The EQMac Wiki:Open Discussion

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==Topic==
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Contents 1 Note for Administrators 2 A Primer 3 Spell Research 4 Spell Template 5 Preview 6 Merchants 7 File Type Uploads 8 Food 9 Backups 10 Performance 11 background color 12 Which is better? 13 Started a Backup 14 Recent Articles/Changes 15 Zone Template 16 Question about Spell Reagents 17 Health/Mana/Attack Items 18 Lore Section? 19 Category Help 20 Item image linking

[edit] Note for Administrators

When archiving, please use the following page:

• The_EQMac_Wiki:Open_Discussion/archive

[edit] A Primer

Could use a simple succinct primer on how to Create a new page, add an entry and how to link it to Category.

• Lyrad, please sign your submissions. =) Anyways, I have updated the editor's intro with some info regarding that. --Zamiel 12:15, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Spell Research

Can we modify the spell template to note the spells research or quest status? I.E, research only, not researchable, quest only, etc? (Also, I am having performance issues with the site - timeouts, slow responses, etc, as an FYI) --Byaga 09:25, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

• Regarding performance, I am hosting the site @ GoDaddy with their cheapest hosting plan. I'm open to moving hosts, upgrading the plan, as long as it isn't paid for by me. =) (And there's no way I would feel comfortable asking for donations at this point in time.) Regarding the spell template, those type of statuses would apply to the item scroll, not the spell itself. The solution is as follows: on the respective page for the scroll, we would have the ObtainedFrom=Quest (or Recipe if it is research). Subsequently, one could do a search for all non-researchable enchanter spells by doing:

[[Class::Enchanter]]
[[ObtainedFrom::!Recipe]]
[[Category:Spell Scrolls]]

This category doesn't exist at the moment, and I will create it, so thanks for being the catalyst for me to do this. =) Additionally, I will configure the item template to automatically add all items beginning with "Spell: " to this category. As an ending note, this type of search should be documented in a place easy to find for the end user, since it isn't really intuitive; I'm thinking the beginning of every "List of ___ spells" page.--Zamiel 20:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

• • After all mage spells have been entered (as an example), will we be able to note how many are researched, and what the recipes are? This is particularly important to eqmac, since the pc side long ago went to a totally different recipe engine. What would be extremely nice, would to be able to pull up a simple list of your spells that require research, what the recipe components are (i.e - one words of duress), what skill level they trivial it, etc, suitable for simply copy and paste over to your notes, so that you can easily produce a shopping list.--Byaga 14:17, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Yes! That is what is great about the property plugin that is installed on the wiki. We can do any type of custom search. Assuming all mage spells are entered into the game, along with the recipes for those spells, we would enter this into Special:Ask.

[[Class::Magician]]
[[RecipeSkill::Research]]
[[Category:Spell Scrolls]]

(You could also search for [[ObtainedFrom::Recipe]] in place of [[RecipeSkill::Research]] and the search would be the same, obviously.) Ok, now you got the database spitting out all the research spells at you, so we are half done. Now you want the ingredients and the trivial number listed next to the spell. We would use the following printouts:

?Ingredient
?Trvial

Easy! We can even "save" this search and have it on its own page, with the #ask command (for an example of #ask, check out the list of Magician spells page). By incorporating the above example query into #ask, we can easily create the list of Magician Research spells (which should be linked to on the normal list page, by the way, so normal users can find it without having to know anything about the search query language). --Zamiel 20:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Spell Template

Hey, weren't you suppose to sign your submission? /wink I'm not much on Wiki's if you can't tell, so I'm learning here. I'm confused about the difference between the spell, and the spell scroll. Could you explain that a little better? --Byaga

• I will attempt to explain. The spell page should say what the spell does (Levitate on Lucy). The spell scroll page is just the item page for the scroll (Spell: Levitate on Lucy). Technically the recipe is for the item, not the spell itself, so all that information should be on the item page. With me so far? So here's the solution I will implement: I will program in a line for spell scrolls on the item template so that they automatically add the Effect property to themselves for the spell they contain. Subsequently, the spell scroll will show up on the respective spell's page via the database query (see Enduring Breath; this "Items with this Effect" functionality is built into the spell template for every spell). Phew! --Zamiel 20:26, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
  • Me again! Okay, I've created a Spell: Lesser Summoning: Water for the level 20 mage spell Lesser Summoning: Water. The scroll does automatically create the link to the spell, but the spell is NOT automatically creating the link to the scroll. (Also, this spell and Call of the Hero did not get added to the Mage spell list.) In addition, the scroll on lucy has the focus item noted, but my attempt to add this during the item creation didn't work. --Byaga 03:27, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
    • Hrm. Well first of all, the focus thing doesn't work because I haven't programmed that into the spell template yet. Can you upload a in-game screen shot of a spell-scroll? I want to see something. --Zamiel 16:57, 15 September 2009 (UTC)
      • I did upload an in-game screenshot of a spell scroll. And a really, really crappy screenshot of a rallic pack (I'll get a better one tomorrow), + 2 more item screen shots, to give people some graphics to look at, when working on stuff. --Byaga 04:17, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
        • Can you do a backpack and a water flask too please? --Zamiel 12:01, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Preview

