User talk:Pharap

Journal Date Template Update Proposal

.Sora Pharap,

The new Riven remake apparently has Gehn writing dates with D'ni numerals, and I was wondering if it would be possible to update the journal date template with support for displaying itself using such for transcriptions' sake, perhaps with a flag of some kind to toggle how the date's displayed. (Example)

Additionally, one date in one of Gehn's journals from the 1997 version of Riven breaks the template, as its listed yahr value is 30. Not sure if this requires an update or an exception or what.

Since I didn't see the journal date template in your proposals article, nor do I see your username in the Cyan or GoA Discord servers, I decided to populate your talk page with this instead to contact you- Though I've heard that some users (Korov'ev) haven't been able to edit their talk pages, so you might not be able to reply here.

ElTipejoLoco (talk) 20:06, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

.Sora

Firstly, I'd like to say that I'm glad to see an attempt is being made to keep the documentation of the journals and documents from the new game separate from the old one. I've not had an opportunity to express an opinion on the matter before, but that's a practice I am in favour of. (Besides which, there is at least one precedence for it.)

Adding support to the {{journal date}} template for displaying the date in D'ni would be quite tricky to do purely in wikitext. It might be possible using a large switch to cover as many character combinations as possible, but I'd have to test to be sure.

I think switching between D'ni and arabic numerals based on a parameter might potentially end up making the template a bit unwieldy (it's already a sea of curly braces), but I'll have a look to see if I can manage it - I know in theory what I'd have to do, it's just that wikitext templates are awkward to read and edit.

Ultimately I suspect it would probably be easier (and probably better) to do it via a Lua module, but I'm reluctant to do that because nobody has given me permission and I don't want to go treading on anyone's toes. (In hindsight I wish I'd asked Alahmnat earlier in the year during the brief time I actually managed to get in contact with them.)

In the meantime, it's best to just focus on getting the dates documented. Accurate information is more important than how it's presented in the article. As long as they're in a format that makes it easy to discern what the date is supposed to be, they can be reformatted/annotated at a later date.

Regarding the error, I purposely made those templates produce an error when an incorrect value is given with the idea that it would help prevent people passing incorrect dates. Canonically there are only ever 29 yahrtee in each vailee (as attested on the DRC's timekeeping flyer, as well as the relevant article), so the fact Gehn's date includes a yahr of 30 is actually a mistake on Cyan's part.

So now we've got the conundrum of whether it's better to just allow incorrect dates or whether to handle that date specially...

It would be interesting to know if the date in the 2024 game contains the same mistake or whether it's been corrected. If it's been corrected in the new version, it might be better to use a {{ref sic}} on it to establish it as a mistake. If there's still a need (or want) to have it provided with the {{journal date}} formatting alongside the {{ref sic}}, then that would probably best be done just after the incorrect date (probably in square brackets, as per {{sic}}).

If the date hasn't been corrected in the new one, then the choice is either to remove the date checking (replace {{checked yahr| {{{3| {{{yahr| }}} }}} }} with just {{{3| {{{yahr| }}} }}}) or just manually insert what the template would have resolved to without the error message (which is something like {{hover text| {{abbreviated hahr|87|suffix=yes}} {{vailee name|7}} 30 | [[{{abbreviated hahr|87}} DE|87]].7.30}} → 87.7.30)

Incidentally, I had been intending to come back to do more work with the references, but several things have got in my way...

Firstly, there were quite a few days earlier in the month where the wiki would just stop accepting edits - it kept failing with an error of some kind. (I think it was a database error, but I didn't keep a copy of any of the error messages since there was nothing I could do about it - it's the sort of thing I would presume only an admin could fix.) The issue seems to have resolved itself more recently, but I neglected to make a proper note of the edits I had been intending to make, so I likely forgot I hadn't got around to doing Gehn's personal journal and Atrus's Exile journal (which is a shame because Exile is one of my favourites).

Secondly, I've spent most of the last week suffering from a cold, so aside from one day where I spent an hour or so doing a bulk edit on the guild pages, I haven't been around here much.

Anyway, I didn't put the journal date template in my proposals because I was under the impression that Korov'ev was the only other person who had ever read my proposals, and thus there wasn't really any point bothering to write another. I originally made those proposals because I had been hoping to get the attention of someone 'official' to ask for proper permission rather tham just barging in and doing as I pleased, but a few weeks ago, on a whim, I ended up saying 'sod it' and just implementing them anyway, hoping that whenever someone 'official' does actually find out about them they'll approve anyway. (A bit of Hopperian "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission".)

As for Discord, I don't use it. I also tend to avoid most social media sites. I do however visit /r/myst on Reddit quite frequently. I'm also happy to reply to my talk page, but as you can see, you're the first person to ever use it.

(Incidentally, you're only the fourth person I've spoken to here after Korov'ev, Talashar, and (briefly) Alahmnat. I kind of feel that this place could do with something like Wikipedia's 'village pump', but perhaps there aren't enough active users to justify it?)

Hopefully that's everything. As I say, I'll have a go at trying to devise a way to get the template to render D'ni numerals when I find a moment to do so.

