User talk:Rahv7

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Welcome to Echo Bazaar Wiki!

Hi, welcome to Fallen London Wiki! Thanks for your edit to the Doing the decent thing. page.

Please leave me a message if I can help with anything!
Wikia (talk) 08:17, May 10, 2015 (UTC)

Hi...

... do you happen to know how to add these useful 'Sources' and 'Uses' boxes on item pages? I've looked everywhere but couldn't find an explanation!

I always use the Classic Editor, and they don't even appear in that view for me. I have no idea how to use the Visual Editor, I'm afraid... :(
Phryne Amarantyne (talk) 21:21, September 11, 2016 (UTC)

Changes: You consulted on another case

This change: http://fallenlondon.wikia.com/wiki/You_consulted_on_another_case?diff=next&oldid=208784 has the comment "removed rare success because it was identical with regular success". Was it identical in all respects, including the Quirks changes? I've just played another low level alt through the Strange Fire following "Making Your Name: A Raid on the Brass Embassy!" and noticed Subtle decreased and Daring raised - I took both image and text screenshots on January 6th and just now. If there is only one success result then the Quirks results were incorrect. For now I'll change the Quirks results to match the results I'm seeing:

]]]]

'The body in the gutter

The Constable led you through a winding alley, until his oil lantern illuminated a half-charred corpse lying curled in a black puddle. "We don't have long on this one. The Specials are on their way."

Through one of the burn-holes in the corpse's jacket, you saw a journal. You extricated it; its pages were full of ramblings and sketches. The last page proved interesting, though: a rough sketch of a map, labelled 'The Forgotten Quarter,' underneath which was written 'The key to the Correspondence is close.' The clatter of carriages filled the air; your escort winced, and you ran out of the alley. "Do what you can with what you know," he called after you. "I trust you more than them."

Record this in your Journal

0 change points, 2 more needed to reach level 2An occurrence! Your 'Route: The Forgotten Quarter Quality is now 1!

0 change points, 6 more needed to reach level 6Your name is calligraphed in Hudum.

0 change points, 1 more needed to reach level 1Your 'Suspicion Quality has gone!

3 change points, 3 more needed to reach level 6Daring has increased to 5 - Intrepid!!

4Progress 5 0 change points, 6 more needed to reach level 6Subtle is dropping...

5Progress 6 Perhaps truths are contained herein - obscured by riddles, misconceptions and near unintelligible handwriting.

Watchful +4. An occurrence! Your 'A Journal of Metaphysical Conjecture Quality is now 1! 58 change points, 6 more needed to reach level 64Watchful has increased to 63 - Insightful! 57Progress'
Fanoftswiki (talk) 13:59, December 13, 2016 (UTC)

After looking at the history I'm confused, too. I *do* remember that there were issues with the wikia-editor at the time I did those changes, so maybe something was displayed wrong or I may have mixed it up when trying to fix what went wrong before. Let's leave it like it is now as it seems to fit what most players have experienced lately.

(It'd be weird if there was a rare success on this particular Making Your Name level when there are none on any of the others. And with the same text on top. Maybe something was changed by FBG inbetween, maybe it really was a wikia issue.)
Rahv7 (talk) 15:14, December 13, 2016 (UTC)

Loitering matters

Hello! Just clarifying what I should be consistent with for the loitering edits :)

I have not been seeing a "quality is dropping..." message for the Invited to Loiter change - rather, it's been a terse and discrete "Invited to Loiter [friend] (number)". I figured this was a counter rather than a levelled quality. Is it inconsistent between the options? (Or is the idea to use the Drop/Increase templates for everything - but could we maybe revise Template:Drop to allow these variants? Or is the difference not much worth documenting?)

Also, with the "Airs of Stillness", I am getting values way above 100 - I currently have 469! (Hence, I've been putting 81+, and not 81-100 - although this huge apparent range does seem unballanced.) Are you seeing anything similar, or have I hit a bug?

