User talk:A goat on a boat

Welcome

Hello A goat on a boat! Welcome to UESPWiki. It's always good to have new members. If you would like to help improve any of our pages, you may want to take a look at the following links:

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Feel free to practice editing in the sandbox or discuss the games in the forums. If you need any help, don't hesitate to contact one of our mentors. Have fun! —Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 22:08, 28 January 2013 (GMT)

Sandbox

For longterm experimentation, you should use a sandbox in your userspace. I moved your two sandboxes to here and here. Our namespace sandboxes get "cleaned" up quite quickly, so anything you did would need to be retrieved. From userspace, you can take as long as you need to work out any kinks. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 22:17, 28 January 2013 (GMT)

I Hate This Thing!!

OK, I've barely touched this wiki and I'm already hating it. :( This is like my 5th attempt to post this message somewhere in my own user area!

To User:The_Silencer:

I'm a bit late replying, but ty for the welcome and for moving my sandboxes. I kinda put them down for a bit, but perhaps you can aid me? I would like a nice cross-reference table for alchemy ingredients and would prefer to do it on the uesp site rather than via sqlite (which was my original thought). While I've done many web languages & databases, I'm not well versed in wiki templates at all. In the template User:A_goat_on_a_boat/Template:Ingredient_Entry2, there are currently four column definitions named eff1title - eff4title. What I would like to replace this with is a dynamic list of all effects, with one column for each effect, and then if the ingredient has the effect (ignoring which slot the effect is in) it will print a small check, X or some "yes" type of image. Of course, the headers in User:A_goat_on_a_boat/AlchemySpreadsheet would have to replace the four "Xxxx Effect" (Primary, Secondary, etc.) with the names of each effect, sorted by name.

Of course, this would be quite an unwieldy table unless the header cells for the effect names are text rotated -90 degrees, but upon doing so, it should be able to generate a nice printable table that can be used both to easily see what effects an ingredient has as well as what ingredients have a particular effect. I could put one together using sqlite to demonstrate, but then my fear is that I would have what I wanted and be lazy and not implement it here, where it can benefit the most people. Perhaps even best would be an in-game list that dynamically populates as you discover the effects, but I'm not going to learn all of that. :)

As an afterthought, I suppose I can have both the template and the table use a static list of effect names, and it would be less complicated and lower CPU load as well, but when an expansion adds some new effect, they will have to be maintained. (Plus, it will be a big sloppy copy & paste template!) A goat on a boat (talk) 20:33, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

So, if I'm understanding correctly, what you want to do is have a table something like this, except with rotated titles (which I don't remember how to do off-hand...the ways I tried didn't format correctly in Chrome).

	Cure Disease	Damage Health
Mudcrab Chitin	Yes
Ectoplasm		Yes

If so, I don't really see a good way of doing that in a template. Anything I can think of would be really ugly and processor intensive. I think a static table would be the only viable way. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:49, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Thank you! That's got a few helpful pieces in it. Of course, I want it to pull from the Ingredient page rather or not to put the check mark there, but now I know how to make a nice checkmark! :) A goat on a boat (talk) 21:53, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Sweet! I got the basics of it to work! :) [1] -- but it has to be in the Skyrim namespace to function. I think I might be able to paste the rest of it together real fast, then I just need to figure out the text rotation thing and fix up the formatting. :) A goat on a boat (talk) 22:08, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

That's roughly what I'd been thinking of, only I was thinking of #switch instead of #if/#ifeq. The problem, though, is that the processor intensiveness scales upwards rather quickly. You end up doing a check for each of the four entries times about 60 or so effects times about 100 ingredients. It can be done, certainly, but the page might be rather slow to render.

And just in case you're wondering how the switch works, it's a bass-ackwards construction of:

{{#switch:Cure Disease
|{{{eff1title}}}|{{{eff2title}}}|{{{eff3title}}}|{{{eff4title}}}={{V}}}}

– Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:23, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Thank you. switch will be more efficient than my series of #ifeq. However, the page renders very slowly, and that means lots of CPU burning. However, the second time I checked it, it came back pretty quickly, which means that something is probably getting cached. I'm going to try the switch and see how it effects performance. Is there any way we can get diagnostics of CPU usage to make sure we aren't choking the server? A goat on a boat (talk) 22:27, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Thanks! that cleans up the code quite nicely! Have a peek at it. Still needs all of the formatting cleanup. Also, it would be nice to have a mechanism to toggle the display of the tables on the Skyrim:Ingredients page between the current view and the one that I'm working on, but that can be worried about later. A goat on a boat (talk) 22:34, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Sorry, looks like we're both editing at the same time here. Your previous reply went into the wrong section, I think, so I've bumped it up to here.

