A KoL Wiki talk:Proposed Standards

Past discussions have been archived.

---

Impending Market RSS Feeds

I am in the process (75% done) of re-writing the marketplace code for Coldfront to streamline it and make it usable by the wiki as well. Each tradeable item will have its own RSS feed with market data, much like the collection RSS feeds. Before I jump into including it on pages like I did with collection data, and then having everyone complain and bitch about the formatting I chose.... I'd like some suggestions/examples of how you'd like to see it out there. The RSS feed will contain: item name, mean (average) price, median (middle) price, mode (most) price, highest price, lowest price, and quantity sold. There will be RSS feeds which cover the last hour, the last day, and maybe the lifetime market data.

I'm open to suggestions. Specifically:

• Are there any other pieces of market data you think would be beneficial?
• How/where should this be displayed on item pages?

--jin 00:21, 21 April 2006 (CDT)

• Very, very cool! I imagine that the data will need to be presented in a textual manner as apposed to a graphical approach, or am I wrong in this? If we had graphical, it would open up more options than does the textual, but even textual is good. Assuming that its textual, probably the 24 hour mode price along with the volume would be the most meaningful short term data. Maybe the 24 hour high/low as well - can you do a percentage calculation to indicate volatility? BTW, does "last day" mean the last 24 hours, or just the current day since midnight? Lifetime market data would be very interesting to have - I'd like to see, for example, how a benchmark item like the Mr. A has fared, although the presentation of the data might be difficult. I'm curious - does Coldfront have direct access to Jick's Mall data, or is the data collected by monitering the mall in-game in some fashion? It's a little early to talk specific formatting issues, but I think I'd like to see something in the same general style as the collections, and perhaps located just above the collections. --Gymnosophist 01:21, 21 April 2006 (CDT)
  • Coldfront downloads the latest changes to the market database directly from Jick's database every 15 minutes. I will be working on some graphical representations, but not right away. I have to get the textual stuff working better first, then I can play around with data. When I say the last day, I mean the 24 hour period which ENDED with the last rollover. Those stats will be generated during the rollover period (if I get my way on setting the cronjob). The interval data is what I feel might be most applicable on the wiki, because it is REALLY current information. But based on a wide enough spread of time, that it's indicative of the current state of the market. For us, I really could write an extension which compares the interval with the last day's data and displays it somehow.... I have some percentage calculation going on right now, but it's not stored with the rest of the data. If you can justify as to why that should be included in the saved data, I'll consider it. I could easily enough throw it into the RSS feed anyways.... If we want it. Any other questions? Once I get an idea for what specific info we want to display for each item, I can work on some preliminary formatting for the wiki....--jin 01:52, 21 April 2006 (CDT)
  • It would be nice if an unformated price could be accessed for Talk:Farming_Strategy#Cost-effectiveness_Script (straight up number, no commas every three digits). Either that or the ability to have the job done by the script mentioned to be done on the wiki instead.--Dehstil 18:53, 24 May 2006 (CDT)
  • As a side note, what do you plan to do about page cacheing? TheKolWiki seems to be satisfied with cacheing a page for weeks as long as the page is not edited. This could produce extremely out of date market data.--SomeStranger (Talk | Contribs) 19:01, 24 May 2006 (CDT)
    • Is there a way to reset the cache on a cronjob? A null edit would update pages, but is probably not preferred (I would hope the wiki isn't smart enough to recognize an edit hasn't actually changed anything.) On the other hand keeping it cached does prevent the server from dropping to its knees performance-wise. As an alternative, each time market data is updated, the date could be put next to it (in a formatted version)--Dehstil 19:07, 24 May 2006 (CDT)

Common abbreviation redirection

• I thought that it would be a good idea to create redirection pages for common abbreviations, such as those found on the Acronyms Page. I would be happy to start this trend by setting up redirections from that page. Does anyone have any thoughts? --Sors 16:11, 10 July 2006 (CDT)
  • As I was unanswered on Talk:Acronyms, I say yes, they should all be redirects. When doing it though, if the redirect is capitalized, link to the capitalized page and etc as I did with npzr and NPZR. (Hatchling pages are typically lowercase while familiar pages are uppercase.)--Dehstil (t|c) 16:25, 10 July 2006 (CDT)
• OK, I've written redirects for almost everything in the Acronyms Page. On a few of them, there were more than one possibility; in these cases I have taken a guess at which should be most likley. I think I sorted all the familiars as per Dehstil's guidelines, but I had some weird trouble with BFV and Bfv. It may be a good idea now to place a note at the top of the acronyms page, saying something along the lines of "If you insert an acronym/abbreviation on this page, please create a redirect page from your acronym/abbreviation to it's full length name." --Sors 14:08, 11 July 2006 (CDT)