Talk:Main Page

Spammers

James: They are sooooooooooooo anoying

Mike: Damnit, I hate spammers, don't you?

Bob: I banned the IP's of the repeat offenders from last night, but I doubt it will help. These guys are almost certainly using anonymizers or zombie-proxies... so I dug through the wikimedia source code, and discovered some nice filter options I can enable. We ought to be seeing a lot less wikispam in the future >:)

Mike: Yay! Filters are good! :P

Bob: I just added support for the wiki spammer blacklist at http://chongqed.org/ , which is pretty darn cool. Even better than the filters I added the other day (which have been blocking about one spamming every six hours)

Mike: Well, it doesn't stop "I don't know how to use a WIKI" spam...

And now for something different

Mike: Erm, where did Bob go? His picture (which I was just in the process of almost using in an OHR related project) is gone! Gone I say!

Bob You mean the picture of Bob in the top left corner of the wiki? [1] ... It is there. Perhaps your browser?

Mike: Hmm, you're right... When I go to that URL, it pops-up a message saying "it can't be found", which is not like other 404 messages... Interesting...

Mike: D'oh! It shows up again when I clear my cache... and I thought Firefox was perfect... :(

RE: The "Q&A" section

Mike: Why?

Future Website Plans

Bob: I love mediawiki. With the addition of the editable sidebar in version 1.5, I think I am now ready to convert the entire OHRRPGCE website to mediawiki. The first step is to move all the content from http://HamsterRepublic.com/ohrrpgce/ to wiki pages. Some of the more important info, such as the official download links, will be on "protected" pages that only sysops can edit. Then I will replace http://HamsterRepublic.com/ohrrpgce/ with a nightly-updated copy of this wiki, similar to the one at http://mirrors/motherhamster.org/ . That way, people will normally browse the static copy at HamsterRepublic.com but if they click an "edit" link, they will be taken to gilgamesh. That means we get delayed updates (for spam control) distributed redundancy, and better performance (since the static copy at HR will put zero PHP/mysql load on the server)

Mike: Hmm. Very interesting... I think this is a very good idea.

Editing the Main Page

Bob: The main page uses some extra spam-filtering rules because it is the most spammed page. Only logged-in users will be able to change it. If you try to edit it when you are not logged in, it will look like it worked, but actually nothing happens.

Mike: I propose similar rules for the News page, since it's not really a content page the way everything else is. Or, maybe just protecting it would be better.

Screenshots

Guest: Hi people! Where are the screenshots? Could you add some? Could avoid useless downloads.

TMC: Oh.. I miss those screenshots that used to be on the download page. What does everyone think of adding them back? (there's also a screenshot for custom on the HR download page. Speaking of which... James! I think you forgot to update wandering hamster! (or at least, you forgot to update the "last updated" text... and why do wandering hamster on the HR download page and wandering hamster on the HR OHR games list point to different zips?))

Bob: Yes. We should definitely have a screenshots page, and we should link it from the sidebar. Newcomers will definitely want to see screenshots both of the ditor and some games. (Re: Wandering Hamster, I have not update it at all, and probably will not do so until tirgoviste. The HR downloads page points to the same zip via a symbolic link.)

The Geek: I concur. The only time I ever download something without seeing screenshots first is if it has come with a very, very high recommendation.

April Fool's

The Geek: Must... resist... urge... to... make... April Fool's day edit...

Mike: Damnit, I didn't even think about that. :( :( :(

Categorization

Mike: I'm thinking that we need to use Namespaces more often. Specifically, we need to use them.

I was thinking about how to organize the Editor menus and stuff, so I thought "Menu:Edit Graphics" or whatever. Then, I was looking at the Sword of Jade page that FyreWulff edited earlier, and I thought "Game:Sword of Jade".

It's that kind of contextual organization that makes MediaWiki great.

Edit: James, take a look at The Meta-Wiki page on the configuration file. Also, could you enable the Sub-pages feature? That would be immensly awesome for stuff like Sword of Jade/Screenshots or Graphics menu/Tileset Editor, for example.

