User talk:Jack Phoenix
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Welcome, Jack Phoenix!
Welcome to Brickipedia, a member of the Brickimedia Network. I hope you like the place and choose to join our work.
Here are a few helpful links to get started:
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Brickipedian! If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page. Happy editing!—CJC95
You are free to remove this message after you have read it.
Hi CJC95 (talk) 20:39, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
- Hello there! --Jack Phoenix (talk) 13:34, 11 June 2014 (UTC)
Question[edit source]
Hello ^_^ I had a question on the MW support desk since George recommended me to post it there, but there's no replies to it so I thought I might ask you since you're really experienced and techy. My question is located at https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Support_desk&offset=20150429021233&limit=20#How_to_select_nth-child_of_grandparent_element_instead_of_direct_parent_element_56384 but I'll copy and paste it here just in case:
"Is it possible to select the nth-child of its grandparent element (2nd parent), versus it's parent element? I researched and apparently there are no CSS parent selectors.
My source code is located at http://dev.brickimedia.org/wiki/User:Codyn329/Sandbox/4
I want to do this so I can highlight the current day out of all the days on the calendar. However, since the way I nested it..
<div class="calendar-all-days">
<div class="calendar-week">
<div class="calendar-day">
When I select the parent of .calendar-day
, it goes to .calendar-week
instead of .calendar-all-days
.
The main CSS block I'm trying to use to do this is here (Note - I'm using a magic word in a parser function (#css from Extension:CSS) so direct input of {{CURRENTDAY}}
in the parentheses should be OK I assume):
.calendar-day:nth-child({{CURRENTDAY}}) {
background: #27ae60;
color: #fff;
font-weight: bold;
}
I hope this question isn't too loaded. If you can help that'd be awesome, thanks :) Codyn329 (talk) 00:04, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Re:Points and Stuff[edit source]
Thank you so much! I will start editing as soon as I can!!! Sibo the First (talk) 05:15, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
Yay, award![edit source]
Gold Brick
| ||
Soupperson1 has awarded you a Gold Brick! Gold Bricks are awards given by users to other users for all their hard work. Great job!
You can copy the code for this Gold Brick and add it to your userpage. Soupperson1 also added the following comment: For all of your hard work |
Soupperson1 Friends are Forever! <3
- Wow, thank you! This was a nice surprise. :) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 13:51, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
Important changes for 2016[edit source]
Brickipedia and the Brickimedia Network are undergoing big changes in 2016. Discussions are currently open and need your input at Project:2016 Changes:
- New hosting – Brickipedia is considering changing servers. Please share your opinion on the matter.
- Consolidate the sites – Brickimedia Customs and LEGO Stories Wiki have recently merged, but to further optimize the site and the community, it has been proposed to consolidate the sites to simply Brickipedia and the Great Ball Contraption Wiki.
- Readership and Engagement – Proposal to frequently survey the community and visitors to gather data to continue optimizing the site.
- Scrap the Admin Wiki – Proposal to give the community more transparency by deleting the private admin wiki for Brickimedia.
- New subsites – Ideas to expand Brickipedia's project scope by adding new namespaces.
Please voice your opinion and read over the proposals and comments! --ToaMeiko (talk) 02:00, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Important changes for 2016[edit source]
Brickipedia and the Brickimedia Network are undergoing big changes in 2016. Discussions are currently open and need your input at Project:2016 Changes:
- New hosting – Brickipedia is considering changing servers. Please share your opinion on the matter.
- Consolidate the sites – Brickimedia Customs and LEGO Stories Wiki have recently merged, but to further optimize the site and the community, it has been proposed to consolidate the sites to simply Brickipedia and the Great Ball Contraption Wiki.
- Readership and Engagement – Proposal to frequently survey the community and visitors to gather data to continue optimizing the site.
- Scrap the Admin Wiki – Proposal to give the community more transparency by deleting the private admin wiki for Brickimedia.
- New subsites – Ideas to expand Brickipedia's project scope by adding new namespaces.
Please voice your opinion and read over the proposals and comments! --ToaMeiko (talk) 02:00, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Questions and other stuff[edit source]
I always love to learn more stuff everyday, so questions are basically my best friends! :P I've some questions for you:
- Does phabricator have a built in GUI? - This question I'm asking is because I'm used to changing files through a GUI, such as Github's GUI where you can edit the text and then press a button. If not, then is there a way to edit repos/projects besides Gerrit yet, like learning Git? There's so much I want to improve and contribute to, but unfortunately can't because Wikimedia and their structures are unnecessarily confusing :(
- ResourceLoader modules can be disabled..right? - Yesterday for some reason I assumed that ResourceLoader MW modules can be disabled, but then I looked through the docs at mediawiki.org and it came to me that maybe it wasn't possible; Do you happen to have an answer?
Thanks :D Codynguyen1116 (talk) 06:47, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
- Questions are good, keep 'em coming!
- I think that either there's no such GUI or at least it's disabled on Wikimedia's Phabricator. For example, in the
mediawiki/tools/grabbers
repository, there is a button labeled "Open in Editor" next to the "View Raw File" button, but it's grayed out for me at least (see for yourself).
That being said, while gerrit no doubt is annoying, it's not a showstopper. Did you try this quick & dirty guide to gerrit I made you a while ago? Did it (not) work? We can talk about this in chat the next time you're online and I can guide you through the whole process of making a change and submitting it (and, depending on the repository, getting it merged).
- This sorta depends on what's your definition of "disabled" and what modules you're talking about, but...no, not really (AFAIK). As an extension or a skin developer, you can tell MediaWiki that "this file/these files should only be loaded when a certain RL module is available & loaded"; the Refreshed skin does this. See Refreshed's skin.json file, the definition of
$wgResourceModuleSkinStyles['refreshed']
(lines 78-82): note the plus sign. (Confusing? Probably. Also I doubt that this was the best explanation. As always, feel free to ask me for more details if/when you need such.) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 10:50, 17 April 2016 (UTC)
chat[edit source]
you should get on chat sometime soon whenever you get the opportunity :D Codynguyen1116 (talk) 06:00, 7 June 2016 (UTC)
Greetings, Active User[edit source]
LegoFan4000's monthly message- July 2016!
Welcome to LegoFan4000's monthly message
In this message I will be posting every month with updates and whatevers going on.
