Category talk:Monsters Needing Phylum
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Indeterminate Phylum
When the Monster Type feature first came out, the only way to determine phylum was with Release the Boots. Now, we have several other ways to determine phylum, and there will possibly be more to come. Many monsters had their phylum marked as Indeterminate because Release the Boots didn't work on them, but it is possible that we may now (or in the near future) be able to determine their phylum. I would like to go through the Monster Data pages and try to find the monsters that we can still fight but have their phylum set to Indeterminate, and revert it to empty (which will populate this category). Does anybody have any issues with me doing this? --Turing 22:26, 31 January 2012 (CET)
- Most of the monsters on this page are all bosses or minibosses of some sort. You're not going to be able to have an instakill against them, so you have to use a skill that targets enemies by phylum or a combat item that deals damage to a specific phylum without destroying it.
- Right now, the only thing that fits either category is Torment Plants. Vine gar and dill plants don't exist in the fax network. You can go ahead and do it, but it'll probably be a waste of your time at this present moment. Though I guess you could try the war heroes.--Toffile 22:46, 31 January 2012 (CET)
- Yeah, the idea is not to get these monsters classified immediately, since I know this is impossible at the moment, but rather to have them unclassified instead of marked as Indeterminate so that if we DO get another skill or item like Feed or Torment Plant, they'll be listed here. --Turing 23:02, 31 January 2012 (CET)
- I think the easiest way to go about this would be changing the template temporarily so when it sees "phylum=!", it adds the page to a temporary category for you. From there you can check each of those pages to see if they're really unable to be determined, or if they simply don't squish into paste. Once that's done you just revert the template. --timrem 23:19, 31 January 2012 (CET)
- "Indeterminate" means "cannot be determined at the present time". So that there might one day be a way is irrelevant. If there is something that COULD have its phylum determined (or at least definitively deemed indeterminate when it has just been assumed so far), but has not, then yeah they should be moved into the needing phylum category. "Could" in this case means "the monster is accessible, either through encountering them naturally or through faxes/other copies, and there is an existing phylum-based mechanic that has not been used on it", so that existing items/skills/whatever that respond to phylum can be used against them. Preferably faxes/copies should restrict to "readily available", such as through faxbot, but that's not to say that you can't spade just as validly with copies that might exist outside of faxbot (they're just not meaningfully accessible until those who have them do something with them). And a certain amount of rationality on existing mechanics: monsters which give us no reasons to suspect they are plants shouldn't be moved because there's a plant-exclusive thing to test on them (though that SHOULD be tested, just in case). --Flargen 00:26, 1 February 2012 (CET)
- If this is the case, then pretty much everything in the this category should have their phylum set to Indeterminate. What I believe should be happening is that Indeterminate should be taken as "We have no way, now or in the future, to determine what this monster's phylum is" and that monsters which we can still fight, should be in the Monsters Needing Phylum category. If we take all monsters for which we cannot determine the phylum at the moment and set them to Indeterminate, then when new methods of determining phylum show up, we'll have to sift through a list of monsters we already know to be Indeterminate mixed in with the ones we should be spading out. --Turing 14:28, 1 February 2012 (CET)
- At some point, we had a similar situation with plurals. A large number of items were marked as indeterminate because there was no way at the time to ascertan the plural of certain items. As time has progressed (and especially with the increased number of chat commands), plurals became easier to determine. Eventually, every item below a certain ID number was added thanks to some hackery. It doesn't make it wrong that certain items were still listed as indeterminate. I would say that as long as there is not an actual way to determine the phylum, mark it indeterminate, and leave this for actual monsters needing a phylum.--Foggy 15:57, 1 February 2012 (CET)
