Discussion/archive

Main Page

It seems like the mainpage is highly inaccurate... There's a halloween notice, but it passed (afaik); the moon phases are not correct anymore,the article of the day stays for weeks, and so on... Maybe a restructuration (like calling it article of the month) or something would make it better? --Twopeak 00:51, 7 Nov 2005 (MST)

• So I guess the topic YOU started at Talk:Main_Page#Moon_phases wasn't worth checking BEFORE you started another one here. See http://kol.thraeryn.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=483 --JRSiebz | ☎ 01:10, 7 Nov 2005 (MST)
• Your problem is browser cache, grasshopper. You NEED to hit refresh multiple times, it seems. The Halloween notice was removed days before you posted this. The featured article changes daily, although it cycles through a rotation. The moons are correct, except for a few minute lapse around rollover. --Alpaca 04:41, 7 Nov 2005 (MST)

Forums

• The forums appear to be almost impossible to load. Is there server issues, or is it a problem on my end? --Weirdguy 10:56, 29 Nov 2005 (Hawaii Standard Time)
  • Yeah, we know. I, and others, experience the same problem, but Jin and co. don't, even when they access the forums through the URL, so they're having difficulty debugging and/or fixing it. We hope to find some way, soonish. --Alpaca 17:13, 29 November 2005 (Central Standard Time)
  • They've been a headache for me recebtly, too. I get the top header of the forums quickly, then it sits, and sits, snd sits, until I hopefully get the page. (even at wierd hours). I makes it really hard to preview and post new posts. Is the wiki stealing all it's available bandwith?--JRSiebz (☎|§|‡) 16:49, 9 December 2005 (Central Standard Time)
    • I asked Jin about that possibility, but she said that the forums and the wiki were on the same priority level on the router, so they should both experience the same amount of lag. Of late, the forums just stop loading sometimes. --Alpaca 18:32, 9 December 2005 (Central Standard Time)
      • Well, while the forums are really bad, I've been seeing some pretty slow response times here on the wiki at times, too. So I'm thinking either the new server is underconfigured (Nooo!) or something's not right in the server setup somewhere. Hopefully the latter, as that can be fixed more easily. -- Old Ned 04:33, 15 December 2005 (Central Standard Time)

KoL History

Since Trog Dor's History of Loathing is somewhat defunct, is that a role that Visual KOL is suited for? If so, how should it be done? A unified approach would be much better, IMO, than just tacking random historical facts in various places around the site. The methods I've considered are:

1. Creating a page for each day of the year, under which the events, developments, etc. would be placed. Lots of flexibility, but LOTS of pages, many of which would not be of much importance. Also, with that type of approach, it would be hard to get an overall feel for the history of KOL without reading all 365 pages.
2. One long listing of dated events/developments, with corresponding pages further explaining them. Not as consistent, but maybe more practical. Also, just by browsing the main page, one could get a bigger picture of how KoL has progressed over the last couple of years.
3. Forget the whole thing - No one but me finds that type of thing interesting, anyway...

--Snickles 12:55, 20 May 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

• If html anchors will work in wiki, this could be done on one big page, inserting anchors at each new day, and using the calendar someone put together, could be accessed in part by using that. Then someone could either hit up one day, or could read it all in one long stretch and/or skim the whole thing. KoL History Let's see how they work.... Yeah, so HTML anchors don't work in the normal way. I wonder if Wiki has its own variety. --jin 15:03, 20 May 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

• Anchors can be achieved by [[NAME#SECTION]]. And yeah, I had to look it up. But anyway, that could become one majorly long page, depending on just how much stuff would be added. Integrating the calendar is a good idea, though, since it's not terribly useful at the moment. --Snickles 15:23, 20 May 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

• My 2p:

1. Most of the changes have been logged in KoL's old announcements and trivial updates pages - I suggest we just link to them.
2. For special events that require a proper description (ie introduction of Ascension), I suggest creating a page for each year KoL has been running, and adding a section for each month and days simply as textual lists within that section. If the page gets stupidly big, split into multiple pages by quarter, and then month etc.
3. Another possibility is to add a full category by KoL Date. There are only 96 days in the KoL calendar versus the 365 of gregorian.

