Wiki discussion

[JoB]

Ummmhhhhh ...

Today I came across hints that Wikia is working on a replacement for infoboxes. (FWIW, it took me quite a while to find the official announcement here, and no, the 40-days-old links to "examples" don't work for me, either. ) In the discussion below, there's a nifty trick to have your "desktop" client display the pages like they'ld appear on a "mobile" one: Just append "?useskin=wikiamobile" to the URL.

Which brings me to my actual topic: SSSS Wiki pages apparently look nowhere like *I* see them as soon as someone reads them on a mobile device. For example, the desktop version of the aRTD page has a manageable size thanks to collapsed parts, but those happen not to be collapsed anymore in the mobile version. And it seems that when you read up on some character on a mobile client, the flags in the fold-out part of the infobox plain don't work. And the fold-out table of the pages' content remains empty for me. And color me wondering why "mobile clients" of today would need the entire color choices suppressed and replaced with b+w ... !?

... so, what should we do about that? Do we even have enough people with mobile clients to pinpoint what differences are really there, and which are an artifact of me displaying the "mobile version" on what is not at all a mobile client?

(Edit: Oh, those links weren't meant to provide "before" and "after" versions in the first place, only "after - source" and "after - result". Silly me. )

(Edit2: OK, lookie here for the visible effect of the infobox makeover: standard Wikia infobox template (which our wiki uses essentially unchanged), PortableInfobox version.)

[JoB]

Today I came across hints that Wikia is working on a replacement for infoboxes. (FWIW, it took me quite a while to find the official announcement here, and no, the 40-days-old links to "examples" don't work for me, either. ) In the discussion below, there's a nifty trick to have your "desktop" client display the pages like they'ld appear on a "mobile" one: Just append "?useskin=wikiamobile" to the URL.
[...]
(Edit2: OK, lookie here for the visible effect of the infobox makeover: standard Wikia infobox template (which our wiki uses essentially unchanged), PortableInfobox version.)

I dared browse Wikias announcements again today (and spent half an evening adding "types" to all our templates). They proceeded with those plans, one side effect being that the new "you might want to check these pages" tool "pages without infoboxes" essentially lists ALL our pages, as they don't use the "approved" kind of infoboxes.

There is a tool supposedly automating conversion of old infoboxes into portable ones, but I'll be darned if I'll use that without any idea of what side effects might result from the conversion.

So, question to y'all before I start with any actual modification there: Whaddya think about the layout changes that appear by default with the new system (in particular, info in two lines instead of two columns)? My understanding so far is that it is possible (though it does require admin rights) to revert at least partially to the original layout ...

[JoB]

They proceeded with those plans, one side effect being that the new "you might want to check these pages" tool "pages without infoboxes" essentially lists ALL our pages, as they don't use the "approved" kind of infoboxes.

So, question to y'all before I start with any actual modification there: Whaddya think about the layout changes that appear by default with the new system (in particular, info in two lines instead of two columns)? My understanding so far is that it is possible (though it does require admin rights) to revert at least partially to the original layout ...

OK, upon reading into the material, things look a bit better. Assigning our infoboxes the type of "infobox" (and waiting for the next cache run) was enough to take the pages that have them off the "no infobox" list, and it seems that two columns is still the default for the new infoboxes; they're just so fond of the new two-lines layout that all their examples happen to use that.

Conversion looks rather straightforward in other respects, too. (The portable infoboxes explicitly still allow the use of parser functions, like the "#if:" I used in the "person" infobox template.) The one thing that IMHO might still need admin intervention is coloration - that's buried someplace in the global CSS, possibly a different setting than the one giving the current infoboxes their coloration.

I'll likely introduce some new infobox types later on to further reduce the "no infobox" naglist, too. Types to match the "Creatures", "Locations", and "Professions" categories would be first, I think ...

[JoB]

I now got a demo of both current and new infoboxes on my profile page. In a nutshell: A bit wider, some changed font/paragraph properties around the image, shaded (blocks of) background instead of frames to mark the tabular layout. Could probably all be addressed if one has admin rights to edit the site CSS.

... so, any opinions on how I should proceed with the makeover?