Helpful stuff[edit | edit source]
Featured article
Olivia is a Friends mini-doll figure introduced in 2012. She is one of the five main characters of the theme and the protagonist of the television series LEGO Friends of Heartlake City, appearing in all seven episodes. She is the smart girl of the group of friends. She currently appears in twenty sets and she has seventeen variations between them. Olivia also appears in thirty-eight of the forty-eight Friends webisodes. Olivia has seventeen variants, all of which have the same hairpiece. The headpiece's eye colour was initially amber in 2012 but was later changed to a rust brown colour. Olivia has light nougat skin. Olivia's eyes are currently rust brown in colour. Above her eyes, she has curved black eyebrows. She has a smile, which is decorated with bright purple lipstick.
Read more... Featured story
Adventures in Heartlake:41114 Theme: Friends Author: Soupperson1Featured review This month's featured review is on 10696 LEGO Medium Creative Brick Box, written by Brikkyy13.
Hello! Today I'm reviewing one of the Classic sets that are new for 2015, 10696 LEGO Medium Creative Brick Box. This set was kindly donated to Brickipedia by our friends over at The LEGO Group. So, is this set worth picking up, or is it just another parts pack? As you can see, the packing is quite unconventional. Like most sets branded under the "LEGO" name alone (i.e. not any specific theme) the parts are packaged in large re-usable for containers.
Read more...Featured art Estari
Links[edit | edit source]
- Very active forum
- Discussion for site changes this year
- Recent edits
- News home page
- Customs main page
- Reviews main page
If you have any questions, or feedback about this, feel free to ask me at my talk page.
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Brickipedian! Happy Editing! —LegoFan4000
You are free to remove this message after you have read it.
While vs Foreach looping in PHP[edit source]
Figured since you're a code wizard, I should ask you this! Is there any reason why in the MediaWiki PHP code conventions it states that foreach()
is recommended and should be used for iteration instead of while()
? Thank you :) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 10:59, 26 July 2016 (UTC)
- The "Assignment expressions" section of the PHP coding conventions simply states that using
while()
is unnecessary in new code. I think that usingwhile()
to loop over database query results is somewhat of a PHP4-ism, i.e. you can do so but it's not necessarily recommended, but it probably won't break anything — just like how you can declare a function asfunction someFoo( $whatever, $whateverAgain )
instead ofpublic static function someFoo( MyClass $whatever, SomeOtherClass $whateverAgain )
— type hinting ("MyClass", "SomeOtherClass") and method visibilities are PHP5+ things. Realistically speaking, though, you don't need to worry about PHP4 because PHP4 has reached its end of life several years ago, and these days even PHP5.3 is EOL and MW requires like PHP 5.5 or something like that (as of MW 1.27 and newer). --Jack Phoenix (talk) 12:13, 26 July 2016 (UTC)- Ah, I see thank you! :) Another question, hope this doesn't annoy you xD Do you know a way to import a JSON file into a JS file? Here's the back-story - I'm currently creating a Periodic Table of Elements because I decided, there's no better way to study for Chemistry for my Sophmore high school year than make my own periodic table in HTML5 and use it as a study guide - right? xD My idea was to write all the elements in a JSON data format, since each element is basically an object with a collection of data, and then convert it to JS where it converts them to usable strings and wraps them around HTML elements, and loops through that until its wrapped every element in HTML and created the whole table! I also added extra field keys so that they could appear as a tooltip on click or mouseover. https://github.com/SamanthaNguyen/periodic-table/blob/master/elements.json This is the file I created, and I want to import it to a JS file into a JSON variable, and then do the conversion from there. Would that be possible and doable - is there a better way to do this? o: Hope this makes sense! Sorry if I'm bothering you xD
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 07:34, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
- I'm more than happy to answer programming-related questions and help you to become a better dev!
- JSON is a relatively popular choice these days, as it's fast, hence why MediaWiki first transitioned from PHP-based i18n to JSON i18n and then even to JSON-based extension & skin setup files! Who knows, maybe one day a significant portion of MW is written in JSON...(personally I hope that's not the case, but you never know!)
- jQuery provides
$.parseJSON
, which sounds exactly like what you need. Interestingly, though, the page notes that in jQuery 3.0 (there's a jQuery 3.0?! Apparently so. Thankfully MW includes a somewhat older version of jQuery — I assume that's documented on mw:jQuery) that method is deprecated and you're supposed to "use the native JSON.parse method instead". I guess that makes some sense in a post-IE8 world, although I'm quite confident there's at least one relatively popular but stupid browser which doesn't implement that or implements it incorrectly. Given Android's popularity, for example, you can be sure that old versions of the Android Browser as well as Chrome are around. Though I'm hoping both of those are new enough to implement JSON support properly. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 13:53, 27 July 2016 (UTC)
- jQuery provides
Greetings, Active User[edit source]
LegoFan4000's monthly message- August 2016!
Welcome to LegoFan4000's monthly message
Need something? Head over to Chat for help with anything on this site or any of the Brickimedia Projects.
Helpful stuff[edit | edit source]
Featured article
8755 Keetongu was released as a set in 2005. He included a bright red Rhotuka spinner. A lock on his chest armour allowed one to open his chest cavity and fire a Rhotuka spinner as in the story. His whirling shields could be spun with an axle on his right arm, and their area increased as they spun and decreased when they again became still. The Keetongu set contained 201 pieces which could be combined with the pieces of Roodaka to create The Shadowed One set, with the pieces of Sidorak to create the Sentrakh set, or with the pieces of both Sidorak and Roodaka to create the Voporak set.
Featured story
Template:Featured story/2024/11Featured review
Template:Featured review/2024/11
Featured art Template:Featured art/2024/11
Links[edit | edit source]
- Very active forum
- Discussion for site changes this year
- Recent edits
- News home page
- Customs main page
- Reviews main page
- Chat
If you have any questions, or feedback about this, feel free to ask me at my talk page.
I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Brickipedian! Happy Editing! —LegoFan4000
You are free to remove this message after you have read it.
Refreshed skin[edit source]
Hi Jack,
I have applied the changes in this commit to the Refreshed skin on the wiki I am admin but I am still having the problem of emoji replacing the icons in iOS. I just wondered if I am missing something? I know this is a vague message but I have no clue why it isn't working so I thought you might be able to help.
Thanks, Lachlan (talk) 14:51, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
- Hi Lachlan,
- Hmm, that's strange. Alas, I don't have an iOS device nor access to one, so my abilities to help you out here are woefully limited, but let's see...