- Happy Medium allows us to find boss phylums. Woo! Just got Baron von Ratsworth. So spade away! --Turing 14:26, 1 March 2012 (CET)
- At some point, we had a similar situation with plurals. A large number of items were marked as indeterminate because there was no way at the time to ascertan the plural of certain items. As time has progressed (and especially with the increased number of chat commands), plurals became easier to determine. Eventually, every item below a certain ID number was added thanks to some hackery. It doesn't make it wrong that certain items were still listed as indeterminate. I would say that as long as there is not an actual way to determine the phylum, mark it indeterminate, and leave this for actual monsters needing a phylum.--Foggy 15:57, 1 February 2012 (CET)
- If this is the case, then pretty much everything in the this category should have their phylum set to Indeterminate. What I believe should be happening is that Indeterminate should be taken as "We have no way, now or in the future, to determine what this monster's phylum is" and that monsters which we can still fight, should be in the Monsters Needing Phylum category. If we take all monsters for which we cannot determine the phylum at the moment and set them to Indeterminate, then when new methods of determining phylum show up, we'll have to sift through a list of monsters we already know to be Indeterminate mixed in with the ones we should be spading out. --Turing 14:28, 1 February 2012 (CET)
- Yeah, the idea is not to get these monsters classified immediately, since I know this is impossible at the moment, but rather to have them unclassified instead of marked as Indeterminate so that if we DO get another skill or item like Feed or Torment Plant, they'll be listed here. --Turing 23:02, 31 January 2012 (CET)
Caching issues?
Is this taking a while to update? There's stuff in here that I added yesterday that hasn't cleared out of the category.--Toffile 06:15, 10 March 2012 (CET)
- Categories are pretty slow to update, yeah. Especially so since the mediawiki upgrade. --Flargen 07:22, 10 March 2012 (CET)
- My changes from 2 days ago still haven't disappeared from here (although stuff from 3 days ago has). In other weirdness, in Category:Weird Critters, "Mimic (Cloak)" is alphabetised before "Malevolent magnetic field." --Fig bucket 13:21, 10 March 2012 (CET)
- The weird thing is that I added the type to 2 monsters in this category about 4 minutes apart on the 8th. One of them is on the list, one has been cleared off.--Toffile 15:08, 10 March 2012 (CET)
Also is there some issue that's preventing a lot of the Bosses from showing up here?--Toffile 04:15, 13 March 2012 (CET)
- I think the code for bosses circumvents auto-cating. Like you forcibly pass in
autocat=noon boss pages. There's probably a way to make that work better. --Flargen 08:51, 13 March 2012 (CET)- Yeah, I see that. Why is that even there, was it to prevent Bosses from going into the general combat adventures long ago? Seems like a waste now.--Toffile 15:14, 13 March 2012 (CET)
- This is basically why none of the boss pages were ever dropped into maintenance categories, and I think the code has been around since 2006? Would anyone really mind if we just get rid of it completely?--Toffile 15:23, 13 March 2012 (CET)
- Yeah, I see that. Why is that even there, was it to prevent Bosses from going into the general combat adventures long ago? Seems like a waste now.--Toffile 15:14, 13 March 2012 (CET)
For whatever reason, we're getting another bout of non-updating. 5 days and counting.--Toffile 16:42, 8 April 2012 (CEST)
- I'm at the point where I'd rather just maintain a manual list that deal with this caching.--Foggy 16:43, 8 April 2012 (CEST)
- This is most definitely a caching issue. It seems to impact the entire Data namespace - flushing the cache on an affected page, by visiting that page's edit URL and replacing the action=edit at the end with action=purge, seems to do the trick. However, having to do this after every edit gets tiresome fast. --Wrldwzrd89 20:15, 8 April 2012 (CEST)
- Follow-up to my earlier comment: It seems there's more to it than that. Purging a data page's cache updates the display... but the category still refuses to update, even if I purge its cache too. How odd. --Wrldwzrd89 11:00, 9 April 2012 (CEST)
- This is most definitely a caching issue. It seems to impact the entire Data namespace - flushing the cache on an affected page, by visiting that page's edit URL and replacing the action=edit at the end with action=purge, seems to do the trick. However, having to do this after every edit gets tiresome fast. --Wrldwzrd89 20:15, 8 April 2012 (CEST)
