Angband Live and Wiki Discussion

[Gwarl]

I'm not sure where to put this thread so I'll leave it here;

I've set up a new forum at https://forum.angband.live/ for discussion of that site and the wiki. I don't intend to replace angband.oook.cz just yet, not least because of the ladder but there are long term plans to consolidate angband's web presence further.

[takkaria]

Could I suggest looking at Discourse instead of NodeBB? IMO it's the best piece of forum software out there.

[Gwarl]

I quite like NodeBB actually. At least it is an improvement on phpBB.

I was persuaded to change the wiki software we were using, but NodeBB seems fit for purpose.

"The server side of Discourse is Ruby on Rails backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache."

Please no more stacks just getting mariadb and php working for the wiki was bad enough.

[takkaria]

"The server side of Discourse is Ruby on Rails backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache."

Please no more stacks just getting mariadb and php working for the wiki was bad enough.

I mean, doesn't NodeBB require MongoDB? It's another database engine, whatever you use. Running Discourse in Docker is pretty straightforward and is one thing I do for one of my clients. But I understand if you don't want to do that, technology sucks.

Anyway, it was worth trying. Discourse is the most highly usable bit of forum software I've ever used. It has great defaults (I have to bump up the text size in the browser with nodebb to not hurt my eyes) and really well designed UI that gets out of your way. It also doesn't let you downvote which I think is really great for building a healthy community. I'll stop now

[DavidMedley]

I don't understand... Why make another forum? Will whomever runs this one be shutting it down, or will they both continue to exist?

I'll write a script to parse/upload monster.txt (including base) into the Wiki by Feb 14.

[Gwarl]

They will both continue to exist. Eventually I will email Pav asking for the ladder code/database and eat this. But this forum doesn't have sections for angband live or the angband wiki so I made one that does.

[DavidMedley]

I don't know how to put the output data into Mediawiki. Anyone who could point me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

[DavidMedley]

I've written a Perl script that parses monster.txt and monster_base.txt. I don't think I have Wiki database access yet to add it to the new wiki. I created a really basic page on the wiki here:

https://wiki.angband.live/index.php/Creature_template

My current idea is to generate a new page for each monster and fill that "statblock" table with the data. Then people can edit all around the statblock - tips and tricks, Tolkien history, whatever - and when the data changes I can replace the statblock and leave everything else untouched. I think we'll want a little drop-down menu to display statblocks from different versions but I haven't gotten that far. It would be handy, I *think*, to have identically named monsters from similar *bands share a page as well, but that's undecided.

If anyone has ideas how to liven up that template, that'd be awesome. For example, if we're legally allowed we could put Shockbolt's icon up there. But I don't know off-hand how to take the big image of all the tiles and turn it into one image for each tile and name it appropriately. But I know that professionals in image manipulation could do it in an hour or less. And we'll need to display what *band(s) this monster is found in. Also, not all info is equally important, so we'd probably want Depth (for example) displayed prominently.

[Sideways]

I've written a Perl script that parses monster.txt and monster_base.txt. I don't think I have Wiki database access yet to add it to the new wiki. I created a really basic page on the wiki here:

https://wiki.angband.live/index.php/Creature_template

My current idea is to generate a new page for each monster and fill that "statblock" table with the data.

I suggested pretty much that a couple weeks ago, and Gwarl said he wanted to fill a database with the data and have the wiki pages call the database (which would require some hackery unless the database itself was on the wiki - but I assumed that was your and Gwarl's problem).

Maybe you can convince him this approach is better and no hackery is needed

--

That's not (yet) an actual wiki template, in that you can't call it with the values as parameters and get a table/infobox as output. I feel like the top row should be the creature's name and default symbol on a black background. I'll have more time for wiki things once 7.1.liquorice is up, which will take another couple days.

Ultimately, I think it would be cool if every monster page just had a {{monster data}} template that didn't need any other input... whether it pulled the data from an on-wiki or off-wiki source. That way, it would never need replacing at all, even when the underlying data was updated. But maybe I'm dreaming too big.

You can read up on MediaWiki bots at e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Creating_a_bot, though it wouldn't surprise me if Gwarl has some idea that bypasses traditional bots, it would be a very Gwarl thing. I'm not very familiar with the bot side of wikis or with AutoWikiBrowser, maybe I'll need to give it a look myself.