User talk:Achris

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Welcome to Echo Bazaar Wiki!

Hi, welcome to Fallen London Wiki! Thanks for your edit to the Duel Mr Inch and his menagerie page.

Please leave me a message if I can help with anything!
Wikia (talk) 14:34, April 18, 2015 (UTC)

Hi! I don't check these messages very often, but will do.
Achris (talk) 14:59, April 25, 2015 (UTC)

Firefox Candle Stub

Hey, why was the candidate for deletion removed from the "Firefox Candle Stub" page? It's differently formatted from all the other item pages, it's incomplete, and there isn't an item in-game (as far as I'm aware) with the name. It's similar to the "Foxfire Candle Stub" page, of course, but it could be confusing to players who find the page. If it's a test of the formatting, then it should indeed have been put in a userspace page rather than elsewhere. Ashë (talk) 13:40, May 28, 2015 (UTC)
Ellie Mirra (talk) 13:40, May 28, 2015 (UTC)

Hi,

I'm waiting for User:Tinkerball to move it to their userspace. The origin page can be blanked (barring the deletion template) afterwards.
Achris (talk) 13:53, May 28, 2015 (UTC)

sorry about the confusion ... thought this: Item_Grinding_(Guide)#comm-31603 would make clear why Firefox is different. Where to put it? userspace? Profile, message blog?!?
Tinkerball (talk) 14:24, May 28, 2015 (UTC)

Tinkerball wrote: sorry about the confusion ... thought this: Item_Grinding_(Guide)#comm-31603 would make clear why Firefox is different. Where to put it? userspace? Profile, message blog?!?

It was clear to me, yeah. Other users finding the page however might not have the background, and it could certainly confuse them to see this "item". Better to maintain it outside the wiki's main namespace – User:Tinkerball/Foxfire Candle Stub for example would offer itself as destination.
Achris (talk) 15:01, May 28, 2015 (UTC)

Changes: Advance from Journalist to Author

Thanks for correcting that goof-up! This is my first time editing on Wikia and I didn't realize there was another spot in the template for that part of the description.
KaigenFL (talk) 16:58, June 1, 2015 (UTC)

That one is on me really, don't worry! I went through all choose-a-profession actions –and many others– recently, but apparently missed two (one of which was Advance from Journalist to Author, the other Choose Rat-Catcher as your profession). Game and Success Instructions are relatively new as far as template parameters go, so some older pages won't be using them yet. If you come across other text that's in brackets or marked up like this, feel free to move it around yourself :-)
Achris (talk) 17:04, June 1, 2015 (UTC)

item injection into module:IL

As u've noticed, I injected some more items. Your module is brilliant, makes for a single place if images change. There should be no speed impact by that, afaik wiki is made for speed and modules is latest playground. If there's any malbehaviour, undo it. Massive test is on my sandbox. Boots, companions and Destiny are already waiting to show up there too. If u think these sortable tables are crap or have any other bad whatsoever, let me know. I picked the larger images and threw off the small versions. wiki engine should resize on first call itself and save the asked size. And we dont need to pay for space or backups.

Hm, yes, I should've asked before doing it, perhaps, but sometimes ... I dunno.

)
Tinkerball (talk) 11:46, June 2, 2015 (UTC)

Don't worry and thanks for assembling those overviews! I should have asked myself, honestly, seeing how you were already doing item-related stuff and I really wasn't :-)

Glad we got the "conflict" sorted out without losing content in the process, wikis sometimes are crappy at handling that.

As a matter of fact, IL started out as a plain wikicode template. That format was easier to add new images to, but as it grew larger and larger, there actually was a noticeable performance hit (measured by Google PageSpeed, there might be better tools for the job) because large wikicode #switch constructs increase lookup times every time the template was called. This was my main motivation for converting to Lua modules, as it supports hashtable lookups which do not care about how large the image list is and provide constant lookup time. Hopefully that advantage offsets the slight syntax regression that is adding new images to the list.

