ALSA talk:Community Portal
From the ALSA wiki
markc 06:32, 28 December 2005 (EST): BrickFilms looks like a very useful site, I'll have to spend some time their. You know a lot more about how MediaWiki works than I do so please feel free to make any suggestions.
So do you find that even with enforced user registration for edits that spam bots are still a problem ?
I'll make a point of dropping a simple welcome message into new users home pages.
And as you can see I reversed the initial order of this page to match your Help:Discussion article :-) I'm a bit concerned about how long these Talk pages might get and how to manage them so with the latest addition at the top of the page then, for both viewing and dealing with the editable textarea, there is minimal scrolling involved. Let's try it on this page and see how it works.
I feel like such a novice with this software, it's all so new to me, but I must admit... quite a nice shiny brand new toy to play with. Yeah right, so what else do I do on Xmas day... go mess it up and have to manually reinstall the database! At least I have it working in a nice multi-hosting mode (multiple sites off a single codebase) and nice short URLs like the old Wiki site.
Saul 06:08, 28 December 2005 (EST): Regarding "RecentChanges", I am not suggesting changing the Main Page and pretty much withdraw my suggestion. I have been the manager of a small wiki for about ten months now and have found that for administrators the recent changes is the most important page (especially once the Viagra and "enlargement" spambots attack). It also might be a good idea to edit a member's "User" page once you are confident that they are "legit". If the User page exists (it doesn't matter what is on it) then the user's name will appear in blue on the Recent Changes page. When an admin sees a red user name, he will know that he should check that edit to assure that it isn't a spambot or other malicious editor.
Regarding these discussion pages, I instructed in the Help:Discussion article that comments be placed in reverse order. I personally prefer that they just be appended at the end (like this page) but was basing my instruction on the previous ALSA wiki. You should probably decided which way you would like to do this. :-)
markc 05:22, 28 December 2005 (EST): Oh wow, I apologize for that. There is no backup as I could not even see or use the database after I made some changes (using non-standard Debian packages) so the shortest path was to do a complete reinstall of the MediaWiki database itself. Please let me know the URL of the original page(s), and where it/they should go, and I will put in some time on (re)marking it/them up myself.
And for RecentChanges, are you suggesting that it should become the front page for the whole site ? Either way, do you know how I would force that the site to start with a different page other than (it seems) the default Main_Page ? FWIW I just use the RSS feed on RecentChanges in akregator to alert me of any changes.
Saul 04:47, 28 December 2005 (EST): Yes, I meant Recentchanges (I am not sure why my erroneous spelling is not red). If you visit the Special:Recentchanges page you will gain a much better idea of what has been contributed than just going to the Main Page.
I had created a few pages on the 24th that apparently were deleted. As you might imagine, I am somewhat discouraged by this, although I blame myself for not saving them locally. If you somehow have a way of retrieving a page called "Asynchronous Playback (Howto)", it represents over two hours of editing and I should not like to have to repeat that.
markc 01:00, 28 December 2005 (EST): Please, by all means, help us make this wiki work as well as it can, any operational advice most welcome. As far as Special:Recent changes is concerned, I'm not sure what you mean (we are WikiMedia novices) but perhaps you meant Special:Recentchanges (with no separating space) ?
Testing what the + link next to edit will do. Saul 18:04, 27 December 2005 (EST): Some advice to this Wiki's administrator(s): the Special:Recent changes page should be the "bookmark" that you use when visiting the wiki (you deleted a lot more than just edits to the Main Page when you re-installed the database).
