Talk:Main Page

just a thought. there seems to be a 'lets jump straight in' sorta attitutde with the main page, there is/are no clicky links to info pages for each of these games which would help some new ppl who are looking for info, find that we don't have nOOb info, so they they just wonder off. If we are gonna keep these game recycled thru the ages... then we'd better have some sort of noob info happening, as:

• Different Versions
• Hardware Specs
• How to get working in Windoze
• What this game is about
• Screenshots (which show the game well, not just "sick-ass" screenies)
• WHat ppl liked about the game
• Who made this game (like a bit of back ground info)

I noticed that there is no "info" heading at the start of game sections....

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There's no stopping anyone from starting such pages. In fact, there's so much more that can be entered - it's not funny! I'd like to see Starter guides myself - for veterans who've been on a hiatus and for absolute beginners alike.

As it is, the articles are only created and maintained at the fancy and whim of the authors that contribute to them. Or the excuse I like to use - we just haven't gotten round to it yet. Heh.

The front page needs a major overhaul - but before that happens: what's missing? Or rather, what else do we need that's left off?

- NKF

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Deleted notes about "real UFOs" on the Main Page. Thanks for cleaning that up, NKF. To whomever put them there: You are welcome to make a new section on the Links page for that, and put links there. And also, start your own wiki about real UFOs. Otherwise, thanks for all your help with the XCOM wiki, and keep contributing towards that!

How to contact wiki owner?

It's GazChap (Gareth Griffith). Your best bet would be to contact him via PM on the StrategyCore forums: here. He also has an account at xcomufo ( username: gazchap) but hasn't logged on there since March. As far as I can tell he doen't give an email address. Good luck! --Zombie 11:51, 10 Nov 2005 (PST)

Nevermind, I found a "proper" channel for you to contact him: his website. Apologies.--Zombie 15:50, 10 Nov 2005 (PST)

Thanks Z!! My email is away! ---MikeTheRed 19:45, 10 Nov 2005 (PST)

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Quote: "Deleted notes about "real UFOs" on the Main Page." I didn't do it EsTeR :-|.

Looks like someone wanted to jump straight in and crap on about their "experience". Anal-probes and such! wahahah

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Hehe, EsTeR... you hit the nail on the head. We don't want a REAL alien harvest mission visiting our farm ;)

Good news, folks! GazChap replied... I'm sure he won't mind me pasting his message:

  Hiya Mike,

  > Thanks so much for making the XCOM wiki. I've been diving into it a lot
  > lately, as have others.

  No probs. I keep meaning to contribute stuff myself, although it's
  probably pointless now as there seems to be a veritable army of users much
  more knowledgeable about the series than I am, already updating the thing!
  :)

  I've not had as much opportunity to browse the various forums either
  recently, so I'll no doubt have missed discussions about your request :)

  > Can you please allow the posting of more file types to the site, than are
  > currently allowed?

  I can't imagine this will be a problem, but I'm not entirely sure how to
  do it. I'll read up on it and let you know. The list of filetypes I'll
  add:

  ZIP, RAR, XLS, DOC, PDF, and DAT.

  I'm not sure if it's possible to stop registered users deleting files, but
  I'll see what I can do.

  Cheers,
  GazChap.

Cool deal! I didn't present him with an exhaustive list. But including .zip and .rar will cover all kinds of stuff. It's great to see his continuing support. I'll update here when he replies (if he doesn't jump in here himself!)

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This spam is getting annoying very fast! Is there any way to stop un-registered users from modifying pages?

--Danial 04:26, 1 Dec 2005 (PST)

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This is the internet, after all, and because of the nature of the wiki, it was just a matter of time.

Whoever this or these rude and thoughtless money grubbing vandals are, you must admit, they're persistent. It's too bad they can't spend all this energy on something more constructive.

Come to think of it, the IPs are logged, and the current vandal has been showing a consistent IP address.

- NKF

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It's time to nudge GazChap about the file extensions again, and I'll ask him about logging in. (Good idea, Danial.) How about if I also ask him if he might consider allowing admin rights to some of the very long-time contributors... I'm thinking NKF, Zombie, Hobbes, Danial. Not myself though. Any others?

