User talk:Lar

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• talk from wikistart through prior to 1 August 2020: User_talk:Lar/archive_01

Colors

Fantastic idea to add the swatches to the acc. images page. Thanks a lot

I thought grabbing the Colour change page was a real coup ;-) You will note I have changed the spelling back here. I often accidentally write color from programming. Whenever I see fixed width text I automatically go to type it. Its something I like about POVray that it accepts either.

I never gave you the touche on catalogues. Well played.

Umlauts

Hi Lar, I removed your comment about umlauts from the Legoland page as, to my knowledege, it is a official German practise to replace an umlaut by Xe in English alphabet situations (such as the internet). To my knowledge this would be true of government departments.

Quick - more trains

These Spacers are taking over the Wiki. We've got to get more train articles in quick.

Astro is away

Lar, User:Astro is away for a while so I wouldn't expect Swatch to be sorted quickly, unless V releases/changes (ESC-X replace-string<RET>swath<RET>swatch if you read this, pretty please) the source code.

I've sent V a modified file to enable swatch and qswatch (it leaves swath but write a please change message after it). Hopefully he'll put it up soon.

Go here for code fun.

test worked, scratching the result

Nice category and help

I like you new Modules category. Also, could you look at talk:Raised ground, I think you might know the answer to my question there.

Responses

Hi Lar, no problem, the BwB was bugging me too and you spurred me to change it. Thanks for the file. I agree about the voting. I'll make a little call-for-votes template which can be dropped into peoples user talk pages. That's what I did last time (by hand then). Just drop it on the most frequent editors and you should get a response pretty quickly. PS. I'll email you my changes. They arevery minor. Just a quick fix.

PPS. Go vote on capitaliSation.

Article idea

Move to Article requests

What do you think?

Of the change I made to BrickWiki:Conventions? I rushed it for reasons mentuined on the talk page.

Oops, forgot I did the Clone Conventions. I actually meant the external images bit.

PS. Those 'colours' were accidental, I was 'removing red' from my Raised terrain article

Images

I think the problem is that a) people cannot choose the name of the file for an Org box or a Theme box, b) templates can't have optional parameters (grrrrr!!!!!) and c) images were broken. As of now c) is mostly fixed and a) can be fixed relatively easily which leaves b) which I can't see being fixed for at least a couple more MediaWiki releases. So I guess the thing is to try to harvest as many images as possible and add them ourselves. I must admit I'm a little worried about Copyright issues here as I can see some younger people helpfully adding Copyrighted material without even realising they are breaking the law, which is why I added that notice to Conventions so that if some corporate lawyers started to harass V he could at least say that there was a warning.

test BS Image template

Mini train by Moko image gallery From Brickshelf. Copyright held by the original uploader.

The above is by hand

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BUUURP!!!

same stuff but via template instead. Does it look the same?

Mini train by Moko image gallery gallery owner ({{{ImageOwner}}}) From Brickshelf Copyright held by Brickshelf user {{{ImageOwner}}}.

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah fraz blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah BUUURP!!!

now my image

Bare pathways with people but no buildings image gallery gallery owner ({{{ImageOwner}}}) From Brickshelf Copyright held by Brickshelf user {{{ImageOwner}}}.

---

source stuff

---

---

Brickshelf gallery

---

---

Hi Lar, this is very cool. I think its OK to have the text below (beside would get a little clumsy). I really dig the way that it links to the gallery and the image. Very useful.

Wall detailing

Hi Lar, I saw some pics of your BtT entry and it's a really excellent diorama and building. Lots of great detailing and life. Do you think you take some photos of the walls and copyleft them here for use in an article on fancy wall techniques? That would be super cool if you could.

It's packed away in the trunk of the car right now... we're still on the road (amusement parks, then GenCon Indy). The idea of an article is attractive, but the wall detail I did was really pretty basic, just use log bricks randomly with regular to make the texture vary. There's probably enough pics on Brickshelf already to do one... However, just writing this makes me think about creating (or asking for) articles on Build the Trust, GenCon, Brick Quest, Brick Battles, Mechaton, "Non Historical Miniatures gaming" GameLUG, dioramas, wagons, stubbies, and at least one other thing I forgot... (also forgot to log in and sign...) ++

That was very quick, wasn't expecting a response for a while. It is the copyright I am after as much as the pictures (although it does work particularly well in tan) because that is one effect which doesn't work well with CAD so I can't do one up myself that looks right (I will do a diagram). I see you'll be busy writing when you get back ;-) (I've wikified your suggestions as help, I've been meaning to start dioramas for a while so I might start it today).

