Mafiascum.net

In post 349, zoraster wrote:so i mean to return to this soon, but one big thing we need to do is more heavily brand the wiki. Every page should make it obvious that it's a mafiascum thing and contain a linkback to the forum.

I totally agree. Its been kinda annoying considering if you go to the wiki from the site it doesn't take you to a new tab.

It should just be a simple case of editing this page (note: only editable by wiki admins, for obvious reasons). Anything you put there will be placed at the top of every page on the wiki. (In fact, it contains a link to the forum at the moment; it's just not a very obvious one.)

That does a lot of the work, but I think we can do even more. The name Mafiascum is conspicuously absent from most everything.




Is the front page for me. You don't get to Mafiascum until four paragraphs into "About Mafia," it appears nowhere else, and it's mentioned in the same breath as Grey Labyrinth, which is probably only a reference we need to make in a "Mafiascum History" wiki entry.

I think the name "MafiaWiki" should probably be "Mafiascum Wiki" or some such.

We can change the sitenote to perhaps be a more eye-catching thing. Perhaps as a clickable image?

In post 352, zoraster wrote:I think the name "MafiaWiki" should probably be "Mafiascum Wiki" or some such.

I like the idea of calling it "MafiaScum Wiki" a lot. Other sites do it, we might as well do it as well. It will bring people to the site from other sites who don't have their own wiki and use this one a lot.

I need to also get working on organising stuff once more again. MafiaScum Wiki seems like a good idea, and I fully support a logo change as I really dislike the old one. Also if one the moderators could switch the default skin to Vector that would be amazing, that can only be done in one of mediawikis config files and as such isn't something I can do. Vector simply looks a few hundred times better than monobook(?).

I'm going to see about upgrading the wiki tonight(from to ).

I'd also like to install at some point, but we'll need to rework some of our pages when we do so. Specifically, the main page and pages with tables don't look very nice with it.

The alternative would be to install a custom mobile responsive skin and make it default.

Upgrade is done. We're on 1.28.0 now. Also fixed all the JavaScript errors/warnings we had.

Other stuff:
- Fixed all the double redirects.
- Rewrote all urls to the mafiascum.net/archive url to the correct forum url.
- Rewrote almost all of the http://67.222.17.61/forum URLs (phpBB2 archive) to this board. All those links were broken. The last few are to some images we don't have here yet, so I'll see if we can host them here and finish them off.
- Converted ~2000 topic urls to plainlink syntax(it removes the little external website box) before realizing there are tens of thousands more.

We have a bunch of broken URLs to the old, phpBB2 profile page here & here. I'll add a 301 redirect but we might as well fix them in the wiki too since there aren't many.

I'll probably write a bot to scrape the entire wiki to look for other broken URLs. LMK if you can think of any other mass fixes that we need.

Thoughts on these updates to the top of the Main Page & the site notice? Compare the image to what we have now.




I think we should rename "Main Page" as well, if we can.

Was hoping that the message at the top would be... bigger? Its whatever.

Also, it hasn't changed yet???

Made it a little larger & applied both changes so you can take a look now.

We should figure out the title tag as well. This affects how the main page shows up in Google.









Installed so we can set a meta description(should let us set the 2-line text below the URL in Google).

i think one of the mafia wikis is actually okay.

MafiaWiki is the most catchy in my opinion. A meta description for search engines is also a great idea. If we could get somebody to make a new logo as well then things will have improved significantly.

Also what would you call the main page instead?

A quick to-do list for myself:
-Do some maintenance on the setups section.
-Update the history and stats for the setups.
-Find a better way to organise roles and articles.
-Make the modding section actually useful.
-Bring the mish-mash section up to standard.
-Start thinking of a way to standardise user pages, or at least make a way for them to get globally improved with ease.

There has also been a lack of article creation recently, so I've been thinking about a way to encourage that and I've come to the following:
You know how we had a setup design contest? Why not an article contest of sorts? We could have different categories such as "town-play", "scum-play", "tells", etc etc. Even though information goes out of date due to shifting meta I know that many new users look to the wiki for aid, and all information they can find can aid them. By reaching out to the competitive nature of users here we could end up with a fair number of new articles.

