Indexing the Network Node factions

[Buster's Uncle]

I'd already given him a heads-up, but he seems preocupied ATM, and may not have seen yet.  He'll take interest and know what to do, I'm sure.

[sisko]

there's a big problem with that plug-in. it is not finished and the author stopped working on the mod some one year ago. investing work in something that we can lose in a month or two when we update the forums again is not a good idea.

i can try installing this plug-in though: http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=3185
i think it does the same things.

[ete]

hm, the biggest thing missing from that seems to be a template system. Also, it seems like the primary wiki page is just a list of articles, rather than being able to set up a more useful customized main page linking to various categories of content/displaying editing information or current projects. Lack of auto TOC would be annoying. And I don't see anything about edit history being stored, which is kind of essential, though maybe that's just not noted in their documentation. Also no note of the kind of anti-vandal/spam tools available on MW (rollback, nuke, regex black/whitelists, patrolling), only approval.

On the plus side, the style integrates easily and it does have some features which mediawiki would not without extensions (rate, fine tuned edit access, attached comment threads(?), report features), though those seem to me like much less important features than it lacks compared to MW.

hm, right. Do you have any ideas about how to track down the system used by SMF themselves? They'd definitely want to keep that compatible with whatever new release you'd upgrade to. I've found a few possibles with a little googling, but am not sure which they're using.

[sisko]

I've found a few possibles with a little googling, but am not sure which they're using.

give me the links. i'm not aware of any public release of their wiki plug-in.

never mind, i found it: https://github.com/SimpleMachines/smf-mw-auth
i have some studying material in there. 

[ete]

I'd still like to do this and have been planning out page layouts etc, any progress/findings about practicality?

Edit: Also 7zip (latest version)/jZip seem to not support whatever compression is used on the download? If someone could advise on what program to use or upload a differently compressed version it would be handy.

Edit2: Got them from WPC, not sure if that includes all of them though.

[ete]

Made a template to display most faction bonuses (not all yet, can add the rest). Here's the code for the template, a page created using the template, and the code showing how the template is used (using it is really easy, basically). I can add graphics and other fancy things if we get a wiki, and make extend its use (e.g. hover text for effects of social table changes, searchable autocatagorization/tagging based on bonuses).

Edit: And in the unlikely event that WP deletes my sandbox page, I've also put the template up here http://test.wikkii.com/wiki/Template:SMACFaction

[ete]

Basic page layout:

infobox - template from previous post, improved and prettified (add justifications, add AI info like aggressiveness and values, add all the bonuses/penalties, add some automatic tagging/categorization system, add graphics (faction portrait, ingame symbols))
leader/flavor inforbox - faction quotes, leader info (maybe AI stuff/faction portrait here?). floats right too, below or above general infobox?
how the faction plays - with subsections for human strategies and how the AI handles it.

It'd also be good to integrate a link to a discussion thread about the faction into each page. And probably a specific download link.

I think a great community project would be each week(?) pick one(?) faction (or overlapping testing periods, say, three weeks each, and stagger the start of each by a week) and playtest/debate the balance of it, make necessary changes (if none are needed that's great, but worth checking) while keeping the spirit of the faction, then add it to a category of generally balanced factions/write up a description for the wiki based on experience in the thread. We could build up a nice set of factions that way, I think. I'd be up for co-leading that (having someone reliably active to ensure one of us gets threads up would be sensible) if/when we get a wiki

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm going to prod sisko about this.  It should come as no surprize to hear that I believe in this project...

[sisko]

i should be able to work on the wiki project this Sunday. i hope i can get the test forum online till then. this way we can test the bridge before adding the feature to the 'production' site.

[ete]

Excellent, I'll keep planning/preparing templates then. And start a preliminary thread to the faction balancing project (establish guidelines, pick a co-leader, get some ideas for the first faction we'll work on), if that's cool with you guys?

[sisko]

.., if that's cool with you guys?

of course it's cool! we need more people like you, ete.

[ete]

Ok, on it

Shall I collect up a set of recommended extensions for mediawiki? If yes, it would be handy to know which version you're likely to use, since more are prepackaged with recent versions, and some are incompatible with old, but there are some which would be useful with with any version The skinning system changed significantly in recent versions and the official docs site uses 1.16 (latest is 1.20), so it's quite likely that there's no SMF skin compatible with the latest version, but to be compatible with old skins we'd miss out on quite a few cool things (take a look through the release notes if you like).

[sisko]

from what i'm reading in the bridge documentation, going beyond 1.18 would be a big gamble.
besides the SMF skin, what else are we loosing if we go with 1.18? (i mean the functionalities that you were intending to use in this project)

[ete]

Right, I don't see much in 1.19 or 1.20 which would be useful. Some note about new version of Cite being fully featured with 1.20, but old cite was good enough, and that's fairly minor anyway.

[Green1]

I used to be a sysop of a wiki site. One of the things you really have to watch for is that wikis tend to attract twenty tons of spam. Wiki spammers are far worse and more persistant than forum spammers because most wikis are more liberal about links. Wikimedia anti-spam tools are in my opinion much weaker. The only reason the large wikis get away with it (ie: wikipedia, rational wiki, conservapaedia, ED) is merely the sheer number of editors watching the pages day and night with auto-protect buttons ready. More link-tos = better SEO for what ever rip off spam site, so they do have motivation.

I would suggest if you do put a wiki up, you limit the ability to edit to folks who request permission.

Plus, sisko is right. Wikimedia requires it's own maintainence on top of your forum.