Bob: I added three new namespaces (with subpages) menu: game: and br:

Lots of changes in the Recent Changes section?

The Geek: What happened?! There's like, 150 changes that MediaWiki made, apparently all to special pages/restricted pages and page titles throughout the wiki aren't working right!

Bob the Hamster That was me upgrading to MediaWiki version 1.6.3. The page titles were screwed up because I didn't know about MediaWiki:Pagetitle, which Mike has already fixed.

The Geek: Ah, thanks :)

Redirector

The Geek: For those of you like me who are too lazy to type the whole URL every time you want to visit the OHRRPGCE-Wiki, I've set up two redirectors with doip.com - go to http://doiop.com/ohrrpgce or http://doiop.com/ohrrpgce-wiki to be instantly directed to the Main Page! Spiffy, eh?

Stupid Error

Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try again. If it still doesn't work, try logging out and logging back in.

Mike C. Logging out and in again doesn't do anything. It doesn't hamper my ability to do anything (it shows up right when I hit edit on a page, and when I save my changes, it doesn't come back), but it's irritating... anyone else getting this?

Bob the Hamster: I have seen that before, but not recently. Is it still doing it now? I would check and see if your cookie really gets deleted when you log out. If it persists, let me know, and I will search the logs for database errors.

Mike C.: It is still doing that, yes. I manually deleted the cookies, logged back in, and it's still there.

Anonymous: I had this problem, and it was solved by looking in /etc/php.ini for the variable "session.save_path", and then making the directory it listed (/var/lib/php/session) writable by the apache user. chown apache:apache /var/lib/php/session ; chmod 770 /var/lib/php/session

Hope it helps. -Nate

Bob the Hamster: We already solved the problem a long time ago, but thank you for the info anyway, anonymous poster.

If you guys resolved it a while ago then why didnt you post the solution? DING!

Wiki Logo

The Mad Cacti: What happened to the picture of Bob in the top left hand corner? It's gone!

James Paige: Hmmm... I'll look into it...

Anonymous: If you guys resolved it a while ago then why didnt you post the solution? DING!

James Paige: It is a mystery

Question for Bob and/or James

Wouldn't it be wise to have James use Wandering Hamster as a bugtest game for anything that may crop up? ~raekuul

Bob the Hamster: Oh, I often do. But simplified test-case games are always the best for fixing the really tricky bugs.

ya!

Thanks for making this Rpg maker. Anything else probably would have been to difficult for my feeble mind. =P So, yeah, hamster dudes. XP Legodude760 20:59, 16 January 2008 (PST)

Bob the Hamster: You are welcome :)

Legodude760: YOu guys invented a new way of talking. I'll try to do it as well. :P

Warning message when browsing anonymously

The Mad Cacti:I noticed today that when not logged in, nearly every page, but not the Main Page, shows a warning message:

Warning:  Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /var/www/wiki/ohrrpgce/includes/User.php on line 3634

Also, earlier today I saw a warning message when my edit conflicted with David's, but I didn't note it down.

Bob the Hamster: I think this was introduced by a mediawiki bug a couple days ago, and fixed this morning. I forced an early upgrade, and the message is gone now.

Handhelds

Anonymous: With advanced game systems like Xbox and Wii, it seems difficult to create and rpg that millions of people would want to play..... Unless it was on a mobile device. Do you think it's possible to one day make your games compatible for smartphones? I think rpgs would be at their strongest on mobile devices. Thank you.

The Mad Cacti (talk): We're very keen on porting the engine to handheld devices running Android, iOS, etc in the future. There are some technical barriers (concerning FreeBasic) that need to be solved (mostly not up to us), but I don't think it's that far off!

Reorganization.

Reposted from SlimeSalad:

I wanted to suggest a reorganization and cleanup for the navigation links.

The general idea was changing some of the names, adding a couple of links, and reorganizing them under 3 different categories (instead of having everything under navigation).

