User talk:Andytizer

Hey, don't know how realistic this is - just posting it here for posterity.

Basically, my idea is that at some point we introduce a box on the homepage that automatically grabs the Top 5 "Top Sellers" on Steam and links to their articles on PCGW. Obviously it would automatically update with Steam. I guess it just depends on what the Steam API is like?

To the forums! http://forums.pcgamingwiki.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=29

Hey Andy, on the homepage the Recently Edited box has two columns for Windows games. Was this by design? Because I could've sworn a previous version of that box had one column for windows games and one column for games in general. Just wondering.

The first Windows box is recently edited Windows games 1-8, 2nd one is 9-16. I acknowledge it's confusing, and I'll be changing it soon.

This will most likely be when we start adding in a bunch of new features, including a big overhaul of the forum system.

You never talk to me anymore, Hows it going? Hows the site? Anything going on? any requests?

Hey man sorry for not contacting you for ages - everything's running so smoothly server-side there isn't much to say at the moment :D. Traffic is steadily climbing, I have another Kickstarter planned soon, everything's going well.

There are a couple of things you could do which would be great:

1) Install PHPBB3 to pcgaming.com/forum with either single sign on, or some other simple integrated account method, such as using PCGamingWiki as an OpenID server?

2) Install Wordpress to pcgamingwiki.com/blog

3) Any ideas on how to embed RSS feeds into MediaWiki? Most extensions out of date. I was thinking of using a third party RSS aggregator and then using HTMLets to embed somewhere.

PHPBB3 -> Mediawiki sounds fun, Ill look into it

Wordpress should be easy

I would use a HTMLet, something javascripty

oh and can I get a PCGW T-Shirt? Size fatass please (4XL+)

Sure thing, I'll add in an order for you if the Kickstarter is successful.

forums and blog are coming online at this time, please note that nginx might restart a few times :)

http://feed2js.org/index.php?s=build

you end up with something like this: User:JRWR/rsssand

Thanks, this looks great. The RSS thing looks good, I'll be using it to feed our Steam group, blogs or forum posts into the main wiki page.

Could you move the blog and forum into subfolders? e.g. pcgamingwiki/forum annd /blog please, thanks.

<grumbles under breath>

Its not really something easy to do, I suggest that it is NOT under a subfolder of the main domain, mostly for wordpress/phpbb like being in their own server block, I can do it, but its going to get super messy and fuck with the wiki a bit

--Forrest / JRWR

Also for auth on phpbb, I have to build that one by hand, its going to take a few days, all the old auth code is all way out of date

-- JRWR

Thanks for sorting this out, it's very much appreciated. Let me know if I can help with anything.

I have been getting feedback that we need to develop a stronger community here, and I think that a forum will really be the key to this. Sometimes, forums even outgrow their parent sites, which is what could happen here.

Okay that's cool. Is there any way to 301 the folders /blog and /forum to the relevant subdomains?

that we can do, expect it done

Hey Andy. The IRC page is broken, complaining about a missing HTML file. The Fullscreen webchat works however.

Thanks! I'll check this out..

We made some server side changes which should have made the site loads faster - but seems to have changed the htmlets extension folder. I'll try to fix this soon.

I'm just curious is it really necessary to include Windows above all the information if the game is only available on that platform (not including consoles)? It just seems like if there is a Mac version then it should be properly labelled to avoid any confusion but otherwise it should just be assumed all the information is relevant to Windows.

Another quick thing is the capitalization, this was recently changed to lowercase some of the second parts of titles so for example "Game Data" to "Game data" I've seen several pages already conform to the old standard but is it really necessary to go back and amend this capitalization to all of the pages? The issue with making minor changes like that is getting everything to conform to it, this is why it shouldn't really be added unless absolutely necessary or unless a whole site edit could be made changing it all in one edit or a huge cleanup of some kind. Both of which I'm going to assume aren't possible or likely.

Thanks Pridit for all the contributions on the site lately, it's really appreciated and it's great to see new people here.

1) Regarding Windows header level 1- it's only necessary if there is a Mac or Linux version as well. Therefore you can take it out if there are no other OSes.

