The Bluelight Wiki Technical Support Thread

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This thread is intended for the discussion of:
  • questions about the MediaWiki software (which the BL Wiki runs on)
  • editing and formatting
  • inserting citations
  • user rights and logon issues
  • system performance issues
  • bugs in the MediaWiki software (?)
  • feature/plugin requests & discussion
  • navigation bar contents
  • suggestions for how we can do things better!
  • etc.

Please feel free to ask your technical questions in here, no matter how basic or advanced. None of us on the BL staff are MediaWiki experts, but we'll do our best to help, and will probably come up with some questions of our own - all assistance is greatly appreciated. :)

Useful resources:

MediaWiki Official FAQ
MediaWiki Help Contents



Please DO NOT use this thread to discuss the creation of actual content - use an existing thread on that subject, or create a new one.


Thanks! :)


-- The BL Wiki Project Staff
 
[*]inserting citations
it's almost as if I inserted that one deliberately. ;)

issue #1:

Enix150 said:
I found that a few of the standard wiki tags don't appear to be working.. (e.g. {{citation needed}} and <ref>) I was wondering if the bluelight wiki has its own tags, or maybe our current version of wiki doesn't support that?
felix said:
I've done a bit of digging and it looks like you're correct - I can't get footnotes to work either. We seem to be missing a plugin - http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cite

Thanks for bringing this up [swearing elided] - I'll talk to the engineer about it. In the meantime, could you just insert them manually???

hope you don't mind me posting that Enix - thanks again. :)
 
Don't mind at all felix! Transparency is my middle name. ;) So anyway, I've been looking into the missing plugins thing and found many many to choose from. I've done some sifting and found a few others we may want to consider?

Cite is the first and by far one of the most important plugins to install. It allows users to cite sources and easily reference them at the bottom of the page.

Nuke is pretty convenient for mass deleting spam/trollery added by a user or IP address, though this would be more important if the wiki was getting more traffic. Right now it's pretty easy to handle manually deleting spam.

InputBox is a nifty one that allows the use of HTML to create custom search bars within the wiki, I'm not certain how we might use it for our type of project, but nifty nonetheless.

DismissableSiteNotice lets the admin put up a dismissible banner at the top of the page when anyone views the wiki. Great for making announcements to our users on the wiki, then just click the X and it bothers you no more.

Vector is an update to the Vector skin that most of us have our appearances set to. This update allows users to collapse the tabs at the top of the screen as well as the navigation bar to the left. It also warns users if they attempt to close an edit page without saving.

Labeled Section Transclusion enhances the way templates work and allows more flexibility when sharing content between pages.

ParserFunctions I'm not entirely clear about, but I see it on all the other wikis so maybe there's something to it? As far as I can tell it adds some logical functions, but as to how they help us, I'm not yet certain.

WikiEditor is a little vague, but it improves the editing experience.

ConfirmEdit uses CAPTCHA techniques to prevent spambots and automated login attempts. Could prove pretty useful to us! But it would appear that we have many options when it comes to anti-spam plugins.

Like maybe AntiSpoof? Especially with the similarity in names that many of the spambots are registering, this plugin blocks users who attempt to create accounts with similar usernames or mixed scripts.

EDIT: Wikipedia going down today made this wayy more difficult than it should have been!

Cheers
 
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Excellent stuff - thanks very much for this. I don't think it'll be a huge surprise to anyone that the wiki needs quite a bit of work done to it to make it more usable and easy to manage.

I'm hoping to get increased access to the server shortly, so we won't have to bug the engineer for every little change. Some of these extensions are must-haves so I'll get them added as soon as I can.

Thanks again. :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So I noticed that the wiki currently does not support the .svg format. Is this to save on space, or is it another case of a missing plugin? Just wondering because most chemical structures on Wikipedia are uploaded as .svg's and it seems like the ideal format for displaying those types of images.

At first I couldn't find a plugin that would allow svg's, but eventually I found that MediaWiki uses one called 'librsvg' aka 'RSVG' which is detailed here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSVG

As it turns out, there were actually two choices for SVG rendering, but the reasons they decided to go with RSVG over Batik are detailed here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SVG_benchmarks

I also found some additional info on installation help here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Image_Administration#SVG
 
Excellent stuff - thanks very much for this. I don't think it'll be a huge surprise to anyone that the wiki needs quite a bit of work done to it to make it more usable and easy to manage.

I'm hoping to get increased access to the server shortly, so we won't have to bug the engineer for every little change. Some of these extensions are must-haves so I'll get them added as soon as I can.

Thanks again. :)

Indeed, excellent stuff, Enix.

Felix, let us know when these extensions are available to use. I've been tinkering around with how to properly format my Methamphetamine Wiki page so that it appears as efficiently/effectively as the MDMA one; having the same format as Wikipedia would be greatly appreciated.
Much love to this engineer, too. More work than I care to comprehend at the moment!

~ vaya
 
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