- Did you apply all changes to all four listed files? Sorry, I know this is a silly question, but look at Coasterpedia's main page, I still see
<!--[if IE]><link rel="stylesheet" href="/w/skins/Refreshed/refreshed/iefontfix.css" media="screen" /><![endif]-->
in the page source; if you look at the changes I made to Refreshed.skin.php, you'll notice that theiefontfix.css
file is no longer loaded only for IE, but for all browsers, despite its now-misleading name. - What about the device's local cache? I recall there being problems with some versions of iOS caching things way too aggressively. So you might want to check what purging the device's local cache does, too.
- Did you apply all changes to all four listed files? Sorry, I know this is a silly question, but look at Coasterpedia's main page, I still see
- --Jack Phoenix (talk) 15:28, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
- Thanks for the quick response, I have checked myself and the IE conditional statements are not there - it must have taken a while for the website to update because I have copied all the changes in the commit. I don't have any iOS devices either making testing difficult, instead I have been using BrowserStack. I have taken screenshots on a 5S and a 6 and both have the same problem so a caching issue seems unlikely.
A barnstar for you![edit source]
The Technical Barnstar | |
For all your technical work. LegoFan4000 talk 11:52, 13 August 2016 (UTC) |
MultimediaViewer[edit source]
For testing MultimediaViewer, can you install it on social-tools.wmflabs and test it while using Refreshed, see whether or not it's site-specific? Thanks :)
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 04:32, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Re: SocialProfile[edit source]
~discussing in chat~ SamanthaNguyen (talk) 18:51, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
- https://gist.github.com/SamanthaNguyen/cea4046bf7a20d7937b4d829526efc3b tada :) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 19:46, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
Disney Castle[edit source]
Hi. If you could send me an email with your name and shipping address, that would be swell. You can do it in PM on chat too, if you'd rather. Please do it quickly, because we have to get back to LEGO before the 19th. Thanks. :) Berrybrick (talk) 00:58, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
Hey, that's great! :D Also don't worry about it, everyone makes mistakes every now and then :) @Testing: Sounds good! Put it on labs and I'll test it tomorrow when I get the time. ^-^
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 02:21, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
- Done, let me know how it goes and I'll merge the patchset if it passes your QA. :) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 03:04, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
My wiki[edit source]
[1] What extension(s) am I missing? LegoFan4000 talk 14:57, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:StringFunctions / https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ParserFunctions. CJC95 (talk) 15:22, 25 August 2016 (UTC)
Re: SocialProfile, Echo notifications, MediaWiki 1.27 upgrade, image migration and more![edit source]
let's talk about it on chat :D SamanthaNguyen (talk) 21:06, 27 August 2016 (UTC)
for your magical code wizardry..[edit source]
i hand you a small kitten (i'm already jealous :( :P) for your crazy code spells!
http://41.media.tumblr.com/05c26af8245e100e0b319dffec763458/tumblr_n04nj1eO101ssyeu4o1_500.jpg
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 01:39, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
- D'awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww, that is one cute kitty! :D --Jack Phoenix (talk) 15:10, 12 September 2016 (UTC)
- yesh it's super fluffy and adorable SamanthaNguyen (talk) 03:54, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
Git submodules[edit source]
Since I know you're busy, I went ahead and posted a message on Ajraddatz's talk page (I've assumed you haven't been able to contact any git wizards yet? if you haven't that's totally okay, don't worry), so tada! Let's wait and see what he says. :)
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 03:54, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
- Yeah, I haven't been working on that, sorry. I googled a bit and found this slightly tl,dr GitHub help article on (not) using git submodules. Haven't had the time to go through it and test it, though. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 17:14, 13 September 2016 (UTC)
No worries! He didn't have an answer but there's still more people we can try and talk to :) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 02:00, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
VisualClear[edit source]
(also unrelated thing, epxanding on from last comment): Do you happen to know the history behind <div class="visualClear"></div>
? I'd like to know why it was originally created - was it a HTML & CSS hack to bypass something back a few years ago (although I can't think of why this would be written to bypass something)? I believe more sane methods of doing the same thing are available, such as applying CSS to the actual element (that doesn't have the class .visualClear
with a margin). I've mentioned this before, such as in the TopUsers phabricator task (T143388). Why would a skin fail to render / get close to failing if such a line was removed? Really curious, as I'd like to see it removed it at one point or another (I've seen it in multiple extensions, not just TopUsers module in mw-ext:SocialProfile, like RandomUsersWithAvatars, see Line 85 on RandomUsersWithAvatars.class.php. There are better ways to do it, and empty elements can cause accessibility issues and (potentially!) confuse readers using technology-assistive devices. Thank you! :)
Edit: I was browsing through the SportsTeams extension, and saw a commit that referred to "the SocialProfile commit", which I was able to track back to at commit #a1c4da4 at mediawiki-extensions-SocialProfile. While it does clear up that the visualClear class actually dates back to the core of the MediaWiki software, it still doesn't explain why it's there, which is confusing. It sounds like technical debt, and it's managed to spread out on multiple lines on multiple extensions, for example: line 73 on RandomUsersWithAvatars.class.php was another offending instance of this happening (wow :o)
Thanks in advance! I'm interested to see a response - Also please don't take this comment as offense to your coding abilities - my intentions are to help improve the extensions ^_^ SamanthaNguyen (talk) 02:17, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
- visualClear and/or things like it are still necessary. That particular CSS class is as old as MonoBook itself (or technically older, since MonoBook somewhat "evolved" from Mono which evolved from DaVinci).
- As for why it's there...well, use your browser's developer tools to manually remove it and see how much it messes up the page. :) I'm actually not sure if that's the case on Refreshed, but with MonoBook/Vector/most other (even remotely) popular skins, that CSS class is very much needed. It does feel somewhat hacky, but most of the time it just works as you'd want it to.
- Technical debt is very much a thing with social tools, given both the sheer size of their codebase and the lack of developers — even in 2006/2007, when ArmchairGM (and later Wikia) was heading the development of these tools, you could count the amount of developers with two hands' fingers. Nowadays you don't need more than one hand to do that, and even so, it basically boils down to me fixing things (or not fixing, in which case they stay broken unless a user steps up with a patch — this has happened a few times in the past!). It would be ideal to reduce the amount of technical debt, but at the same time we must be careful not to break anything, and that's not always so easy.
