User talk:Afker

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Section 0
Tim Starling is working on the interwiki template system today, so you might see some bugs like the one you reported. Hopefully they'll be working again soon. You might want to subscribe to the mailing list to get updates on bug fixes and other Wikicities news. Angela (talk) 06:58, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

Hello. I've added a Sitenotice since this wiki is currently getting a lot of visits from Japan so I wanted to make sure that Japanese users would be able to find other wikis if they couldn't read this English one. Angela talk 04:35, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks Angela. Is there an easy way to check how many of the Japanese visitors actually look beyong the first few pages?  I know this wiki is linked to from a Japanese portal that doesn't exactly explain the link is to an English site... -Afker 04:49, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Dungeons & Dolls Images
I'm aware that AliceSoft has said no images of their games should be placed inside the Wiki unless the image itself is on their page as well, but I was wondering something...

I've been taking pictures of every girl in Dungeons & Dolls (about 80% done) and I was wondering if I could off-link to, say... My Photobucket account where they would all be. Would that still be in violation of AliceSoft's terms? -GrayFox2510 27 January, 2007.


 * Your photobucket account would be in violation of AliceSoft's terms, and I would consider linking to it also as a violation. I would advise using "imitations", some examples can be found in AliceSoftWiki:Policy (and it only took 10 minutes for me to make most of them). -Afker 03:27, 30 January 2007 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I did see about the imitations, but I think it wouldn't be the same. Oh well, at least I'll have a collection of them for if I ever feel nostalgic. Too bad I can't really show them off through. Thanks for the answer however. -GrayFox2510 30 January 2007

About Putting Links
Hi, thanks for reminding me. I'm still pretty new to Wikis so I'm sorry that I've somehow broken the wiki rules when I don't realize. What I am trying to do is just to encourage more collaboration among the gaming communities, by putting game info's link on good wikis, and putting links to good wiki on game info. (AliceSoft's link is on Gameinfo's mainpage.) My approach may be a bit wrong this time, so let's promote our gaming community together in a good way! =) Also, thanks for visiting and editting for GameInfo, I hope our link on GameInfo will add visitors to AliceSoft too. --Eric 20:43, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

GalZoo Island Omake Dungeon
Well, I can try revising it out of memory. Truth be told, I didn't really feel like going through that place again. Plus, I've already uninstalled (or more like simply deleted since there are no registry records) the game because I needed the space for some other things. Though then again, there's really nothing too hard about that dungeon aside from getting the tokens and fighting the... weird bosses that show up. -GrayFox2510 March 05, 2007.

WGEP
Your comment on Anime:Animepedia talk:Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project was interesting. I don't feel that we're going to change the name further anymore. ACG is a Asian coined word, but it's not recognized in the Western world where most of the WGEP's readers come from. Plus technically it would mean we're using an abbreviation within an abbreviation. WACGP for the abbreviated form, Wikia ACG Project supposedly would be a proper name, but the real full name would be Wikia Animation, Comics, and Games Project. And because the readers are mostly westerners the Games part would get confused with other types of games which are under the watch of Wikia's Gaming Hub. And the biggest reason... T_T It's a hellofalotta work to change the name. I changed it from Wikia Anime Project to Wikia Graphical Entertainment Project, and there was so much work involved in that, even using Bots to take out most of the work there are still remnants of the old name left over.
 * As for the Alice Soft Wiki joining the WGEP, that sounds interesting. Have you familiarized yourself with the various things that happen to wiki which join the project? Pages with info on that can be seen at What will happen? and Extended information. The first thing I scanned were your templates. Once the AutoTemplate bot runs, your Template:Disambig, Template:PD, and Template:Stub will be overridden. And Template:GFDL will become useless (I can help with any migrating you want; Bots handle that like pie). So you should check over Anime:Template:Disambig, Anime:Template:PD, Anime:Template:Stub, and Anime:Template:FS. I'd be interested in learning a bit of the Alice Soft Wiki's policies and positions on various things to compare them with the WGEP's. I was at some point considering creating a bot to regenerate the sidebar (because the sidebar is used to link back to the WGEP, and at times new Top-Level wiki are added), considering the extra links would you be comfortable adding new links using a special type of format? Most likely it'll be done by adding a few subpages to MediaWiki:Sidebar which the bot will read to decide what to add in addition to the standard things.
 * One of the things which deterred me from AliceSoft, other than the Gaming focus was the Japanese. How much more Japanese is used in the general areas of the site? I see something even in the site notice, but I don't know what it means. The Visual Novel and Animanga Related Games section of the WGEP was a unofficial idea, not a planned phase. So it can actually come in at any point. In fact, it might make the MMKB a little less opposed to joining.