2) The 'sentence case' - I have chosen to use this capitalization method because it makes the titles and links much easier to read- The Upper Case For Headers And Page Names was getting excessive, and since then I've learned much more about what makes a good, usable and readable web style. Unfortunately I only got half-way through the sample article before I ran out of time to complete this.

My actual plan is to use ReplaceText to do all the necessary changes on every single page, so you don't have to worry about doing it for individual pages. However, we have run into a small issue with using it as we have had $wgCompressRevisions turned on, and there's no way to uncompress the pages to allow ReplaceText to work. Anyway I'm working on a solution which'll fix all the capitalisations.

Andy, I really like this site. It has so much potential to be big. But when I see that from the last two days that the majority of edits come from you and a handful from others, I'm starting to get a slight bit worried. Granted it's a monday, but I think we really need to go on the offensive and work at recruiting a bunch more active editors. I wanna see us have fixes for every game. I wanna see us have and hold fixes for every game. But when we have 881 registered users and most edits come from you, I tend to think there is a slight problem.

Just my slight pessimism. I hope it's unfounded.

Hey, thanks for the concern. We are actually doing very well in terms of traffic, with a record traffic hit of 97k unique visits in July. We have fewer edits in August, which I think is partially due to some of our main contributors taking vacations or being busy with the summer.

In terms of attracting new editors, I am interested in hearing suggestions about new marketing strategies. My last big game giveaway in July was a huge success, drawing in over 100 new editors. I'm interested in doing something like it again, but it's a lot of work. If you have any suggestions please let me know. I'm thinking of doing something with an editing competition involving Twitter, and a hashtag, maybe in the next couple of weeks.

Ah, well that's good to hear. I guess I was just worried over the almost complete lack of editors outside of you me and a handful of others in the last few days. No doom and gloom then. Yay.

I don't have any suggestions off the top of my head, but I'll let you know if I think of any.

I just had an idea. What if we do a editor drive such that the editor on here who brings in the largest number of new editors with 5 or more constructive edits gets some sort of prize? We can get the new editors to put a "recruited by X" badge or something on their profile. Biggest count at the end of a month wins or something. Just gotta make the prize a game off the Notable releases page or something. I'd even be willing to help chip in a bit to pay for that if need be.

What do ya think? I also like your idea of an editing competition.

Thanks for the feedback. I'm trying to plan some promotion ideas, including something like 'best editor' award.

I've done some work yesterday doing some marketing yesterday, and our visitor count peaked quite a bit due to the new release content I was promoting, which you can see in the analytics.

Just wanted you to know we are all working hard trying to attract more people, and it's a hard task.

The next thing I am doing will be:

1. Finish the games in the Fallout (series)
2. Make big changes to the sample article layout to reflect the new templates
3. Push a bit editing promotion, using the Fallout series as a 'sample'

I'm hoping this'll be done within about 2 weeks.

Not majorly, but the "From PCGaming Wiki, the wiki about fixing PC games" bar under every pages title is misaligned.

I like the lack of clip art in the Did you know box, but maybe put a space between each entry to make it less visually cluttered?

Thank god the clip art is gone. Needs fewer entries and greater line spacing. Will definitely be implemented in our new homepage :P

Hey, I played around with a few ideas as mockups, and decided this would look the best of the various variations: http://i50.tinypic.com/33ue6fr.png

Let me know what you think

I think for a site logo, the text is not ideal in that shape. Could we try a more 'horizontal' type logo? Maybe take our current logo and just replace the PC image with the new one.

I'll try a few horizontal ideas then and send you what I come up with, but I'm not a huge fan of how its done at the moment

Ok, I played around with the original logo, tweaked the letter spacing and changed the text colour. I think it looks a bit neater now - thoughts?

http://i48.tinypic.com/2w54jux.png

Cool the logo looks much better than before!

Some thought - on the front of the tower, I think the spacing on the left should be slightly less.

Also - how about using the same shade of light blue on the front as the colour on the side?

I hate to say it, but we could really do with a server upgrade - Jan and I have been working on the homepage all night and pages have been loading at a snails pace - sometimes 30 seconds to load a single page. Is this affordable for us to do?