- If you were attempting to offend me, well, I'm sorry but I gotta say that you failed miserably at that. :P It's gonna take a lot of time and dedication to offend me, and I'm still willing to bet that fixing 15 hard bugs in MediaWiki's lovely Parser.php would be easier than that. ;-) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 09:22, 14 September 2016 (UTC)
mai fingers[edit source]
My fingers are dead after opening up 30+ tickets within 2 days. JSYK, I'm probably gonna take a break from writing tickets for a few days after I report everything I find for the social tools (mainly WikiForum but If I find some in the others I'll do it) :P
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 04:52, 21 September 2016 (UTC)
Re:AFTv5 and responsiveness[edit source]
I tested your max-width for the child element (..articleFeedbackv5-panel
) and it went smoothly, so yes it does sound good as a commit! I also +1'd your commit for the other phabricator task you mentioned. (although I still hate px units, and for good reason too. :P) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 15:00, 25 September 2016 (UTC)
A barnstar for you![edit source]
The Technical Barnstar | |
Your dedication to the MediaWiki software is outstanding - so many contributions, and using your knowledge to help improve not only for communities such as this one (Brickimedia), but for other communities too, as a volunteer. You're not being paid yet you still keep at it. Awesome job :D SamanthaNguyen (talk) 01:02, 15 October 2016 (UTC) |
- So I never thanked you properly in public for this. Just where are my manners? So, um, thank you! A little recognition goes a long way as software developers don't get enough of that most of the time. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 19:40, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
Planning the VisualChanges proposal to send to the 2016 WMF CWS[edit source]
The 2016 Community Wishlist Survey for members across Wikimedia projects (including MediaWiki.org) to vote on is going to be happening soon, so if you have time tomorrow, could we start discussing together on how we should write the porposal about VisualChanges? Thanks in advance :) Sorry I've notified so late, I've been mainly working and trying to finalize the rough draft of the UI (which is quite complex). We should make sure it'll fit within Community Tech's scope) and explain how it'd help veteran users and new users (the core community), and make sure we can do what's possible to lessen their workload as much as possible (if it were to pass), since it would be a collaborative effort (creating all of the UI was part of the plan to work towards a lesser workload, otherwise it'd require rethinking an interface from scratch for them). :) We should also note that if it was to pass, it should be a BetaFeature, since it would be something completely brand new and would require much iterative testing, etc etc.
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 03:55, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
- Sure thing, just ping me on chat and I'm sure we can work out something. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 19:40, 24 October 2016 (UTC)
AJAXPoll[edit source]
Hey, when you have time, could you look at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:Teq68x8k7s4m9x38 ? Thanks :)
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 05:20, 7 November 2016 (UTC)
Your request for rights[edit source]
Jack, I regret to inform you that your request for rights is invalid. You need at least 500 mainspace edits to make a request, but you only have 470 at the moment. I've closed the vote but left it on the page since I don't think you'll have any trouble reaching the requirements. LCF (talk!) 07:17, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- Actually the page does not say that you need 500 mainspace edits, but rather 500 content namespace edits. In addition to the main namespace, the following namespaces are configured as content namespaces ($wgContentNamespaces) on this wiki: Brickipedia News (NS_NEWS, internal ID 2000), Fan (NS_FAN, internal ID 112), Inventory (NS_INVENTORY, 114), Review (NS_REVIEW, 118) and Part (NS_PART, 120). SQL never lies, so:
MariaDB [(none)]> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM en.revision JOIN en.page ON rev_page = page_id WHERE rev_user_text = 'Jack Phoenix' AND page_namespace IN (0,112,114,118,120,2000); +----------+ | COUNT(*) | +----------+ | 504 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec)
- But you can use Special:Editcount/Jack Phoenix to verify that I didn't make up the result. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 07:37, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- I don't need to see anything, but thanks anyway. I'm just reading off what the policy said when it was instated (this was over a year before Customs was added back to enbp - I don't know anything about BP News or Reviews at that time, however.), "content" being defined as the main, part, and inventory namespaces. A lot has changed since then, but perhaps you should take a look at this vote on the forum. If you could vote on that, we might be able to change that rule, as it is archaic at this point. LCF (talk!) 18:54, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
Refreshed[edit source]
Hi, I installed the latest version of refreshed on my wiki but when I add the code to LocalSettings.php it breaks the site and shows a white screen. Any ideas? 2600:1000:B00E:51F:D077:A97B:77CE:A93A 23:23, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
- The proper place for this discussion is mw:Skin talk:Refreshed. You'll want to take a look at mw:Manual:How to debug first. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 04:52, 28 November 2016 (UTC)
WMUI color palette[edit source]
(copy pasted from last night's PM):
* SamanthaNguyen: I believe it should be changed to #00af89 (from M82), while the red should be changed to #d33 (also from M82, WMUI color palette) * SamanthaNguyen: I'm not sure how they should be exactly styled though, as in if the background should be a lighter red, or if it's white, or if the background is #d33 or if the border is #d33 (or if there even should be a border!), since that hasn't really been styled yet * SamanthaNguyen: Related specifically to phab:T152171; I think we should wait until we can get some input from Volker, who leads the UI standardization efforts * SamanthaNguyen: (sorry rephrase, I mean we should put the color change in a future, separate commit)
Basically, I think we should wait until we can get a response from Volker :) SamanthaNguyen (talk) 02:36, 3 December 2016 (UTC)
Generic new admin message[edit source]
This is a generic message expressing congratulations at your becoming an admin and informing you that if you have any questions you should ask, since no one else has done this yet. CJC95 (talk) 11:34, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
{{#ev:youtube|sY3rIlrTTh8}}
{insert generic comment about girl power} Congrats! :P Soupperson1 Friends are Forever! <3
- Thank you, my fellow colleagues! I'll be sure to nag you both equally if and when I have questions. ;-) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 16:57, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
http://i.imgur.com/0mKXcg1.gif {insert generic cliche congrats here} :D SamanthaNguyen (talk) 22:01, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
- Thank you for doing the actual opping! :-) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 02:13, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
Congrats on the admin, ashley![edit source]
^ Jello chitchat! 22:31, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
- Muchas gracias Rock-O-Jello! --Jack Phoenix (talk) 02:13, 5 December 2016 (UTC)
VoteNY redesign mockup[edit source]
You tell me to post design mockups on your talk page, so here you go! :P -> codepen:SamanthaNguyen/debug/zoaQOx
It's based on WikimediaUI/OOJS-UI, and the ButtonWidget that's classified as primary and progressive. (Source: OOJS-UI UI Demos) It's currently done with just plain CSS, and FontAwesome.