On another note, I saw your stuff on Image Use. But from my memory you can at least use a few screenshots from the games under Fair use laws. Of course, there would be a few limitations, but generally Fair use laws are geared with free documentation in mind. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 13, 2007 @ 20:41 (UTC)
 * I realize it won't work for much of the interface. But, using fair use you could probably use some box art, and screenshots of general areas of the games on the individual Game's main articles. It would be good for giving people a good look at what the game is actually like. On another note about re-drawing the interfaces. If you had your readers use SVG and draw those images in an editor like Inkscape, the quality of those images would be improved, and you could scale them up. ~Dantman -local (talk&#124;local) May 13, 2007 @ 21:01 (UTC)


 * In terms of ACG, I was mostly using it as a springboard to make the connection that AliceSoftWiki's focus would be highly related to WGEP. Your arguments against renaming makes perfect sense, and I respect that (-:
 * Most AliceSoft games are not actually "Visual Novel and Animanga Related Games", unless you count having a stereotypical "Anime art style" as being "Animanga related". And if simply having a stereotypical "anime art style" is sufficient to being considered an animanga-related game, then the "Visual Novel" part of the section name probalby should be deleted for redundency and dilution of focus.
 * Thanks for the headsup about the template conflicts. I'm fine with using Animepedia's version of the templates, and also fine with our GDFL template being useless.
 * For the sidebar, as long as I can keep the custom links we currently have, I don't mind the exact formatting or addition of new links.
 * The usage of Japanese:
 * Japanse site notice - Angela added it for us originally, and I modified it slightly. It currently says "Welcome to wikia!  For all Japanese wiki content, click here".  Angela added it because supposedly we are getting quite a bit of traffic from Japan (our site is listed on one of the major Japanese PC game walkthrough portals).
 * On the main page - The Japanese paragraph on the main page says "AliceSoftWiki is a wiki for all the fans that support Japanese (although it's currently only in English). It is not the AliceSoft's home page.  For AliceSoft's home page, click here."
 * Our Template:Box and Template:Game also uses Japanese. They display the English name, the Japanese name (in Japanese), and the romanization of the Japanese name, of various people/places/events/games etc.  Our Games article also shows the games' Japanese titles alongside our translated English names.
 * Sengoku Rance:Version history currently has quite a bit of untranslated Japanese text. Those are just placeholders until I (or someone else) get to translating them into English.
 * If there are any that I forgot about, please let me know. In general, this is an English content wiki.  Usage of Japanese is limited to notate the original Japanese term, or non-content notices for Japanese users (that are unnecessary for English users).
 * For image use, I intentionally chose a policy stricter than Fair Use, because the AliceSoftWiki is more as a fan wiki then the average "documentation wiki", and as an overzealous fan I would like to respect what AliceSoft wishes of us. That said, it is something that only applies to the AliceSoftWiki, and I do not intend to impose such limitations on any AliceSoft-related article on the main WGEP wiki (I assume for each game it'd have a general article on the WGEP wiki).  Is letting AliceSoftWiki keeping its existing policy while having the main WGEP fairuse anything AliceSoft-related an arrangement that is acceptable to you, or do you believe that the AliceSoftWiki should allow any fairuse image in order to be part of the WGEP?
 * For naming policies, we currently adopt a "plain-text friendly" convention towards romanizing Japanese names. That means where wikipedia uses "ō" we tend to use "ou".  Exceptions include things like "Tokyo" (Wikipedia doesn't use "Tōkyō" as their article name; and we probably won't use "Toukyou" if we need an article for that, unless it's something that happens to have the same pronouncation, but is not actually the current capital of Japan).  In the end, as long as redirect works, I don't particularily care about the exact naming convention.
 * Importing from wikipedia
 * Atlach-Nacha is an article that is imported from Wikipedia. For attribution, I mentioned wikipedia and provided the perma-link to the version that I exported from Wikipedia.  I'd be happy to have the article changed to whatever format WGEP requires for proper attribution to Wikipedia.
 * Aside from Atlach-Nacha, I don't really see any other article being imported from Wikipedia. If there happens to be a wikipedia article of decent quality on something AliceSoft-related, I'd be happy to import it.  But generally speaking I can type up an article from scratch better than what's currently on Wikipedia (with respect to AliceSoft-related topics).  So in general, I would prefer to be able to bypass the "when creating a new article, import what Wikipedia has first" policy.  Of course I can hack around it by simply import the wikipedia article, then do a complete rewrite (keeping the attribution which will become meaningless), so it's not too big an issue for me.
 * Those are all the issues I can think of right now. -Afker 21:43, 13 May 2007 (UTC)