FAQ

Hi Lar, I guess you're probably still on holidays given the rarity of your posts ;-). I wrote an FAQ which answered a lot of the questions people have been asking me about BrickWiki. Since I'm sure you've had external conversations with other people I'm sure you must have a few more to add. PLMKWYT

Copying BW

Hi again Lar, hope you're having fun at Gen Con. I found out how a user can sort of backup a Wiki. This is where I found out. It's a real pain in the posterior to do though. I've copied the main and important bits of the BrickWiki namespaces which I can send to you if you like. Didn't copy the history though, just the current state. PS. I did actually put the Barnstar on V's user page--he then moved it.

Good idea

Good idea about the ILTCO post, it should work as people will feel confident to post about their own club and then some will get addicted. I know what you mean about burnt out. I hate to think how many article we've made between us but it's well over 2000 edits IIRC. At the moment I'm starting superstubs like the prototype trains (country) articles and others in the hopes that people will feel more comfortable editing a structure rather than a blank page. Tim David said he preferred it so I started with British and continued. It's a good way to get ideas out that someone else can then fill in. Good to see you're back and let's hope that more people can help out.

Spellig/ISD speed challenge

Thanks for confirming that. I did have a vague idea it was so which was why I left it. With regards to the speed builds, it would probably go in [[:category:challenges]] which has only one article at present. I might start a superstub article on Speed Challenges so that people who know something about them can add.

SetBox/Links

I agree that we should have those links in the SetBox. Its hard to know what to do about multiple numbers in the links though. Perhaps always link to the older one since Peeron and Lugnet will both crosslink internally to other versions. Once again we get back to the limited nature of templates. Feel free to have a hack at it, I won't be doing any editing today or I'd have a go myself.

Hi Lar, I was confused, but yes I agree. Perhaps a tiny table at the right of the screen would be good. It would only need to be 10% of the screen maximum so wouldn't be too intrusive. Anyway, I'll start a template: template:SetLinks seems as good a name as any.

The alignment just happened, I did nothing. It was all an amazingly simple and basic procedure... and I think you need to use more 0s in your 1337 writing in future ;) the 'o' just don't cut it.

B3773r!

.tix Icons and Such.

Thank you, they're not copyrighted they're copylefted - I drew them this morning :) I'm going to draw one for the My House set now, because someone just posted the inventory. If Dan doesn't tackle the .tix-ing of the file I may do it. I was going to sleep, but this is more fun :) Adrian

Reverts

Hi Lar, I think that reverts ought not be made too obvious. The harder they are to find, the less likely they are to be abused. As for the perl snippet, I've just written an extension to take any XML tagged file and print it in the box with all tages in blue. All we'll need to do is <XML>tixfile</XML>. Got it working on wikionastick here at home.

Bag Screencaptures

Quick question, should screen captures of bag contents go here or on BS? I've got the .lxf files for the My House bags I puzzled out and would be happy to post the screen captures either way. Dan

boxy goodness

I've made a box for user details since they seem to be proving quite popular ;) See my user page for how to use it (pretty simple change really).

Whoops! I always think of box as a suffix rather than another word. Thanks for the catch.

Cool template h@x0rz! I certainly won't be reverting.

more boxy goodness

Great idea for the notebox. Looks good too.

train terms

Hi Lar, do you think it might be useful to have a page which contains a bunch of train terms with links to the wikipedia articles on each term. It would be somewhere to link to when you use a term that probably doesn't deserve a whole article on brickwiki eg. [[train terms|linked coupler]] and also somewhere for train newbs to go for quick term links. What do you think?

Created both the trains glossary and trains FAQ and have crosslinked them with the category and article. Glossary is empty as I am impressively ignorant of train terms and couldn't find the Wikipedia article (I fear there may not be one). The trains section overall is looking really good. I am quite pleased with it.

images

Best to keep it hidden behind the ImageBoxExt methinks. When people know enough they can use it but it keeps newbs from accidentally abusing it.