Just a thought - I know in Dokuwiki you can add a plugin so that a page cannot be saved without previewing it first. That might be something you want to consider for here, if its doable.--Byaga 15:23, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

• Nah, I think that would probably piss me off, and I wouldn't want to subject others to something that I myself hate. ;) --Zamiel 20:29, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Merchants

How can we show what npc sells what? I will commit to recording and entering all items sold for Grobb and PoK (To get the two most important places out of the way) along with prices at Charisma 105+ and indifferent faction. --Byaga 12:58, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

• Cool! I will whip up a sample merchant NPC page soon and you can copy from that. --Zamiel 17:00, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] File Type Uploads

I would like to be able to upload zip files. On the spell research tables, I want to make them available as a csv download. --Byaga 14:18, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

• Why do you want to upload zip files? (As a bulk upload?) Regarding the CSV, you are in luck, as that is already built into the existing Semantic extension; just add |format=csv to any #ask query. For example, {{#ask:[[Lodizal Shell Shield]]|?AC|?WIS|?Effect|format=csv}}. --Zamiel 10:49, 20 September 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Food

I know you've done a nice writeup on food, and added it to the item template, but its just a touch too persnickity. If it could be adjusted to be a little less exact in what it will accept - or the template documentation updated to show exactly what it will take, that would help out. --Byaga 02:33, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

• Done. --Zamiel 05:56, 5 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Well my desire was that you add to the options - which you might have, but ration and iron ration are broke at the moment. :( --Byaga 02:03, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
    • I did add to the options; see the item template. For example, on Iron Ration, you could use the line "Food=Hearty". That is what you wanted, right? Also, I fixed the bug that was causing the nasty red letters. ;) I probably should have tested to see if the change I made worked, lol.

[edit] Backups

What sort of automated, hands off from you backups do you have set up for this thing? Ones that don't depend on the ISP? --Byaga 19:42, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Backing_up_a_wiki I want to be sure to get something going for backups, ASAP. Something thats automated, and that you can ftp down (setup an automated ftp download nightly or something) to your local machine. Particularly with both me and Zenum experimenting with mass imports (and neither of us having a solid idea of what we are doing) I don't want to risk database corruption. Thanks! --Byaga 13:17, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Yup, you're right, now is the time to start producing daily backups. I found this so when I get a chance (the weekend) I will setup the correct cron entry, etc. for daily backups. Then you can log onto MSN and I can msg you the super secret URL of the directory where the backups are stored, and you can set up a scheduled task on your computer to download them every day at midnight or whatnot. It's gonna take some work for me to figure out how it all works though. --Zamiel 15:51, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Yeah, its going to be a pain in the ass. I was hoping for something like wordpress has for my blog, where it just emails me an encrypted, zipped copy of my blog database every three days or so. I haven't found anything yet. I'll get into MSN tonight. We can each setup an automated download. That way three copies exist, in widely different locations. Speaking of which, where are you? I'm just north of Atlanta, in GA.
    • I just visited that link you posted - thats a good link! I bookmarked it. Also check out this Mediawiki backup script referenced from my posted link above. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Kaotic/WikiBackup Finally, I wanted to be sure you saw the below from that same page.

n some common configurations of MySQL 4.1 and later, mysqldump can corrupt MediaWiki's stored text. If your database's character set is set to "latin1" rather than "UTF-8", mysqldump in 4.1+ will apply a character set conversion step which can corrupt text containing non-English characters as well as punctuation like "smart quotes" and long dashes used in English text. --Byaga 17:21, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

• I don't see any reason why the EQMacWiki DB would use a latin character set... but I'll double check later. Anyways, I haven't got around to this yet. Give me time, or you can do it yourself now that you have access. ;) --Zamiel 06:57, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Performance