For centralization, this conversation is being continued on AliceSoftWiki talk:WGEP

Gaming Hub
Hi Afker, I wanted to introduce myself. I've been working at Wikia for about 6 months working on a variety of marketing and business projects, but as of last week I am totally focused on growing our gaming communities. I think its great that you are asking the communities to link to the new gaming hub! I hope this will start to create a larger gaming community and editors will start editing multiple game wikis. We are also going to start to use the spotlight across Wikia to promote gaming wikis. Jimmy is doing an interview on G4 Network tonight to promote the gaming wikis so hopefully we will see a traffic bump from that too! Since you are obviously a passionate gamer and very knowledgeable I would love to get your ideas on other ways to grow existing and attract new gaming wikis angies (talk) 20:35, 22 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Some thoughts:
 * I only sent out a general email over the mailinglist, which many people may not have read (or may not be on the mailing list). I'd suggest go to each gaming-related wiki, post on ther MediaWiki talk:Sidebar and/or Talk:Community Portal about adding the gaming hub to the profile.  Then after a few days, have wikia staff add the gaming hub to the sidebar of gaming wikis that were inactive/apathetic (for the wikis that discussed it and decided against it, respect their choices).
 * Alternate use of the wikia blogs - Right now the wikia blogs is only some low priority experimental tech toy to see if certain wikias can gain exposure via various blog-spiders. However, I see it as having potential to help develop a sense of higher-order community.  By letting members of the community feature articles from their side, and if we can let the gaming blog appear in the bottom of the gaming wikis (similar to how the Magazine wikias have RSS feed of content from other magazines, except I would suggest something that take up much less space), that can help encourage users to participate in other gaming wikis, or show them how other wikis structure their articles (and give them ideas on how to improve their own wikis).
 * Unfortunate wikia's current tech priority seems to be the new skin, and work on the blog is having lower priority. This affects which wikis actually can publish to the blog.
 * Another issue is that right now the Gaming blog is effectively taken over by fan fictions from the Earthen Ring Wiki. Fan fictions itself isn't a bad thing, but when other sites try to come up with an article from their own gaming wiki (which isn't a fan-fiction wiki, but a game-documentation wiki), it might skew the view of "what is appropriate" or "what is effective" to put on the gaming blog, and have an discouraging effect on other gaming-wikis to show case their feature articles on the blog at all.  Thus I would suggest that fan fiction articles go on some "Creativity Blog" instead of the Gaming Blog.  That might entail changing the blog association of Earthern Ring Wiki from Gaming to Creativity, or allow wikis to be a member of multiple blogs where they can choose which blog to publish about which article (as opposed to publishing in all the blogs they are associated with).
 * GameInfo needs a more active community to help establish itself as a focal point in the greater wikia gaming community. The hub on central is nice and useful and all, but a one-page hub isn't capable of building the greater community. We need an active community at GameInfo to be the nexus that cares about an inter-game meta-community, and that will attempt to keep wikis of individual games connected.  GameInfo needs to establish enough of a reputation so that, if a particular game doesn't have its own wiki on Wikia, it would actually occur to a user to look on GameInfo and build upon the content already there (either by adding to GameInfo, or if the info has grown enough to split that entire section into a new wikia), instead of simply requesting and creating a new wiki from scratch.
 * Right now the Gaming hub seems to say that if a game "Foo" doesn't have a wiki, I ought to just request one, suggesting that there's nowhere else on Wikia that would have information on the game "Foo" (which effectively further cripples GameInfo from what it already suffers due to lack of activity, IMHO).
 * Unfortunately I lack time and concrete vision to actively take a part in helping GameInfo (my hands are already full with respect to my own wiki and some other stuff), but if an overall greater gaming community is to succeed on Wikia, I believe GameInfo needs to be active and successful.
 * -Afker 02:48, 23 May 2007 (UTC)

