User talk:Sean Fennel

Welcome

welcome! TedErnst | talk 14:18, 1 Mar 2006 (EST)

Gidday, Sean! Noticed you wondering about real names - just when I'd decided that I'd revert to my simple email and zeal.com abbreviation!
Anyway, I didn't even know about wikis till "early '04" so you may be ahead of me in many respects. What do you think of the (rather inconsistent) use of CamelCase here? Probably quite unnecessary and it strikes me as odd, but I guess the prime movers here are used to it (from what I've seen of their other activities), so I'm not rocking the boat. Enjoy! robinp 00:02, 2 Mar 2006 (EST)

Yeah, most everybody here is used to UseMod. I'm used to MediaWiki. That's to be expeced, I guess. Sean Fennel 03:58, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

You saw this? Naming Conventions TedErnst | talk 11:53, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

your sig

since this place isn't using the User namespace (except for talk), you might want to modify your sig to avoid the redirect. Excellent explanation of patrolling recent changes. I'll have to try that! TedErnst | talk 12:26, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

Thanks. Glad you don't mind that I customized it like that. Joey Day at HRWiki taught me how to customize it with a template, so that every time you tewak it, every single instance of it will be simultaneously changed to reflect that. Wikipedia figured out people were doing that and so in version 1.6 of MediaWiki it forces the adition of the Subst: parameter to all sigs that are templates, thereby making using them pointless (which is what they wanted to do to reduce server load).

I didn't realize you were using a template. I just modified mine in my preferences. I actually don't want my old sigs changing if I decide to change them going forward. That seems too weird. :-) I don't mind if that's the way you do it. TedErnst | talk 12:44, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

I'm not using one. I figured I didn;t need one here since I'm pretty well satisfied with what I've got and I don't think I'll be changing it any time in the forseeable future. —User:Sean Fennel@ 12:49, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

re: images

Thanks for the tips. I actually did that so I'd have various sizes available to me on other websites, without having to learn their markup for re-sizing the display. Too many wikis! :-) TedErnst | talk 12:33, 3 Mar 2006 (EST)

RC patrol

Patrol recent changes - feel free to change the name to something more recognizable to yourself and other familiar with this function. TedErnst | talk 13:58, 7 Mar 2006 (EST)

Done!

I'm sure we'll be upgraded at some point. It seems John Stanton is hosting a ton of media wikis so will have to dig in to do them all at once at some point. Is it worth pushing for? TedErnst | talk 18:06, 11 Apr 2006 (EDT)

This is copied from mediawiki.org:

IMPORTANT: Running a 1.3 or 1.4 wiki and don't want to jump to 1.5 yet? Be sure to upgrade to 1.3.17 or 1.4.11, also released today. Versions prior to 1.3.16 and 1.4.10 have a serious data corruption bug which is triggered by a spambot known to operate in the wild.

Note that they're on 1.4.15 currently. 1.4.13 added protection against WMF vulnerability attacks, and 1.4.15 renders more accurately in the IE7 beta. Oh, and 1.6 also introduces CAPTCHA support. You could do it before, but it took a lot more work in 1.5 than before. So in summary, Yeah, it's worth pushing for. —User:Sean Fennel@ 20:35, 11 Apr 2006 (EDT)

Okay, I put in a plug here. TedErnst | talk 00:12, 12 Apr 2006 (EDT)

Thing is John is the administrator for many, many wiki, fyi. :-) MarkDilley

Yeah, and maybe getthem all done slowly. Upgrading from, say, 1.5.X to the latest 1.6 is a bit of a process, but as long as you don't have too much custom code in it (This Might Be A Wiki has so much that the usually simple upgrade from 1.4.10 to 1.4.11 screwed up quite a bit), then upgrading from, say, 1.5.6 to 1.5.8 is such a breeze that it probably won't even be noticed by most users. —User:Sean Fennel@ 11:11, 12 Apr 2006 (EDT)

Yea I have found lots of unknown engines to be UseMod, I am not sure John, who did the work of converting the 1000 wiki in SwitchWiki to an excell spreadsheet with 12 data fields, was very familiar with UseMod. MarkDilley

monobook.js

How did it turn out? TedErnst | talk 17:33, 18 Apr 2006 (EDT)

