User talk:Optimatum

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Wikia (talk) 05:20, August 11, 2016 (UTC)

New pages recently created

FYI - no need to crete new pages when something changes and the old page is retired (e.g. Give to the poor 2, or Give to the Church 2). Just edit the existing page. It's history is accessible if anyone is interested.
Adnoam (talk) 19:46, January 6, 2017 (UTC)

If an event has been updated, sure - but that's not the case here. Just editing the old SMEN options to add changes doesn't work as those options are still linked from the pages for the original cards. Given those cards have distinct names, mechanics, and sometimes different text, just including the new option results in those pages would be very confusing. In addition, replacing and mixing the old and new SMEN content would obfuscate the information preserved in the original SMEN guide.

In this specific case, I also added the new page for consistency. There were two instances of Give to the Church, for both Restitution? and KNAVE OF REGRETS, while Give to the poor had only one page across the old and new content.
Optimatum (talk) 22:11, January 6, 2017 (UTC)

Recent change to Get rid of the plant page

Hi,

I saw your recent changes to the Get rid of the plant page.

It seems that you've essentially replaced using the {{[[Template:Action|Action]]}} template with recreating what the template is actually doing.

Since the whole point of templates on the wiki is to have a consistent look and feel we can control from a single location, I don't understand the purpose of such a significant change, which leaves this page different than other {{[[Template:Action|Action]]}} pages.

Was this specifically just to get rid of the brackets shown around the three possible card sources for this Action? If so, I don't think it's a good approach to have a page duplicate a common template's content (making it harder to maintain) just to solve a simple visual inconsistency.

There are much simpler ways to do this (which will make this more easy to copy to other such pages with multiple sources linked). e.g. Add a new field to the {{[[Template:Action|Action]]}} template for multiple source links. This is what we did when we wanted the ability for an Action page to show a custom name for the redirecting storylet/card - we've added the "Title Appearance" field to the template.

Thanks!
Adnoam (talk) 20:51, April 28, 2017 (UTC)

OK, I think I got it working (for now).

I ended up adding a a new field to the {{[[Template:Action|Action]]}} template: "From field formatted". Setting this to any value will mean that the Action template won't try to make a link out of the From field(s). This leaves the freedom to format the From field(s) at will if needed (i.e. this supports not only multiple source links, but also any other change we want to make to how to display the page's source cards/templates).

It's still ugly (in the template's code), but I can experiment with making it prettier later.
Adnoam (talk) 06:44, April 30, 2017 (UTC)

And now I've cleaned up the Action template's source to look much cleaner.
Adnoam (talk) 07:31, April 30, 2017 (UTC)

FYI - found a few other pages which apparently use multiple source cards: The Puppet Show
Adnoam (talk) 09:06, April 30, 2017 (UTC)

Concerning "A ticket for one?"

Hi, I reverted your latest change. The way the message is worded suggests that you don't simply get a ticket but that the number of tickets is set to 1.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:44, May 1, 2017 (UTC)

I'm not convinced that's the case. The exact message in the image source is "You now have 1 x A Steamer Ticket to Polythreme". I just went and played some chess to test, and the exact message I get with zero Sudden Insights is "You now have 2 x Sudden Insight". Unless chess failures now set Sudden Insights to 2, I'm pretty sure the ticket message's wording just indicates not having any tickets before.
Optimatum (talk) 22:15, May 1, 2017 (UTC)

When you have none and you gain some, it says "You now have ..." Here's a proof that you can get more than one: http://fallenlondon.storynexus.com/Profile/Liam%20Nevs
Flubsters (talk) 22:23, May 1, 2017 (UTC)

How did you manage that?
Optimatum (talk) 22:45, May 1, 2017 (UTC)

You can get a steamer ticket to Polythreme, then arrive to London. And then do it again. That way, I have a ticket to Polythreme, to Apis Meet and to London in same time, on my main. (To get the London one, get two Polythreme ticket, zail to Polythreme with your own ship, set sail to London but come back to Polythreme to keep the London ticket.)
Flubsters (talk) 23:07, May 1, 2017 (UTC)

Alright then. Sorry about that.