In other news, Wikia introduced another update the past week supposedly only changing the pages' titles (as appearing in the tabs and window frame of one's browser, and supposedly changing for better SEO). We AFAIK never fiddled with those, and I don't remember things being different before, so ...

[JoB]

Ah, lovely. We have massive photo-laden ad bars now.

Edit: Or did they just now manage to work around my ad blocker?

[JoB]

I now got a demo of both current and new infoboxes on my profile page. In a nutshell: A bit wider, some changed font/paragraph properties around the image, shaded (blocks of) background instead of frames to mark the tabular layout. Could probably all be addressed if one has admin rights to edit the site CSS.

... so, any opinions on how I should proceed with the makeover?

Slight change of plan: Since having just two infoboxes on my profile page already messed up the layout, it now has a list of links to PI drafts instead. In order to make those show the draft version, I'll have to include the documentation into the drafts themselves - which is a good thing, I guess, as the separate "/doc" subpages we're using so far have been deprecated for quite a while.

So, still everyone, and admins in particular, invited to check out the new looks and comment here ...

[ParanormalAndroid]

Have to say, I don't think any major Wikia updates have actually done much good in ages.
Remember when they introduced that new editing method? The one that was actually less capable than rich-text that they'd used beforehand with no trouble?
It's much like that.

[JoB]

Have to say, I don't think any major Wikia updates have actually done much good in ages.
Remember when they introduced that new editing method? The one that was actually less capable than rich-text that they'd used beforehand with no trouble?
It's much like that.

I started using Wikia when the SSSS Wiki was set up, which was pretty much at the same time this forum was founded; both the "Classic Editor" (with its "visual mode") and the "Visual Editor" were already in existence at that time, so no, I cannot actually remember that. I note that most of the power users (still?) use "source mode" (Wikitext) editing, though.

First forced update I've witnessed was the Global Nav Toolbar ... which still clashes with dark-color-themed wiki(a)s like ours.

[JoB]

For the records: Wikia is breaking out a special feature to have wikis have a completely different main page on mobile devices than is being shown on desktops. The controls are entirely stashed away in admin-only land, so I cannot even tell whether that feature has already arrived in our wiki or not, much less get an idea of whether and how we might want to use it ...

That reminds me, however, that IIUC the couple "spoiler" templates I made flat out don't work in the mobile skin. Would someone like to comment on how horrible the article that use them (currently listed partly here and partly here) do look on a mobile?

[JoB]

I went ahead and replaced the preexisting-but-unused nonportable templates:

Template:Infobox
Template:Infobox episode
Template:Infobox quest
Template:Infobox item
Template:Infobox book
Template:Infobox character
Template:Infobox album

with the drafts I had made of portable versions. That means that for every "Template:Infobox foobar", there's now the previous version's documentation subpage, "Template:Infobox foobar/doc", uselessly dangling around. Could an admin please delete those?

Two actually used yet-nonportable infobox templates (location and person) still to be dealt with.

[JoB]

Two actually used yet-nonportable infobox templates (location and person) still to be dealt with.

Done deal(ing), ".../doc" subpages still waiting for urbicande's nukes admin deletia powers ...

[JoB]

I just noticed that after switching to the new "portable" infoboxes, we now have a marked difference between their design and that of our navboxes. I don't have the slightest yet how I would go about adapting the latter to the former, but: Is that something I should dive into?

[JoB]

... when exactly did Wikia stop updating the cache daily (which was already a bit on the "not often enough" side in certain multi-page-fixin' cases)?

[JoB]

FYI: Fandom (formerly Wikia) has announced that they will migrate nearly all Fandom sites (Wikias / wikis hosted by Wikia), including the SSSS Wiki, from their [name].wikia.com domain name to [samename??].fandom.com over the next couple weeks. They also say that requests for the old domains will get redirected to the new one ... for however long they feel like it, I suppose, and IMHO very likely not to be concluded with a "please update your bookmarks" splash page phase.

[JoB]

FYI, Fandom has begun(!) to migrate the SSSS Wiki to the "Unified Community Platform (UCP)", a move that they openly admit to be likely to seriously break their own codebase, not to mention individual wiki's oddities.