I've never been able to get them to work properly … there's a page somewhere where I rage quite on one after repeated attempts.
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I added a few more examples, but I botched the bibliography link. It's been too long since I've done this!
"All the World's a Stage and Everyone's a Critic" — Mervyn Alquist
It happens. There are a lot of shiny things to get distracted by here at Arcanawiki. :)
Yeah - to be honest, I found the initial attempt by the original author, tried to make it work and then, once I decided that it didn't work, wandered off without actually fixing it …
in discussion General / General Discussion » We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon
Just on a lark, I checked out wikidot's registry info in the whois database again, and was pleasantly surprised that it was recently updated. While there doesn't seem to be anyone at the wheel collecting money or upgrading accounts at wikidot, they none-the-less just a few days ago renewed their registry through 2022. So, it's likely this particular crisis is averted for now.
It's probably still a good idea for all the admins to save backups a few times a year, just to be safe.
Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon by 
r_b_bergstrom, 25 Apr 2020 20:32
in discussion General / General Discussion » We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon
We are just a couple days out from the cited expiration of wikidot's domain registry. I have saved myself a backup of the site. I haven't seen a better alternative than DokuWiki, but I've been focused elsewhere and haven't looked as thoroughly as perhaps I should have.
Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon by r_b_bergstrom, 25 Apr 2020 20:06
Were you talking about the problem with the links to body-snatcher and soul? I fixed that by just moving some brackets (though the target pages don't exist yet). Or was there another problem I'm not seeing?
Looks like you can't bury another link inside anchor text - tried several attempts to fix the broken code and I can't figure it out either.
Found a lead - this character is meant to be the son of one of the supporting characters from Sonic the Hedgehog - although who Kristie Kesuiko might be remains anyone's guess. Google has nothing obvious on her.
in discussion Meta Forums / Per page discussions » Beethoven And The Illuminati
Seems to have trashed the page far more thoroughly than the Chinese spammers…can't fix this, needs a revert.
in discussion General / General Discussion » We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon
Hmmm… DokuWiki and the randominc plugin might work for this, but if anyone knows of any options, I am game.
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Arcana Wiki - Distilling the Real World for Gaming
Urbis - A World of Cities - an urban fantasy setting of industrial magic
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Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon by 
jhubert, 31 Jan 2020 19:51
in discussion General / General Discussion » We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon
Thanks for the heads-up. I know that I wasn't very active here in recent years - first due to a succession of moves to different parts of Germany and now due to another major project (translating German folklore tales into English), but I really don't want the Arcana Wiki to go away - I still use it regularly, even if I rarely contribute.
As a first stopgap measure, I have created a backup and put it into this Google Drive Folder. I will do so now and then in the coming weeks, and if you have admin rights I encourage you to create your own backups. I also created a Google Sheet to this folder where you can add your own name and email address if a move should become necessary.
Now, the backup format is simple enough that I believe I should be able to develop a Perl script that converts its format to that of most other wiki formats, after which it we need to enter this code into a new wiki platform - tedious given that we have 5008 articles right now, but doable with a day's labor or two. Unfortunately, the backup doesn't save any tags, so I will probably run HTTPTracker over the site for future reference. We will have to enter these manually (in whatever form the new wiki system require), but that's vastly preferable to converting all the articles by hand.
The question is which Wiki system to choose for this project. The one unique feature of Wikidot.com that I'd like to duplicate was that it allowed pages to call up random other pages with particular tags - such as with the Random Nations generator. Does anyone know which other Wiki system does this?
The Spambot Death Wall
Arcana Wiki - Distilling the Real World for Gaming
Urbis - A World of Cities - an urban fantasy setting of industrial magic
LiveJournal
Re: We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon by jhubert, 31 Jan 2020 17:20
in discussion Off Topic / Off Topic General » Anyone know how to get in touch with Wikidot billing team?
I posted the same thing over in the larger wikidot help community, and the responses there were pretty disturbing. If what they say there is true, then wikidot management has gone "radio silent" to most communication. Supposedly a host of features are broken and not getting fixed. One such bug they mentioned is search functions, which I can corroborate I've noticed being extra buggy lately and often ignoring pages that I know for certain exist both here and on another wiki I work on. Supposedly there are also issues when trying to send invitations to new users — I haven't experienced that personally, but I also haven't had reason to send an invite in a couple years. The "whois database" lists the registry for wikidot.com as expiring on April 28th of this year. I don't want to be alarmist, and I'll freely admit my level of "research" into this is quite limited and essentially is nothing more than listening to rumors posted in that forum… but there's a non-zero chance that wikidot could just vanish at the end of April. I hope they are wrong.
We might want to consider migrating the site, and that might take some serious man-hours to do. At the very least, I would encourage my fellow admins to log in to the admin panel and save/download yourself a backup of the wiki. I saved one for myself tonight, but if wikidot expires we may have trouble trying to reconnect elsewhere. Having a copy in your back pocket seems like a good precaution.
in discussion General / General Discussion » We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon
As I mentioned in another thread, I was having trouble with billing for my wikidot account.
