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Well, we're hitting our memory limit on some requests which is -- believe it or not -- 128 MB of RAM. I don't know why this is happening, but it's causing problems with indexing for CirrusSearch, so the new search engine might take quite a while.
Anyway, there are two new gadgets, lovingly named and gadget-TropeHighlightingStyle1 and gadget-TropeHighlightingStyle2. They're CSS that show the links for tropes and YMMV tropes in different colors. Try them, it totally revolutionizes the way you browse. Well, maybe not totally, but it's nice. Anyway, bikeshedding is quite welcome here -- I couldn't decide on what colors, so I came up with a couple options to play around with. I tried green first, now I'm trying purple. You can try your own on your user CSS page -- just define colors for a.tropelink and a.ymmvlink. Feedback welcome. (I'm going to get it to fully work on recent changes eventually -- you'll see).
-- ∇×V
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Cool, I'll have to give those a try.
Meanwhile, I just spotted a little something over on the EPU forums in one of the in-universe UF documents, and I thought it would be fun -- and improve our whimsy level -- if we set up a template for the wiki that was similar to this: Quote:This article contains no references. You can help Galactipedia by providing them. Just make them up if you have to; nobody's really gonna know.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:Cool, I'll have to give those a try.
Meanwhile, I just spotted a little something over on the EPU forums in one of the in-universe UF documents, and I thought it would be fun -- and improve our whimsy level -- if we set up a template for the wiki that was similar to this:
Quote:This article contains no references. You can help Galactipedia by providing them. Just make them up if you have to; nobody's really gonna know.
I fully support this. I think being whimsical is a good thing, and I see no harm in it. ![[Image: banana-dance.gif]](http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumimportfiles//banana-dance.gif)
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Ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to admit that I screwed up.
We had several preloaded templates that I forgot to enable, and several that were mislabeled. I have been working as hard as I can to fix this and I apologize for any trouble this may have caused, and please let me know if there are further issues.
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Ran into a few snags
01-27-2014, 09:44 PM
We planned to do two things: do a massive bot job to fix a lot of stuff and hopefully release a copy of their content as an XML file, both as a safety net in case our edits did something horribly wrong and because unlike TV Tropes we have no problem making a copy of our content publicly available.
However, we ran into an issue with both: Orain's server keep dying trying to make an XML file, and our botting efforts are being foiled by low memory limits on Orain's server.
We've filed issue reports on the problem, and hopefully, they will be resolved soon so we can get stuff fixed and release that XML, but it might have to wait for a little while.
*sigh*
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Welp, more time to fix little things until then. "Wanted Templates", for instance, which are mostly conversion burps, are now down to around 600 listed items. (Of course, at the top end, we're talking about things on hundreds of pages, but still, more time is more time.)
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
Another Troper
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That doesnt sound good :-( And I just wanted to tell you that theres a problem on Cuteness Proximity, with the page quote. In the source it looked different than on the page, but now the page gives me a timeout...
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Good news!
01-30-2014, 12:00 PM
First, whatever issues we had with users creating accounts got fixed!
Second, we now have our own subreddit!
http://www.reddit.com/r/AllTheTropes/
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Reporting a problem:
The Search function still appears to be borked. I've tried letting it load search results, but it takes a long while and only results in it giving me a 504 Gateway Error (I believe that I got the number right; it's either that or a 503). I've tried it in several different browsers, all with the same result. Would there be any way to fix this? If so, I would greatly appreciate it! 
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The search has been spastic for as long as the wiki's been up. Sometimes it works just fine, other times you're better off setting loose a pack of hounds to find your page. What really annoys me are the times -- like right freaking now -- when you can't even find a known page by clicking its name in the search box's list of suggestions.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob Schroeck Wrote:What really annoys me are the times -- like right freaking now -- when you can't even find a known page by clicking its name in the search box's list of suggestions.
Quoted for truth.
If anyone has any ideas on how to improve the situation, please, inform us!
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Quote:If anyone has any ideas on how to improve the situation, please, inform us!
Go in #orain on freenode. Complain at the admins. File issues in the Orain github. Complain more. Wait until the weekend, when stuff actually gets done.
Right now we're in a spot where CirrusSearch is only half-enabled, and we're getting out of memory errors from just indexing the content.
I'm approaching the Out of Memory errors in my own way -- by trying to do as many {{trope}} to {{work}} conversions as possible. For every page on Category:Trope, PHP uses ~128 bytes to run the link highlighter -- which doesn't sound like a lot, until you realize we have over 35,000 pages so tagged. And there are definitely not 35 ktropes. So every little bit there helps our cleanup. (Actually, I guess we're down to 32ktropes now).
Either way, I'm sure this is not the long-term solution to our memory problems, but it's all I can do until tomorrow.