Now, for the question of "small" vs. "regular" images, doing something about that distinction has been on my invisible to-do list for Template:IL for a while and have some ideas. I might take another stab later today, depending on what other things I feel like tackling first :)

And finally: IL is not my own invention, though I did more or less hi-jack it from its original author and added some features. Here's a blog post I started preparing once and that has been rotting for about a weeks already, and that contains a bit of history as well: User:Achris/ILblog
Achris (talk) 12:08, June 2, 2015 (UTC)

Templates item uses/sources

Saw u last edited these and didnt want to fumble around with'em unasked, but ...KISS: keep it short and simple

They name and link 2 or 3 times the pagename, I claim this is more confusing than helpful - isn't a one time display of it sufficient? Like:

This category displays all uses:

* actions which require it
* cards/storylets that unlock if you possess it

See [sources] on how to obtain it.

And wouldnt this be somehow prettier:

* before: Category:Blankpage Sources
* after: Blankpage Sources

There u see again my preference, not to make a whole line bold, but what's important. Btw, thx for healing
78.52.86.143 11:22, June 5, 2015 (UTC)

Hi!

I made some edits to the Sources and Uses templates, following your respective suggestions. Feel free to further tinker with them!
Achris (talk) 08:05, June 8, 2015 (UTC)

Message from Aximillio

Just would like to thank you for all those fixes you've done the last couple of days =)
Aximillio (talk) 13:11, June 17, 2015 (UTC)

You're welcome! If you have other ideas for something that could be given a try but involves some code tinkering (or anybody else has them), I'm happy to try my hand – just leave me a message :-)

My most ambitious recent project however, User:Achris/EmptyPage, seems to not hold up well and turned out to be basically impossible. (This is in large parts due to Mediawiki shortcomings and other technicalities preventing the Action template from wrapping parameters with includeonly in the generated source page.) That's a bit sad, as nobody could be expected to go through all action pages and add lots of awkward wiki tags to them (even if some of it could be handled with {{<span class="new">subst</span>}} as I found).
Achris (talk) 10:28, June 18, 2015 (UTC)

New item templates

The new templates are nice, but it seems to have removed the "uses" section for items on their pages.  If you aren't the templateer responsible, sorry.
206.169.213.2 22:50, June 17, 2015 (UTC)

That unfortunately was my fault indeed, and should be fixed at the source now. Item pages affected will update over the next few days, and you can manually purge the ones that are of more importance to you.

Sorry again, that's what I get for not double-checking the changes with others first!
Achris (talk) 10:19, June 18, 2015 (UTC)

Loss template

Just noticed the Loss template you're introducing. It would really clean things up if it were possible for the template to also include the quality name with link, the "is dropping..." text, and "(n CP)" if a value is supplied [or add "Missing CP" category to the page if it isn't].

Especially if there were also a Gain template to go along with it, there would be a lot less boilerplate to copy to get a consistent look with automatic categorization.
Marcmagus (talk) 16:04, July 31, 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for noticing! :) I'm currently trying to teach my bot how to correctly replace the images, best expect this to take a few days. (And yes, a corresponding Gain template will happen as well!)

As for your suggestion of further automating, unfortunately I can't promise much going into that direction. You may or may not be aware of the history of {{[[Template:I|I]]}} (basically it used to do text-linking too, but was unwieldy for several reasons, so I dropped those features again and made it image-only).

One of the first ideas I had for new templates around here was a general-purpose "gain/loss/…" result template. The more I've been working with the many pages we have, however, the less I found myself believing it could actually be done in a way that improves the workflow for editors.

Major issues are:

* differences between items, qualities and other results
* finding the "right" wording — this either means introducing around thirty templates, most of which editors would need to learn by heart, or introducing around twenty optional parameters (and template code that performs badly to parse them)
* properly supporting quality and item caps and their sort order inside categories (this is hard to do even with the almost feature-less new Gain template right now, so I restricted it to quirks only for the time being)
* making the results editable and understandable from Visual Editor (that's what ultimately made me scrap old version of {{[[Template:I|I]]}})

There's more to this list and I'm not really confident I can tackle all those problems myself and produce something usable. Everybody else is very very welcome to try their luck, however, and I'll assist as best as I can with any questions that arise!