It didn't. More due to, what I finally figured out was a dependence on pieces of code that you don't have to explicitly state on Wikipedia, but you do everywhere else. I fixed it elsewhere, so I guess I oght to move it here. —User:Sean Fennel@ 03:10, 23 Apr 2006 (EDT)

Just tried making te tabs at the top of pages round (which is only 3 lines of CSS) and &mdsah; nothing. Must not be enabled. Oh well. Whatever. —User:Sean Fennel@ 03:16, 23 Apr 2006 (EDT)

Maybe it'll come online after John's upgrade of MediaWiki. TedErnst | talk 00:09, 8 May 2006 (EDT)

After playing around with the wiki on my PC, I've discovered it's a database setting. It's turned on by default (at least in 1.6), so it must be purposely turned off.

I assume you are talking about the $wgUseSiteCss (Use the site's Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)) and/or $wgUseSiteJs - (Use the site's Javascript page) we are using the default settings which are both on as far as I can tell. These settings affect MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Monobook.js. I know that MediaWiki:Monobook.css is active because that is how I changed the linking attributes to remove the underlining John 13:48, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

I had to check, but it's $wgAllowUserJs and $wgAllowUserCss. —User:Sean Fennel@

Those two are turned off by default John 14:36, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

Are there security issues involved in turning it on? I think that functionality could be really helpful here and totally admit that I don't know all of the ramifications. TedErnst | talk 17:05, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

There are security issues especially with Monobook.js, less with Monobook.CSS but we should talk about it together before we make a decision John 18:30, 28 May 2006 (EDT)

Like I said, my db knowledge is strictly 1.6. —User:Sean Fennel@ 15:32, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

We're using 1.6 now, aren't we? TedErnst | talk 15:48, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

We are on version 1.6.5 now. I had hoped that we could talk about turning this stuff on in our weekly conference call but we had limited participation this week :-) John 16:04, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

Sorry, it didn't occur to me we'd still be on for the holiday so I didn't send my regrets. I'll put it on the agenda for next week. TedErnst | talk 16:40, 31 May 2006 (EDT)

Image linking

Ah, I see you already figured this out and fixed it for 2kom.org Wiki. How do you get that actual path? Is this bot work we're seeing or manual? TedErnst | talk 02:00, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

Still me. I get the path of the actual image by viewing the image page and copying the url of the link directly under it from the right click menu. Not a bot yet. For the Pywikibot I'd have to write a custom script for it, and as I'm not a programmer I can't do that. What I will use is the Auto Wiki Browser which means I'll still be doing it manually, but it'll still be a lot faster than doing it without. —User:Sean Fennel@ 15:51, 4 July 2006 (EDT)

How will a new person adding their logo for the first time do what you're doing now? TedErnst | talk 15:51, 6 July 2006 (EDT)

Geez, it never occured to me that this might cause a bit of instruction creep. I suppose we could put the instructions on the template itself encased in noinclude tags, and then just keep an eye on Recentchanges for pages to fix it on. I suppose I could start substituting the template and when I'm done revert it (the template) back to the other way, and then catch new pages and apply it manually. Anybody else have any ideas as to how it could be even partially automated without any instruction creep (barring I learn python so I can program the bot as any instructions beyond simple find and replace have to be scripted in python)? —User:Sean Fennel@ 16:05, 6 July 2006 (EDT)

Very awesome what you're doing --Raymond King | talk 01:09, 13 July 2006 (EDT)

Thanks — I guess it's what I'm best at: [1] —User:Sean Fennel@ 23:04, 23 July 2006 (EDT)

Sean, I see you're doing a lot of great work with the image linking and I think it really adds a lot -- Thanks!. I'm afraid it might wear you out, however. We've hired some people in the past to do repetitive work, do you think that would make sense here? --Raymond King | talk 03:05, 2 August 2006 (EDT)

Possibly, but I think it might make more sense to get somebody to write a script to do it for the pywikipedia bot so I could just use that. As for that edit summary: I am in Texas, though I guess "overseas" depends on your point of view. — User:Sean Fennel@ 23:34, 2 August 2006 (EDT)

You are just way too cool! --Raymond King | talk 02:33, 30 August 2006 (EDT)