Project Info

---

-(Take out main page... most sites don't have it since it's taken for granted you can just click an image at the top to go there)
-About (rename the project info page)
-News
-Screenshots
-Downloads
-Source Code

Resources

---

-Getting Started (the F.A.Q. page renamed, since it is a good place to start)
-Tutorials (the HOWTO page renamed)
-Custom Editor (this page? http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/Main_Menu)
-Plotscripting - Put plotscripting links, articles, tutorials here
-Documentation

Community

---

Slime Salad
Castle Paradox
Other Links (rename community)
Contributing

This certainly isn't perfect, but I think it's a good starting point. What does everyone think?

The Mad Cacti (talk) 06:31, 8 May 2013 (PDT): Thread on SS? I must have missed it. But anyway, thanks for the comments. I've been trying to encourage people for years to take more interest in this. Splitting the sidebar up a little seems like a good idea. My comments:

The HOWTO is a far better way to get started than the FAQ. At least it would be if it weren't so out of date, but many of the FAQ answers are also really out of date. I guess renaming the HOWTO to Tutorials may be a good idea. The original HOWTO was one long tutorial in parts, which was great. The newer chapters don't fit together in that way. I definitely feel we have two types of tutorials, and they should be separated: the core stuff that explains the main engine features, including the HOWTO plus some of the other stuff linked from the HOWTO page and elsewhere, and all the other tutorials. So I guess my preference would be to link all tutorial-like articles from a Tutorials page, with the HOWTO (possible renamed) at the top and highlighted. IMO the HOWTO mess is the single biggest problem here.

I don't want to link to Main Menu since that set of pages is mostly unfinished and also terribly out of date, and not particularly helpful. The Plotscripting page is definitely one of the main hubs of the wiki, so perhaps deserves to be on the sidebar, but I wouldn't promote it above Documentation.

I don't really think we need links directly to CP and SS instead of Forums or Community links. Hmm, we have a lot of double-up between Forums and Community Links.

(Note to self: MediaWiki:Sidebar contains the sidebar)

Bob the Hamster (talk) 09:04, 8 May 2013 (PDT): I would like to completely remove the Main Menu article and that whole (unfinished) tree of articles about menus. These were started before we implemented F1 help in every menu, and the wiki is less convenient and harder to keep upt-to-date than the F1 help.

--Crowtongue (talk) 09:10, 8 May 2013 (PDT) I'll stop updating those pictures then. I figured it could be useful if it was updated to have more information than can be displayed in Custom.

MadCacti, that all sounds pretty reasonable. Maybe we could use HOWTO as ONE tutorial again, and have a separate page with a list of tutorials. Plotscripting could also go below Documentation, but Documentation needs a lot of cleaning up.

Also there is a link for "Alternatives" that isn't on the sidebar that is on the main page. These things are all easy enough to find with google, and it isn't super useful. Is it worth keeping?

Bob the Hamster (talk) 09:47, 8 May 2013 (PDT): I made most of the suggested changes. For "Getting Started" I used How do I start?. the Alternatives page is actually a throwback to the most ancient days of the OHRRPGCE, when only a handful of game making tools even existed, and I wanted a place to link to Verge. The concept of game making tools in general is pretty mainstream now, so there is not much point in having our own list of them.

--Crowtongue (talk) 10:01, 9 May 2013 (PDT): Just a couple more things... there must be a way to get rid of the "main page" heading, but I have no idea how. Also - we have the search box 3/4 the way through the links. Should that be at the top?

Re-reorganisation

Sword (talk)

• • Clicking on the logo/image of Bob the Hamster (in the upper-right corner) doesn't seem to direct to the main page, and on most pages, I do not see a link to the main page either (for example, at the top or bottom of the page) unless I just plain missed it, in which case, most users might as well.

It's not strictly necessary, but users might appreciate being able to click on the logo to go back to the main page. Will this image be updated? If this is part of the OHR, we might see hamsters (plural) representing the community, such as Misa alongside Bob.