Currently there isn't any empty heart icon, full & empty like icon in WikiFont, although there's some star icons available. For the purpose of this demo and to show a rough concept, it's using FontAwesome (for now), but in the real extension there should be a folder named something like assets
stored with WikiFont SVGs. It shouldn't use a git submodule (compared to how Refreshed uses a submodule), since that would just be unnecessary. It's only a couple of icons, and we could update it manually when necessary. I don't think they change that much anyways actually, so updating it manually shouldn't be too hard IMO :)
The hovering to change icon works by checking whether or not the button has been :hover
ed over, and then styles its descendant selector, i
by changing the content of it's psuedo-selector, :before
, which looks like:
.button-like:hover i:before { content: "\f164"; }
This would work for WikiFont too, except we'd just a different unicode for selecting the icon ;) The star rating works slightly differently, with using some different CSS selectors (e.g ~
) and a couple properties. (Source: https://css-tricks.com/star-ratings/ ). The stars doesn't fully work yet, since I created a slightly different HTML structure for semantics, but I'll fix it tomorrow since it's kinda late here! As for the star :hover
color, it uses the color YELLOW50
which is equivalent to #fc3
and rgb(255,204,51)
from the WikimediaUI color palette. The star :active
color will use YELLOW30
(#ac6600
/ rgb(172,102,0)
), also from the color palette.
I was thinking that the icon could be configurable via setting the value of the variable in LocalSettings.php, which could possibly be: $wgVoteNYIcon
, or it could be set via a custom attribute in the custom vote tag - although I think the icons should be consistent so that the user doesn't possibly get confused. I showed both though just to show how it'd look like, and what you think about different icons?
Let me know your thoughts if you see this message later!
Edit: If anyone else wants to post feedback too, feel free to. :P SamanthaNguyen (talk) 06:36, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
- The stars look nice and probably are more HiDPI-friendly than the current ones as the current ones are images.
- I'm not sure about redesigning the green voting box as a "like" button, though. This much I can say: we don't want the combination of 1) the button-esque CSS styles, 2) the thumbs up icon and 3) the word "like", because Facebook did that already. I'm okay with the heart, though — since obviously we can't use stars to indicate "like" here like how browsers etc. do! Thus there's no need to introduce a new configuration global or anything for this redesign.
- Here's a "redesign", if you can call it that, which I worked on earlier. As you can see, the CSS needs (lots of) love and the awkward raw timestamp oughta be passed through a formatter function of some kind...but, of course, that's not the whole story: turns out that while the code itself is technically OK, it calls a few core methods in a way that isn't anymore possible. I've submitted this patch to core to see if we could get that fixed, but I bet it won't happen quickly. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 07:31, 9 December 2016 (UTC)
Refreshed and MediaWiki version[edit source]
Hi Jack, I'm not sure if you're the right person to ask so hopefully you can help with this.
Is the Refreshed skin compatible with MediaWiki 1.28? I want to update my wiki but I see Brickipedia is still on 1.26 so I wondered if there is a problem with the skin on newer versions of MediaWiki. I don't want to update the site and find the skin broken.
Thanks again, Lachlan (talk) 14:55, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
- The proper place would likely be mw:Skin talk:Refreshed so that more people can see the question and the answer, since this is a generic MediaWiki question and not a Brickipedia-specific one.
- That being said, it certainly looks to be compatible with 1.28: the social tools test wiki at social-tools.wmflabs.org is running MW 1.28 with plenty of custom skins and extensions and the skin looks fine. The only tricky part when it comes to the Refreshed skin is initializing the WikiFont submodule, which is a hard dependency and thus required for the skin to work. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 18:04, 17 December 2016 (UTC)
git rebasing?[edit source]
If you have time tomorrow, could you help teach me how to rebase patches? I was reading through https://git-scm.com/docs/git-rebase, but it seemed a little confusing. Thanks in advance! :-)
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 09:55, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
- git docs are notorious for being confusing and using overly complicated words and concept to describe simple operations.
- So in the best case, you can rebase via gerrit's web UI by clicking on the rebase button. Alternatively there's cherry-pick, which means "take this commit and (try to) apply it on top of the current master".
- But sometimes you genuinely need to rebase manually:
# download patch / git review -d ### or whatever git fetch git rebase origin/master # fix conflicts; need to "git add" conflicted files here! git rebase --continue git push gerrit HEAD:refs/for/master
- So if you were to rebase gerrit:304597 which currently cannot be merged, you'd click on the "Download" link (top right, next to "Patch Sets (2/2)", copy the command from the "Checkout" row (
git fetch https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/mediawiki/skins/Refreshed refs/changes/97/304597/2 && git checkout FETCH_HEAD
and execute it to download the patch locally, and then run the commands listed above (git fetch, git rebase origin/master, and so on).
- In reality sometimes it's easier to just check out a copy of the repository (unless you already have it checked out!) and manually reapply the patch. If you keep the same
Change-Id
, gerrit will treat the new patch as an updated version of the old one. So you could clone a copy of the Refreshed repo, manually apply the code changes from gerrit:304597 and includeChange-Id: Ib42c546213a63a0fbb60b9c5bca23b5334e25479
as the last line of the commit message and once you'd push the change back, it would be treated as a new version of gerrit:304597 and it'd show up there (instead of creating a new patchset). I'm not sure if you can call that exactly rebasing, though. --Jack Phoenix (talk) 13:37, 2 January 2017 (UTC)
Code review of ArmChairGM's/wikia's old UserImages extension[edit source]
You asked me to practice code reviewing by code reviewing an old extension that Wikia wrote, so here's a code review. It gave me a headache. :P (code review in progress) I tried to poke out comments on security, and ended up writing down comments about other stuff too! (Also you were right when you said it was full of batsh*t-crazy code.. :P)
- MiniAjaxUpload.php
- Line #54, Line #62, Line #130, Line #189 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #210 - Inline styling
- Line #225 - Inline styling
- Line #232 -
ereg()
is a deprecated function in PHP. Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (===
) - Line #243 - Inline styling
- Line #308, Line #309, Line #310 - these can be compacted into one line.
- Line #325 - Inline styling
- Line #334 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #337 - Inline JavaScript
- Line #375 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #399 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #405 - Inline JavaScript
- Line #406 - Inline stylesheet
- Line #407 - This CSS block isn't needed.