We need to start looking at Performance tuning too. I'm getting results like <!-- Served in 7.569 secs. --> for individual pages, which is just absurd. (That is at the bottom of each page, when you do view source). I'm going to try and recreate the wiki on my laptop, to play with some accelerators and the like. --Byaga 20:06, 10 October 2009 (UTC)--Byaga 20:06, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

• That sounds like a lot of work. I could just give you access to the real thing instead... ;) --Zamiel 02:03, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I still need a testing ground. I just created some sort of loop while importing 15 merchants. (Close the import page, and it stops). So I need a sandbox. Copying down the stuff would probably be the fastest, I admit. How goes the backup work? --Byaga 02:11, 11 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Now that you have access you can just experiment with accelerators on the real thing. Before you do, you should probably do a DB backup through the GoDaddy SQL tools, but you probably already know that. =p --Zamiel 06:59, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] background color

Over on eqmac a user posted (about this site) wow.

being color blind, I can barely see the words in the frame to the left.

So, do you want to put a slightly shaded background to it? Presumably they don't have a problem with eqmac, which has a quite subtle shaded color on the background. --Byaga 02:47, 11 October 2009 (UTC)

• No to this at the moment. --Zamiel 06:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Which is better?

Which looks better, the background, or the bolding?

Sortable table

Level	Trained	Type	Skill	Cap until 50	Cap above 50
1	No	Combat	1 Hand Blunt	110	110
1	No	Combat	2 Hand Blunt	110	110
1	No	Combat	Bind Wound	100	100
1	No	Combat	Defense	145	145
1	No	Combat	Hand to Hand	75	75
1	No	Combat	Offense	140	140
1	No	Combat	Piercing	110	110
22	Yes	Combat	Dodge	75	75
1	No	Arcane	Abjuration	235	235
1	No	Arcane	Alteration	235	235
4	No	Arcane	Channeling	200	220
1	No	Arcane	Conjuration	235	235
1	No	Arcane	Divination	235	235
1	No	Arcane	Evocation	235	235
4	Yes	Arcane	Meditate	235	252
16	Yes	Arcane	Research	200	200
20	Yes	Arcane	Specialization	200	200
1	No	Trade	Blacksmithing	250	250
1	No	Trade	Baking	250	250
1	No	Trade	Brewing	250	250
1	No	Trade	Fletching	250	250
1	No	Trade	Jewelry Making	250	250
1	No	Trade	Pottery	250	250
1	No	Trade	Tailoring	250	250
1	No	Other	Alcohol Tolerance	200	200
1	No	Other	Beg	200	200
1	No	Other	Fishing	200	200
1	No	Other	Sense Heading	200	200
1	No	Other	Swimming	200	200

• Why not just have the skill names in the left most column? That would remove the need to highlight them. --Zamiel 06:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Not really. There is enough in that table that its "busy" and having the skill names in the middle helps to break it up, and makes it easier to read, for me at least. I can (now) write an awk script to do some formatting to it, so its not as tedious to change as it had been. --Byaga 02:41, 23 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Started a Backup

Zenum/Byaga: I have started a DB backup at this time of this posting. (I know Byaga has been trying to do this, but has been having troubles.) It will take 1-2 hours to complete; feel free to start the import at that time. --Zamiel 08:32, 16 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Recent Articles/Changes

Would ibe possible to have a link from the main site that would show recently added or changed articles? --Bïërtrïnkër Öktöbërfëst

• Does the recent changes link on the right hand side of the main page not show what you need? Sorry that I missed this post too, and I"m responding to it late. --Byaga 02:38, 23 October 2009 (UTC)
  • • Byaga omg only use one bullet!!! And Bier, I added the new "for editors" section to the left bar. =) --Zamiel 09:26, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
      • /snickers. Its not intentional, honest! But considering how much it bugs you, I might make it intentional..... /grins --Byaga 13:17, 24 October 2009 (UTC)
        • By the way, good request Biertrinker - After only an hour, I find that new "for editors" section on the left makes working on the wiki much more enjoyable. And thanks for adding it Zamiel! --Byaga 15:24, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Zone Template

First off, thanks a million Zenum for the NPC import! The wiki now has a shitload of data in it, and I am excited. Secondly, at first glance, I am aware that browsing NPCs by letter isn't that useful. What is useful is browsing NPCs by zone, and that should be on the respective zone page. Basically, what I am saying is that as soon as I can I will create a zone template so that we can get pages created for every zone. Stay tuned. =) --Zamiel 08:31, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Question about Spell Reagents

Are there any spells in the game that have more than 2 reagents? --Zamiel 03:44, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

Hell, I didn't even know that there were ones that used two. --Byaga 04:55, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Health/Mana/Attack Items

1. Are there any other effects other than Flowing Thought that give worn mana regen?
2. Are there any other effects besides Aura of Battle and Fungal Regrowth that give worn health regen?
3. Are there any other effects besides Aura of Battle and Vengeance that give worn attack?