The Train Glossary

Wow, that has really grown... is the goal to describe everything that is on your separate glossary?

And there is a small techie point about your entry on catenaries. Yes, its true that cables placed in free-hang form catenary shapes. But bridges and other load-based structures change that. Because they create a uniform amount of weight per deck length (which results in nonuniform weight per cable length), suspension bridge cables form parabolas, not catenaries. During construction, they stay in the catenary shape, but as the deck is built, they change. This actually ends up being an issue, since parabolas have sideways forces to be dealt with, unlike catenaries. An excellent demo of that is the St.Louis arch. It is an inverted catenary, so no side loads stress the shape. --Venkatesh 21:

Brackwiki

I'm going to LMAO if I ever see that site registered.

Fine

One pound sterling is about 20 USD at the moment? ;) Thanks for the spot.

Images

Hi Lar, I thought of the stop sign (we certainly have them in Aus but I don't recall seeing them here in England) and the minifig but I am rendering so I'm limited to what I can do and what looks good (not minifigs as a general rule) with LDraw and POVray. I'll have a more careful look for a stop sign in LDraw as it's bound to be there. A caution would be good too but I can't think of anything to make for it off-hand. If you have any suggestions drop me a note. PS. Looked at that link. Like most mediawiki tech discussion it is borderline incomprehensible but I'll see if I can work it out.

Added the stop sign and an unfinished house for template:ToBeAdded.

User Box

Hi Lar, I added an Affiliations tag to the user box and narrowed it (so it looks a little less dominating on the user page). I hope to remove OfflineAFOL at some point as it is a bit stupid.

Windows

Windows was already marked for delete, I just made it correct. I thought it was odd but figured there must have been a good reason. I'll change it to a superstub instead.

Deleted

All those pages were marked by the text 'delete' and no other information. I simply substituted delete by {{delete}} and left the comment blank as I didn't have any further information and couldn't be bothered to go looking for it.

PS. Do you prefer the new image I uploaded? (click for the full size version)

Given that those article were not part of any category and were marked delete I seriously doubted anyone would ever look at them so it didn't matter what I marked them with. I was only adding the delete template so that they can be deleted for real in a purge rather than remaining in no mans land wasting space.

You raise a fair point there. I will be more careful in future and where I'm not sure why something has happened I'll take a closer look. Given that we have no formal proccess for deletion I agree that it does pay to keep a close eye on what is marked. As you say, sometimes it may be better kept and turned into a superstub or stub.

PS. I just worked out what you meant about the cleanup tag. Yes, I agree it is very handy. Somewhere for those unknown articles to go. Any ideas for an icon ;)

Space/Castle-they're all not train

Oops! Glad you caught that before I had some spacer telling me off for bad categorisation.

Hints, hints...

Hi Lar, I did take the hints but thought that since half of my user talk page was your comments and vice versa it might look a little too contrived. I think I've even suggested somewhere that you should have an article ;). PS. Has BW been really slow for you for the past week or two?

good point but it was fun to twit you about it anyway. PS: yes it has... ++Lar

Wikipedia Donation drive

I'm famous! (but not that famous, my comment wasn't pithy enough to make the daily summary like this one: "I call you my husband's mistress because you get his attention much of the time..." hehe...) Here's the main fundraising page. ++

• LOL. Your 15mins of fame. And BTW, thanks for the banner the other day. Tim
  • Dude, I only have 8.5 min left to go (I've been on Detroit local TV for 1.5 min and again for 2 min, about train shows, and 2 min in GR about exchange students, and have been cited in a research paper on informal banking, and another one on community formation and growth, and interviewed for Wired, twice, those 4 are 15 sec each I figure) so... not too upset I missed that, glad it wasn't counted actually. And it's an award man!!! not just a mere banner. Go go cleanupman! ++24.11.19.170

Cool that you get TV recognition for your train shows. Great work and great advertising for the hobby. Print media has to be worth more than 15s, at least 30s so I make it 7.5m left ;) Speaking of awards, this just reminded me I haven't done the X posts banners yet. I'll try to get around to that soon but first I need to learn to use Rosco's txt2ldr program to do up number and letter tiles. Tim