- Line #411 - Overqualified CSS selector - just state the CSS class instead.
- Line #412 - Appending units for 0 are unnecessary. Value needs spacing after property
- Line #413 - Value needs spacing after property
- Line #416 - Overqualified CSS selector - just state the CSS class instead
- Line #417 - Appending units for 0 are unnecessary. Value needs spacing after property
- Line #422 - Inline JavaScript
- Line #449 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #467 - Should use the HTMLForm class instead (also currently uses inline JavaScript in the anchor element)
- Line #468 - these HTML attributes are deprecated.
border
can be replaced with theborder
property in CSS (e.gborder: 0;
)cellpadding
can be replaced withpadding
CSS property ontd
elements (e.gtd { padding: 0;
)cellspacing
attr can be replaced withborder-spacing
CSS property on thetable
element (e.gtable { border-spacing: 0; }
)
- Line #510, Line #521, Line #565 - Should check for equality with a stricter equality operator (
===
) - Line #511 - Should be i18n message instead
- Line #518 - (AFAIK) there's no need for this line when it's just going to be immediately redefined in the next line at 519.
- Line #531 - Should be i18n message instead
- Line #551 - Inline JavaScript
- Line #569 - Inline JavaScript
- UserImages.i18n.php
- UserImages.i18n.php - Should be a JSON file instead
- UserImageList.php
- Line #21 - Should be loaded through ResourceLoader
- Line #22 - Should be loaded through ResourceLoader
- Line #45 - Should be i18n message instead
- Line #114 - Inline JavaScript
- UserImages.css
- UserImages.css - Every value for each property should have a space right after the property, use
em
instead ofpx
units, avoid floats when possible, - Line #45 - Separate selectors into different lines
- Line #47 - Use shorthanded hex color value instead
- UserImages.js
- Line #2 - Color value should be lowercase
- Line #11 -
ajax
isn't a valid value for the API action module - Line #20 - huh? I'm assuming this line is trying to connect to some sort of Yahoo API? Whatever data is trying to be retrieved from the Yahoo API (if it is), there's probably an alternative to get the data.
SamanthaNguyen (talk) 08:41, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
- Heh, yeah, sorry about that! If it's of any consolation (probably not :P) a lot of the time code review is that — 'especially when working with a codebase that's almost a decade old! That at least somewhat explains many (but not all!) of the things you pointed out, which are related to general code quality and best (or worst, as the case might be) practises. 2006 and 2007 might've been a whole lotta different than what 2016 and 2017 are/will be, but inline JS and whatnot wasn't exactly the best practise then either, but it was only ResourceLoader (in MW 1.16) that forced developers to rethink their JS loading logic, for example.
- Looking at the things you found, I'm simply going to say that you're 100% right on all of those and there are probably plenty of other things to fix (which I've fixed in my local copy). Some security things I noticed from a quick glance:
- MiniAjaxUpload.php
- Line #333 — This isn't validated at all, save for the length check below so Special:MiniAjaxUpload?callbackPrefix=<your nasty JS here> would lead into XSS since the value of the URL param is passed as-is to the JS. I'm not fond of how the
$msg
param is handled either, as it's not very obvious that its value is safe since it comes from MediaWiki messages. (Technically speaking a rogue admin could modify one of the three error messages passed intomainUploadForm()
, but these kind of XSS "holes" still exist all over the place. The general assumption, which may or may not be true, depending on the site and various other circumstances, is that admins are trustworthy.) - Line #532 — Hello there SQL injection, my old friend. It's extremely unlikely to be safe to use
$this->mUploadSaveName
in the (raw!) SQL query like that. This (potential but likely) SQL injection point wouldn't exist had the developers used MediaWiki's database abstraction layer for constructing the query. Using the DBAL has the nice "side-effect" of producing cross-DBMS-compatible SQL (in most cases; in practise non-MySQL/MariaDB DBMSes do some strange stuff which may or may not cause b0rkages). - Line #553 — Classic XSS times four!
$img_tag
and$desc
are escaped, but improperly; Tim Starling once said that there's no reason to ever use addslashes() in MW code, and thus it's more than likely that there's a better replacement for that.htmlspecialchars()
is (IIRC) preferred overhtmlentities
.$prefix
and$this->mUploadSaveName
are passed as-is without escaping into the output, which is a big no-no. - And the same XSS stuff persists in the
uploadError()
method.
- UserImageList.php
- Lines 21 and 22 use
$wgStyleVersion
...but it isn't declared as a global. On setups where the nowadays deprecated (and, IIRC, removed) PHP optionregister_globals
is enabled, this could lead into code injection by letting an attacker set the value of $wgStyleVersion from an external script. That's why MW code had theif ( !defined( 'MEDIAWIKI' ) ) { die(); }
checks in place back when MW supported versions of PHP where the aforementioned nastyregister_globals
option existed. - Lines 32 and 157 —
$user_name
(theuser
URL param) is passed as-is into the HTML output, so visiting a URL likeSpecial:UserImageList?user=<script>alert('lol')</script>
would execute the JS code; thus this is an XSS injection point. - Lines 64 and 75 — the SQL queries are ugly and should be using the DBAL (and that way there wouldn't be a need to manually escape the user name or anything with addslashes(), which you shouldn't be using in the first place)
- UserSlideShow.php
- Being rather similar to UserImageList.php, this file suffers from many of the same issues. An additional noteworthy XSS point here is the user name (
$user_name
, theuser
URL param) being passed as-is without any validation or sanitization to the HTML output on lines 150 and 151.
- Additionally it's noteworthy that even though this extension attempts to be somewhat stand-alone (like many other ones — SystemGifts, UserProfile, etc. — which were later bundled into a single extension called SocialProfile) there's no setup file of any kind and parts of this extension actually live in extensions/wikia/UserProfile/UserProfilePage.php (currently /extensions/SocialProfile/UserProfile/UserProfilePage.php) — namely the
getMiniGallery()
function and the call to it onUserProfilePage::view()
on line 87. (In addition to being badly designed interdependent code, there's at least one XSS vuln in there, on line 312.)