• • As a side note, I do not see "O.H.R.R.P.G.C.E" written anywhere on a page, and it might be nice to include this on your logo, for example surrounding Bob as part of the logo, or written somewhere at the top or bottom.
  • I feel that the Main Page itself should have a short introduction, similar to, or the same as, what is written in "About"
  • Screenshots could do with updating. We can also record GIFs and link to youtube videos.
  • Anything happening with the "News" page? It could be integrated into the main page, similar to bulbapedia's main page

Obviously, this wiki is a lot slower and smaller, so it's not that big a deal. Then, do we really need it in the sidebar? The News page also links to CP, which seems to be inactive. Surely we want people to come to SS? It might create the impression that the community is inactive or no longer existant!

• • Do we really need links to "Downloads" and "Source Code"? I can imagine this is useful for devs, but not new-users so much. The downloads page contains a link to the source code page anyway. I am not a dev, so I have no idea how useful/useless it is.
  • On the main page, we see this: [[2]]... It is fuzzy and dull, and quite frankly ugly. Please use GIMP and add a nice gradient, clean it up, or redesign it a little.

• • Redesign Contest

We could hold a contest on SS to redesign the logo and title images, with specifications as to the size and contents, and the winner would have the honour of helping and being on the wiki, and maybe the opportunity at creating the new logo for the OHRRPGCE. I understand if this is too personal to leave up to others, or you have strong feelings about it, but consider changing the design. GIMP is a really great tool and easy to use, extremely versatile and powerful. I would personally like to see a fancy new splash/image when I open CUSTOM, as the current one feels outdated.

TMC (talk) 20:19, 19 July 2017 (PDT): Funny, I just noticed yesterday that the logo doesn't lead to the main page. I might be able to fix that.

Yes, many screenshots are out of date. However, it's likely that parts of Custom, especially the sprite and spriteset editors, but possibly everything, will be change significantly soon. Feel free to update screenshots, but maybe better to wait rather than put too much work into it. Also things like the help pages and slice editor don't appear on the Screenshots page!

Regarding the 'O.H.R.RPG.C.E' logo, there have been rumours about asking people to create possible replacements (or at least a re-rendering that looks better). In fact several people have already started. Would you also contribute something? James has final say whether to use anything, naturally, so it wouldn't exactly be a contest.

Maybe there's not much point linking to CP's news page... but to be fair, it's about as active as the News page! It would be nice if the News was a little bit more active. But, we have a news page, and the obvious, logical places to link to it are from the sidebar and main page. It doesn't make sense to hide it. In fact, I dislike websites which are lacking a news section; it makes me immediately suspicious that the website/project is dead.

I agree, it is weird that there's no text on the main page. Virtually no other website does that. I guess we could have a blurb. I guess we could copy the last couple news items to the main page. Yeah there's no real need for a prominent link to Source Code, since that should be linked from Downloads.

Also, I'd like to add a summary of engine features (illustrated with screenshots), to the About page.

Sword (talk) 12:42, 24 July 2017 (PDT) I feel that much, if not all, of the "About" page could be integrated into the main page directly. A summary of features sounds like a brilliant idea.

NEWS FEED / CURRENT OR RECENT ACTIVITY

Sword (talk): Any of the below could be featured on the main page! This would make the wiki look really fancy.