(Also, thanks for fixing up 'friend' to 'your name'; I didn't think of it. We're all one ambiguous 'friend'.)
Indigofera (talk) 08:16, July 29, 2017 (UTC)

(cutting into the conversation :-) )

Personally, for all these new social actions, whenever they increase/decrease a quality which has a separate counter per 'friend', I use:

{{Gain|quality}} '''[[quality]]''' [friend's name] (+1) <br>{{Loss|quality}} '''[[quality]]''' [friend's name] (-1)

With so many of these popping up we might want a special template for this (or an option in the existing Increase/Drop ones)
Adnoam (talk) 10:35, July 29, 2017 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for the late reply. You are right, it's a counter, we just want to use the exisiting templates so that categories work correctly. You can use either Gain/Loss like Adnoam suggested or Increase/Drop. Both work fine, there's just a little difference in the way they are displayed.

Concerning Airs: I have not seen Airs above 100 yet but if you did you are correct to use "81+". I would assume it's a bug for precisely the reason you mentioned.
Rahv7 (talk) 20:08, July 30, 2017 (UTC)

Latest edit to Swear a thieves' oath in the Medusa's Head

Hi,

Are you sure about the change you've made to the requirements?

There's already a wiki note that there are two practically identical versions of the option. From your edit it makes it seem as if the requirement is *either* favouring the Cheery Man *or* having the Cheery Man's Fate.

But (until I draw the card myself to confirm), shouldn't the option *always* require favouring the Cheery Man, and *in addition* have two identically-seeming options, one with and one without the Cheery Man's Fate? If so, then, given the wiki note (and our practice in similar cases) there's no need to add the requirement in the Unlocked with field.
Adnoam (talk) 12:53, February 18, 2018 (UTC)

I did favour the Constable *and* the Cheery Man perished in their duel. For me, the "Cheery man's fate" is the unlock condition now. I have no idea if there's a third identical option, i.e. if you favour the Constable and the Cheery Man is still alive, although I could check with one of my alts if they draw the card.
Rahv7 (talk) 14:34, February 18, 2018 (UTC)

I meant something else. There are two identically-looking versions of the option:

# Requires Favouring the Cheery Man *and* *not* having The Cheery Man's Fate
# Requires Favouring the Cheery Man *and* having The Cheery Man's Fate

The differences in the results for both options are listed on the page. (you could never have played the option if you've favoured the Last Constable)

As it is now (with your recent change), the option lists the following requirement:

* Requires Favouring the Cheery Man *or* having The Cheery Man's Fate

Which seems wrong to me given the explanation above.
Adnoam (talk) 15:36, February 18, 2018 (UTC)

Is it possible that there are four difference versions of this option? Favouring the Cheery Man with (Cheery Man dead/alive); and not favouring the Cheery Man (i.e. Favouring the Constable) with (Cheery Man dead/alive)

I haven't been able to draw the card again all day. I'll double check when I do.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:07, February 18, 2018 (UTC)

Just wanted to let you know that you were right. Favouring the Cheery Man was a condition after all (it's just displayed using a neutral image instead of the Cheery Man). I rolled back the changes on the page.
Rahv7 (talk) 20:43, February 19, 2018 (UTC)

Election duplication

Hi,

I saw that whenever there's an updated option/storylet/action which has changed in this election cycle you've created a duplicate page (usually moving the old version to have a (1895) suffix).

In the past, it was agreed that for changing seasonal content the wiki should update the pages to reflect the latest. Those interested in past holiday's mechanics can look at page histories and in the actual history guide.

So:

# Old pages without a current equivalent should be marked as Retired.
# Old pages which have a new version (new image, new options, new game instructions) should be updated with the new content instead of creating duplicated.

Thanks.
Adnoam (talk) 10:38, June 19, 2018 (UTC)

Template Typo

Line in item template reads "This item has noother recorded uses." should be "no other". I was unable to update the template due to the protected state, but thought you should be aware. Also, thank you for all you do for the community!! The Neath would be far harder to navigate without your stellar efforts!
107.77.217.218 20:57, December 10, 2018 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks.
Adnoam (talk) 22:56, December 10, 2018 (UTC)

Reputation: Abomination Gain

Hi,

I've seen you've explicitly added this category to several pages. Those pages already use a template for indicating growing this quality - {{[[Template:Item_Gain|Item Gain]]}}, which adds those pages to the Category:Reputation: Abomination Sources category.