- In any case, I hope you learned something about security, especially in the context of MediaWiki. :) In retrospect the review I asked you to do wasn't exactly the easiest, since the code won't run on modern MWs and thus you couldn't test it and you had to rely only on the MW.org documentation and your skills for spotting the various issues. For a slightly easier and probably more useful challenge, you could try finding an extension that hosts its source code on the WMF git and is actively maintained, but not deployed on WMF sites and consists of a reasonable amount of files (that basically translates to "most things which aren't SocialProfile or Semantic MediaWiki" :P) and testing it out and reviewing it for possible security issues. (And if you do manage to find a security issue that isn't yet fixed, please report it appropriately on the WMF Phab!) --Jack Phoenix (talk) 18:12, 8 January 2017 (UTC)
Refreshed[edit source]
Sorry to bother you, but I need a response here asap. 2600:1000:B00F:CF38:DD2F:928D:CCCC:D82E 16:22, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
- I was going on a patrolling spree and didn't mean to patrol this one. Watch out for a potentially hazardous link. Vasko (talk) 18:46, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
- Oh relax, :P, it's just a link to a topic on the MediaWiki page for refreshed. 2600:1000:B02F:88F4:18BA:C1A1:A9FF:3746 19:45, 29 January 2017 (UTC)
Re: Thank *you*![edit source]
Hey, sorry I disappeared for a while, it's been a bit tricky getting to a computer these past few days, and probably won't be around much until after the weekend. Just been trying to do some Hidden Side stuff since it's coming out soon, it was a bit confusing figuring out what's "real" at the beginning since there's an app for the sets that make everything appear differently when you view the sets through a phone but I think I've got the hang of it now. Will probably head back to Ninjago after that for a while until the sets for the new Star Wars movie get leaked. I know we don't have a whole lot of editors these days but hopefully there are still a few people out there reading the pages.
That's interesting with colors now you've mentioned it with Scala- with a lot of their parts being so different I never really considered if they matched them with the Colour Palette or if they just had their own sort of system, do you know if things like this kind of clothing has an official color ID associated with it or did they just all just end up being called "multicombination"? (I got really into learning about the colors way back when LEGO started to publicly release their color palettes. Thanks for that link you sent- I've got that bookmarked now- I knew there was some variation with the colors they displayed but I never knew there were so many differences over the years. There's some great links to sites that have color palettes including discontinued colors in there too- I've seen some of them but not all, will have to see if there's any missing on our page).
Anyway, I remember the Fabuland article you wrote, really enjoyed reading a well-written post about a theme I knew so little about so I'm definitely looking forward to the Scala one! :) NovaHawk 13:01, 28 June 2019 (UTC)
- Hmm, Hidden Side definitely looks fascinating! Ah, apps...I could rant for days about that, but instead I'll just say that the problem with apps is that they're platform-specific and the vast majority of businesses and developers only care about the big two (Android and iOS). It'd be nice if you could enjoy the functionality on other platforms, too, but nobody's interested in the platforms that are neither Android nor iOS; true, some things are hard to implement, but many could be implemented somewhat differently with not that much effort, I feel. Okay, I'll shut up now for good, I promise. :P
- It'll be interesting to see all the new Star Wars merchandise as well as how the last installment in the Skywalker saga is received by fans! The reaction to Disney's Star Wars movies has been mixed at best, and as a long-time Star Wars fan, I've found it both shocking and pretty sad how divisive the last two "mainline" movies have been. True, some stupid decisions were made—such as throwing the entire Expanded Universe out of the window just to bring Chewbacca back, instead of declaring The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime only non-canon—but the negative reaction to films and Disney in general has been just absurd. I'm most certainly not saying that Disney's always doing the right thing, but there are multiple ways to make a point, and the kind of personal attacks that too many fans resort to are not the right way to criticize a company or its management.
- As for Scala clothing and the color IDs, that's a very fine question! I don't know what's the official stance, if any, on it, but it would certainly make sense for such clothes to be simply labeled "multicombination", for, well, that's what they are! I can definitely say that at least in the case of 3149 Happy Home, the textiles are made in China and the foam material was made in Taiwan (according to the box; and although not explicitly said, it's at least implied that actual bricks and other stuff was made in Denmark).
- Yup, the color variation is quite the something! One thing which has confused me to no end is how seemingly every site has different designations for colors; at least now we have a relatively easy-to-use color map and we can create redirects etc. accdordingly to ease our own work here.
- Glad to hear you're looking forward to learning new stuff; I hope I can provide you at least a few "wow, I didn't know that!" experiences! Suffice to say I've been working on this Scala post for quite some time now... *cough*
- Finally on a more technical note, ArticleFeedbacvk5 will support Echo notifications in the future! That was an...interesting patch to work on, for sure; I'm glad it's now been merged (though it's not yet live on Brickipedia, but I assume we'll be deploying that as well in the near future for MediaWiki 1.33 has been recently released and we'll want to work towards upgrading to that version). Please let me know how that feature works! Brickipedia is de facto the only major user/developer of AFTv5 these days, but it seems to be working well here so I see no reason to change that anytime soon; however keeping it working due to breaking core changes can be a bit tricky at times, for core devs sure love dropping random stuff and not always even ticketing the issue, which in turn means that I need to discover the issue on my own and fix it instead of being told about it well in advance by the person or people who caused it in the first place. Ah, development... --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 13:27, 7 July 2019 (UTC)
www.brickimedia.org down?[edit source]
hi, so this url is working but the www.brickimedia.org url is not working. do you know why this is? LegoDarthVader (talk) 06:25, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
- @LegoDarthVader: The splash page that used to be located at www.brickimedia.org is indeed gone, but the wiki has always been accessible and remains accessible at http://en.brickimedia.org/wiki/ (and nowadays also over SSL: https://en.brickimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page); it can also be accessed via the URL http://lego.shoutwiki.com/ . Hope this helps! --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 19:02, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
- What happened to the splash page? LegoDarthVader (talk) 01:16, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
- Lcawte might remember. Why? --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 01:29, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
- It just feels weird that it's no longer there LegoDarthVader (talk) 21:11, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
- Lcawte might remember. Why? --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 01:29, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
- What happened to the splash page? LegoDarthVader (talk) 01:16, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
Monaco?[edit source]
How have you guys managed to get monaco working with latest 1.33 release? i run a wiki independently and i cant get monaco to work as an alternative skin option, so let me know how thanks LegoDarthVader (talk) 19:45, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
Merger?[edit source]
Hey, Jack. I'm an admin over at LEGO Batman Wiki and I was wondering if maybe we should merge the two wikis? I haven't had a lot to do with that site since I forked it from Wikia, so that's why I was considering the merger... --Listen to the beat of the soul ☆ Talk to me~! 18:15, 11 September 2024 (UTC)
- Hi Rock-O-Jello, great to see you around!