Template tags

<noinclude> and <includeonly>

I saw these somewhere on Wikipedia. They mark sections that are used ONLY when the template is displayed directly (noinbclude) ONLY when the template is transcluded, and thus let you have a template's documentation in the template text instead of the talk page. Dunno what they do to server performance though.

for example wikipedia:Template:Routeboxint

++

Can you tell me where that'd be useful? --Venkatesh 14:

Many of our templates currently are documented on the talk page. A user that finds the template just sees an example of what it does but with no parameters. They have to KNOW to look at the talk page, which they might not know. These tags let you document the template right in the template. Going to the template (follow the link to the routebox) gives you usage info but that usage documentation does not intefere with the actual usage, because the tags mark sections that are used ONLY when the template is displayed directly (noinclude) or ONLY when the template is transcluded (includeonly). Hope that helps. I AM concerned about server performance impact though, because as near as I can tell, it's still terrible and this might make it worse... ++

The new server will be doing all of Apache and magic by Monday. I have plenty of time and resources to work on it now. --Venkatesh 21:

Conditional code

see wikipedia:Category:If_Templates ... cool stuff ++

That is cool. Do you know if they are they official or an extension? I couldn't quite figure it out from my quick look. Tim

I think they are some clever template coding and don't require extensions. Suggest we bring them over here and see. Note that just bringing the main templates over may not work, they may have nested helper templates we'd need to bring too. ++

Thanks for the revert

Thanks for the revert. I was sure I'd done it myself when I blocked the user but must have stuffed it up at some point. I must be going crazy. Tim

No worries mate. ++

Template:Delete

I noticed Template:Delete for page moves.

#REDIRECT [[Destination page]] Looks more appropriat for reasons i stated on the talk page--

PS is it just me or is this server worthless. I get Sorry! The wiki is experiencing some technical difficulties, and cannot contact the database server. 9/10 page loads (I have decided to boycot the preview button an hope for the best)-- I got that message 1,2,3 times tring to save this page (I add a new number each time i try to save the page)--

A redirect is almost always the way to go. But there are a few times (categories, for instance) when outright deletion is what is wanted. That flags the page for that, just like a "deletebecause" does on WP. And yes, the server seems to be balky. It was fine for quite a while, wonder what's going on. Contact Venkatesh I would say. ++

Sorry for the block

Sorry for accidentally blocking you. I meant to block the sig vandal but clicked on the wrong line. Fortunately Venkatesh noticed and let me know.

Congratulations on your adminship

Congratulations! I see you've already been using the extra powers wisely. Well done. Claude Bombarde

Thanks Claude! ++Lar: t/

Thanks for the restore

I completely missed the deletion... rather blind of me. Tim

No worries mate. I almost missed it myself though, it seemed to make sense the way it read, but it also seemed a bit .. short. ++Lar: t/

misc

How can I reach you (on irc)? --Venkatesh

Just saying 'Hi'

Hey Lar, I know it's been a while since I've been on and I guess I haven't really been around to promote the Welcome team much. I'm glad to see that everything is still going great on the BrickWiki. How are you doing? Is Tim still around? --Merond e

Hi. I'm well, thanks... You? I am pretty involved in Wikimedia Foundation projects, actually. I help out here as I can, I would not worry about whether you yourself have time, it ebbs and flows... Tim's around as well. Since V turned off anon posting the vandalism has went way way down, which helps. ++Lar: t/

I'm doing pretty well, also. Yes, I noticed your involvement in Wikimedia projects. Unfortunately my attention wavers over there too, but I am still in school after all. Next year I head off to college. Maybe in the future I will have time to do more wiki-related work. Depends on what kind of occupation I get. It's great that you guys were able to get vandalism down. It was getting annoying. Glad to hear Tim's still around! By the way, I made a note on your Wikipedia page about notability. ;) --Merond e

Heh. saw that. thanks. Good luck with school, College is a big shock to the system, you can be sure. Make sure to work on your study habits, tis too easy to get distracted :) ++Lar: t/

Discussion of deletions?