For now my next projects (after finishing quality and quirk Gain/Loss) include converting item sources to Gain, introducing new Item loss categories, and writing Unlock/Lock templates to correctly track item uses.

That's going to take the better part of the next two weeks, optimistically, and doesn't include my next vacation plans (I'm writing this from the day in between two such things this very moment, hehe)
Achris (talk) 16:20, July 31, 2015 (UTC)

To follow up on this: I'm slowly getting somewhere, with around ten new templates and up to three additional parameters each (most cases will only use one). Converting all supported wiki result text to those templates is going to take several more weeks, though.

Current overview of those templates:

* {{[[Template:Move|Move]]}}
* {{[[Template:Airs|Airs]]}}
* {{[[Template:Increase|Increase]]}} and {{[[Template:Drop|Drop]]}} (with parameter |now= for set levels)
* {{[[Template:Item_Gain|Item Gain]]}} and {{[[Template:Item_Loss|Item Loss]]}} (with parameter |now= for set amounts, will be renamed to simply Gain and Loss soon)
* {{[[Template:Success_Increase|Success Increase]]}} and {{[[Template:Failure_Increase|Failure Increase]]}} (these will list the challenge CP gains so both are needed)
* {{[[Template:Progress_Reset|Progress Reset]]}}

and of course their common ancestor, {{[[Template:I|I]]}}
Achris (talk) 12:01, August 16, 2015 (UTC)

Marking seasonal content

Hi,

I noticed your comment about seasonal content: "The embedded actions on storylets and cards don't yet show whether content is season- or holiday-specific or retired. (I haven't figured out an easy way of making that happen … nor a complicated one for that matter.)"

The easiest (if not necessarily the best) way of doing so would be to add the Key of Seasons unlock to seasonal content. So for example "Throw another soul on the fire" will be Unlocked with 1 x Soul and 1 x Key of Seasons: Christmas.

The only issue is I can't track the official names for 3 of the Keys. I do know that for the feast of the rose it's "Key Of Seasons: The Feast Of The Rose" (see https://community.failbettergames.com/t/key-of-seasons-the-feast-of-the-rose/13462). But we could have "Key of Seasons: Chirtsmas", "Key of Seasons: Hallowmas" and "Key of Seasons: Zee Festival" as placeholders until proper names can be confirmed during the actual events.

What do you think?
Mikey thinkin (talk) 17:49, August 11, 2015 (UTC)

Hi!

This sounds like something that could work, certainly, but the seasonal templates do more things than just mark unlocks: e.g. sort content as available/unavailable in categories (that's the ^ and ~ stuff). It also wouldn't cover retired content.

I really should just look into tossing together a bad hack of sorts, but my FLwiki-reading activity these days is mostly from mobile to keep myself in the loop, and I'm so not going to try writing important templates from my phone :-)
Achris (talk) 14:49, August 12, 2015 (UTC)

Oh certainly! I know it wouldn't be a panacea but I suppose my thinking was that the two approaches would be complimentary rather than mutually exclusive.
158.143.75.8 15:16, August 12, 2015 (UTC)

Ooh! Sorry, I completely missed that! Yeah, sounds like it could work as a simple addition just like that... I'll look into making it so :-) Many thanks for the suggestion!
Achris (talk) 16:39, August 12, 2015 (UTC)

(Done, for three of the seasons. Zeefruit festival has no dedicated template yet, apparently, and I'm inclined to wait for a second incarnation of it before jumping into action headfirst.)
Achris (talk) 19:55, August 12, 2015 (UTC)

Awesome!
Mikey thinkin (talk) 22:07, August 12, 2015 (UTC)

Playing with Broken Toys embeds

Hi there, thanks for everything you've done and are still doing!

Something strange on the Playing with Broken Toys page, the embed code works fine for the first several levels, but then stops. I can't tell what the difference is between the working links and not.
Arvedui (talk) 01:02, August 17, 2015 (UTC)

Right, that's the problem with Embed and, to a lesser degree, Options as well: from the wiki software's point of view, they include all child pages fully and then do more expensive computations involving the entire text. Unfortunately, wikis don't like many of those happening on the same page, so there are internal thresholds of how much a single page can do—and if they try to embed many other pages, one of those thresholds is hit: in our case, "post-include template size" is exceeded.