- Ideally this'd be subject to a community discussion, but, well, Brickipedia is currently having issues with the "community" part of that, sadly. :-(
- Personally I welcome the merger, as I see it beneficial for both and in time, it'll help Brickipedia to become the greatest free LEGO encyclopedia out there and it reduces the maintenance burden of having a separate site for LEGO Batman content. After all, spam is a major issue for pretty much all sites (and it looks like it's about time for me to rotate the CAPTCHA questions here too...), and that aside, community building is objectively hard. But the broader the topic, the "easier" it is; the English Wikipedia and most other language versions of Wikipedia are probably the best examples of this. :-)
- I'll need to talk to Lcawte some more about this and see how we can go about achieving this. --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 09:05, 16 September 2024 (UTC)
Re: Great to Have You Back![edit source]
Hi Jack,
Thanks for deleting those pages, and thanks for the message! Partially, I wanted to make up for my embarrassing Fenrakk/Kardas edit mishap. I still can't believe I made such a blatant mistake, with images on the page standing right in front of me and everything, that I didn't catch on at any of the multiple steps. Like, what was distracting me? Because if it wasn't as extreme as something like my mayor being eaten by a T-Rex, I'm quite baffled. Anyway, as for the near future, I might not have too time for substantial editing (I'm a grad student, so if I'm being perfectly honest with myself, I probably don't even have time to blink). That being said, I'll probably start checking Special:RecentChanges now and a gain when I'm waiting for code to run/compile (it seems like a healthier Alt+Tab choice for that time than sites like Reddit), and I might look into writing some bots.
As for ideas, I've thought about it so much back before I "left" in 2015, and certain times since, that I could probably write a manifesto. I'll try to follow-up with a reply on that sometime shortly.
The Main Page looks great! The theme logos and the random discontinued themes are great ideas and really grab one's attention!
Oh my gosh, set article creation is the most grueling task. It's basically just LEGO paperwork, and writing a bot to automate what's such a repetitive task would scratch a huge itch that I've had for almost a decade, so that's something I'll try to get to before the end of the year at least.
Thanks again for the message, and talk to you soon! BrickfilmNut (talk) 19:55, 19 October 2024 (UTC)
- @BrickfilmNut: Heh, no worries, mistakes happen, right? Sometimes they go unnoticed for a while; other times, they go unnoticed for 12+ years...
- I think it's just a wonderful thing to have a seasoned editor around, even if you're not able to dedicate as much time to Brickipedia as before. :) After all, slow and steady wins the race, right?!
- Gotta love compilable languages, yeah? "Sorry, no can do, my code is compiling right now" ;)
- Can't wait to hear your thoughts and ideas! My plan for quite some time, due to my obvious bias, has been to increase the amount and use of social tools on Brickipedia, but it goes without saying that something like that only works when you already have people using the site in the first place. Furthermore, over the years, I've stumbled into surprising and unusually complex issues related to them, e.g. prior to May '22 many of the tools which allowed the user to upload an image did not allow using an existing one — obviously a showstopper for a site like Brickipedia, since we have almost 108k files and oh so many of them are poorly named and lacking licensing info, not to even mention all the unused and/or off-topic ones...every now and then I try to clean up the situation a bit but goes without saying that it takes more than just a single person to get meaningful results.
- Content-wise, I've been focusing on expanding info on (some of) the themes I know well, particularly Belville and Scala. Goes to show off my age, eh? As far as some of the images go, I think we can really shine in this respect as, given how old those themes are, even the "best" images that search engines and the like can turn up aren't really great. Alas, the reality is that I'd expect most people to be looking for information on current themes and we're not quite there yet. :-/ While the logos on the Main Page are all there, many of the link targets (e.g. Animal Crossing, DREAMZzz, ...) are redlinks, and even the ones that aren't truly redlinks per se are...outdated. (Turns out that 7 years is a long time, at least when measured in e.g. the amount of Friends sets released over that period of time...)
- It greatly delights me to hear that you've had the same idea and sounds like you've also progressed further in your planning than I ever did! There's a lot of information out there, it's the whole "gather it all into one place" that's the tricky part, and if we can tackle that...it'd be outright brilliant. Suffice to say I'm more than excited to hear more about this! I've always envisioned Brickipedia to be your (nearly) one-stop shop for all things LEGO, save for maybe the literal commercial aspect of it, i.e. "where can I buy X?" because BrickLink, eBay and the like already exist, and there's a lot of region-specificity when it comes to eCommerce.
- Thanks for the compliments regarding the Main Page! It was surprisingly tricky, because turns out that things which look fine on my 720p screen (did I mention that not only am I old but I also like older technology and have no problems using computers which are old enough to be attending high school? :P) look a bit empty in newer, 1080p and greater screens...I don't have a 4K screen or anything like that, I totally expect it to be needing even more work on such screens, but adding the amount of logos made it look better on 1080p, so there's that. :)
- In the future, it'd be nice to add more community-oriented sections to the Main Page as well, and some sort of a historical thing, but as always, you need people writing great, unique content for such sections to thrive. Similar to my blog piece on Fabuland from almost 8 years ago (!), I hope to be providing an insightful retrospect on some of my favorite discontinued themes, but we definitely need more than something new every N years ;-) After all, 8755 Keetongu has been featured on the Main Page for soon 4 years...so if anything, you want more fresh content there, not more super stale content.
- Looking forward to collaborating with you on making Brickipedia the best LEGO encyclopedia it can possibly be! --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 08:24, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
- Hey Jack. Sorry for the slow reply. I wanted to wait until I had some time to start the bot before sending a full response, partially to motivate myself not to put it off; while I started some of the initial research and planning the logic, I might not have time to code it for a few weeks. But I should hopefully be able to send a complete response sometime mid-to-late-November! Cheers. BrickfilmNut (talk) 22:21, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
- No worries, it's all good! Again, as said, I for one am glad to see you work on this! Naturally this is an important project, so proper planning and research is a must; no need to rush anything, it's not like we're on a tight schedule here. :) Like you, I'll be rather busy in November as well, so late November works just fine for me; lemme know if there's anything I might be able to help you with! --Jack Phoenix (Contact) 19:12, 3 November 2024 (UTC)