And collecting tickets is a pretty cool idea :)
Rahv7 (talk) 14:17, May 2, 2017 (UTC)

In case anyone else decides to collect all three tickets, be aware that the option giving the ticket to Apis Meet does set it to exactly 1. You do have to spend the full price of the Polythreme ticket twice and get off there to dodge losing the London ticket. You can take a slight shortcut though by only zailing to Apis Meet to get on the steamer to London, instead of having to sail the full distance to Polythreme.
Optimatum (talk) 17:35, May 5, 2017 (UTC)

I learnt this the hard way 2 minutes ago (literally!). I wish I had looked here before burning my actions instead of after.
Rahv7 (talk) 18:21, May 5, 2017 (UTC)

I learned it the hard way too. RIP, actions unwisely spent.

So nobody else ends up doing things in the wrong order, here's how I did it. There might well be further refinements to add that I haven't thought of.

# Get on the steamer at London, going to Polythreme, and get off at London. Do this twice.
# Get on the steamer at London, going to Apis Meet, and get off at London. This requires Flint. (This and step 1 can be done in any order.)
# Zail to Apis Meet. You could also zail directly to Polythreme but the voyage is longer and you'll have to pay 80 Silk Scraps.
# At the end of the day in Apis Meet, get on the ferry to London. Get off at Polythreme.
# Zail home to London. You should now have two tickets!

Be careful though - if you ever take the steamer again, you could lose your tickets, depending on where you get off. Going to Apis Meet will consume your ticket, and pulling the arrive-at-London trick will lose you one London ticket. (Edited as per Fluby's corrections.)
Optimatum (talk) 19:02, May 5, 2017 (UTC)

Heh, but if you use the steamer again in the future, it'll work just as intended if you take the right destinations. You'll stack two Polythreme tickets and lose one on arrival, vice versa. The only exception being Apis Meet, of course...

And if you don't have a ship, you can still do it if you do Polythreme three times.
Flubsters (talk) 22:15, May 5, 2017 (UTC)

Journal

Have you full journal of "Bag A Legend" ambition?
Голос Йирка (talk) 00:27, March 11, 2020 (UTC)

Character count

Hey, I noticed you added several pages with descriptions that violate the editing guidelines because they exceed the character count. I don't know if you intend to go back and trim those, but when you do this the full text is preserved in the page history. This requires an admin to delete the page and readd it to get rid of the history.
81.204.111.74 15:55, April 14, 2020 (UTC)

Edits?

Why are you editing all the Whitsun pages to turn they're unlock qualities from single to plural form. As this isnt in line with the game?
Asarta (talk) 16:13, May 18, 2020 (UTC)

Aurochs is actually the proper singular form of the species name. Failbetter had the name wrong, so they just renamed those four items and I'm fixing it on here too.
Optimatum (talk) 16:16, May 18, 2020 (UTC)

Oh saw it just now, just getting worried when someone starts mass editing
Asarta (talk) 16:18, May 18, 2020 (UTC)

Quoting you?

Hi Optimatum,

I just quoted your message about Getting started on wiki editing on Editing Guidelines as it was incredibly helpful. I hope you're okay with that?

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is obscured.
Asarta (talk) 14:34, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Bag a Legend

Thanks for all your contributions on Bag a Legend!
Fynnkaterin (talk) 13:55, June 23, 2020 (UTC)

Faction Templates

Hi,

I've recently created Templates for the Faction pages. As there however was some discussion about how they should look and their potential impact I've decided to put it up to the Community how they should look at User blog:Asarta/Faction Templates. Any contributions you could make would be greatly appreciated!

Asarta
Asarta (talk) 15:06, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Board persuasion tables

I noticed that you separated a few of the identical results when persuading board members again. I see the value in having the numbers in the proper order, but for me it's more important to not have duplicate text – both from a maintenance perspective (it hasn't happened afaik, but if there was a typo that got fixed it'd be easier to not have to fix it in several places), and to save space. When I look at a results table I also expect all of them to be different, but that might just be me.