--ZzinG 08:01, 25 November 2005 (GMT)

Profanity

• I've just added a Pulp Fiction quote to "Another Lavatory Troll", and it includes the word "fuckin'". I couldn't find an official policy on profanity, so I figured I should ask here whether or not this kind of thing should be avoided. --Fnord

• I think it's nearly impossible to avoid "fuckin'" when quoting anything from Pulp Fiction. However, that reference seems a bit of a stretch. I think that's an okay use of profanity though. I think we should avoid/eliminate profanity that is rude, insulting, or extraneous. There's no reason to say something fucking sucks or call someone a bitch, etc. But, for quoting something like Pulp Fiction, I'd say it's okay. --jin 10:50, 26 Jul 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

Sorry guys

sorry about the random number generator page's suckiness. i'm so new to this wiki stuff

drinking and pastamancer?

I'm a pastamancer, and I can drink up to "Inebriety 20", but according to the booze page only people with the liver of steel can drink that much.

And when drinking a dry_vodka_martini I got 7 adventures instead of 6 (as written), 12 Chutzpah (instead of 0) and as stated, 3 drunkenness.
I haven't adapted the pages since I don't know if it's normal or not! Send me some booze and I'll test further  ;-)
twopeak 12:50 (CET-1), Halloween

• Couple of things, I'm not sure how familiar you are with the game, but the 20 drunknness could be acouple of things. you might be able to drink more than 15, but you can't adventure unless your drunknness is less than 15 (20 with the liver). or it may have been st sneaky pete's day. the other differences are becasue the results are somewhat random, and it may have been a stat day. test it a few more times and if it is consistent, add to the database. the result that is there now is probably from one person drinking once. --Pastamancer5 21:55, 11 Sep 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

Clan Pages

There are the beginnings of a discussion on clan pages and notable clans over at category talk:clans. Feedback would be appreciated. --Aardvark 10:35, 11 Sep 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

Miscellaneous

I'd have put this on the forums, but I can't seem to get it to come up, and I didn't know where else to put this. It seems that "special characters" have become UTF-8-isized (e.g. ™ has become â„¢). Is there some simple, blanket way we can fix this, like in the database? I don't know much about how the Wiki works internally, so I could just be talking nonsense here. Otherwise we might have to go page by page. Example: Template:Ascension_Rewards --Fryguy9 20:12, 21 Sep 2005 (MDT)

• For info on the forums see current events. While the wiki moved, it went form a windows server to a linux one, some characters have fouled up. --JRSiebz 20:37, 21 Sep 2005 (MDT)

• More or less i think the header <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"/> has become <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> , so the wiki identifies itself as using a different character set. ™ probably should never be in page name anyway, since it's not allowed in a web address. --JRSiebz 20:42, 21 Sep 2005 (MDT)

• On futher inspection it seems that all the ™'s not entered with ™ , but using alt+XXX commands, are the ones which messed up, ™ still works, though it cannot be in an address, alt+XXX characters are based on the character set. We should switch to standard characters instead of windows specific ones --JRSiebz 21:01, 21 Sep 2005 (MDT)

• I saw the post about the forums almost right after I posted. I agree on the special characters being posted in the HTML standard way (with the &WORD; format) as opposed to just pasting them from some other application. All special characters, that were not written the HTML standard way are messed up, including accented characers. (e.g. Retenez_L'Herbe_Paté...that one just happens to be a title, but all are changed). It seems they all got converted to their UTF-8 byte equivalent, hence why I asked if there was a quick database query we could run to do search-replace for these. Also, in the move was anything changed in the database, such as collations? --Fryguy9 22:45, 21 Sep 2005 (MDT)
• There really aren't too many, and I almost have em all. I keep noticing one here or there, either something spanish, french, or trademarked ;-) I've been moving the offended page, deleting the old name with the goofy characters, the going to wanted pages and figuring out how many links were broken by linking to the deleted page. For some reason all pages with the ascension rewards template show up as still linking to the wrong Retenez L'Herbe Paté in 'wanted pages', even though they don't, I have already altered the template.--JRSiebz 09:33, 22 Sep 2005 (MDT)