• • TWITTER: The news feed could possibly incorporate the OHRRPGCE twitter bot? It's not very interesting, but it shows things that are happening and is extremely up-to-date. Are front page posts tweeted? You might consider a locked forum specifically for tweets, or a way of selecting a thread to be tweeted. You'd probably want to be able to add images or short descriptions to each tweet as well... And maybe you could modify the behaviour of the bot to make multiple tweets that include the top post of the thread.
  • FB: Also, there is a facebook group (a few actually, I think) so maybe that could be a good resource to link to and show activity, and allow users to get in touch quickly and easily, with each other, and devs. It's really modern too!
  • CONTESTS: On a related note, it would be really cool to show ongoing contests, their results, participants, and projected timelines, link to threads, etc., etc., (please don't implement this as just text! for example, writing the name and date of the contest as a paragraph - that would be awful :( ... consider using a simple timeline/barchart instead! You don't have to use graphics, you could just use ASCII art/tables. then you could write additional details to the side or below. presenting things in a fancy way is not only attractive, but fun, cheap and easy as well.)
  • YOUTUBE: Having the multicart featured on gamesites has raised the profile of the community and engine, and having associated youtube videos is an extremely clever tactic! You could consider an official youtube channel that hosts teasers, announcements and help/guides. Youtube is one of the biggest services that could help with documentation, tutorials, examples, and more! This could then in turn be featured or linked to from the main page.
  • REDDIT: There's an official subreddit and reddit is extremely popular. We should at least acknowledge this somehow.

I suppose that some of the above, unless in abbreviated form, could increase bandwidth costs.

Is black-and-white the accepted theme for this wiki? It appears plain, sterile and hurts the eyes. It is also generic. This could be alleviated by having fancy-ish top/bottom/side bars, or adding a hue of colour here and there.

I also do not see a "donate" button or link anywhere on the main page or in the sidebar. The donations page could be featured more prominently somewhere, and most pages generally have this linked in the upper-right corner of the page.

More stuff. The main page is rather unhelpful I feel. It could do with a GIF of GAME as well as CUSTOM. And a link to SS and the SS discord would help newcomers instantly find the community. It should be one of the 1st things that newcomers see, imo.

LOGO Is it planned to use Ichiro's logo for the wiki and other(?) (web)pages?

TMC (talk): Lobby James about the logo! Maybe on SS instead of here.

I still plan to make changes to Custom's splash screen, as I previewed on SS, but will leave the choice of logo for that up to James' decision too.

As for this main page, I'm not happy with it myself. I'd prefer at least a short blurb about the engine. And I agree that prominent links to SS and Discord would be a good idea. At least, after rewording the Forums page it seems that the stream of people registering at CP instead of SS has stopped.

What if the main page and About page were merged?

A news "feed" (either automated or just manually updated) would be cool. I am actually planning to create such a feed on the front page of the OHR Archive website I am (not actively) working on. Perhaps that feed could then be embedded on the wiki.

I don't like the theme either. It's just the default mediawiki theme. I've been waiting for someone to create a nicer looking theme for years!

Not linking to the subreddit is an oversight. (You could easily add a link to it on the Forums page yourself, you know!) I didn't know about the facebook page, is that worth linking to?

Sword (talk): If you maintain a feed for your Ark, it would fit really well on the main page. Something curated is way better than something populated by a bot. Maybe a combination of the 2?

Regarding online presence in popular sites: I think the subreddit and facebook are potentially dead. In addition, I think the state of the forums puts off potential newcomers. A few sparse posts, occasional contests, posts on the scale of weeks if not months.

The discord itself is entirely TOO active to allow people to easily fit in. It's too hectic and disorganised. But it allows instantaneous discussion! So it's nice to talk there.

Unless there were some incentive to go one place or another, or there were some overhaul in the community... better leave it be for now.

One thing I'm keen on is a list of features on the main page.

• • export to win, mac, *nix, &roid!
  • powerfully featured scripting language! create from scratch! or modify existing features!
  • versatile editors! databases! inter-engine links! other stuff!
  • robust mapping tools, with multiple layers, zones, all manipulable through script!
  • well featured and complex (maybe TOO complex) battle system! uhh...
  • in-built sprite drawing :)
  • import and export different graphic and audio formats!
  • mouse/touch support!
  • free, as in, free beer?
  • mysterious slices... they will rule the world one day
  • etc,.