I'd be happy to collectively decide what system to go for, since different systems on different pages is the messiest it could be.
Cactusorange (talk) 17:50, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm not sure what the ideal approach is. I was separating the identical results partially to preserve numerical order, and partially to avoid the unreadability of having five different ranges next to one piece of text. Maybe we should try to identify the default result for each board member, list that separately at the top, and use a footnote to note which questions use it? That's been the big offender.
Optimatum (talk) 19:15, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

Marking some results as generic and putting them at the top sounds like a good solution. Many members have a generic voting off result too iirc, which should probably get the same treatment.
Cactusorange (talk) 19:26, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

My instinct is to keep the generic voting off result with any more specific ones, but put it before the others.
Optimatum (talk) 19:37, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

I was thinking of pages like the Widow's (April also has it, but to a smaller extent), which currently has more numbers on the generic voting off than the regular generic, so it'd be subject to the same issues with that.

Perhaps I misunderstood your intention about keeping the generic result at the top – I was imagining just having it as a row on the top of the table, did you imagine a more distinct separation than that?
Cactusorange (talk) 19:55, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

I meant having the generic vote off result before any specific vote off results, as opposed to the overall generic result being at the very top of the table.
Optimatum (talk) 19:59, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

Ah. Yeah that seems like a good way to do it.
Cactusorange (talk) 20:01, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

I'd like to offer a suggestion that the generic text be used for the Success Description/Failure Description fields in the template. 

There's also a complicating issue of semi-generic text for board ousters. Some board members have unique text for removing certain members from the board, and then a kinda-generic text for removing anyone else from the board, which is different from their generic-generic text. Depending on which members they have unique text for, the generic board removal text could cover several non-contiguous number ranges.
PSGarak (talk) 22:02, July 28, 2020 (UTC)

Don't you think it would be a bit confusing to put one of them in the regular field? I think it would make it seem like that text is always there, and the other is in addition to it.
Cactusorange (talk) 02:53, July 29, 2020 (UTC)

I see your concern, but I think that can be addressed with a Wiki Note and/or proper headings on the table. I just have a preference that the text fields to have actual game text in them instead of just saying "[varies]" or "see table below" when it's possible for them to do so. There are some cases where it's not feasible, but in this case where there's a clear-cut "default" text there's something sensible to put there.
PSGarak (talk) 03:14, July 29, 2020 (UTC)

I get that desire. I'm not strongly opposed to it if it's presentable, but it seems like more trouble than it's worth in this case if there has to be a lot of explainer text for something that would be intuitive otherwise.
Cactusorange (talk) 03:21, July 29, 2020 (UTC)

I actually really like that solution. Leaving key template fields empty always feels awkward to me, but here there's an obvious piece of text to use for it. Shouldn't need much explanation either, just "Some [[Question_before_the_Board|]] Question before the Board values use more specific text instead, listed below."
Optimatum (talk) 23:53, July 29, 2020 (UTC)

Guess I'm in the minority. What about the footnote detailing for which levels the default text is present? I'd still like to have that data visible, at least.
Cactusorange (talk) 00:03, July 30, 2020 (UTC)

Definitely. Otherwise we couldn't tell which levels needed checking.
Optimatum (talk) 04:43, July 30, 2020 (UTC)

If we've decided then, could one of you edit one of the pages to how you imagine it? I'm not sure I'm able to visualise the layout exactly, but I'd be happy to make them all follow the same style once I've got something to imitate.
Cactusorange (talk) 17:27, July 30, 2020 (UTC)

Since I'm recording board text anyway, I've started changing the pages over. The one thing I'm not sure about is where on the page the footnotes should go. I also haven't yet done it for the failures, since it's often less clear which is the generic result.

I can't figure out which success is Jenny's default, though.
Optimatum (talk) 03:48, July 31, 2020 (UTC)

I think it'd make most sense to put it right below the table, so both the regular generic and the booting generic footnotes are next to each other.
Cactusorange (talk) 05:17, July 31, 2020 (UTC)

While researching other Wikia functionality, I found out that you can make tables collapsed-by-default! I've updated the root Debating Matters of Business with the Board page and HAL's page to compact the variation. Is this an improvement?
PSGarak (talk) 20:23, August 7, 2020 (UTC)

For overly long tables I think it's good, yeah. When going to Debating Matters of Business you probably want to see the branches, not several pagesful of varying text. For convincing members I'm less certain – love that Difficulty is collapsed (though it'd be nice if it was slightly wider collapsed, so the table explainer doesn't need a newline), while the text variations I'm not sure since they're not that long to begin with. Having to separately expand the Question and Board Member variations is pretty annoying, but if this can be solved by putting them into the same table or something I don't have a strong opinion on those either way.