Areas by Number

This wiki has Effects by number, Items by number, Skills by number, and Familiars by number. But I don't see an Areas by number (or equivilent, if that name seems wrong). Things like 9 => The Sleazy Back Alley, 91 => Noob Cave, etc. Any reason? I have a fairly comprehensive list of them. The number shows up in the URL for the repeat last adventure in the left pane.

Other things in game have numbers, too. Like the choice adventures that come up. Of these I only know the number of one, the Under the Knife opportunity from the Back Alley. Would that be appropriate for the wiki?

Vandalism

User Bobbob210 is being naguhty. Can his account be disabled? Can this wiki post some guidelines for reverting vandalism? As a sample, here's the one from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:How_to_revert_a_page_to_an_earlier_version --Club 18:10, 5 Oct 2005 (MDT)

• I just banned him, the easiest way to revert vandalism is to rollback a page, which only admins here can do, if someone is the last editor of a page I can roll it back to the last version by someone else rather easily.--JRSiebz 18:56, 5 Oct 2005 (MDT)

Chat Pages

The Chat pages (In Category:Basics) have been in the Needs Work section for as long as I can remember.

How about a new category Chat, that's contents are

• Chat Moderators
• Chat Channels (Split from current page)
• Chat Commands (Split from current page)
• Chat Mechanics/Structure (Split from current page)
• Interactive Bots (Split from current page)
• Chat Etiquette (Split from current page)

Firestorm ZERO, 9th October 2005

I don't think we need a new category. The page should be restructed, however - specifically, the channels section. The section should list the channels, what they are for, and what you need to do to get into them. The section should not list players who frequent such channels. It's in invitation for vanity pages, IMO. There is already a seperate chat moderator page, although I actually wouldn't mind that being merged into the current article. --Aardvark (Talk | Contribs) 03:06, 17 Oct 2005 (MDT)

True, but things as small as candy get their own category, and chat is one of the biggest things in the game and therefore having just one page would make it quite hard to navigate as it would be cluttered. Firestorm ZERO, 20th October 2005

This is what I think is the 'obvious' thing to do: The page (all pages, really) should be re-organized, when necessary, to keep the sections well separated and easy to navigate. As a distinct process, when the page becomes very large, sections can be made into their own pages. So if the chat page is already very large, it should be split, but if it is not, you should wait until it is. But then again, what the hell do I know. -- Shadowless

It seems FirestormZero got tired of waiting for consensus, so he went ahead and did it his way. See the discussion in Category talk:Chat about cleaning up what he did. -- Old Ned 20:09, 12 December 2005 (Central Standard Time)

Transparent Images

Over at Cooking strategy, I've got tables with colored backgrounds and item images. Without transparency, obviously the images looked clumsy. (And of course many other pages, including the Main Page, have the same problem.) So I made simple GIF versions of the images I needed, with the pure white background converted to transparent.

The problem with this isn't hard to figure out. Since the images are anti-aliased, they have quite a bit of light gray around their edges, giving them "halos". After some fiddling about in Photoshop, I worked out how to make PNG versions that had partially transparent outlines for less halo. (This technique was already in use on Mushroom Fields Strategy.)