So, either:

# This is a discreet quality (increases in whole levels), in which case {{[[Template:Item_Gain|Item Gain]]}} is correct, and there's no need for the "Gain" category at all.
# This is a linear quality (increases in CP), in which case {{[[Template:Item_Gain|Item Gain]]}} should be replaced with either {{[[Template:Increase|Increase]]}} or {{[[Template:Gain|Gain]]}}.

In any case, those categories shouldn't be added explicitly on the action pages but come from using the proper template. Right now there's double categorization.
Adnoam (talk) 06:43, March 5, 2019 (UTC)

I see ... I was checking the Reputation: Abomination-page and there were no sources linked how to raise the quality, only how to lower it. Is there some way to solve this issue using the ItemSources-Template?
Rahv7 (talk) 15:44, March 5, 2019 (UTC)

Of course :-)

In the {{[[Template:Quality|Quality]]}} template, using the argument "Discreet = yes" changes the link from the "Gains" category into a "Sources" category.
Adnoam (talk) 20:54, March 5, 2019 (UTC)

Allow me to introduce myself

Hey Fallen London Wiki! I'm Emptylord, and I’m part of a new team over at Fandom who are tasked with supporting communities, such as yours. Lucky you, you’ve been designated me! If you have any questions relating to your wiki—whether it's code-related, policy related, or otherwise—I'm your first point of contact, and your own personal liaison to full-time Fandom Staff.
Emptylord (talk) 22:38, June 3, 2019 (UTC)

New items

Hi there,

Now that there are new Election items, it's a great time to use the new Module I've created which adds items automatically to the relevant quality/class lists, provided that we add there data in the proper table (like we do in Module:IL/images for the images) :-)

See: Category:Items without Module ItemList data
Adnoam (talk) 13:04, July 22, 2019 (UTC)

I had completely forgotten about that. Just added the Tarot Deck and the Talons and it worked. Neat! :)
Rahv7 (talk) 20:03, July 22, 2019 (UTC)

Chess Watchful Gain

Back in November, you edited Rely on your intellect to say that the loser gains +50cp Watchful after the 3rd round. Do you have a source for this? I haven't seen any evidence of this, in either direction. (I.e. if it's either the inviter or the invitee who's losing the last round).
D0SBoots (talk) 08:28, February 13, 2020 (UTC)

We did a few tests with players over at reddit to confirm this.

I just tested this with an alt and you are right that it's not 50 CP anymore but seems more in the range of ~5 CP. I can only assume it's been changed over the past months.
Rahv7 (talk) 16:01, February 14, 2020 (UTC)

Do you still have a link to thread? I searched chess "50" site:reddit.com/r/fallenlondon, but I couldn't find it anywhere.

And yeah, like I said I haven't seen evidence of it. I'm going to spreadsheet my Watchful gains once I start grinding to 200, and if I still don't see it I'll edit the page.
D0SBoots (talk) 22:23, February 22, 2020 (UTC)

As mentioned above, I did already edit the page.
Rahv7 (talk) 01:08, February 23, 2020 (UTC)

Oh, cool. I didn't see where you said that, although I guess you implied it.

But I still plan on tracking my gains closely; it's also part of tracking whether 2nd chance turn-ins are really 1-70 or if they're actually 1-50 like the others.
D0SBoots (talk) 01:20, February 23, 2020 (UTC)

"Broken Toys?"

Out of curiosity, why'd you revert my edit there?
D0SBoots (talk) 06:23, February 24, 2020 (UTC)

Nevermind, I just figured it out... I think. I interpreted the range as an uncertainty about the outcome, because cp loss on qualities like that is rarely random, but often people don't know exactly how much they lost. I did have a handle on how much was lost (and it's a one-time only event), so I updated it.

But if it really *is* a random event, that wouldn't be accurate. Not sure how folks pinned it down to that range though, given that it's once per character...
D0SBoots (talk) 06:28, February 24, 2020 (UTC)

A question about trimming

https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Trimmed looks like it was written for an earlier stage of the wiki, when articles were still in the process of being trimmed? Specifically, it's being linked as "Trimming guidelines" (from places like https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Template:Action), but it has the following steps that I'm guessing are obsolete:

4. Add this category to the page (enter 'Trimmed' in the field that currently says 'Add category...'). 5. Wait for an admin to delete and restore the page.