I wonder if it'd be a good idea to have a varying text table template, so we don't have to fiddle with them manually all the time. Be nice to mark stuff for immediate review if it goes over 250 characters too. But I'm useless at templates.
Cactusorange (talk) 20:35, August 7, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for the feedback! I've combined the Question & Board Member variations into a single table. I agree about the table width. You can slightly work around that by using longer header text, but I'll see if Wikia gives more options there.

I haven't worked with Templates yet. But I'm willing to try, if for no other reason than being able to enforce the 250-character cut-off.
PSGarak (talk) 21:33, August 7, 2020 (UTC)

I have some bare-bones template in progress at User:PSGarak/Sandbox. The main issue I'm running into is that the template that currently handles flagging overlong text (Template:QuoteSummary) also inserts extra p tags. This adds some undesirable vertical padding into the cells.

The good news is, template-based tables can be included into other fields in a way that raw tables cannot. This lets us move difficulty tables into the Challenge information field, rather than having it set outside the Action template.
PSGarak (talk) 03:27, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

I saw you'd been working on it!

And yeah, it looks like QuoteSummary has some features that interfere a bit when used for this :/ From what I understand it inserts the [Find the rest of the story at https://www.fallenlondon.com] stuff after anything that contains trimming markers too, which seems a bit tedious to have on several cells of the table.

For the user end of the template, I wonder what parts could be standardised into template fields – such as having the header automatically using {{[[Template:Use|Use]]}}, with either Type=Text or Type=Math depending on a variable. Though not all tables uses that format, instead having the qualities on the individual rows. I'd have to try and find all the different table variations to see how they do it.

Would it be possible to use a single template for all the non-header rows? Having the entire thing as just one template might be difficult(?), but the rows seem simple enough that it might be possible to just initially define the amount of columns and then you could just fill in each cell sequentially.

Just spitballing for now, I could write up an example of how I imagine it in use if you like.
Cactusorange (talk) 17:51, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

I thought about putting {{Use}} into the first column header. There's two main problems. First, as you mention, in some cases it's bare text in the header and qualities in the rows (like Board persuasion results that very based on the presence of another board member). The second is that Use can take other parameters that sometimes you want to override, like Appearance. Trying to cram all of those parameters into a table template sounds like a headache. 

There might be a middle road where there's e.g. a Type parameter that takes Text (default), Math, or Other. Text or Math turn into Use templates, Other passes through the text as-is (which could also be an invocation of Use with other tweaks).

A single template for all of the rows is difficult because Wikia text (to my knowledge) doesn't allow for something like variadic arguments. You can't just pass multiple Row arguments (this is why the Action template takes Option1, Option2, Option3, ...). Putting them all together would require some way to process an Array of values. If it's possible, it's beyond what I can do. 

Templates and Tables also have an unfortunate interaction because of how the pipe character | works. In a table context it's a cell separator, but if you try to put table syntax inside of a Template, it's parsed as the Template argument separator. 

The rows would be doing more work if we replicate the trimming logic.
PSGarak (talk) 18:31, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

There might be a middle road where there's e.g. a Type parameter that takes Text (default), Math, or Other. Text or Math turn into Use templates, Other passes through the text as-is (which could also be an invocation of Use with other tweaks).

Yeah something like this was what I was imagining, though I think an optional parameter Appearance (applying only with Type=Text or Math) wouldn't make it overly complex, since that's used very often. But it doesn't seem at all worth it to account for the more niche {{[[Template:IL|IL]]}} parameters, I agree.

