User talk:DanQ

thanks for bringing back a space for communing!

cheers, Arlo (talk) 10:26, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

woo, thanks DanQ! I have a few expeditions I made in the past months I have to report about :) --SastRe.O (talk) 13:28, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Thank you so much, DanQ! --Fippe (talk) 10:45, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

You cannot believe how happy I am to see the wiki back up, so many thanks! -- Mampfred (talk) 08:40, 29 February 2020 (UTC)

Uploading images

Hi DanQ! Thanks a lot for bringing back the wiki. However, I can't find the option to upload images; can you help? FelixTheCat (talk) 22:01, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Whoops! Should be back now. I've also added gpx as a permitted file type because it always bugged me that it wasn't. --DanQ (talk) 22:04, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! I just created my first new expedition report, and everything seems to be working fine! I'll start working on my backlog tomorrow :-) FelixTheCat (talk) 22:18, 2 February 2020 (UTC)

Bots and Maps

Hi Dan, thank you again for bringing the site back.

I have a request: Could you add User:FippeBot to the bot group? That way it won't spam the recent changes when making it's edits. Before the Dark Ages, it tagged expedition pages with {{location}}, but it could also take care of changing the links to wiki.xkcd.com. --Fippe (talk) 17:18, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

Done! --DanQ (talk)

Thank you very much! --Fippe (talk) 06:57, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

A weird error happens when I try to access 2019-01-02 -43 172. Do you know why? --Fippe (talk) 08:05, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Looks like the <math> tag was breaking it; not yet sure why. Removing it fixed the problem for now; I'll look more-deeply later. --DanQ (talk) 09:15, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Nice, thank you! --Fippe (talk) 10:10, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

The new OSM maps are nice. It is good that we no longer have Google's "for dev purposes only" message. I haven't encountered any problems at {{meetup graticule}}, but at {{meetup global}} the map does not display anything. There was a bug pre-Dark Ages as well, it used to display wrong coordinates. Now it does not display any coordinates at all, which I find weird, as it seems to call the same function which {{meetup graticule}} is calling. --Fippe (talk) 17:18, 15 February 2020 (UTC)

I didn't get a copy of the original mapping extension with my dump of the database, so I had to reimplement by reverse-engineering; I missed globalhashes when I did so. I've now added them, aaaand... I've hopefully managed to fix them so globalhash maps work. If you're able to check a few (you might need to purge/edit-and-resave pages to refresh the maps) that'd be appreciated! --DanQ (talk)

Currently it seems that there is a mistake in the calculations. I checked 2019-12-15 global, where the map now exists, which is very good. However, even after editing and purging, it currently seems to show the coordinates for the Geohash in the graticule of the Globalhash, not the coordinates of the Globalhash.

And now as I am writing this it seems that now it changed and the correct coordinates of the Globalhash are indeed marked, even on Globalhash pages such as 1990-04-20 global which I have neither edited nor purged. Did you just change something? It is working now, thank you! --Fippe (talk) 10:10, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Cache gremlins, I guess. --DanQ (talk) 06:39, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Hi Dan, I found a map bug. For expeditions so far in the future that the coordinates are not yet known, for example 2020-02-29 53 -2, a marker gets displayed anyway. In those cases, the map gets error\ndata not available yet as the value for the dow, and thus the result of echo -en '2020-02-29-error\ndata not available yet' | md5sum, which is 4833c98649ca509cb315699d45792c16 as the hash. In accordance with this, a marker is drawn at the resulting coordinates, in this example at 53.282040210042204,-2.699545479675611. This should not happen. It would be better, if in cases where the Dow value is an error, that no marker is drawn. --Fippe (talk) 11:35, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Well-spotted. Fixed. -DanQ (talk)

Thank you very much! --Fippe (talk) 12:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

email

I can't seem to get special:confirmemail to work. Do you think this might just be on my end? Arlo (talk) 02:37, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

Me neither. Simply doesn't do anything, it seems. Rincewind (talk) 10:50, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

A few people have had trouble; I'm looking into it! Sorry! If you're among the folks inconvenienced, email geohashing-email-validation at Dan Q dot me from your email address, mentioning your username in the email, and I'll manually mark them as validated. -DanQ (talk)

Unnamed graticules

I have considered cleaning out Special:WantedPages. Currently, this special page is not very useful since it is swamped by unnamed graticules. One way to fix this would be to create those graticule pages. We have had three approaches so far.