Wow, these are some great ideas. I really like your idea about using blogs more. I am going to spend some time thinking about that. I just submitted a request to engineering to enable the wiki to blog to all the Gaming wikis. Regarding GameInfo, I agree with you completely. We are actually talking about potentially using the MainPage of gameinfo as the hubpage. I don't actually get the feeling that any of the admins (Garret or Furrykef) are active anymore. Another idea we had was to merge gameinfo with gaming.wikia. They both seem to have a similar mission, and gaming.wikia community has been growing. Thoughts? angies (talk) 16:15, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Merging GameInfo into Gaming is a possibliity, though that idea has its own sets of issues:
 * The Magazine's system needs to be more transparent, so it doesn't feel like sites run by the NY staff who are too busy to do much with it. How do articles get promoted to "popular articles"?  It seems the staff have sole power over it, and if they are too buzy, new articles gotta wait forever to become "popular", by when it may be out of date.
 * Articles become promoted based on the number of votes/comments the article receives and if it achieves the required number in 24 hours; after 24 hours, the score goes up. Votes are worth one point; comments by logged-in users are worth .25 points (with only one comment per use counting toward the score).  The only power the NY guys have is controlling how many votes/comments it takes to get promoted.  The reason the new articles have "taken forever" recently is because the amount of votes was set too high. But we are happy to lower it and also allow the community to determine what the requisite number of votes/comments should be, and are trying to make it so admins can set the publish score. --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

The mazazine skin is too specialized, and doesn't allow much customization via MediaWiki: namespace. I've tried using Javascript to deal with it (see http://gaming.wikia.com/index.php?title=Help_test_layout_customizer%21 ), but I can't figure out how to make it work with Opera.
 * We're trying to make the site a lot more friendly to those who aren't familiar with MediaWiki, and the skin is the best tool with which to do that.  Right now, building a skin that allows for user customization is really time consuming, so basically, we ask that you bare with us as we improve those services.  It may be a long while, though, as we're still focused on adding features into the skin. --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

The current layout of Gaming, IMHO, contributed to the flood of consol fanboy flame wars that plagued the beginning of Gaming.wikia's launch. And now after the immature children have moved elsewhere to flame, what's left is a remanent band of contributors trying to revitalize the site, but their effort hampered due to a number of things needing staff intervention which ordinary sysops lack power to do (or unconfindent whether they should do it or not, since the site feels like it's being run/owned by the staff).


 * The redesigned front page and general layout (which you've been helping me with and will be up next week) should fix that. Thanks for giving me advice on how it should look. We're also going to re-do the green menu bar so it is not focusing on specific consols --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

I've tried to see what I can do by requesting my own gaming-related openserving, hoping with shared content but my own frontend I might be able to help with some stuff, but my openserving request still hasn't gone through. The number of contributors may be growing (counting after the fanboys left), but I don't see much of a community on Gaming. I believe the entire Gaming.wikia need a major structural overhaul (the skin, main page design, structure/organization of articles), and let contributors feel they have more power on the wiki (or alternately, the staff would need to put in significantly more time dealing with the structural issues of the site), before it can really rise out of the ashes of the consol fanboy flamewars and develope a general gaming community.
 * We're hoping that the redesigned front page and general layout, combined with the more social networking tools that you've already seen, will help foster a community. About the User: page move; well, you can still use the bottom of the User: page instead of UserWiki: -- that's for you and the rest of the gaming.wikia community to decide.  We're just trying to brainstorm options. --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Magazine articles (opinions, reviews, news) ought to be clearly separated from the game articles (an information page about a game, a game or game series' mini wiki). Ideally I would like the magazine articles be tossed into a different namespace, however that will probably break a multitude of things with respect to Openserving's content sharing system, so it will probably have to be the the game articles that get tossed into a "Games" or "GamingWiki" namespace (not to be confused with the "Gaming" namespace for site stuff... which means it will be very confusing).
 * Different namespace causes all sorts of problems from an otisder's perspective, and honestly, have proven unnecessary on ArmchairGM. For those who aren't familiar with MediaWiki, they're more trouble than they're worth.  Opinions and other articles that require a set-off are flagged by the vote box appended to it.  So it's not a terribly bad problem. --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)

Yep, hear you on this and agree. I also shared your comments with Dan/Rob. They are working on a re-design (which I believe you are helping with) and are planning to spend a lot more time on the gaming.wikia going forward (as gaming in a top focus for Wikia right now). I think they do want community to have more active involvement (like they do on armchairgm) so I would encourage you to share these concerns with Rob. I think you will find him very open to suggestions you have about developing a productive community


