, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The italics stuff is flat out bad formatting, no disagreement here. There's an earlier discussion about it somewhere on this page or the archives. Nobody should be adding stuff in that format anymore... I hope.

As for double quotes... um... I have no clue what you're referring to. -- Repowers 21:23, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Gone Too Far

I've been alerted it's past the 30-day period for "coming soon Club stuff" non-updating. Have at it. --M Sipher 22:03, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Searchbox improvement drive

So now we have a very nice set of searchboxes, thanks to the lovely design work of M Sipher and the superhuman coding skills of Suki Brits. The effort of these boxes is to show the visitor all of the awesome crap we have. To do that, said cap must in fact be awesome. Unfortunately, a lot of the pages linked to by searchboxes are imageless, missing fiction, or pretty much content-free. Thus, I propose an improvement drive of the searchbox articles. When you click on one of those suckers, try and add something. I dunno how we'd make this official, exactly... - RolonBolon 06:49, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Are these images supposed to show up automatically by/around/with the actual text box in which you type your search parameters? If so, I'm not seeing them in the current Monaco skin.--Apcog 14:29, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

They don't show up in Monaco, Quartz, Cologne Blue, or any other custom theme. Just Monobook, the default. --Suki Brits 20:15, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Is there a way to get the search box changes to load sooner? The way it is now the custom settings for the box are the last thing to load; it uses the default settings until the google ads finish loading. This can take awhile depending on how the crappy campus wireless is acting. --FortMax 20:39, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I agree with RolonBolon about the searchbox thing. I know we're hard up for help, but why are we spending time creating these little searchbox images using pics from God knows where, yet we've neglected to upload a single image for the actual pages these buttons lead to? Not the mention pages that have absolutely no content whatsoever. I think we've overreached ourselves, and in the future we should only do these searchbox things for articles that are largely complete and/or have alot of content and imagery, otherwise we look really half-ass and unfocused. --FFN 22:37, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, what drove it home for me was Sixtrain. I see Sixtrain in the Search box. It looks nifty, like it's his box art. I click on the article, no images. Why the heck can't we upload Sixtrain's box art when we evidently have a clear enough copy of it to make a search teaser?--Rosicrucian ^Talk 23:33, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

I was simply making boxes using what I had on the hard drive as examples, and not everything is good quality at main-image size. I don't think we've "overreached ourselves" at all. At worst, we omit a few items from the searchbox list if their entries are that empty for a little while, OH NOES. --M Sipher 00:22, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

I am of the opinion that a fuzzy picture that can be replaced later is better than no picture at all. It helps users know what it's talking about in the meantime, right? Spriteless 02:24, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

We prefer no pic/no content to a crap pic/crap content. I've been taking a break from the Wiki, but it looks like I'm going on another image safari. My scanner not working is annoying. --FFN 06:54, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

The fact that the image is the last one on the page to load isn't just visually annoying; it for some reason also makes whatever you've typed in the search field vanish in Firefox. I've had this happen to me a bunch of times. A lesser annoyance is that the input box moves when the image appears; it would be nice if it could stay in the same place (maybe by making the whole Search box a fixed size?), as it's a bad idea to have a clickable thing that spontaneously jumps around. - Jackpot 20:31, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

The way the Search Image works right now, I'd rather not even have them. My computer has slowed down epically trying to load those images each time, and if it's a high traffic time of day, the rest of the page will basically freeze for 30 seconds or more until that search image gets around to loading. This is extremely annoying when I just need a quick peek at a page before making a link, like checking if Stormcloud is one word or two or if Whirl needs to be disambig-ed in the link. And if I try to click Search to move on to a next page too early, the Image drops down in front and shang-hais my "click", so I go there instead of being able to type in where I want to go.

I don't like the thing at all. It's been nothing but a hassle for the last day or so. There's already a Random page button right about it -- do we really need this too? --Xaaron 00:30, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

The same thing has been happening to me lately, and I've never experienced that problem on Wookieepedia. And this is a real problem for me, as I'm actually supportive of the image icons. We may want review the system. -- SFH 01:30, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Though in fairness, some of that may be due to Wikia's tendency to nearly-crash every weekend. And to be honest, this weekend has been rather traffic low. I mean, seriously, did every head to BotCon a week early? -- SFH 02:09, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Let me know if this continues to be an issue during weekdays (well, before Thursday, anyway). If it is, I'll figure out a way to let users optionally turn them off. I've never noticed it slowing down while trying to load, and any sane browser shouldn't, but if that really is happening for some users, something definitely ought to be done about it.