From what I can tell, you're *not* actually supposed to add the Trimmed category to freshly-trimmed pages, as long as they were never submitted in non-trimmed form?
D0SBoots (talk) 08:12, February 28, 2020 (UTC)

The guide is for already existing pages that do not adhere to the 250 character limit (that is stated in the very beginning of the guide).

Currently, such pages do not exist. However, if somebody were to add a page without trimming the text, it'd be relevant. You (or anybody else) could then trim the text, but for the untrimmed version to be removed from the file history, an admin has to delete the untrimmed history. That is what the "Trimmed"-category is for, so admins are able to find those pages.

And no, if you create a page with already trimmed text, you're not supposed to add the tag. Only do it after trimming previously overly long text on a page.
Rahv7 (talk) 18:17, February 29, 2020 (UTC)

OK, that's basically what I thought. I'll fork a separate "Trimming guidelines" page for the more common case of adding new text that needs to be trimmed, and maybe tweak the category page to be more clear that it's not for everyday use.
D0SBoots (talk) 18:33, February 29, 2020 (UTC)

The New Map Redesign

I have to take a moment to cry on your shoulder.

At first I thought it was mostly cosmetic. Then I thought it was just about splitting up the stuff in Your Lodgings, which admittedly was getting overfull. No big deal, that's a few new categories and some shuffling.

But no. They've re-shuffled *everything*. All the sub-storylets have their own sub-areas now, generally only accessible via the map instead of by linking storylet. And some things have shuffled between areas too, like moving to "Your Activities."

I'm sure you've faced bigger cleanups in the past, but... it's daunting.
D0SBoots (talk) 19:08, March 4, 2020 (UTC)

Surprisingly, it seems a lot of the work is already done. A few editors have been really busy :) Personally, I'm not all that happy with all those nearly empty sub-areas that have been introduced but I'm sure we'll be getting used to it. And hopefully they'll add a few more storylets to those in the near future.

The conclusion to the "Bag a Legend!"-ambition released this week will probably take a lot longer to add (plus of course the conclusions to the remaining two ambitions released within the next six weeks).
Rahv7 (talk) 23:44, March 4, 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm more worried/sad about the long-tail of one-time storylets that will be miscategorized for a long time to come. Parts of the various Making Your Name questlines, etc. And I agree that the new areas seem pretty barren, but maybe now that the map design is fully released they can focus on putting more stuff there?
D0SBoots (talk) 18:09, March 5, 2020 (UTC)

Also, by "a few editors" did you mean you? :) You've been on a tear, nice job!
D0SBoots (talk) 04:35, March 7, 2020 (UTC)

There have been a few others you've also updated/created a lot of pages ... incl. yourself! Thank you!
Rahv7 (talk) 10:04, March 7, 2020 (UTC)

Documenting efficient item sources

Is there a standard/consensus on where to put good sources of items?

There are two possibilities, and I've seen both done:

# Put it directly on the item's page. Example: I can't find one right now, but I've seen it somewhere.
#* Pros:
#** It's front-and-center.
#** People can comment on item pages (and discuss strategies, e.g. Bazaar Permit)
#* Cons:
#** It's not in the place it most logically belongs.
# Put it on the item-sources page. Example: Category:Shard of Glim Sources
#* Pros:
#** It's the logical place.
#** There's more room, since the sources page doesn't have anything else to discuss.
#* Cons:
#** People don't think to look there (see comment on Shard of Glim)
#** You can't comment on category pages.
D0SBoots (talk) 02:47, March 9, 2020 (UTC)

I believe most players adding gameplay strategy information like this on the item category pages, see here for instance.

Keep in mind though that the wiki isn't supposed to include all kinds of gameplay-related information and strategies. It's supposed to display all the information actually included in the game. A few guides for tricky aspects of the game (SMEN, Nadir, Polythreme, etc.) are fine, but my personal opinion is that things have been getting a little out of hand, lately.

Definitely don't put it on the item's page. It'll just clutter up the page. You have no way of knowing if there are more efficient sources in other parts of the game that you aren't aware of. Plus, it makes keeping things up date super-difficult because lots of meta-information needs to be changed when content is updated.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:24, March 10, 2020 (UTC)

That's an interesting stance, that the wiki should only include the information that's actually present in the game as opposed to meta-information, and definitely in contrast to most other game wikis I've seen.

However, I do agree that it's easy for things to get out of hand - both Wild Words Sources and Category:Shard of Glim Sources are examples of this IMO, because they're attempting to document every source for an item, which is both a maintenance nightmare and also done automatically on the category pages. Plus, it's not that helpful, because it becomes too overwhelming to actually use.

What I was talking about is linking particularly profitable or important sources for an item. And don't claim that one is the best - you can't know that 100%, plus that might get stale, plus depending on a player's circumstances it might not be the best. But by keeping the list for a particular item to a small-ish list, it will (hopefully) be both maintainable and factual.

Edit: My motivation here is that usually I'd go straight to a wiki to answer the question "what's the best source for Searing Enigmas?" In Sunless Sea, the wiki *is* the answer for this. In Fallen London... I guess you ask Reddit to find out?
D0SBoots (talk) 23:46, March 10, 2020 (UTC)

The difference is that Sunless Sea (as well as most other games) are released as a final product. There may be a few fixes and maybe an add-on or two, but not several content updates per year for over 10 years total.

This wiki is already huge even if you count only content and ignore meta information. And there're not all that many people actually maintaining it. A lot of pages containing meta information are created by players that think a particular piece of info would be useful to have, but often nobody is actually maintaining these pages afterwards. And it's not unusual for multiple pages to end up containing the same or similar information because players are not aware that information already exists elsewhere. And, again, after some time they end up outdated to varying degrees. Part of the problem is that the structure of the wiki is designed for game content (and not meta information), another issue are the many updates I already mentioned. Yet another is that most players give up on the game (and the wiki) after a year or two. And so on.

Regarding your original question: If I had to recommend a place to put that information, I'd say to put it on the item source category page (i.e.. But I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up another outdated list eventually. Sorry for being so pessimistic.
Rahv7 (talk) 23:35, March 11, 2020 (UTC)

Nah, I hear you. Keeping things up-to-date is *hard*, and it's harder when things sprawl.

The same issues do actually come up elsewhere; the Minecraft wiki comes to mind, where stuff was changing continuously for years. It had different challenges - less raw content being added, but understanding the changes required analyzing decompiled Java code. Of course, there were a lot more people active on that wiki, too. They actually had a lot less templating IIRC and just relied on brute labor to keep things up-to-date, and amazingly that worked for them.

But that's why I asked the question in the first place - I know I'm likely to wander off at some point, and I don't want to create yet *another* place where the same info is duplicated.

I wonder... it might be possible to create the tables that are in Wild Words Sources by using a Module. Then they'd never get out of date...
D0SBoots (talk) 03:57, March 12, 2020 (UTC)

Solution for thumbnail not appearing correctly?

So, I was looking at the changes you made for this page:

https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Set_up_some_lenses?action=history

The work-around for thumbnails not appearing correctly is to use the Unlock template?
42.188.94.97 14:36, April 6, 2020 (UTC)

The reason thumbnails don't work for newly-added items and qualities is that {{IL}} actually gets the relevant image names via the script Module:IL. If you want to add images to its database, that can be done at Module:IL/images.

Using {{Unlock}} is separate—it's like {{IL}} but also adds the appropriate unlock category to the page, so should be used for the Unlocked with (but not Locked with) field.
Optimatum (talk) 04:44, April 9, 2020 (UTC)

Images for Module:IL

Is there any way to see what items and qualities are missing from IL?
Optimatum (talk) 04:36, April 9, 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don't think there is. I just keep adding whatever I notice is missing. It's fiddly, I know.
Rahv7 (talk) 10:28, April 9, 2020 (UTC)

That's a pity. I don't suppose there's some way to write a script that would check?
Optimatum (talk) 15:22, April 9, 2020 (UTC)

It's probably possible to write such a script. Wikia supports Lua-scripts but unfortunately I'm not familiar with that language.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:40, April 9, 2020 (UTC)

Fate-locked status of options that require Election items

Do we consider options that require the 30-Fate election items to be Fate-locked? All of them are technically obtainable for free, even though candidate-specific ones are only in one year.
Optimatum (talk) 22:07, April 12, 2020 (UTC)

Not all election items were available for free (e.g. the trumpet or the voting booth or the Mutton Island account never were).

But if they have been available for free at any point, it's okay to add anything related to the wiki. I assume you are referring to the Tarot deck. That'd definitely be okay.
Rahv7 (talk) 23:33, April 12, 2020 (UTC)

How is the 250 character limit counted?

I'm trying to add the Students Crew option from https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Light_Fingers:_From_Above I made a new page for it, and added 226 characters from the ingame text to the Success description. It's too many (281) characters if spaces are counted, I'm not sure if they are, but it seems to be counting the [...] things, bringing it to 402. I'm not sure how to fix this, because I didn't think the count isn't supposed to include the brackets and ellipses.
Derpypandaqueen (talk) 02:58, April 13, 2020 (UTC)

It's counting any character, including spaces, and including ellipses. Note that "[...]" requires five chars while "[…]" only requires three.

I suppose ellipses would not need to be counted, but to change that I'd have to take a look at the script how difficult it is to actually to account for that. I'll try to find out when I have a little time, but for now it's just counting any character.
Rahv7 (talk) 14:14, April 13, 2020 (UTC)

Meticulous student updates

Hi. You replaced the variable resultS with “Certain reactions...” text but I am pretty sure that’s specific to Experumental Object 910
Mikey thinkin (talk) 10:14, April 14, 2020 (UTC)

Whoops, sorry about that. It sounded so generic. I removed that part again, thanks for letting me know.
Rahv7 (talk) 10:51, April 14, 2020 (UTC)

Small image

Hey, I added the Cartographer's Hoard item yesterday but on the Assess your Progress regarding the (Project_Name) page the summary for Complete your Hoard shows a question mark icon even though the page itself has an image added. How do I fix this?
Mona37 (talk) 16:56, April 14, 2020 (UTC)

Hi there. That happens if no image link has been added to the IL-module. I've fixed it now.

(I know it's a bit fiddly that you need to add it specifically to that list, but the advantage is that you never need to remember which image is linked to that object ever again.)
Rahv7 (talk) 17:20, April 14, 2020 (UTC)

One storylet leading to an action

This storylet: https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Seek_out_Jasper_and_Frank_to_offer_a_bribe leads to this action: https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Light_Fingers:_Bribing_Jasper_and_Frank on a success. As soon as you click 'Onwards' on the first storylet, you see the 2nd one. Do I need to show that one leads to the other? How do I do that?
Derpypandaqueen (talk) 01:51, April 16, 2020 (UTC)

It's helpful to show that you are immediately redirected to another storylet. Use the {{[[Template:Redirect|Redirect]]}}-template to do that. It's also useful in the second storylet to show that it is unlocked by a redirect. I've added both for your example.
Rahv7 (talk) 07:08, April 16, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you!
Derpypandaqueen (talk) 13:55, April 16, 2020 (UTC)

Arbor

What are El's?

==== Grinding EIs Edit ====

This just loops between burning all your EIs via Investigate the Near-Arbori and buying 2x as many back with Spy on London's Embassy. You need 125 Watchful to 100% the latter check, and I wouldn't recommend doing this with less. This is 1.875 EPA in theory (and quite close to that in practice), which is not very good for money making, but is one of the better ways to get a whole lot of EIs. Generally you do this a few times to double or quadruple your stock of Extraordinary Implications in preparation for the next grind.
71.77.7.86 23:09, April 16, 2020 (UTC)

Just short for Extraordinary Implications. 
Mona37 (talk) 22:29, April 17, 2020 (UTC)

As mention in the other comment, it's short for "Extraordinary Implication". This was from the Arbor-guide, wasn't it? I've adjusted the text so the short form is no longer used there.
Rahv7 (talk) 09:17, April 18, 2020 (UTC)

Category

Hello, what exactly is the purpose of the trimmed category? Why isn't trimming the text good enough? 
Mona37 (talk) 22:26, April 17, 2020 (UTC)

Failbetter doesn't allow texts on the wiki that are longer than 250 characters. That is a compromise between making money off a text-based game and allowing the community to have a source of information about the details of that game.