Just a thought.

-Tom

N.B. The server just crashed and we couldn't access it for ten minutes - idk if we crashed it by overusing the site, but we could definitely use an upgrade - kept getting redirected to the server gremlins.

Yeap, it's been pretty tragic these past few hours. In the last half-hour, I think we breached server-spacetime and let some warp-creatures in from the other dimension, so they'll be a danger to the 'Server Minions' for a while too.

But in all seriousness, hopefully this was a one-off caused by Vishnu or whoever, else we really would benefit off of having a more reliant and responsive server.

Cheers, Jan

I'd be happy to contribute a few squid towards better hosting, though I'm not suggesting we approach the NSA about renting out a wharehouse or anything :P

Amusing messages :D I will get this checked out. We are on a Linode 768 which should be very fast. It appears as if there was some kind of derp happening last night which caused massive CPU spike. You can see the graphs here: http://pcgamingwiki.com/munin/localdomain/localhost.localdomain/index.html

I'll get JRWR to investigate.

Hey, just thought I'd give my feedback on the new article style being implemented. I really like the new icons, but I'm worried we will end up with too many different ones, which will be confusing for both the editors and the readers. The way I see it, we should restrict ourselves to four icon types.

1. Green plus - positives
2. Red minus - negatives
3. Blue i - information
4. Small window - instructions

I think we should do away with the red i and any other icons as it is just confusing to look at, even if upon hovering over the icon, it gives you a description. The information presented under the red i at the moment can just as easily be presented as either a negative with the red minus, or as information with the blue i. I also don't think each issue requires a red i symbol before the header - this is unnecessary.

We need to be careful not to overdo the icons, they can be a bit distracting to look at whilst trying to read the article, and spoils the flow. In my honest opinion, it would be better to merge all the points of the same type in each section into one symbol each to keep some form of prose and structure. For example, there would only be a single red minus outlining the negatives under "Issue: 'Mic in use by game'" in the Orcs Must Die! 2 article.

Finally, I think we should retain the "Issues and Fixes" header name rather than just calling it "Issues". Shortening it to issues is confusing because we also have the "Unresolved Issues" section which is for issues with no known fix, and we want to make it clear to users which issues have fixes and which don't. If you don't like Issues and Fixes, then we could go with "Resolved Issues" or something similar?

Anyway, just some ideas. -Tom

Hi Tom thanks for the feedback.

Agreement about the icons - 4 types is enough. I'll make some adjustments this weekend. I'm thinking of beefing up the way we do attributions- self-note look at the Cite extension properly. Was previously using the Template:Star icon for that.

Regarding number of icons - I want to use them as bullet points. Partly because there shouldn't really be a 'flow' to the article - when it comes to fixes, there shouldn't be a point that is more than 2 sentences long. Using a bullet format forces people to be as concise as possible (people tend to waste precious space by saying 'an advantage is that.. a disadvantage however, is..' etc.) I think by forcing icon/bullet point usage it makes finding a fix a lot easier (especially as the content is nested).

Issues - I initially wanted Issues and Fixes and Unresolved Issues because I wanted to include points like 'there is no FOV slider', 'no option for mouse acceleration'. However we've put these at the top of the article with the new templates which present 'missing' essential features very quickly. With the rest of the issues, I don't think there needs to be a distinction between resolved and unresolved issues - it just creates an unnecessary 2nd level header. People tend to just want to know succinct info on an issue in my opinion. What do you think?

I can see your point regarding using icons as bullet points and it does make sense. I still feel that we need to have distinct resolved and unresolved issues however - not only does it separate issues which have been dealt with from those outstanding, therefore offering a rough guide as to how good the PC port/version is, it also makes it easier for people to contribute - they can quickly see which issues don't have fixes and therefore if they decide they have a fix for an unresolved issue they can spot this more quickly and add their fix to the article.

Also, I think if you're searching for a fix for your problem, its nice to know quickly and definitively if there is currently no fix, and the "Unresolved Issues" header serves this purpose.

Finally, I think it just plain looks nicer xD

-Tom

I see a good point for adding these as two separate headers, thanks.