I'll also take a look at preserving the form data while the images load, because that is definitely something that really should happen, too. --Suki Brits 03:44, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Things sped back up again shortly after SFH's last post, but I'll post again if it keeps happening regularly. Maybe it was just an anomaly. --Xaaron 03:47, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Furthermore: I did a bit of code modification that should make the form retain anything you've typed before the images loads. You may need to do a hard refresh for the change to show up, but lemme know if that doesn't work for anyone. --Suki Brits 03:52, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Templates listing

Is there a page editors can refer to for templates (messagebox, user notices ect) without having to go through the categories or remembering the last time somebody used it so they can copy-paste it? They seem to be unnecessarily difficult to track down. --FFN 03:43, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

here --FortMax 04:50, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

My main concern was not requiring the page soley for myself, but was this page obviously linked on a help page or something somewhere that anybody could find easily? I'd personally like to see this wiki become more user-friendly. --FFN 07:25, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Agreed, as I've said before on this very page. -- Repowers 15:05, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah. Our lack of user friendliness might discourage people from joining up. --FFN 17:47, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

What I'm worried about is that some of the other users would actually be okay with that...-- SFH 17:48, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Well, last time I checked some of these other users don't own the wiki. --FFN 09:12, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

new template: Comicinfo

Please checkout Template:Comicinfo. It's a little rough around the edges, but something I think could be useful on the comics pages. Comments and suggestions are welcome.--MistaTee 02:42, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Masthead

Okay, the old Monobook masthead doesn't look so good under Monaco. How do we change this?--Rosicrucian ^Talk 21:31, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I've looked around and seen that other wikis have already taken advantage of the extra masthead space. Question is, how do we do so, and what dimensions would the new masthead be?--Rosicrucian ^Talk 16:05, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Before we do anything, I would recommend keeping the masthead's filesize reasonable, because there's nothing worse than trying to load a site with a masthead image that is like a megabyte or something. --FFN 16:22, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, absolutely. I was mainly thinking perhaps something involving a 'shopping of the TFA logo, considering it'd fit the color scheme nicely. Alternatively, maybe something aping the "grid" of G1.--Rosicrucian ^Talk 16:26, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Another thought is whether it's possible for the masthead to be random/rotating. If so, it'd let us do Autobot/Decepticon versions of the same masthead (via color swap) or even rotating versions for different franchises (G1, BW, UT, etc.)--Rosicrucian ^Talk 16:35, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Sidebar

Given that we're getting a lot of Transformers Animated traffic lately, I'd say an item in the Monaco sidebar is likely going to help direct people to the right articles.--Rosicrucian ^Talk 21:45, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I put it in the sidebar. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 21:56, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

The more I think on it, the more it seems we'd be best served by condensing the G1 and TFA menus and instead just having one menu that's franchise navigation. I dunno. I'm a little bothered that we can't seem to get the admins to chime in on this, since they're the ones that can edit the sidebar setup the most easily.--Rosicrucian ^Talk 19:02, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Eh. Monday after BotCon. A lot of them are probably still sleeping off their flight / drive / booze. Another reason why big changes probably shouldn't've happened this weekend. Give it a day or so. --Xaaron 19:12, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The sidebar does need major work, and "MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar" is a protected page so I guess it's not just easier for admins to change it, they're the only ones who can? The issues I have with it are:

"Featured characters" menu still includes articles that haven't actually been Featured, as well as Spark, which has been featured but is not a character.
Generation 1 and Animated are the only franchises listed.
The G1 and Animated menus are inconsistent in the sorts of articles they list. The Generation 1 menu includes Autobot and Decepticon, articles were not restricted to G1, then several high profile characters and one obscure, jokey one. The Animated menu, on the other hand, just lists the franchise's cartoon, comic, toyline, and books articles.
The "Embrace the Knowledge" menu seems to take a bit of scattershot approach. Marvel Comics is listed, but none of the other publishers. Hasbro is there, but not Takara. With Mini-Con there, might this be a better place for the Autobot and Decepticon articles, and other factions as well? --KilMichaelMcC 19:55, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar can only be edited by admins. That's true for all MediaWiki pages. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 20:31, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Set up properly, I think the sidebar could be really handy. The best approach I can think of is to turn it into essentially the Main Page. Have the four categories be Featured Articles (with the actual articles that've been designated "featured"), Categories, Franchises, and Series. More or less duplicate the lists on Main. Or if anyone else has even handier ideas, let's hear 'em. "Franchises" and "Series" might be a little redundant if there's something else I'm forgetting. But whatever we do, having an easy way to navigate around the main hub-pages of the site seems like a great potential tool. Edit: Aha, I just thought of something: An "Editing" list of key tools, like Create a new article, Stubs, Templates, How to edit, Style guide, Preferences, My watchlist, etc. Right now there are a lot of very informative pages just scattered around or even apparently unfindable without searching. This could be a great place to round up the most important ones. This conversation also has good ideas along those lines. - Jackpot 07:04, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Discussion of the sidebar has also started up on MediaWiki_talk:Monaco-sidebar. Might want to mirror your suggestions over there. --KilMichaelMcC 09:05, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Done. - Jackpot 16:22, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

Hate the new skin.