Sorry but I do not know where to discuss the deletion of Bruce Hietbrink as requested in the edit notes: "Delete page at request of biography subject, please do not recreate without discussion..." Can you point to a place where we can discuss this? Tedward

Hmm, that is a good question. We have Technical Issues and its talk, and Brickwiki:Open Questions and its talk but there isn't a WP style "admin noticeboard" (which I sort of think is a good thing...). I guess the closest fit (from looking at the main page list: ( Brickwiki:Requested articles, Conventions, Brickwiki:Guidelines, Open Questions, Brickwiki:Requests for deletion, Technical Issues... (some redirects exist, some don't)) maybe Requests for Deletion for the specfic deletion? The user in question contacted me directly, validated bonafides and I acted, seemed the right thing to do, without mentioning names any more than necessary. There may be policy ramifications, maybe those go to guidelines or conventions. I don't know, really. Maybe there are too many places. ++Lar: t/

Moved to Conventions:Discussion Tedward

Seems the best place. I've replied there. You should be an admin, I think. :) ++Lar: t/

Vandals are on the loose!

There's a guy named *** rape on this wiki. Block before he starts vandalizing! Quick! Tuma TumaTuma

Thanks for bringing it to my attention. ++Lar: t/

LDU vs Stud measure

Speaking of posts getting lost in my flood of tiny edits, I wanted to make sure you (and others) saw my query re: changing a convention: LDU_versus_Stud. Tedward

Adminship

I've created a requests for adminship page for those who want to become sysops or bureaucrats. Please check it out! Tuma Tuma

Was there a particular reason for this? Adminship on this wiki basically is decided on by the owner, or has been in the past, anyway. ++Lar: t/

most wikis have these. Tuma Tuma

Just up and creating a page isn't the way to get a major change in things accomplished. ++Lar: t/

=did what u said

i did what u asked on my talkpage P.S. IM SORRY ABOUT THE GRAMMER Tuma tuma

Testing the new server

Can I post? This post made while we are at siteorchard. ++Lar: t/

Looks like you can! ALittleSlow

Deleting pages that cannot exist???

Hey, can you figure out how to delete the remaining pages from Special:DoubleRedirects. I have fixed the rest but there are still three that I cannot touch. When I click on edit it tells me the page does not exist because it uses illegal characters in the title. Tedward

Hmm... not sure, I can't even go to the page either. Could be a database glitch. ++Lar: t/

All three pages have Set:xxxx as the title. Set is aliased to peeron.com, so normally these would redirect the user there. I wonder if these were redirects created before the aliasing was implemented. Cleaning the entries from the database may be the quickest fix, but that will take me some exploration. I'm going to put a note in technical issues to track it better. --ALittleSlow

Major Change proposed to theme categorization

Hi, just wanted to make sure my proposal on Brickwiki_talk:Conventions re: flattening the theme categories did not get buried in all the minor edits I have been doing to tidy up the place. Tedward

Proposed Template?

Hi, I was wondering if you are planning to use Template:Unverified‏‎ which is listed under Special:WantedTemplates as being referenced on User:Lar/monobook.js? It is the last remaining item (for now) to clean up from WantedTemplates. Tedward

I think that was from 2005 and I don't know what it was for. I have my whole monobook.js commented out, I thought. Most of it would not work here without major surgery. No preference as to the specific template. ++Lar: t/

Domain Name Registration

Lar, I've been unsuccessful at getting a response from Venkatesh regarding the domain name switching. As I recall, the registration is up for renewal in October? I think it should be transferred to one of the active trustees. Any help/advice? --ALITTLESlow: t/

Just keep trying? Ping him on every channel you can find? Copy me and everyone else too... That's all I've got. But if we don't get it switched or at least renewed we are in for a world of hurt. :( ++Lar: t/

C'mon, is this really happening? I thought we had this all sorted out! Tedward

Well, what we feared came to pass. We were off the air for a while. But fortunately, we're using brickwiki.info now. Whether that's a permanent change or a temporary one, time will tell... ++Lar: t/

I think we should make it the permanent "base" domain and try to acquire alternates and forward to .info. Tedward

Sounds like a safe strategy. --ALITTLESlow: t/

Concur, let's develop a list and get them all. As I said, tap me for part of the cost if desired. ++Lar: t/

In addition to the usual "CLIENT TRANSFER PROHIBITED", whois now reports brickwiki.org is also "PENDINGDELETE". Maybe it will be freed up soon? --ALITTLESlow: t/

So squatters can grab it, and ask bajillions of dollars... Sigh. Kinda sucks, really. We thought we had all the bases covered but without Venkatesh actively helping, we're stuck. !!! ++Lar: t/