My first approach, redirecting the page to unnamed graticules where the situation is explained.
Your approach, putting the page into Category:Unnamed graticules and leaving the page blank.
My second approach, giving the page a full graticule info page, just not naming it.

One issue that I see with #3 is that it will create even more Wanted Pages if the unnamed graticule has neighbours which also are unnamed. However, since the number of graticules is not infinite, it would be not impossible to do this, but it would take the bot longer to do this.

One issue that I see with #2 is that it could be confusing for a user to just see a blank page, and may not see the link to the category.

One issue you brought up with #1 is "Just being of the right category ought to be sufficient to encourage its eventual naming, and makes adding expeditions to it less-hard". I agree that a user may not know how to add expeditions to these redirect pages, and that giving the graticule a non-redirect page is better.

I am currently favouring #3, and could make FippeBot do the work if you are okay with this.

Non-related: Do you have some input here? --Fippe (talk) 12:50, 1 March 2020 (UTC)

I think #3 is best, personally, but I'm not super-fussy (despite my ninja edit!) -DanQ (talk)

Okay, it is done now. --Fippe (talk) 21:28, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

Raising awareness, reactivating geohashers

As even Mampfred had given up on a wiki being set up anew, he only realised it when I had a call with him this week. I think he even has some reports he can now do up his sleeve.
He's probably not the only one- could we send a single notification mail out to all old account owners, maybe? I don't think this has been done. I am sure there's still people mourning the loss of their favourite hobby and if we don't want to "die out", we need to reactivate a couple of people so there's activity drawing new enthusiasts. And it's a shame to lose great people and take their fun. Rincewind (talk) 11:01, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure if Randall and Davean handed all the email addresses over to Dan. However, Davean surely has the email addresses since those email addresses were used for the 2019-09-03 emails notifying us that the wiki is down. --Fippe (talk) 11:36, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Correct; I don't have people's old email addresses. Some people may have mentioned their email addresses (or other ways to contact them) on their profile pages, of course, and for others it might be possible to work out who/where they are and get in touch, but that sounds like a bigger job than I (personally) have time for... but if you want to, you can! -DanQ (talk)

Session timeout

Could we raise the session timeout a bit? It's slightly annoying, I think. However, it's good this is set up in a way so you don't lose edits. Good work. Things like these used to really hurt and still do on some pages. Rincewind (talk)

Session timeout raised from 24 minutes (of inactivity) to 4 hours. Your existing session will have to timeout (or you'll need to clear cookies) before the change takes effect for you. -DanQ (talk)

Meetup 2020-03-14 51 -0

Any chance you're considering a Saturday 4pm meetup in Hook (London West) tomorrow? I thought I might do it, and it would be great to say hello in person! --Macronencer (talk) 22:17, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Amazingly, I was _supposed_ to be in West London today... but then the event I was to attend got re-arranged thanks to Covid-19 and turned into a remote-only conference, so I stayed at home and videoconferenced-in to it instead: boo! But I'd love to team up for one someday, sure! -DanQ (talk)

Ah yes, that's impacting everyone now, isn't it? At work we have a German customer, and my boss has stopped all on-site support. Don't worry, you didn't miss much yesterday, it was just a residential street. But I'm sure we'll meet at some point, we're graticule neighbours and I'm often forced north by the water! --Macronencer (talk) 08:36, 15 March 2020 (UTC)