Thanks. --Zamiel 11:04, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Lore Section?

Hey folks, I was wondering if it'd be feasible to start up a lore section, containing things such as dieties and subdieties, in-game history, and whatnot.

I like that there are disciplines and factions; could that be cross referenced from Game Mechanics as well?

Biertrinker 11:52 A.M. EST, 24 February 2009

• If you want to head up the lore section, then go for it. I personally have 0 interest in it, so you would be on your own here. =p As far as the other stuff, sure. --Zamiel 20:50, 27 February 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Category Help

I added the Halfling Druid newbie quest information in (the category was already there) but the categorising seems a bit messed up. I'd obviously like it to appear under the newbie quests category but not as it's own additional category also. Also when I try to link the NPC to the quest it doesn't recognise the header as a quest..? --Muess 00:40, 8 June 2010 (UTC)

• I recreated the page as just a normal page instead of a "category" page. Good work! Now, in regards to your other question, I'm not quite sure what you mean. What do you mean by "it is not recognizing the header"? --Zamiel 05:20, 9 June 2010 (UTC)
• How the "list of druid spells" page works is that we just put a single line of code that queries the wiki database for all wiki pages that are flagged as druid spells. Then it displays all those pages in a table. So basically, what you did was correct - by blanking out the "Mass Imbue Emerald" page, you removed the flag on that individual page that told the database that it was a druid spell. Only, you incorrectly figured it didn't work because you were loading a cached version of the list page. To tell the wiki to send you a non-cached page, you have to click the little refresh tab up top that is next to the "watch" tab. Furthermore, the correct course of action is to delete the page altogether instead of just leaving a blank page in the wiki. The reason why you couldn't do that yourself is that right now only admins are flagged to be able to delete pages, but in the future you can just leave a note for me if any pages need to be deleted. I've gone ahead and deleted the Mass Imbue Emerald page as well as Mass Imbue Black Pearl and Mass Imbue Black Sapphire. Thanks for your interest in the wiki; it is now a little bit more accurate thanks to your efforts. If you have any other questions I will be glad to help. --Zamiel 05:34, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

Don't worry about the NPC link question, it's picked it up now that you've changed it from a category to a normal item.

Regarding spell deletion; there are quite a few more spells listed that are not available on AK (most of the LoY spells are listed for example). If I just go around and blank them all will you be able to pick up on it and delete them from the database? --Muess 17:00, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

• Yes (via the recent changes page, link is on the left pane if you are interested). --Zamiel 00:35, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

OK, I've gone through and blanked all the spells I could find that don't exist on our server. I also blanked all the AA abilities I found that were showing up as level 1 spells. I think in hind sight it might be better to leave most of the AA information in there and just remove the class/level from these abilites in case anyone wants to create an AA guide in the future (I notice there's no AA section currently), what do you think? Also, with regards to loading a non-cached page; I don't have a refresh tab next to my "watch" tab. I think this may be something only you admins get.

I also made some changes to the layout of the druid newbie quest page and plan to use this as a template for the rest. I prefer this way of displaying it as it allows you to quickly see how good the reward for the quest is and decide if it's worth your while. If there's a format you'd rather I follow please let me know --Muess 13:32, 13 June 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Item image linking

Is it possible to display the image of an item on a page? (ie. rather than displaying a link to the item in the database, display the item itself) --Muess 17:08, 9 June 2010 (UTC)

• Sure. For example, to link the image for Ifir, Dagger of Fire, you would enter in [[Image:Ifir, Dagger of Fire.png]]. Keep in mind that only a small subset of items on the wiki actually have item images uploaded. --Zamiel 00:39, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

What I meant was display the full item information window not just the item icon, is this possible? Thanks for your answers --Muess 14:45, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

• Yes. Use {{#dpl:|title=Ifir, Dagger of Fire|include={item} }} --Zamiel 15:25, 10 June 2010 (UTC)