For people visiting the site via a search, having it appear as a wiki about Mafia (rather than a wiki connected to Mafiascum) seems like the most likely to attract traffic.

However, we should make it clear that the wiki is affilated with / connected to a Mafia-playing site as soon as someone arrives.

Cool. I left it as MafiaWiki. We can always make it if we can think of something more to add.

I added this as a tentative meta description for the Main Page:

I'm excited to see if the changes increase traffic flow from the wiki to the forum.

As for the logo, I'm going to work with Zakk on updating it.

wgeurts wrote:A quick to-do list for myself:
-Do some maintenance on the setups section.
-Update the history and stats for the setups.
-Find a better way to organise roles and articles.
-Make the modding section actually useful.
-Bring the mish-mash section up to standard.
-Start thinking of a way to standardise user pages, or at least make a way for them to get globally improved with ease.

Let me know if there's anything you need help with. I'm happy to do grunt work as well.

wgeurts wrote:You know how we had a setup design contest? Why not an article contest of sorts? We could have different categories such as "town-play", "scum-play", "tells", etc etc. Even though information goes out of date due to shifting meta I know that many new users look to the wiki for aid, and all information they can find can aid them. By reaching out to the competitive nature of users here we could end up with a fair number of new articles.

Interest idea. I think it's worth trying at least.

Was the default Skin changed to Vector Kison? Because that would make the Wiki look nicer over a hundredfold when compared to monobook.

Also how much work would it be to create a script that retrieves a users join date and other such information? Something like that would be nice when I get round to scummer pages, an automatic Join Date, Number of years a member, post-number ect.

A way to have setup statistics update automatically would also be a huge time-saver. I pushed the limitations of MediaWiki templating to make updating this kind of stuff a lot easier with the following template: Template:SetupHistory, but limitations prevent me from automatically having it calculate and display win-percentages, instead having to use a workaround (which is still faster than manually calculating but I'm sure this can be improved further).

Oh, add to my to-do list:
-Organise all templates and remove ones not needed.

Zakk created a new logo. Let us know what you think.

Switched default skin to Vector.

Also how much work would it be to create a script that retrieves a users join date and other such information? Something like that would be nice when I get round to scummer pages, an automatic Join Date, Number of years a member, post-number ect.

I'm not super familiar with MediaWiki. Is this something we can have it parse from a data source, or do we have to manually plug it in for each user? I can easily retrieve the data, just not sure what format we would need it in.

MediaWiki's own template syntax is intentionally low-powered, to stop random editors running arbitrary code on the computers of everyone who visits. You'd need a MediaWiki extension to do something like that (or else a bot or the like that manually edited pages with join dates).

Just taking a quick look at wgeurts's template, it seems like we should be able to have a page where we can dump everyone's signup date, right?

Like, it looks like is pulling historical data from .

I would think that if that is possible, we could do something similar where we have a page with username/user ID/join data.

In post 368, Kison wrote:Zakk created a new logo. Let us know what you think.

Switched default skin to Vector.

Also how much work would it be to create a script that retrieves a users join date and other such information? Something like that would be nice when I get round to scummer pages, an automatic Join Date, Number of years a member, post-number ect.

I'm not super familiar with MediaWiki. Is this something we can have it parse from a data source, or do we have to manually plug it in for each user? I can easily retrieve the data, just not sure what format we would need it in.

Simply something that if provided with a variable (username) could go retrieve data for that user and then output the data of its kind as a string.

So I'd make three templates for instance: GetJoin, GetPost, and GetYears which would call on the script.
If I were then to place {{GetJoin|wgeurts}} on a MediaWiki page the script would provide a string which would then be placed where the template is. Really the main challenge is getting text from a page to be seen as a variable, but that is doable via inelegant means I know and probably via some nicer ones.

In post 369, callforjudgement wrote:MediaWiki's own template syntax is intentionally low-powered, to stop random editors running arbitrary code on the computers of everyone who visits. You'd need a MediaWiki extension to do something like that (or else a bot or the like that manually edited pages with join dates).

My horrifically ugly coded CSS customiser thingy for scummer pages shows this is not necessarily the case.

Also the new logo looks much better!

Eh, just saw the mediawiki update broke my fix to have setups ordered by size in categories and having the letters be numbers. I'll have to go fix that later as well.