Hate this new skin. Just wanted to say it. The old look was much more pleasent and open to read. New one is just crouded and Blah. THIS is gonna take getting use to. No Sir, I don't like it.

Can it at least not be burgundy and orange? - Chris McFeely 22:08, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it can be any color you like. I was messing around with colors before, but wasn't doing a great job with it, and Rosicrucian said he wanted this color scheme. Any admin can change the colors by editing MediaWiki:Monaco.css. There's instructions on how to do it here: Customizing Monaco. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 22:15, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

I mainly liked this because it fits with the color scheme of Teletraan itself. I'm not married to the idea, though. I also figured I'd speak up about it because Walky liked it, and he's off enjoying his ridiculously expensive Transformers collector's items at BotCon.--Rosicrucian ^Talk 22:21, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Ahh, right, well, I can see the logic, there, all right... I'm just not dying about the dark-coloured backgrounds, since it's a big visually jarring to have big white boxes of text in the middle of them. - Chris McFeely 22:24, 25 April 2008 (UTC)

Seconding the hate. -hx 00:04, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

This looks pretty hideous compared to MonoBook... and it's hard to navigate. Well, at least I can override it in preferences, but I think I'll be ignoring admin skin choices unless a custom one appears in the future.--MCRG 00:44, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I think I can try to get used to the new skin unless/until I find something inconvenient. Well, so far so good. At least the seach function is better. But the logo on the left side of the top, well... um, oh. --TX55 01:23, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Fourthing the hate. The colors hurt my eyes. That, and the obscure character search images are gone. --FortMax 01:45, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm afraid I don't much like it either. Fortunately, it was pretty easy to uncheck the "override" box on my preferences. JW 01:54, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't like the new skin either. I don't get the menus at the side. "Featured characters" includes articles that I don't think have actually been Featured. G1 and Animated are listed, but no other franchises. And the menus are inconsistent. The G1 menu lists Autobot, Decepticon, and then a bunch of character pages, while the Animated menu lists Animated's toy line, cartoon, comic, and books articles. Why the difference? And what was the selection process for the "Embrace the Knowledge" menu?By the way, in the middle of BotCon is probably the worst possible time for major changes like this to be made. --KilMichaelMcC 04:29, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

The menus at the side are examples that I made up. You guys can change them to be anything you want, by editing MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar. I'm sorry about the timing... We've been talking about this for maybe three weeks.

Lots of things can be changed -- the colors, the menus, the logo. I'll put it back to the basic Sapphire for now, which is more like Monobook. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 05:08, 26 April 2008 (UTC)

Not a fan of the skin, either. Losing the brown and yellow from earlier was a step up, but it still doesn't quite work. The extra crap on the side feels bigger now, so the actual articles feel smaller. And those blamed automatic pulldown menus keep getting in the way everytime I move my cursor to or from the Search box. Annoying. --Xaaron 17:02, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

I'm a little unclear- you say Monaco is the new Wikia standard skin. No one likes it. But we can override the style in our preferences to set it back to Monobook.

So does TT1 have the option of deciding to switch back to Monobook if that's what the consensus decides? Danny is saying they are switching Memory Alpha Monaco and "at a certain point, pretty much every Wikia wiki is going to end up on Monaco." So is this something we get to decide for ourselves, or will Monaco be forced on us even if we don't want it? -75.168.112.43 18:55, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

What I find interesting on the MΑ example is that Toughpigs said, and I quote:

Actually, they're working on switching over to the Monaco skin on Memory Alpha too

Now, who are "they"? Because I've just looked at MΑ - and in the designated forum on the matter, one Wikia staff member (who has no main namespace edits on MΑ in the past three years) is the only user pushing for it. Only two other users have (briefly) commented - one admin who's strongly against it because of the top ad banner, and one other user who dittoed that. The only other place it is mentioned is on their main page talk, where one "Wikia Helper Group" member (who has no MΑ edits on any other matter, main namespace or otherwise) shilled it - and in response, got a reply from one user that they were confused, and another user that they preferred Monobook. Unless there's some hidden forum somewhere, there's no consensus from MΑ that they want to switch.

If Toughpigs's line is intended to say there's a push from MΑ as a "do you want T1 to be left out", it's, well, draw your own conclusions. - SanityOrMadness 19:42, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

I've been vague about what the future holds, because I don't know. Right now, the community does have the option to switch the site back to Monobook, if that's what you decide. However, at some point in the future, Wikia may need to switch everybody over to Monaco. We need to figure out how to get more advertisers to buy ads on Wikia. We're exploring a lot of different possibilities right now, so I can't predict how that's going to go yet. But we may find that it hurts us to have skins with completely different ad sizes all over the site. Companies don't want to advertise on sites that have a leaderboard on some pages and a skyscraper on others. Right now, we're able to offer a lot of flexibility with the skins, and we're not forcing a change on any community. But if you think about it, no other (sane) website does that. Ad-supported websites have a format, and everything on the site is in that format.