Well, I posted the same thing over in the larger wikidot help community, and the responses were pretty disturbing. If what they say there is true, then wikidot management has gone "radio silent" to most communication. Supposedly a host of features are broken and not getting fixed. One such bug they mentioned is search functions, which I can corroborate I've noticed being extra buggy lately and often ignoring pages that I know for certain exist (this has happened both here and on another wikidot wiki I work on). Supposedly there are also issues when trying to send invitations to new users — I haven't experienced that personally, but I also haven't had reason to send an invite in a couple years. The "whois database" lists the registry for wikidot.com as expiring on April 28th of this year. I don't want to be alarmist, and I'll freely admit my level of "research" into this is quite limited (and essentially is nothing more than listening to rumors posted in that forum)… but there's a non-zero chance that wikidot could just vanish at the end of April. We might want to consider migrating the site, and that might take some serious man-hours to do.
At the very least, I would encourage my fellow admins to log in to the admin panel and save/download yourself a backup of the wiki.
We need to look at possibly porting Arcanawiki to another service real soon by 
r_b_bergstrom, 31 Jan 2020 07:51
in discussion Off Topic / Off Topic General » Anyone know how to get in touch with Wikidot billing team?
I have a billing issue with my wikidot account. I'm listed as free, but I've paid fairly recently and should be ProLite.
I sent one email to moc.todikiw|selas#moc.todikiw|selas on January 19th when I noticed the problem, and one to moc.todikiw|troppus#moc.todikiw|troppus on the 21st, and one to moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap#moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap on the 26th.
I have not yet received a response from any of them, so I sent a second email to each of them on January 28th. I made sure the latest email expressed that the radio silence was worrying me, and that I'd appreciate a response even if it was just a quick "we're looking into the problem".
As of this morning (Thursday, January 30th) I haven't heard back from any of those addresses. The moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap#moc.cni-todikiw|lapyap one bounced both attempts, despite being the contact info listed for them on PayPal.
Does anyone know a better way to reach the billing and processing team at wikidot?
I really like wikidot. I really want to give wikidot my money. I'd just like to also get the upgrade that I paid for. Any suggestions?
Why history/politics tags? Thought it might be useful for the generator if it could stick such a character, Cincinnatus like, into a timeline.
Do we need a separate category of disambig pages to store … well, disambig pages at?
For reference I got a "you have saved a draft copy, do you want to edit this or edit the original" message - so if I have wrecked anyone else's edits I'm sorry. There was no reference to any edit lock.
I really debated whether to:
make this bare-bones mildly redundant page so that he could come up in character lists and random generators,
just make it a redirect page to the article about Tubal and his brothers,
or just go change the link that was pointing at Tubal-Cain so that it pointed at The Sons Of Cain Invent Technology.
I went with the version that populates random generators, but I'm not sure it was the right way to handle it. Oh well.
in discussion General / General Discussion » Opinion: Over-reliance on Footnotes makes the site harder to use
Just sharing an opinion here, you're welcome to disagree. I feel that the footnote function on the site is at best a double-edged sword.
At times it can be helpful to tuck a small note away at the bottom of the page rather than have it disrupt the flow of a paragraph. Footnotes definitely have their place, and I wouldn't call for an all out ban. In fact, I use them myself every so often.
That said, I think we collectively tend to over-use them. I frequently encounter two problems that footnotes cause:
- They make it harder for other users to edit the page you made.
- 1A) If someone wants to edit something that's in a footnote, they have to hunt all over the page to figure out where the thing they're trying to edit is buried.
- 1B) If someone wants to edit something that's not in a footnote but is in a heavily-footnoted paragraph, it still raises the difficulty of that edit. It's harder to get a sense for the flow of a sentence you're editing if that sentence is broken up into two or three pieces by lengthy footnotes.
- The footnotes at the bottom of the page lack context. But if they catch your eye, trying to figure out where on the page above that footnote is anchored can be perplexingly difficult, and often that missing context is highly important to the meaning of the footnote.
Personally, when I'm using Arcanawiki, I don't always read articles exhaustively. Sometimes I skim them quickly looking for the most useful nuggets, especially if I've followed a quick link from another page that was the main topic I had intended to read about. Sometimes I refer back for a refresher on an article I'd read months ago that has recently become relevant to my campaign. There are also a few beloved pages that I follow and check in on regularly whenever the site notifies me that someone has added more information or cool new ideas to them. In all those cases, a cryptic sentence fragment in a footnote at the bottom of the page has astounding powers to derail me. :)
I would encourage my fellow users to avoid using footnotes in situations where the potentially-footnoted-statement could just as easily be demarcated with parenthesis. If the thing you were planning to put in a footnote would work just fine as a new sentence in the main text, please consider doing that instead.
Likewise, when using footnotes, I would encourage my fellow editors to consider whether or not the footnote makes sense when encountered without context at the bottom of the page. Cryptic incomplete-sentence footnotes can sometimes be rendered completely intelligible by just adding one or two extra words. If that's the case, please phrase them so that they make sense when read on their own. If doing so would cause the footnote to greatly grow in length, then please consider whether or not the article would be better served by the footnote becoming it's own paragraph or sub-section of the article, rather than a displaced snippet.
Thank you for considering this suggestion. I realize it's entirely possible these are just my pet peeves, but I really do feel like footnotes can at time be problematic, especially on longer articles or when an article of more modest length has more than 2 or 3 footnotes.
Opinion: Over-reliance on Footnotes makes the site harder to use by r_b_bergstrom, 15 Dec 2019 20:11
