Talk:Main Page

These issues are listed (roughly) in order of decreasing gravity. Please sign your entries with four tildes (~~~~), or see the editing help for other ideas.

Spammers Attack!

It looks like (re)CAPTCHA has been thoroughly defeated--my own GLASScutters.org forums are also inundated daily with spam member requests, which I have to routinely reject. I have no good solution, yet; I have to manually approve all new members.

Perhaps it's time that the IHG.org wiki were similarly locked down? How many new members do we really GET each week; would it be too tough to manage? We MIGHT see a big pop with the new box release, but only if this URL is published in it (not sure if--and kind of doubt that--it will be). But even still, it's got to be easier to approve obvious human members than to clean up the daily damage done by vandals and spammers? --David Artman 17:07, 12 January 2011 (UTC)

We should have implemented this a year ago. Only Brian Campbell can do this, though. - Cerulean 13:13, 20 December 2011 (UTC)

File uploads broken?

I've tried several times to upload a file, and I get error messages instead. Has anyone else had this problem? - Cerulean 18:58, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Issue apparantly resolved. I was able to upload an image today. - Cerulean 19:05, 17 March 2009 (UTC)

Broken thumbnails?

Is anyone else seeing "Error creating thumbnail: /usr/bin/convert: Unrecognized option (-thumbnail)"? I've tried clearing my cache, and switching to other browsers, but nothing has yet helped. - Cerulean 10:40, 25 September 2007 (EDT)

I see it too. I tried poking at the templates involved and I can't get it to work. I wonder if it's something wrong with the image file involved? Donsheldon 12:02, 3 October 2007 (EDT)

The same here, with the thumbnails... --Joe 04:26, 7 March 2008 (EST)

I couldn't find this page yesterday, so I created a error notice on the Help_talk:Image page. That as an Admin attention notice on it, so hopefully someone will look into it.--Jason 15:39, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Administration#Image_thumbnailing Thumbnails worked at one point, but stopped about a year ago? If you have access, I'd see if ImageMagick or GD library is still on the server, then look through the settings and see if something looks off. (I'm no wiz at this, I've only done this sort of thing once, a few years back and it was coupled with Gallery.) Also there could be something wrong from the permissions side of a directory?--Jason 14:24, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

This looks like a server-side issue I might not have access to. Is there a way I can check to see if I can access the PHP code? - Cerulean 14:40, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

This is a server side thing. If you don't have access to FTP into the server you probably can't fix this. (I could be wrong, I do not have experience with setting up a wiki, the closest I've done was setup Gallery on a website.) That said the following might be useful: Thread on mediwikiusers forum, Image Administration on Mediawiki.org, & Imagemagick page on thumbnails--Jason 15:35, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

Thanks for the legwork on this, Jason. I will try and get it resolved soon. - misuba 18:30, 20 March 2008 (EDT)

Semantic MediaWiki?

This would be a big change, but there's a Wiki extension which is intended for this kind of catalog:

 meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Semantic_MediaWiki
 wiki.ontoworld.org/index.php/Semantic_MediaWiki

(links de-htmled to work around spam filter)

The idea is that you can set up pages with attributes, and then create a page with an <ask> tag and a query. When someone visits the query page, it does the query dynamically and shows the result list. So you don't have to maintain the indexes, just the items; and the queries can be a lot more flexible than "category". -- Zarf 10:24, 28 July 2007 (EDT)

Not sure how I missed this post, but YEAH, I like the idea! We already have trouble with poorly categorized pages, though--what's to make a user put all relevant attributes?

But, yeah, anything that will help folks find games they can play with their sets or based on their interests is GOOD. --David Artman 13:52, 27 September 2007 (EDT)

Just wanted to let everyone know that Semantic MediaWiki is now enabled on the wiki. It was a feature quietly added during the migration process. Please play around with it and make the wiki better! I feel like Semantic MediaWiki is much, much preferable to categories for things like number of players, numbers of stashes required, etc. It doesn't have the most powerful query language yet, but it should help out with the mess of categories currently existing. —Lambda 20:57, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Was playing around with adding semantic to the templates (I've got some experience with same since I write larps using semantic mediawiki on my own wikis), but noticed that we're running a pre-1.0 Semantic. Any chance of an upgrade? (pre 1.0, there was no set and show, which among other changes gives one a lot less flexibility). If we don't have Parserfunctions and StringFunctions, those are incredibly useful as well. Mneme 18:57, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Also, it might be worth seeing how performance looks with caching off ($wgMainCacheType = CACHE_NONE; $wgEnableParserCache = false; $wgCachePages = false;). Sure, it makes the entire wiki a bit less efficient. But on a write-many, read-some wiki with only moderate amounts of data, that's not a huge deal, and caching in my experience works much better when you have lots of reads. Without them, it takes a long, long time to reparse old cached pages). Mneme 18:57, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

Semantic properties are awesome! I am currently building a set of automatic search pages which will largely replace most of the messy and ill-used categories. Unfortunately I just discovered that some of the properties were named incorrectly and need to be changed. For future reference NEVER include a period "." or hyphen "-" in the name of a property!. Doing so will make it impossible to create searches based on those properties (although you can display them just fine). Umjahwa (talk) 03:51, 19 November 2016 (PST)

PDF Uploads

Is this wiki set up to accept PDF files? - Cerulean 14:48, 17 July 2007 (EDT)

I tried to upload a PDF, but got the following error message: "Upload warning ".pdf" is not a recommended image file format." Would be great if we could upload PDFs here, for rules or other data.--Jason 15:44, 14 March 2008 (EDT)

This page offers a workaround for handling unsupported file formats. - Cerulean 10:26, 21 March 2008 (EDT)

I have added support for uploading PDFs to the wiki, but I have not yet tested it. Let me know if there are any problems. —Lambda 21:02, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

I uploaded a pdf and linked it from the Rosicrucian Chess page. Worked like a charm. --Carthoris 15:12, 19 December 2011 (UTC)

Categories don't include all tagged games

Please forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious; I am new to this site and wikis.