After that point, the wiki software shuts down any further template operations and just displays a link to the template it's refusing to work with, which is exactly why the page you mention seems to stop working for no apparent reason.

There's no solution as of now, I'm afraid :( using Embed only a few times per page should be safe, and Options should be safe up to around 30 (it also depends on the actions that are included,somewhat)

More on this when I'm home, doing any actual work on the phone is not something I'm capable of yet :-)
Achris (talk) 10:20, August 17, 2015 (UTC)

Hi Achris!

I've posted several correction in various section lately. If you check my Contributions you should find them. I still find hard to edit them myself.
Licantus (talk) 17:23, September 17, 2015 (UTC)

Hey Achris!

I know that you are busy but, when you have time, I noticed a few issues that need permissions of some kind to fix.

* In the navigation bar, the "Location specific cards" link leads to a deleted category. It should be linked to the existing Location-specific cards in London category.
* Unexpected advances should probably be deleted as it was a copy of Unexpected Advances. I temporarily changed it into a redirect.
* 'Naturally I refused her overtures'‎ should probably be deleted as it was a copy of Naturally I refused her overtures‎. I temporarily changed it into a redirect.
* 'Naturally I seized the opportunity to extend my experience'‎ should probably be deleted as it was a copy of Naturally I seized the opportunity to extend my experience. I temporarily changed it into a redirect.

Thanks!
TraversDurward (talk) 21:53, September 28, 2015 (UTC)

Hey there,

I've deleted the redirects. Unfortunately, editing the header links is not as easy (wikia prevents it due to some silly misconfiguration on their end, it's not the first time we ran into the problem) so it might be easier to recreate the category that's linked to as a redirect page.

Best, A.
Achris (talk) 20:26, October 17, 2015 (UTC)

Potential Christmas Cards

The item known as A Potential Christmas Card on the wiki is now named Potential Christmas Card (can be confirmed in-game while they're still around). Maybe it got renamed back when this happened, and of course no one could've noticed until this month. (Maybe I should've just added it to that page instead of leaving a message here?)

(After several edits, I'm just going to list all further renamed items on Renamed Items. Also, I'm moving that stuff that's there with a note that you don't have time to add it to the table into the table. Hope you don't mind.)

When you get a chance, perhaps you could ask the bot to help out with this?
Cimanyd (talk) 01:37, December 19, 2015 (UTC)

Mr Sacks! Take my best regards! 3

Why was Mr Sacks! Take my best regards! 3 deleted? The only explanation given is "Housekeeping: See Mr Sacks! Take my best regards!" But the Day 3 option, despite looking the same as the day 1 option, is of course different, with different text and a different increase of [[Experiencing_Strange_Times:_Twelve_Days_of_Mr_Sacks|]] Experiencing Strange Times: Twelve Days of Mr Sacks. I'd recreate it myself, but I don't want to ignore an admin deleting something, and if you restore it it wouldn't need recreating anyway unless it has changed since its original existence (or wasn't the Day 3 option in the first place).
Cimanyd (talk) 18:50, December 27, 2015 (UTC)

Issue with Options template not removing extra formatting

The Options template seems to not remove the "This page contains details about Fallen London Actions." header box, or templates like disambig, when the page it's including is missing an image. I'm not really sure how to fix that myself.
Optimatum (talk) 18:09, October 9, 2016 (UTC)

Also, any way to force the Options template to use a specific image? I'm trying to fix the template loop issue for ...a_fading_wash_of_sunlight? options and noinclude and includeonly fix most of the problems. I can't seem to add an image though without breaking Options so it displays the image twice in the preview, and if I don't give Options an image it'll still display the question mark image in the preview. The ideal solution would be a way to set the image Options uses and a way to have it not display an imagine in the preview, but I don't know how that would work.
Optimatum (talk) 18:28, October 9, 2016 (UTC)