Now some people are reporting, and I have confirmed, that Internet Explorer under several versions of Windows (including XP) does not handle this type of transparency correctly, giving the images oddly-colored backgrounds. Here are examples:

Original GIF

Transparent GIF

File:Gravy-alpha.pngTransparent PNG

So I ask for consensus or mandates on two questions:

1. Should the use of partly-transparent PNGs be abandoned because of this glitch? This is surely a large portion of the audience that's affected.
2. When I made the transparent GIFs, I uploaded them over the originals. Setting aside for a moment that the halos make them look not-quite-perfect, is this a no-no? Or is it desirable because it automatically makes the image transparent everywhere without editing any pages?

I believe that we should forge ahead, not look back. That is to say, forget IE if it doesn't support something like transparent PNGs, especially since they're not really necessary to enjoy the site. People who use IE won't see the page rendered quite as prettily, but if we go back to GIFs, then everybody suffers that fate. Besides, IE will get there eventually. -- Shadowless

• I'm inclined to agree with Shadowless. When Microsucks releases Internet Explorer 7 here in a few months(?), this problem should be fixed. In the meantime, there are two work-arounds. Quicktime comes with a handler that (I assume) can properly render the alpha layer of PNG images. And alternative browsers are proving to be better than IE. Firefox isn't really a big download. It does have a slightly larger memory footprint, but this is because many of the components of IE are embedded in and load with the OS. Also, Opera has been made free.
• When creating the transparency, if possible, use either white or #ccffcc as the color you are converting from. This is the background color that will be displayed when the image is loaded in Internut Exploder or any other browser/image program that can't read the alpha layer. --Aardvark (Talk | Contribs) 01:44, 4 Oct 2005 (MDT)

• Do you happen to know how this is accomplished? I'm working in Photoshop, and for me it's a matter of separating the inside, edge, and background onto separate layers, deleting the background, and reducing the opacity of the edge. Color never enters into it. Of course the original background was white. There is no option to choose a background color when saving the PNG. And yet I do believe (no Windows to check at the moment) my PNGs were coming out colored. --PaperWhiteMaskOfEvil 06:22, 5 Oct 2005 (MDT)

• From what I understand, there is a way to do it, but I have no idea what that entails. I believe it differs between image editors. I really don't have much experience with .PNGs, as I still use the older standard .GIF and .JPEG for most purposes. Meh. --Aardvark (Talk | Contribs) 06:36, 5 Oct 2005 (MDT)

• Not to change the subject, but it seems like we're all agreeing here - we all want to move forward with transparent PNGs. All opposed? Worrying about background color is a secondary concern - and it probably can be changed later. Let's forge ahead, background-colors-on-old-browsers-that-don't-support-PNG-properly be damned! --Shadowless

• Until IE 7 is released, people are making due with a simple javascript fix. It's probably an admin-level fix, though I'm just guessing. How to use PNG in IE --Yehman 18:42, 21 Oct 2005 (MDT)

Monster Stats

From what I understand, stat gains from monsters are level dependant, with 5 levels equaling a stat point. For monsters that fall in between blocks of five, such as a level seven monster, stat gains are variable between the upper and lower possibility, with the average gain weighted depending on level (average gain for a level seven monster, therefore, would be 1.4, (2*1 + 3*2) / 5). If this is true, NO monster should have a range of greater than 1. However, there are quite a few adventures listed in the wiki with ranges of 2 or more stat points. Can anyone confirm that this description is accurate? --Snickles 23:50, 23 Jul 2005 (Central Daylight Time)

The following areas indicate the existence of monsters that have a stat gain with a range of greater than one. It is believed that no monster in the Kingdom actually has a range of more than one it its stat gain. These areas should be investigated. To investigate, be sure you have no item which increases monster level, and no stat increasing skills, effects or familiars. You should make sure you encounter the monster you are investigating multiple times (10 would probably be the absolute minimum). Outskirts of Camp Logging Camp The Valley Beyond the Orc Chasm King's Chamber The Misspelled Cemetary (pre-crypt) The Defiled Niche Entryway Guano Junction The Bugbear Pens Whitey's Grove Thugnderdome Orcish Frat House --Payback 08:53, 27 Aug 2005 (Central Daylight Time)