User talk:Joannac

Old talk has been moved to User_talk:Joannac/OldTalk

Admin function to Rename/Move a Category?

Do you as an admin have the ability to change the name of a category without having to change it on every page? See the discussion at Category_talk:Expedition_Outcomes#"Failed" Should Be "Thwarted".

User to Block

All requests up to date :) --joannac 20:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

Please don't send me spammers to block unless they've hit >1 page. There are a few spam networks that keep changing IP addresses, and there's no need to ban an IP if it's never getting used for spam again. --joannac 22:39, 25 February 2009 (UTC)

To-do list

• update All Graticules with any stray pages
• Map NSW and Victoria
• Tag images
• Fix retro hashes
• Clear out Category:Tagged_for_deletion
• Fix inconsistent Swedish grats (mainly around Stockholm) -- ekorren's job!
• Tag expedition pages properly (Coords reached, Coords not reached, meetup on ..., meetup in ..., retro, failed, etc)
• Check all the day pages are well-formed

User:ReletBot

works. ty! [1]

Two Ideas

1. Could the Achievement List in the nav bar point to the Achievements page instead of the category? It seems a much friendlier entry point for browsing achievements.

Yep, will do this later if I don't forget again >.<

2. Some Wikis have a topic of the week or daily news section on the front page. Can we do that? I'd love to have a venue to bring people's attention to things like Naming conventions and Category:Galleries by topic. It could be used to announce a photo of the month ontest (throughout the month, anyone can add Category:Nominated for April 2009 photo of the month to any photo, then over the next month draw their attention to the gallery thus created and logged in users can vote for their favourite nominees). There are the fanatical few who log in and check Recent Changes often enough to stay on top of things, but for the people who don't it can be a way to get them more into the community. One of the topics could be about not linking to the Main Page until the write up is ready! Another could be working out a process for introducing new achievements. -Robyn 23:14, 4 April 2009 (UTC)

Isn't this just a section like the gallery? The news section is just another section, right? Nothing fancy?

And I think creating "photo of the month" gallery shouldn't be too hard *touch wood*. --joannac 20:17, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

I thought I'd seen it in the sidebar, but I see now that the wiki I was looking at has a two-column front page layout. I see now that I can probably copy what others have done on the front page to figure out how to do it. I can do the photo galleries I was tlkain g about, I just needed a way to get people's attention to it. For some reason modifying the Main Page myself didn't ocur to me. Thanks for the Achievements change. You rule. -Robyn 03:29, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

protect a page forever

Regarding you inquiry in the recent changes: It's "infinite". (at least it used to be in older mediawiki versions) Koepfel _talk 11:53, 8 April 2009 (UTC)

Weird Quasi-Spam

I put a delete tag on a page called Developer. It was the third biggest page on the wiki, and appeared to be full of spam. There was a notice at the top of it that it was a research project, and gave a link to click on for more info. It was a Brown University link, so I followed it. It came up with a page saying "WARNING" and my IP address. So I ditched that IP address. I then chopped the back part of the link and went to graffiti.cs.brown.edu . It looks like it's real, but it also looks like there's people not happy about it, and I think understandably so. They say they won't delete it, but if we want to and scrub our logs, we can. But part of their thing is that they want the spam to persist as long as possible. I looks fishy. I figure you know more about wiki'ing in general than I do, and you're a sysop, so enjoy.  :-) --excellentdude 05:00, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

According to their FAQ, it's a file sharing "network" - we're effectively hosting a chunk of a file for them (they say it's a Linux ISO, but it could also be illegal content for all we know). Maybe not spam in the traditional "advertising" sense, but definitely abuse. Page should be deleted - otherwise the content remains accessible through the history tab. (If that is indeed a research project, they don't want their content to remain there as long as possible, but just want to see how long it does - and thus, if file sharing through wiki spamming is viable long-term. Interesting approach, but still wrong.) --dawidi 05:23, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

It leaves me wondering how useful having the wiki unprotected is. Do we know what proportion of page edits are done by users who are not logged in? And once we ignore the few who would have signed in if they'd remembered to do so, what proportion of edits would be lost by making the wiki log-in-only? I'd estimate it's quite small. And it would certainly make spam-removal a lot easier. -- Benjw 12:18, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

I've removed the page in question. They seem to have created at least 2 pages (Developers, and Singletons), when their FAQ says they'd only do one per site. Maybe someone should yell at them (I will, if no one else does, in the morning).

RE:making people log in, I'm happy to keep fighting the spam if it means we get more expedition reports from people who would otherwise not report because they don't want to create a login (or don't want to login from a public computer if they're geohashing while on holidays or something). --joannac 12:34, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh yes, so am I. But it would be interesting to know if we are getting any reports from people who don't have a login. -- Benjw 12:36, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

2009-04-09_33_-84 (the one that isn't NWoodruff) --joannac 12:44, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Those are both NWoodruff, as far as I can tell from their edits! -- Benjw 13:19, 11 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, I found that on the Recent Changes page you can click a link to see only anonymous edits. And yes, there are a few contributions by people who don't seem to have user accounts. Whether they would stop contributing if they had to log in is a separate question, but for now at least, I agree, it's probably easier to keep dealing with the spam. Thanks for the replies. -- Benjw 13:24, 11 April 2009 (UTC)