Pharap (talk) 02:44, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, those edit-interfering and upload errors have kept cropping up occasionally for hours at a time. I'm unclear as to whether Alahmnat or someone else has been addressing them when they're brought up in the Archivists' Discord server, but I feel like the cause of it must definitely be due to the nonstop influx of bots that keep assailing the site.

I've unfortunately not gotten either Myst or Riven's latest remakes, and was merely attempting to provide assistance for another user's efforts as their account was apparently too new for them to be able to create and edit articles. But having noticed that the text and objects appeared to not contain nor be presented in the same way between the two entries, I felt it was better to add them as a new article specific to the game they were found in (similarly to how Uru differentiates Myst Online and offline Path of the Shell content). As a result, I don't know if an 'impossible' date is also in Gehn's latest iteration of their journal(s) so as to know if it's less Cyan's and more the character's mistake.

The Discord servers are the places that I've seen that tend to have the most activity, hence why I tend to give them preference, but I myself tend to be terrible with keeping up with social media. I just acknowledge it's one of the fastest ways to reach a lot of people on average, so I rely on it for that. No judgement for giving it all a wide-berth: I'd do the same if I could, but too many things I peruse rely ultimately rely on them to do things, either at all or at least in a timely manner. No clue if a little built-in forum would or wouldn't be welcome, I do agree it feels like there's hardly any actual user activity except in the short bursts triggered either by new games or new content for MOULa, and even then it's mostly from the usual suspects.

Anyway, no hurry on my part in implementing D'ni support for the templates: I personally feel like my workaround will do for the time being, though I suppose it might look a bit clunky if more texts being using them more frequently.

ElTipejoLoco (talk) 10:10, 17 December 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for the delay in replying. I read your response a few days ago and began a reply, but I've been busy with other things and kept forgetting.

Personally, I suspect the edit and upload errors might have been due to lack of disk space, and either someone is going in and deleting some files to make room or space becomes available as the result of some sort of automatic periodic maintenance. In which case, yes, the nonstop bot account creation would be contributing to the problem, because those account creations chew up space in the database and thus on the hard disk. I don't know for definite though, that's just an educated guess.

I have yet to buy the remakes either.

Unfortunately I don't know if there's a way around the upload limitations. It might be that making a handful of constructive edits or creating a user page might be enough to 'earn the system's trust', so to speak, but equally it might not - I'm just guessing at the sort of thing I would expect might make a difference.

I'm half tempted to try to contact Cyan to ask about the date, but the best I could manage would probably be to send them an email and hope they respond. I could also start a thread on /r/myst, but I doubt it's something that's been discussed before and I doubt the thread would get that much interest.

I don't doubt Discord is more active, but I'd still rather remain in the dark than use it. Fortunately I'm not involved in anything that requires its use. (I was almost involved in a project that did, but I opted to turn them down instead.)

The wiki does have a fair number of active users, but we're often like ships in the night - we see who has edited what, but we rarely discuss what we're doing, we're all just independently doing what we think is best, and because there's so few of us we're not really treading on each other's toes.

I think if there was a place to discuss things publicly, the site would potentially be more productive, because then we could collaborate on planned projects (e.g. maybe a drive to get some more citations into certain pages, with the work being divided up, or resources being shared), or inform each other of ideas for improvements or what edits are being planned.

I particularly would have liked to run my template ideas past some other people. It would have been a chance to get feedback, (e.g. perhaps someone would have liked an additional feature,) as well as to draw attention to the new templates being brought into existence and what their intended use would be.

In my case, my bursts of activity are usually a result of either having some free time to kill and doing it on a whim or because I've ended up looking something up and then gone down a bit of a rabbit hole. For example, I only noticed your original message because I'd come to refresh my memory on the names of some of the more obscure ages and noticed the notification. (And in the process of replying to you, I found some pages that I intend to do some work on when I get a chance.)

Lastly, I'm happy to announce that after much messing around I managed to modify the {{journal date}} template so that it will properly format journal dates in D'ni.

It's very simple to use: You use it exactly the same as before, but add an extra dni parameter with a nonempty value. E.g. {{journal date|87|7|28|dni=yes}} → 3@ • 7 • 13 . I've already taken the liberty of replacing the date in Gehn's 2024 Lab Journal. (I left the non-D'ni version in the brackets for the time being.)

In the process of developing this, I bit the bullet and ended up creating my first modules...

One, Dni-numerals was simple and worked as intended. It converts any number to its dnifont equivalent, with or without surrounding dni tags.

The other, Journal-date, failed miserably because apparently modules are resolved after the dni element, which is a shame because the module code is so much easier to read than the messy {{journal date}} template. I may attempt to figure out a way to fix it at a later date, but for now it's best to stick with what works. Failing that, I'll try to find a way to schedule it for deletion.

If you need any help with anything else technical in future, feel free to ask. I'm far from being an expert since this is the only wiki I actively edit, but evidently I know what I'm doing most of the time.

Pharap (talk) 03:36, 24 December 2024 (UTC)