I see the difficulty with rows. What I was imagining was something like

{{VariantRows<br>|Columns=2<br>|First cell text goes here   |Second cell text goes here<br>|Now we're on the second row |This is the second cell of the second row<br>}}

which from what I understand assigns the fields without explicit parameters to just 1, 2 etc. (Or does the explicit Columns interfere with that?) But a module would be needed for it, like you mentioned the Storylet* template uses. Might be able to make it all one table including the header then, though a table like the HAL failures which have two "headers" would still be tricky.
Cactusorange (talk) 19:06, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

There's potential, but it requires either learning Lua or asking the admins to install Extensions for dealing with loops. I see the appeal but I'm not sure it's worth the effort. Especially if the row template is named something short, the syntactic gains seem minor.
PSGarak (talk) 03:08, August 12, 2020 (UTC)

I actually find the Lua module easier to understand than the rest of the stolylet template, heh. I don't want to make any promises but I want to try looking into it.
Cactusorange (talk) 14:18, August 12, 2020 (UTC)

Page change

Hello! Just wondering why you edited my user page? I'm not upset, but I was surprised and a little taken aback — it's general wiki etiquette to not edit other people's user pages, and there was an ongoing discussion (though it seems petered out) about if we wanted to limit categorization to avoid the User namespace. Try.else.finally (talk) 19:33, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, didn't mean to step on any toes! I don't remember the exact reason why, but it was some instance of the {{Item}} use showing up in queries and playing havoc with... whatever I was looking at. I think I assumed it was there for sandbox purposes and thus not a big deal to remove; apologies if that wasn't the case.

I agree that it's good wiki etiquette towards fellow editors to not edit their user pages, but I also feel it's good etiquette toward the broader wiki community to keep user pages from affecting the functional part of the wiki. Purely-cosmetic templates are a-ok, but templates with organizational effects? We're certainly lax about it here, a few extra category entries aren't a big deal, and it's much less of an issue with our small editor cohort than on the bigger wikis where I picked up the habit. However, our increasing use of SMW queries means stray userpage templates more and more often affect actual page contents. That's the line where I'm willing to start trimming personal pages.

I wasn't aware of the discussion on limiting the User namespace's connectedness. If Mediawiki allows automatically separating it from the main namespace's categories and queries, that would be great! But that clearly hasn't happened yet, so for now if a userpage is showing up in an important query... well, next time I'd try to subst it and remove the SMW parts first. Optimatum (talk) 06:50, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Would you then say that you are also in favor of that proposal? I feel that it also does make sense, and I know that there are some other user pages that have the same issues.

Though, now that I'm looking at the first one that comes to mind, I'm a bit confused by what I'm seeing... User:Adnoam/Sandbox does appear in [1] but does not appear in the equivalent SMW search linked to in Route: The Cave of the Nadir — see [2]. Have user pages have already been excluded from SMW queries? Try.else.finally (talk) 22:11, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Namespaces can be part of the conditions of a SMW query. Restricting results to Main is usually as easy as slapping [[:+]] on the back, but gets a little more tedious if the main query uses the OR operator. Templates that use SMW queries should add that filter as a best practice. I don't know if they all do, but {{Property category}} at least does, which is the one driving the example you linked.

- PSGarak (talk) 03:14, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

This proposal? I'm certainly in favor of the goal but I really don't know what the right approach is. Will say something in more detail there. Optimatum (talk) 16:24, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

From what I understand from PSGarak and Tirerim's responses, it seems that SMW queries, which are the default way of displaying information on pages, already exclude the User namespace. That is, with Zeefaring as an example, Actions which raise, Actions which lower, Pages which use/require and Challenges are all already SMW queries.

So while userpages are included in category pages, it may not be a high priority concern as the expectation is that casual wiki browsers will not actually look at category pages.

I ultimately do not have strong feelings about this. I do browse categories, but generally only wiki-internal ones like Guides needing work. I don't really know how casual browsers use the wiki, though I'd be interested in finding out! Try.else.finally (talk) 18:54, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

More precisely, SMW queries can exclude the User namespace but have to do so manually. Most of the major templates do so but definitely not all of them; I've seen userpages show up occasionally (generally when templates have a link to full query results). More likely to evade notice are guide concepts or other queries that are custom written for one purpose.

I don't have especially strong feels about this either, certainly not enough to embark on a large project myself (especially with several other more meaningful projects I already have half-done). But I do care enough to address the occasional stray page if I see it. Optimatum (talk) 19:47, 27 May 2024 (UTC)