Yes caching does come into play, which muddies the waters as to how complex to make something. To get an idea of how hard a page is to render when uncached, you can view the page source and then search for "NewPP limit report". The higher the numbers there, especially the "Post-expand include size" and "Template argument size", the harder the page is to render. Obviously you're versed enough in programming to know that it's never quite as simple as a couple of numbers, but it's good for a rough estimate. The Ingredients pages are some of the more complex pages, so they're probably a good guide as to what're good numbers. I'd say go ahead and build it, then we'll see what the numbers look like and go from there.

As for a toggling mechanism, there are a couple of ways we can approach that, but it's doable. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:41, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

(←) Looks like you've got the basics in place already. The numbers aren't as bad as I thought they'd be! For rotating the titles, check with Jak Atackka. He's done a lot more work with CSS3, webkit, etc., than I have. You can also look at the {{Rotate}} template, but in what I tried, at least in Chrome, it calculated the header size before doing the rotation, so it looked completely wrong. Googling, that seems to be a bug with several browsers. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:47, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Thanks again. There doesn't seem to be a browser independent solution from what I've seen so far. Here's one example that uses extensions from various browsers to do it, similar to the {{Rotate}} template. It's a bit messy (on Firefox) at the moment, but I have to leave for a while, so I'll come back to play with it again later 2nite. A goat on a boat (talk) 23:13, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Inquiry

Hey Goat what are you trying to do to place messages on talk pages? Just explain don't demonstrate. I might be able to figure out why it thinks you're spamming. Lord Eydvar ^{Talk|Contribs} 20:39, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Thank you very kindly! The subject would be message in the "I Hate This Thing!!" section above starting from "I'm a bit late replying..." to the end of the post and the action was that I tried to add that as a reply to the "Sandbox" section above it. It did not allow that, but I was able to add it as a new section. Prior to that, I attempted to add the same message (minus the ranting) to The Silencer's talk page where this section now sits: "Hello and thank you!." It said something about not being allowed more than 100 words, so I snippet it and tried my small rant (that appears there now) and that did go through. Thanks for the help!! A goat on a boat (talk) 21:10, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

I have a bit more info, the page said that the filter that got triggered was "Bulk Spamming Filter" A goat on a boat (talk) 21:28, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Yeah from what I read of that you're trying to code templates/tables in a non-compatible language. Wikis basically really only use HTML/CSS and Wikitext and more or less Wikitext is what you want to stick with unless you know what parts of HTML/CSS the particular site you're working on will accept. Lord Eydvar ^{Talk|Contribs} 21:39, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

No, I don't think I want to use anything non-standard on this site, I was only talking about using other stuff for my personal use to create such a spreadsheet -- but that's not as fun. So i'm trying to figure out Wiki's language for its templates -- which is coming along, although slowly. I will have to put my pages back in the global sandbox however, since many templates depend upon the namespace, but I'll keep copies in my own sandbox in case they are nuked later. A goat on a boat (talk) 21:48, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Judging by what I'm seeing on the abuse filter, you were getting caught by the Bulk Spamming Filter because your posts were too long for a non-autoconfirmed user. Once your account is autoconfirmed, you shouldn't have this issue. ⇠eshe^talk 21:44, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

hmm, anyway you can speed up that "autoconfirmation" process? What constitutes an "edit"? Even editing my user discussion page or sandbox? A goat on a boat (talk) 21:48, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Nope, sorry! But yes, any edit you make anywhere on the site will count. Hope that helps! ⇠eshe^talk 21:50, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

Goat: You probably haven't noticed it yet, but on The Silencer's talk page, he's already checked and you're autoconfirmed now. He explains the details of what was necessary there, if you're curious. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:54, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

ooh, ty! :) A goat on a boat (talk) 21:55, 22 February 2013 (GMT)

(←) I should've mentioned it earlier, but if you want to double-check that you're auto-confirmed, just go to your preferences and right near the top of the "User profile" tab, you should see "Member of groups: Autoconfirmed users". – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:08, 22 February 2013 (GMT)