TMC (talk) 21:07, 10 September 2019 (PDT): I agree that we should have a page with a list of features, we score a zero for selling the engine. https://www.aseprite.org/ is a great example of showing off features! (BTW our Screenshots page doesn't manage to show off much either.) The features page might be the main page, but I'm not sure about that. A separate page would work just as well if it's linked prominently. I think it should (largely? wholy?) replace About. If it's not the front page then it's more reasonably to use that aseprite format: one screenshot or gif per feature. Also note that the .gifs on asesprite's front page only load when you mouse-over to avoid being really heavy.

That's a start at a features list. More:

• Complete keyboard support, not mouse support. Everyone supports mice! ;)
• Free as in beer and liberty
• Live-preview changes as you edit and play at the same time
• No scripting required. Menus, NPCs, battles, items, learnable spells, textboxes, shops, conditionals, a menu editor, all built-in.
• Feature packed by 23+ years of active development and still being improved as of 2019
• Help screens everywhere, and lots of documentation on the wiki; extensive Plotscripting Dictionary
• Dozens of debug menus and functions
• Thousands of games released
• Reliable backwards compatibility, no worry or work required to upgrade to a new version

But putting together a features list always makes me think of the vast number of features I wish I could include, like customisable menu layouts and autotiling

Oh, and the newsfeed I was thinking of producing would be largely automated, probably partially curated (new forum threads?)

Maybe the community links pages could be cleaned up to indicate more strongly SS and Discord are where you should go, everything else is dormant?

Wiki Skins/Themes

Bird (talk) 11.09.19, 09:09
There are links for the purpouse of showing details about the OHR to the right of the pictures. That's a very clean front page we have there, not bloated at all. But clean also means somewhat boring, which a new theme could improve. How can this be done? Give me something to test out a new colours! One needs root access to the wiki's source, right?
The pictures on the front page speak for themselves. However I feel that a short video, showing a Windows 95 computer being put next to a smartphone, both running the OHRRPGCE, would explain a lot of attitudes about this whole thing here.

TMC (talk) 21:29, 12 September 2019 (PDT):

Good news, you can now skin the wiki yourself! Go to Preferences -> Appearance and chose one of the available skins. I strongly recommend changing to the Vector skin which is the new default for Mediawiki wikis, not the old Monobook skin, before making any customisations. Or you can try to Metrolook skin, which I think might be a promising base to start from.

Then click on the "Custom CSS" link next to the name of your selected skin (after saving changes to your preferences) and you'll be taken to a page where you can input CSS to customise colours and many other things, like icons and even the logo. There are various examples of Mediawiki CSS for you to look at or try out, eg. [3] [4] [5]. Click the Preview button to see the effects.

You can try out and modify the Vector theme I just created, if you want a dark theme: User:TMC/vector.css‎ However there are still a lot of problems with it.

(I'm not really suggesting changing the wiki logo to that, it's just an example).

See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Skinning_Part_1 If you're not familar with CSS, the best way to edit it is to use the developer tools in your web browser to try out different edits live.

Some examples of customising Metrolook are here.

You can also look through the list of skins for mediawiki and make suggestions. Look for screenshots or links to wikis using them.

TMC (talk) 08:46, 13 September 2019 (PDT): Well, this is fun, isn't it? I just look a look at your vector.css :)

I fixed some of the parts of Metrolook that bothered me, and made everything a little darker to reduce eye strain with my custom metrolook.css. I don't necessary like the colour scheme, I just started with the existing orange bar and continued with that. I like that this skin is simpler compared to Vector, so that it looks a lot less like Wikipedia. I'd rather start with re-theming it rather than Vector.

It's much more satisfying to write the CSS from scratch like I did this time, rather than edit some huge mess of rules which are irrelevant. Unlike my vector.css, my metrolook.css doesn't have any significant badness anywhere, and is quite compatible with colours on existing pages.

Bird (talk) 14.09.19, 11:50
We are not ready yet! This is a big decision about the default theme for the wiki, so that visitors know immediatly, that something special is going on here. Where did you pull your black vector.css out? Was that a modified version of the default vector.css? Can we have some default template for monobook.css, too? I think there should be a compeition about, who can make the best theme.