-- ∇×V
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Hey GethN7,
I've come up with yet another place where you can inform people of the existence of ATT:
The forums of the online news site Ars Technica. The main site covers a lot of technology and science and assorted stuff, and the forums cover more still. I would like to see how they'd respond to the existence of ATT as an alternative to TVT.
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Honestly, I should be the one to venture into Ars, because I read the news there religiously. Not that I'm a subscriber or anything >.>
The wiki is slow today because we're doing the indexing for CirrusSearch, which should be finished within an hour or two. This should mean the end of the search complaints, I hope.
-- ∇×V
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Oh, dear god, I hope so. Because now I can't even look at my own contributions without pulling up the all-too-common 500 error. The number of simple tasks that it's become utterly impossible to do is so great that I came into this thread to specifically say "the hell with this, I'm going back to not troping at all because the frustration level is much lower". I'll stick it out a little while longer, then.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Bob, I have good news and bad.
Good: Search has vastly improved. Still needs some bugs worked out, but it's definitely more responsive.
Bad: Still get 500 errors when trying to view 500 or more changes. I will be filing an issue for this, but in the meantime, we're limited to seeing 250 at a time on RC and anywhere else. We also still seem to have some memory bottlenecks, will file an issue on that as well (I suspect both are interrelated).
Also, while I'm leery of a fullblown forum still, a troper named Topazan made some arguments I find convincing, and from a technical standpoint, I could easily set one up on site LQT style, but I still have several reservations about it.
Regardless, Topazan's arguments were persuasive, so here's a link to my reply to his arguments (go up to see his arguments)
http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/Thr ... misc/reply_(10)
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GethN7, two things:
(1.) I tried copy-pasting the link to the thread that you provided into the address bar, but when I tried to access the thread the screen instead claimed that "no such thread exists". I'm not sure how to fix that, just thought I'd let you know what's going on over on my end at least.
(2.) This thread about TVT over on RPG.Net was necroed earlier today. Perhaps you could come in and mention about ATT and how it's trying to undo some of the damage (or however you prefer to word it.). I would greatly appreciate it if you do so!
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Tennie, the url looks like it's on the discussion tab of Geth's user page -- and yes, confirmed: go http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/User_talk:GethN7]here and you'll find the thread.
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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Thanks Bob.
And after having read that I'd have to say that there's certainly a lot of issues involved with expanding the ATT forums beyond where they currently are. Personally, I wouldn't mind extending their breadth to some extent (perhaps to cover media and how tropes relate to them), but definitely not as much as the TVT forums (a good number of issues with that site, IIRC, stem from the forums there, or at least with certain elements of them at any rate.).
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Tennie Wrote:Thanks Bob.
And after having read that I'd have to say that there's certainly a lot of issues involved with expanding the ATT forums beyond where they currently are. Personally, I wouldn't mind extending their breadth to some extent (perhaps to cover media and how tropes relate to them), but definitely not as much as the TVT forums (a good number of issues with that site, IIRC, stem from the forums there, or at least with certain elements of them at any rate.). First off, I agree. Some aspects of the TVT forums I have no stomach for and don't want to see us recreate or mimic in any way, but other may be worthy to add.
In a technical sense, setting up the forums in question would be very easy, but if we were to expand them, I would only be comfortable doing so once we have a good idea what we want to do with them, what we plan to allow, and so forth. Moderation is also a concern, but it should be somewhat easier to do than on TV Tropes, and I hope we can bang out a reasonable policy for that as well.
Also Tennie, I checked out that link to RPG.net's discussion and politely confirmed a few things and invited anyone to ask questions about what we're about, so thanks for the link.
Another Troper
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Wanted to tell ya that I found something strange:
Somehow I went to the page 2 x N - link is http://allthetropes.orain.org/wiki/2_x_N
and theres the text of the TVTropes HP. Huh?!?
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Bad data filtering on my part is how we got the TVT Home Page. Whenever you send a request with an invalid title, they just redirect you to the home page, which is an interesting failure mode. Deleting that page; it never had content.
Anyway, I wrote this last night, because I was trying to synthesize the complaints I've heard about TVT and ATT: http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2014/02/trop ... rmful.html
-- ∇×V
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And the entire wiki is down this morning. Just trying to get to the main page gives me that old familiar 500 error.
Edit: Correction: It's all of Orain that seems to be down. Trying to go to the main Orain page gets the same result.
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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I gotta wonder what happened over on Orain's end (Internet connection troubles? DDoS attack(s)? Something else? Some combination?).
Regardless, I hope that they can get it fixed fairly soon!
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Ladies and gentlemen, I can clear that up. They occasionally have to run server maintenance, and when that involves updating wiki farm wide service like commonly used extensions or something similar, we'll get 500 errors until they finish since the wiki is temporarily down (the database is disconnected) until they finish.
This is often required when they have to update database tables with sensitive information that could be damaged if they are interrupted for any reason, like overload due to too much server traffic.
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