One thing about logging in is that it doesn't even require email confirmation. IOW, it makes spamming a 10 second proposition instead of a 5 second proposition. :P Should we ask whether email confirmation can be added? Even that won't hardly stop a dedicated hacker since anybody can make more free accounts (and a spammer like this one probably does it for breakfast). But still, every additional step makes it less worth the hassle for the spammer. ---MikeTheRed 18:50, 1 Dec 2005 (PST)

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Not a bad idea to force a login to add material or even an email confirmation to start out. I'm just wondering if it would be beneficial to contact the folks over at Wikipedia to see how they handle stuff like this. From what I can tell, it is a free and open system like this is. I also looked through the recent changes over there to see if they had spamming problems. Kinda hard to determine with all the activity and the disabled search function. Though I couldn't find a spam list like we had, there are instances of people adding BS/boarderline offensive comments. I suppose that's the nature of the beast, but it gets a little annoying to see a new batch of spam evey morning while drinking my OJ. --Zombie 20:00, 1 Dec 2005 (PST)

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I'd like to hear from at least one more person so I get some kind of consensus on what to say to GazChap, if you folks don't mind.

New issue: I wish there was a more obvious place for the pages "Damage", "Explosions", and a new one I'm about to make, "Experience Training". To me, Damage and Explosions in particular seem a bit too good to be buried down under layers. But they don't really fit anywhere near the top of menus neatly. It's not just Weapons, it's not just Soldiers. Anyone else have ideas? ---MikeTheRed 19:07, 2 Dec 2005 (PST)

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Hmm. I realise the main ufopaedia entries, which was the framework we've been building off, is rather restricted strictly to... well, the ufopaedia entries.

That was fine when we started, but as you've brought to our attention, we've got a whole mess of interesting articles that need somewhere to fit into.

Field Weapon Mechanics? A section devoted to everything about how offense and defence works in the battlescape?

It sounds like coming up with a whole new table of contents (for the main page) would be the solution. Alas, what should it include? How should it be structured? At the moment the main page is, well, a mess. We're squeezing too much in.

Perhaps the main page should be a simple portal that lets you choose between the first two games (combined as they share so much in common), Apocalypse, the three spinoffs (Interceptor, eMail X-Com, Enforcer), the Would-Have-Beens, and a general information page for the really generally stuff, like the links. Basically remove all the specific ufopaedia entries and actually give the individual games (with the exception of the first two, and the would-have-beens) their own personal section, then siphon all the related ar.

Bah, I'm not good at this organisational stuff. I, like the next person, hate breaking the site up into even further subsections, but if it allows for better organisation of the articles, then I'm all for it. Just as long as the information is easy to locate and not 10 clicks deep, eh?.

Let's brainstorm a bit and see what turns up.

- NKF

P. S: I think we need to start pruning some of the old discussions from Talk: Main Page. Everyone fine with that?

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Hey, what happens if someone deletes a page outright? Has someone got a backup of the page/site to replace it? Those bastards spammers! Sheesh! Do anyone actually buy the rubbish online? Man! ya gotta be retardard to pass money. Just a thought, maybe to stop the spammers, probably should put a bolded, underlined "Do Not Spam" and/or "Spam will be deleted within the hour, so DON"T bother" sorta heading at the top of the Main Page. I'm not doing it, so more common ppl to the site can decide on such a drastic measure... It is me, EsTeR. Doh! formatted puters Doh! forget my p/w. DOH!

Heh, telling spammers to kindly stop is like pushing a boulder uphill. All we can do is do our best. Perhaps enabling the patrolled edits might help to allow members to mark good edits. New revisions of the wikipedia have this enabled by default.

If the contents of a page is wiped of all its info, you can still refer to previous edits through the page history and recover the info. Unfortunately, this also stores all the rubbish left behind by vandals - for a while .

-NKF

Reading a bit (too much) on the Wikipedia boards, it should be possible for administrators to block certain IP addresses or users from posting. (It still lets them post to their talk page, and I assume that when they do try to post there's a message directing them to the e-mail of an admin.)

So... who's da admin? Alitorious 21:47, 6 Dec 2005 (PST)

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Alitorious, it's Gazchap. Contact info was mentioned earlier.

Also, a brief explanation for those scouring the recent changes list:

I've been messing with file transclution (I'm using the term they use on Wikimedia) because it allows you to insert entire files into other files, and when you edit the first file, all documents that include that document will automatically be updated. This is useful for applying uniform style changes to entire sets of documents by simply changing a single template file.

(For programming buffs it's like the #include statement used in C/C++ and similar languages)

It's not just for text formatting, but that is just one of its applications. When you think about it, if used well, it can be rather a neat little time saving trick.

This is also an attempt at understanding how Wiki formatting works a bit more so that I can start adding a bit of spit and polish to some of the articles if I ever decide to get round to it.

- NKF

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Hmm, spam eh? Tsk,Tsk. NKF Wrote: "Heh, telling spammers to kindly stop is like pushing a boulder uphill"

and I write (EsTeR) this: "never hurt trying"