 * As for the idea of putting the gaming hub on GameInfo's main page, I also have some thoughts:
 * Things like the Earthern Ring Wiki and the Halo Fannon don't really provide any information about the game. They are fan creations derivied from games.  As such, they should have less or no prominence on the main page of GameInfo.
 * GameInfo should have a basic info page even for games that have their own wikis. Some gaming-wikis may make the assumption that any visitor to their wiki would already know the general information about the game.  If the hub is to be on GameInfo's main page, then it shouldn't be linking directly to individual gaming wikis, but rather to GameInfo's own information page about the game, from where a prominent link to the gaming wiki is provided (except for other general wikis such as CheatBase etc that'd still have direct link from the GameInfo main page).  This also makes mini-wikis (on GameInfo or elsewhere) more locatable in general.  Games that make the GameInfo main page hub would be the ones that have its own wiki or mini-wiki somewhere (but the link on the main page hub would go to GameInfo's general information page on that game).  Thus, on the main page there's be a link to Halo, and then Halo's page would have a prominent link to Halopedia and another link to the Halo fannon.

If we can work out the issues you described above I think this can all happen gaming.wikia, where each game will have its own "snap shot" page linking to its game-specific wiki (where there is one). I would propose banding these two small (somewhat inactive) communities together, gameinfo/gaming.wikia, to make something bigger/better using the great tools the NYC guys have created. Whatcha think? angies (talk) 22:32, 1 June 2007 (UTC) 17:22, 31 May 2007 (UTC)


 * -Afker 23:06, 23 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Akfer. I agree with you about the blogs. I'd love to see them used more widely once we've fixed the remaining bugs in them, and I'll talk to Earthen Ring about which blog might be more suitable for their content. Features on gaming.wikia like the "popular articles" section can be changed by any admin. We're happy to make active editors into admins so they can help with these features - it's definitely not a staff-only thing. Whilst the NY team got the wiki started, it's like any Wikia site and relies on the community to maintain and develop it after that point. There is a division between the magazine and "library" content, but perhaps we need to make that clearer. It relies on page templates rather than namespaces, but there should still be a way we can make it clear which section of the site you're on. Angela talk

Hi Afker, I responded to all your concerns about gaming.wikia. See above (I wrote my response under each individual concern). We want you to lead the community at gaming.wikia so that we can focus on helping the wikia Gaming community at large grow... taking the above responses into consideration, what do you need from us? --Roblefko 19:55, 1 June 2007 (UTC)


 * After you guys are done with the social networking stuff and new features, and move on to the interface, first work on making the sidebar customizable by sysops via MW messages. Once that works and is rolled out, then worry about individual user customizability. (-:
 * I do acknowledge the issue with namespaces. My primary concern as been that when looking at Sitescout and RecentChanges, it can be hard to tell whether an article is a Magazine article or a game information article.  With RecentChanges, it's actually doable via Special:Recentchangeslinked/(category), in which case I'd like to be able to place those links on the interface somewhere via Javascript.
 * Can the sitewide global javascript, MediaWiki:Common.js be enabled? That would give me (and other sysops) the power to modify the interface to improve user experience without you guys' intervention.
 * I understand for some Openservings, there is a concept of "Ownership" (which doesn't, or at least isn't supposed to, exist on normal wikias), and Ownership supposedly gives the user more power than a typical sysop. A while ago I've request an openserving (game-related, meant to share content with Gaming.wikia), partly to see what abilities being an "Owner" would give me, and thus to see whether it would be useful for me to ask for those abilities on Gaming.wikia itself.  Is the "Owership" tied to the Bureaucrat flag?  Or is it a separate user status thing?  What are its capabilities beyond what sysops and bureaucrats can do on a typical MediaWiki installation?
 * I feel my vision and imagination are still clouded by the legacy of the "old" (current) site structure/interface. Lack of vision tends to increase skepticism.  Hopefully as the structure/interface improves, I'll be able to see more and more. -Afker 00:26, 2 June 2007 (UTC)

DaiBanchou Characters
Hey, was thinking about making a guide in here for DaiBanchou (I don't think too many play the game still, but since I was doing this for me anyway, might as well put it up here for others to see if the need arises). Anyway, I noticed there are two sections related to characters in DaiBanchou, one for "conquest" and the other for "stats".

The layout I had in mind included both stats and all of the stars requirements along with all other sorts of things together, so I was wondering if it was ok to "combine" both sections.

I probably won't upload much until I have it done. I'm using the help of Cinderwood from HongFire (well, the guide he started), so I suppose it shouldn't take me too much. -GrayFox2510 3.29, 20 October 2007 (GMT-6)