I have no real problem with Wikia's need to place more prominent banners. I don't like them, but I recognize that it is a reality of your business model.

I do take issue with the banners being tied to a sucky new UI that's being forced on us, hammering us with a double-negative. Is there any way to place the new banners (satisfying Wikia's business imperatives) in the old skin (satisfying our desire to not have the site suck so badly?) Maybe we can find a treatment that makes them less obnoxious without de-valuing them.

Of course- you keep stressing how this new UI causes more clicks... which means more pageviews, with means more bannerviews, which means more ad revenue. I really feel like your entire pitch is a thinly veiled attempt to monetize this wiki regardless of what the users want. So not only do we have to have the banners that generate more revenue-- we have to have the UI that's editor-unfriendly but promotes more pageviews.

Why don't you just rewrite the site interface so you have to click 8 times to do anything like MySpace? I mean- that seems consistent with the whole 'sacrifice the user experience in exchange for saleable ad impressions' philosophy you're espousing here.

You quote a lot of statistics. Are they internal? Do/can we have access to them? Would TT1 be allowed to pursue evolving our interface to maximize pageviews without having to buy into Monaco?

Strictly speaking the best way to increase pageviews on this wiki would to make all the links un-disambiguated, so every time you click on a link you have to view the disambig page before you can select the page you actually wanted to see from the list. There- pageviews have increased... at the expense of the user experience.

Packaging can be a force multiplier to make content more attractive... slightly more attractive. But in the end it's the quality of the content that drives readers. If we have to increase viewership to pad Wikia's bottom line, I'd really rather we did so by offering different or better content- not by putting obnoxious shiny packaging around it. (And yeah, that's a toy marketing metaphor. You get a lot of those here.) -75.168.112.43 07:05, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I know that the obvious response to the ad talk is "that's your problem", but it's actually everybody's problem. Wikia offers free hosting to communities like this one because we're advertiser-supported. But the ad market is changing -- and if we don't keep up, then we go out of business, and we can't host wikis anymore. Anyway, we're not anywhere near a problem at the moment. Wikia is fine, and if the community decides to switch back to Monobook, then that's fine. But it will be easier in the long run if folks give Monaco a chance, and see if we can make it work the way that you want it to work. Meanwhile, I can address a couple of the concerns that people have posted about. First up: The size of the content area. Xaaron says that the crap on the side feels bigger, so the content area feels smaller. I took screenshots of the same page using both Monaco and Monobook, at the same browser size and screen resolution.

Monaco
Monobook

You can see from those pictures that Monaco gives you a wider content area. The first two paragraphs take up 16 lines in Monobook. On Monaco, it takes up 13 lines. The number of logins has gone up just in the last few days. On April 26-27, 41 people logged in to the site (20.5 per day). From March 1-31, there were 381 logins (12.3 per day). This may be because of the interest generated at BotCon, but it also seems like being at BotCon over the weekend kept people away from the website. The increase in logins is consistent with what we've seen on other sites -- Monaco makes logging in more visible to new users.On the sidebar over the last couple days, these are the most clicked on items:

Transformers Animated (cartoon): 295 clicks
Murdered puppy: 192 clicks
That big green, fire-snortin' lizard: 168 clicks
Transformers Animated (toy line): 131
Autobot: 111
Optimus Minor: 108
More featured characters: 83
Optimus Prime: 76
Gas Skunk: 74
Airazor (BW): 72Pageviews for April 26-27 are up 21% over the average from the previous 30 days. That may be because of the interest around BotCon and the new episodes, but it might also be because the sidebar is helping new readers find articles that they're interested in, and because the pages load faster with Monaco. In any event, it doesn't seem like Monaco is chasing people away. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 20:27, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

It could also be because existing users have been giving the new skin a test drive. Anyway, couple of things about the skin that I'm wondering. First, the Teletraan 1 image in the upper left corner is now tiny with ugly, empty whitespace on three sides. Can it be enlarged? Second, can the recently-added neat little search box images be included in the new skin? --KilMichaelMcC 20:51, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

The logo can be changed by uploading a new image to

The search box images are a neat idea, but I'm confused about why they're attached to search. They don't take you to a search page. They're basically a random featured-article generator. If you want, I can talk to the designer here about creating a randomized featured-article widget for the sidebar. -- Danny<staff /> (talk) 20:59, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I personally would like to see that added in. I think it makes it more appealing for a random article to be represented in image format. --FFN 10:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Basic test image for the top left: