User talk:Strangelv

If you need to leave a message for me you can do so here by editing this page. Please don't forget to sign your message with '~~~~'.

Be happy to help. I'm new to editing though, and my html is rusty. Jarogers2001 03:05, 1 January 2007 (PST)

My Trigonometry is non-existant at this point. I dont start college level trig until January 16th. Jarogers2001 21:31, 1 January 2007 (PST)

Charles mentioned a page structure with GFDL for wikipedia material? Is that for imported articles or all articles that site wikipedia in their content? Jarogers2001 19:45, 7 January 2007 (PST)

GFDL is the licence that Wikipedia uses, which is why I created the GFDL namespace after lunarpedia list voted in favor of it as one of three licences for Lunarpedia to use. GFDL is viral. Referencing it doesn't infect the source article, but using it for a base or including chunks beyond public-domainable quotations will turn non-GFDL content into GFDL content or cause a GFDL violation.

One ambiguity is if GFDL has the '150 contributor' problem where all 150 contributors to a given article must be credited if you're using it. My take on it is that it does (and I'm not the only one, although Wikimedia doesn't seem to be enforcing it that way and may occasionally be in violation of their own licence), thus the import tutorial (where theoretically at least all 150 contributors are listed in the article history and thus credited)... As a matter of fact, this IS one of the reasons I argued for public domain instead -- no copyright means no entanglements, although it seriously constrains our available selection of stock content to swipe and put into the main namespace. -- Strangelv 21:14, 7 January 2007 (PST)

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would it be possible on the bottom of the elements template to put the above/below element symbols above and below the symbol for the current element? -- Jarogers2001 00:30, 21 January 2007 (PST)

Please feel free to make changes and especially additions you find appropriate. --Strangelv 00:33, 21 January 2007 (PST)

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Dropdown Menus

I tried installing some CSS driven dropdown menus, they looked crappy, but I suppose we could have fixed that. But the main reason I removed them is that they only work properly with IE7, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 and maybe Safari. They do not work properly with any version Opera that I tried, nor do they work properly with IE5, 5.5 or 6. So, handy as they would have been, I removed them. Reinstalling them would not be difficult. You can get an idea how they look at Extension:CSS Dropdowns
-- Mdelaney 03:33, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

Help Breakdown

Quick Help

I think we should regard the ref tags help as quick help since anyone can use ref tags even when not logged in.

Not-So-Quick Help

This should be moved to a position below Specialized Help.

Specialized Help

The files in the specialized help section don't belong there, as most of their content is aimed at administrators.

Suitable candidates for Specialized Help would be "Using math functions" etc.

Beating your head off a wall Admin Help

That's the place for that nasty stuff with all the import help etc.

-- Mdelaney 16:16, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Spam

James, I recommend we disable anonymous logins completely, can you do this? We are only getting spam now, and I cannot keep up with it. Charles F. Radley 13:21, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

Hi James, I've returned to Marspedia after an extended absence (family, travel, sleeping...) to find you guys have had a bit of a battle on your hands with spambots - I will commence cleaning up the bits of damage I can find via the logs, but if you have anything specific you need me for, give me a shout. Headed back to the US this week, so I'll be more proactive trying to generate content and users all going well. All the best. Ioneill 01:21, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Hey James, thanks for the info on the botnet. I will do my best from this end to stem the flow of junk, but let me know if I can be of further assistance. Cheers :-) -- Ioneill 08:45, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I blocked a bunch of anonymous IP vandals and reverted their edits, everything since you last signed off, so caught up and current as of 6.30 am Pacific Time, Sat 3rd Nov 2007 Charles F. Radley 13:31, 3 November 2007 (UTC)

Hey James, Marspedia is getting hit again by a new barrage of spam over the last week. Looks like the blocking of IP addresses is reaching their expiry. Is there any way of seeing which IPs have already been blocked once in the past (apart from looking at the Special:Ipblocklist which only shows current blocks)? I assume this new lot of spamming is coming from the same IPs, in which case we can probably extend the block to 3 months (if not longer?) for repeat offenders.

Also, when a spambot drops it's trash on our doorstep, it seems that no matter what is inputted (like "bgfdbffd" - random rubbish), only a "1" is displayed on the page. I've noticed the same with Lunarpedia. Is this a funky new countermeasure you guys have put into place? Good stuff :-) -- Ioneill 14:51, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

No, it's about the only way this cretin can get his or her botnet to post to Lunarpedia or Marspedia at all. Unfortunately, this protection isn't in place on Exoplatz, Exodictionary, and Scientifiction.org. Mike was right in putting it up and I was wrong. Now if we can just find where we misplaced the passwords so we can get the other three wikis usable again (or even shut them down until we can). -- Strangelv 01:16, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that the other 3 sites were getting a hammering. Once we are in a position to get them active again, let me know, I'll try to help with the clean-up job where I can :-) -- Ioneill 13:16, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

Marspedia stuff

Putting Lunarpedia Main Page to Shame

Hi James, got a couple of questions for you...

• I've had a few questions recently from contributors to Marspedia concerning our front page - generally newcomers don't like the format and find it text-heavy. Are admins able to change what is displayed on the front page? Or is there a specific reason for the generic look across Marspedia, Lunarpedia etc. Some suggestions include:
  • Adding a featured article (in a similar way to wikipedia).
  • Separating the copyright info to a different page (I wouldn't be happy with this, but would be happy with a re-formatting effort).
  • Cutting down on text and making it more obvious for newcomers as to what we are doing.
• Is there a way for sysops to see who has registered with Marspedia?
• Likewise, can users access a page with reference to the sysops/admin staff so they can quickly get assistence?

No rush with the questions, but thought it best to put past you first. At last we are getting a lot of contributions from some great sources! Cheers for your time, hope you are well. Ian --Ioneill 03:05, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

As an admin you have the ability to do almost anything that can be done without server access, and that definitely includes changing the front page, which is only locked from general users because it's such a good target for attacks. If you have bureaucrat access, strike the 'almost' in the first sentence. Bureaucrats can turn people into admins and bureaucrats.

I fully trust you to make useful changes to the front page. Just note that your innovations may be plagiarized for use on Lunarpedia, et al. 8)

Who has accounts: go to the lower left corner and look at 'special pages' -- there's a mess of stuff there including a small number of special pages that only admins can go to. 'User List' isn't a restricted page -- you could go there as anonymous. Note that I know of no special means of sorting through that list, such as not showing banned accounts. You might want to look at http://mediawiki.org to see if you can find an extension that does what you're hoping to find that the simple list doesn't provide.

Feel free to set up some sort of help request page. Again, this might be something to duplicate on other wikis.

We should probably stop thanking each other, or that's going to eat up a large percentage of our time. 8)

--Strangelv 04:17, 18 November 2007 (UTC)

Lol, good stuff. Will have a play around and see what options we have for the front page. I'll probably be asking for advice when I get some time to commit to any big alterations to the front page. I'll try thinking up some nice gadgets useful to both Marspedia and Lunarpedia (plagiarize away!). Cheers ;-) -- Ioneill 03:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Hey James, I've had a play with the front page of Marspedia and would be interested to hear your thoughts. In particular the new "featured articles" section. This is along the same vein as wikipedia, but I will need to develop this further as there will be future issues with automation of templates. None of it has been taken from Wikipedia as their templates and system is a nightmare. Better to start at the beginning ;-) Most of the text remains on the front page, but I've highlighted the important bits to improve understanding for newcomers. Cheers -- Ioneill 08:55, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Your changes look beautiful.

If you want to change the protection level go ahead. I didn't know that non-admins could make changes to the Marspedia main page -- usually we can't get away with that as the first non-admins to do so historically want to vandalize it or promote something highly dubious and not at all on topic. The klunky, too big, and too wordy copyright notice could probably handle quite a bit of tinkering -- maybe be made smaller and at the same time larger text? It's kind of important for people to have that information, but it does eat up too much room. I look forward to whatever changes you and the other Marspedia contributors can come up with. --Strangelv 07:55, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks James, glad you are enjoying the progress... I'm just really happy that Marspedia has a small but dedicated group of contributors who are very motivated to add quality articles, given me the motivation to develop the site :) I will hold fire on changing the protection of the main page, but I will be keeping a close eye on what is added/changed. If there are signs of abuse, then I'll lock it down, but for now it seems OK. --Ioneill 19:07, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

It won't be the regular contributors or even anyone capable of making a constructive contribution who will force you to lock it down. It will be people and scripts who have no interest in Marspedia other than as a place to add pagerank or similar to their highly dubious sites, typically selling certian prescription pharmaceuticals, tones for ringing telephones, online gaming services, and the like. In other words the sort of nonsense that presently constitutes most of the content for Exoplatz and Scientifiction.org right now. Hopefully Mike can get the passwords so I can at least lock down new account creation for awhile to contain further damage. --Strangelv 00:23, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Keys Locked in Progress Module

Hi James, embarrassing problem here. I have blocked myself out of Marspedia. I didn't actually think I could do that! I try to unblock myself, it works, but then the wiki realises I was unblocked on a previously blocked IP address and locks me out again. Not entirely sure how i made the mistake, was just being too quick when blocking a spambot IP. Many thanks in advance. Will also message Mike D to see if he's near a computer. Happy Thanksgiving by the way. -- Ioneill 04:13, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Moral of this story? Be sure to have a buddy holding the keys for you when on walkabout ;) --Ioneill 20:21, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Featured Articles and stuff

Hi James. Hope you're having a great start to the New Year!

I'm going to make a concerted effort to get this "Featured Articles" section on Marspedia fully up and running throughout 2008. I think the system I am using makes logical sense (template-driven) and it takes minimal effort to maintain. On your travels, if you come across any nicely written articles you think worthy of being featured on the front page of Marspedia can you nominate them? Instructions can be found via the front page. Will be good to get your view on how this is built :-) I'm hoping that little (useful!) gadgets like this will keep visitors coming back for more as our contributor retention is really bad at the moment (apart from a dedicated couple!).

Also, I've noticed a lot of 500 server errors of late, have you noticed any problems?

All the best, Ioneill 15:11, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

Marspedia collaborative pages

Hi James,

Can you see any issues with having some pages on Marspedia dedicated to collaborative work between members of the Mars Foundation? We are trying to find ways to share and modify documents within the group and as we have a wiki already set up, it seems like a good plan to do some of our work on here (besides it will give some members experience of wikis who have so far not experienced it). Is there any way of selecting users who can modify pages (rather than simply restricting editing privilages to admin staff)? This isn't a necessity, but it would be interesting to know.

Hope you are well, -- Ioneill 00:02, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

That's the sort of thing the wikis are here for. I'm sure you can think of how to label and categorize the page in progress. 8)

Creating a special group for permissions to edit... I believe that requires hacking on LocalSettings.php, and I must admit that I grabbed some influenza as a souvenir from the Ron Paul rally at UNT on Monday... -- Strangelv 00:13, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

Ouch, hope you get better soon... and stay away from those Ron Paul supporters, sounds like they're contagious! I'm sure we can do without the special group permissions for now, Bruce was just concerned about non-group members changing things they shouldn't... but we're a nice bunch here, I can't see that being a problem. Cheers, and good luck with the flu -- Ioneill 02:53, 23 February 2008 (UTC)

captcha installation

Hi James, can you please help with this? --Rfc 09:13, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Hi again, there are new bot attacks in both Lunarpedia and Marspedia, and I wonder whether it is less work to install the new captcha trigger or to revert the bot's edits over and over. As fas as I understand you are the only person keeping the passwords for php access. It should take only a few minutes to insert the green parts:

1. Logon to the machine where the wikimedia software is running.
2. Find the files ConfirmEdit.php, ConfirmEdit.i18n.php, ConfirmEdit_body.php.
3. Be sure the contents of the files match.
4. Create a backup copy of the files.
5. Insert the green parts using vi or prepare the files on your PC and ftp them.
6. Check the effect. If you try to change the first letter in a page a captcha should pop up on clicking the "save page" button.

That should be all. You can count on my assistance, if needed. Cheers! -- Rfc 10:23, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, I don't have them. They're all in a text file on a hard drive that may be complete toast that can only run on a specific notebook of mine that may also be complete toast. Dana Carson and Mike Delaney both have these passwords last I checked, however. -- Strangelv 10:41, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I have left a message on their talk pages. You seem to have some doubt regarding the usefullness or the integrity of this captcha thing. If you are suspicious about me because I am not telling my real name I can understand this. Alteration of the software may put the whole system at risk, and I would not let an anonymous user do such a think, nor would I insert any code as long as I have the slightest doubt on its integrity. Reverting on the other hand is definitely safer, and is actually not so much work. Okay, I'm leaving the decision to you and will no longer nudge. Have a good weekend! -- Rfc 13:04, 8 February 2008 (UTC)

I'm not suspicious of you at all becouse of your anonymity. I'm very pro-anonymous here, thus my insistence on allowing minimal inconveniences for accountless anonymous contributions. The problem is that I don't have a lot of experience under the hood, and have'nt even had the passwords for when I've felt adventurous enough to try. As you can tell from my fumble yesterday, I can mess up when I'm too tired -- sorry about that. O_O Hopefully you haven't had residual effects from that, as Dr O'Neill had when he accidentally banned himself a couple of months ago (even after I unbanned him, he couldn't contribute without logging in).

Good news: Mike found the login information and got it to me and Dana. Trying your suggestion is in the queue, but there's a lot of stuff to deal with first -- you might easily guess what some of these other things are -- many are crises that have been getting worse and worse for months. 8\ Mike is starting with upgrading the wikis to a newer version of MediaWiki. -- Strangelv 04:54, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

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Ok, all wikis updated from 1.10.1 to 1.11.0, all wikis now have captchas, all captcha extensions use the mod suggested by Rfc. Strangelv will not be happy with me, I have set the captchas as follows:

$wgCaptchaTriggers['edit']          = true;  // Would check on every edit
$wgCaptchaTriggers['create']        = true;  // Check on page creation.
$wgCaptchaTriggers['addurl']        = true;  // Check on edits that add URLs
$wgCaptchaTriggers['gibberish']     = true;  // Check gibberish
$wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true;  // Special:Userlogin&type=signup
$wgCaptchaTriggers['badlogin']      = true;  // Special:Userlogin after failure

Remember, we still allow anonymous editing, as long as anon is willing to enter a few letters in a field.
I haven't decided whether to go with a manual upgrade to 1.11.1 as this would not show up in the Dreamhost control panel. But I am not repeat not the only one capable of performing that update.

Next: The Cleanup!

-- Mdelaney 23:27, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

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Oh, this is hard! No bot will be able to overcom this barrier. Unfortunately, the trigger "$wgCaptchaTriggers['edit'] = true;" pops up the captcha on every edit, making the create, addurl and giggerish trigger effectless. So, we can not test the gibberish trigger. How about setting the triggers as follows:

$wgCaptchaTriggers['edit']          = false;  // Would check on every edit
$wgCaptchaTriggers['create']        = false;  // Check on page creation.
$wgCaptchaTriggers['addurl']        = true;  // Check on edits that add URLs
$wgCaptchaTriggers['gibberish']     = true;  // Check gibberish
$wgCaptchaTriggers['createaccount'] = true;  // Special:Userlogin&type=signup
$wgCaptchaTriggers['badlogin']      = true;  // Special:Userlogin after failure

This is exactly as it was before plus the gibberish trigger. Let's start with one of the wikis for testing. The gibberish trigger has not been tested, yet.

-- Rfc 10:28, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

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I'm going to leave it as is for a couple of days so the spambot masters get the message that they can no longer spam us. We are thinking of adding an extra user level however, this would be similar to flagging a user as unmoderated in a forum. That way anyone with a decent track record can bypass the captchas while anonymous users and new users would still be required to enter captcha codes. In the interim, we still have a lot of cleaning up to do. In fact we're going to restore two of the wikis to their state as of September 25th 2007 since those wikis have had no legitimate input since before that date and restoring to that point eliminates all the bogus user accounts.

Basically we never lost control of Lunarpedia and Marspedia, and Exoplatz wasn't too hard to clean up. But Exodictionary and Scientifiction got hit really hard, the SQL backup for the Scientifiction databse swelled to almost 408 MB. (Yes, that's four hundred and eight mega bytes)

We'll probably set the first two triggers to 'false' before the weekend.

-- Mdelaney 13:01, 11 February 2008 (UTC)

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Front Page

Looking Good! I posted a bulletin about the change over at http://groups.myspace.com/lunarbase -- Jarogers2001 18:18, 17 May 2008 (UTC)

Sintered regolith is ready for a featured spot. Jarogers2001 06:13, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

Category for deletion on Marspedia: Category:MarsDrive

Hi James, I have detected a counterproductive category on Marspedia, combined with a violation of GNU Free Document License. And I have nominated this category on the Deletion page. Can you please have a look and, if you agree, delete the category? Thanks... -- Rfc 20:28, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Abuse of Lunarpedia

• "User:349 buy synthroid" is a scam that must be removed immediately.--Farred 19:14, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for flagging my attention. This attacker has also hit other space wikis as well as lpedia.org; let me check the other space wikis not hit as of last time I checked... -- Strangelv 19:45, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

• Same song, verses 2 & 3: "User:107 buy starlix" and "User:543 buy stress gum"--Farred 11:27, 29 June 2009 (UTC)