TMC (talk) 09:20, 14 September 2019 (PDT)
My vector.css is a modified version of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Gadget-Blackskin.css, which I linked to earlier. But I think that it's the complete CSS for a skin (a modification of Vector's CSS), not really intended as a set of modifications to an existing skin. It would be a better to start over with hand-written CSS, so that it's just a small easy to modify set of rules.

I notice a lot of these CSS rules are intended to work for Monobook too. There are comments about that. I haven't tried but think it will work if you just paste the same css into User:Bird/monobook.css, after you switch to that skin.

I'm not going to change the theme that easily! I was planning to post a thread on SS soon and see who else wants to make suggestions.

Although your vector.css is even darker than mine (since the content area background is black), I think it feels less dark because it's more colourful. Even after using it for a couple days, I'm not used to mine and I'm not sure I like it.

Bird (talk) 15.09.19, 22:20
We will get used to a new theme quickly. That really spices things up here. The black-to-darkblue theme looks like this is the website of a dark night cult (thanks to the great logo, too!). However both our vector.css have problems with the "Lists" (List of Lumps in the RPG file Format and List of other OHRRPGCE file formats), having now a bright color for text. When we have a default theme, the templates should have their background color changed from white to grey or another color.

TMC (talk) 22:42, 16 September 2019 (PDT)
Hahah, yes, the logo becomes more interesting that way.

Ah! I worked out the solution to the problem of table background colours: use colours with alpha! That way they tint the default background (black, white, or anything else) instead of replacing it, and look fine with any theme. I've fixed Template:LumpSpec but various other pages need manual fixing, like Heart of the OHR 2018/HeartBugs.

However there were some other problems with tables in the CSS: it overrode manually specified background colours of table cells (td), which I've fixed in my copy of the CSS, and I also fixed after copying over your CSS to User:TMC/vector.css. I also want to see whether I can trim some cruft from the CSS.

Bird (talk) 17.09.19, 08:43
Is there an easier way of using other wiki users templates? Can you make an extra option to add a fourth option to the "Preferences"/Appearance/Skin page, like "use custom skin of ..."? We currently only have three custom skins and there will never be twenty of them. Maybe the list can be expanded for every skin in our wiki.

I would like to change the background colour of the templates to grey. That would look well with white letters and with black letters, too. What do you think?

TMC (talk) 03:54, 19 September 2019 (PDT)
Unfortunately there doesn't seem to an easier way to try out someone else's CSS, and I would not attempt to modify mediawiki to add it. However once we settle on something it can be made available as a new skin option. (I see there's also a 'Theme' extension for mediawiki which would allow having multiple themes for one skin instead of multiple skins, but that's not a significant difference.)

By "the templates" what do you mean? Template:LumpSpec, and what others? Why change them to grey, don't they look fine now? The text overlaying them is not actually black or white, but is the colour of a visited or unvisited link, e.g. blue or purple.

Now, what about changing fonts? I think it would be amusing if some more "retro"-looking (e.g. bitmap) fonts were used for the sidebar or tab text (e.g. View, Edit, History), to make the wiki theme look more like the engine itself.

Bird (talk) 20.09.19, 07:58
Then we have to continue forging our skins and spam over the changelog with sparks that fall.

The Template:LumpSpec is perfect and works for white and black backgrounds. But the Template:Obsolete or Template:BAM for example, they have a white background which doesn't work well with white letters. The background colour #665 would give it a yellowed touch. (like an old yellowed computer)

The wiki's fonts. Which format do they have? .TTF? .FON? I have a Windows 98 machine with fonts accumulated from 20 years. There would be some perfect fits there.

TMC (talk) 08:14, 21 September 2019 (PDT)
TTF fonts are the standard. Might also be amusing to convert the default OHR font to one.

I've fixed the bg color in most templates by making them transparent. Possibly some are now too washed out to greys. In the course of doing that I noticed a few other problems with this CSS, especially that transparent images are no longer transparent, aside from the wiki logo.