When I navigate to Category:Turnless, the only game listed there is Icehouse. However, IceTowers also is tagged with this category. Why doesn't IceTowers appear in the Category:Turnless list? This is only one of many examples of this phenomenon.

I was hoping to find games of interest to me by navigating through categories, but this issue seems to block that strategy.

Thanks!

JonPrud 18:32, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

I made a dummy edit to a game which listed several Categories, but did not appear in any of them correctly. After the dummy edit, it appeared as expected. Maybe all pages need to be touched after the wiki update in June for categories to be updated properly? JonPrud 20:28, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

That's one approach -- in theory, enough loads will rebuild the cache, but that can take a while. I find myself wondering if (as I've done on other wikis) its worth turning off caching here, as the efficiency gain might not be worth the old data (IMO, for low traffic wikis, caching is a net loss with no significant speed improvement. For high-traffic wikis, it's a big improvement with no noticable disadvantage (the cache is rebuilt fast enough that the delay doesn't cause issues). Mneme 15:50, 29 May 2009 (UTC)

ParserFunctions Extension

Does the icehousegames.org wiki installation have the ParserFunctions extension turned on? Mediawiki help page for ParserFunctions

I'd like to create some templates that use conditional branching based on input parameters and the #switch: function doesn't seem to be working.

More info: I'm working on a Martian Coaster template that will work similarly to the Chess_diagram template on wikipedia, but without having conditional branching (#if, #switch, etc.) this won't work. An email was sent to the site webmaster, Brian Campbell, to see if the wikimedia ParserFunctions extension could be installed. Installation instructions are on the wikimedia website. Oosterwal 13:51, 18 June 2010 (UTC)

Both Extensions:ParserFunctions (which adds basic logic support to templates as described), and Extensions:Scribunto (which allows full-fledged scripting in Lua), have now been installed. This should allow for plenty of scripting for displaying fancy diagrams. — λ (talk | contribs) 14:36, 14 November 2016 (PST)

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Past Discussions

See Talk Archives

Upload all rules

In order for this Wiki to stay valid over time, the access to the rules of games is essential. Can we just include the rules of the games, instead of linking to the external page? Or is there a copyright problem? Of course, a link to the external page can still be in place. But if an external page disappears, a game suddenly becomes unplayable for new gamers. And if I want to ensure access to certain rules for later, I should copy them to my hard-drive... That seems to be counterintuitive to a Wiki. Cuc 03:28, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

You can add game rules to the wiki if you have express permission from the game's author. Yes, this is a copyright issue. Please read the IceWiki's Policies and Usage Conventions. - Cerulean 13:26, 16 May 2011 (UTC)

For the record, if you find any of mine out in the wild anywhere, you have my express permission to add it to the site. Preferably in text format. Then leave a note on my talk page. - Chris Goodwin (talk) 10:52, 17 May 2018 (PDT)

Deleting Empty Categories

This is the list of categories that have nothing in them:

https://www.icehousegames.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special:UnusedCategories

Some of these might be useful to have, I like the games under development tags although I'm not sure if it's practical for them to be this granular. Some of them we should definitely clean up -- Category:2 Treehouse sets is a redundant copy of Category:2HOUSE, and Category:DeleteThisPage has been asking to be put out of it's misery since 2007.

I have no objection to deleting these empty categories, and if there are no other objections, I'll go through and do so. If anyone wants me to keep the game under development categories, let me know. I'll give this about a week to give people a chance to discuss. — λ (talk | contribs) 14:43, 14 November 2016 (PST)

I am fine with deleting these categories. The development categories listed here are incorrect versions of the categories currently in use. I think the current three development levels (Initial Design, Playtesting, Nearly Complete) are important to have since there can be a large difference in the playability of a game at each stage. Getting people to use them correctly is the hard part. I think most of the current categories can be replaced with semantic searches. Most people don't use them consistently anyways and the current number of categories is getting kinda out-of-hand. However, it will be a while until we can safely delete any of those... Umjahwa (talk) 16:16, 14 November 2016 (PST)

Missing footnote

In the paragraph:

«What Can I Play? — a list to help new players find games to play based on desired inputs3»

there's a link to a footnote #3, but only 2 items in the current footnotes. How we fix this?

--CiberSheep (talk) 20:32, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

It might been obvious but I just realized. May it be that note 3 is note 2? There is no other note 2 :)

--CiberSheep (talk) 18:14, 16 September 2023 (UTC)

Hello Everybody

I don't know who still uses this but, I can't find the news section anymore and I don't know if there are any new products for looney pyramids anymore. This site seems very dead. Please respond if you see this so I can know.

-- If you're looking for new/available pyramid products then the Looney Labs store is probably a good place to check.

I'm not finding a news page in a quick search. There's a news archive that probably just got sections from the home page moved to it after they were less relevant. -dazeysan