Wikia is using a versioning system in the background, i.e. you can go back and see every version of a page that ever existed. Including ones where the text isn't trimmed. Setting the Trimmed-category marks pages where the untrimmed text can be found somewhere in the history. It allows admins to take a look at those pages and remove the untrimmed versions, such that Failbetter's condition for putting text on the wiki is actually met.

I've seen you've trimmed a bunch of texts and that is really super helpful. I'm slowly adjusting the histories of those pages. It's a bit fiddly and not really fun work so I only do a few pages at a time. We had all pages meeting the required criteria before the Lab/Base-Camp content dropped. So I'm sure we'll get there again :)
Rahv7 (talk) 09:13, April 18, 2020 (UTC)

Place templates

Hello,

I've been trying to update the templates for Places in line with how we did Qualities last year (or was it the year before...?)

As part of that i created {{Place uses}} and {{Place changes}} and updated the category structure of the templates as well as in {{Move}}.

You can see how this works now with After the Case.

What I would like to do now is change {{Places}} so that it can have automatic text pointing to the new subpages (similarly how we did it with Qualities). And I also would like to update the template category (currently {{Places}} is categorised under Quality templates, instead of Places templates). (Also, as a minor thing, I was also thinking of adding fields to the templates to specify what kind of deck it has, if it has a deck - i.e. does it refill, does it have a fixed 3 hand or a lodging-determined deck, does it keep the cards)

however {{Places}} is locked. Would you be willing to unlock it so that i can make those changes? (Or make those changes yourself, if not?)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:05, April 25, 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I am not exactly sure what {{Place uses}} would collect. All storylets that have the location-tag for that place? If so, doesn't make that make the category-page for that place kind of redundant?

Regarding {{Place changes}}, why do you think this is useful to collect?

I'm sorry, I'm probably sounding super negative. I'm really not, just interested what your thought on this are. The deck changes are definitely useful to add, currently there's no consistent way to do this.

In any case, I've unlocked the template. Let me know if there are any more issues. Cheers!
Rahv7 (talk) 23:27, April 25, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks! Currently the place category-page lists both pages with that location-tag *and* actions that used the Move template for that location. I am simply proposing to split these. They are conceptually different and, personally, I found this conflation confusing and unhelpful.

As an actual use case, for example, when the Lab/Base-Camp were introduced and the wiki had not yet fully documented the content fully I was very confused - I could see pages *in* the Lab/Base Camp but I couldn't figure out quickly which actions actionally enabled a move to these new locations.Another example would be quickly checking which actions can send you to a menace area without trawling through every page that's *in* a menace area...

The current place category will carry on as is minus the moves, which would go to a separate category-page. (This is similar to what we did with Qualities. We didn't create a separate "Uses" category for each quality but just repurposed the existing quality category-page)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 23:40, April 25, 2020 (UTC)

Hello again,

I've updated the template (in a test environment) to accept deck parameters. Here are some examples:

* User:Mikey thinkin/The Bone Market (saving cards between visits)
* User:Mikey thinkin/On a Heist (different card multipliers on leaving and entering)
* User:Mikey thinkin/A Flash Lay (unlimited deck)
* User:Mikey thinkin/After the Case (no deck)

Let me know what you think. if you don't have major objections I'll then move on to updating the Place pages with this template
Mikey thinkin (talk) 20:55, April 26, 2020 (UTC)

That is really neat :) I like it a lot!

And many thanks for the explanation. I was obviously misunderstanding something before and this explains it very well. Cheers!
Rahv7 (talk) 20:14, April 28, 2020 (UTC)

Question about editing

A question,

How do you add a new option to a storylet? more specific enquire to sourcing an egg from the "Welcome to Whitsun" page seems to have a second variant, how should I add this to that page

Asarta
Asarta (talk) 16:05, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

It depends ... if it is just a different result for the same branch, you would add a new Success-section to the existing page.

If it is actually a different branch, you create a new page. If it has the same name, you could call it "Enquire as to sourcing an egg 2", for instance.

Let me know if you have more questions.
Rahv7 (talk) 16:33, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

Well as far as I've been able to see its a new branch which replaces the old one. My main question however was how I would add this new branch to the Welcome to Wintersun page?
Asarta (talk) 16:55, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

The issue is that there seems to be a hidden quality that's unlocking one and locking another. I would suggest using "Enquire as to sourcing an egg 2" and then use "|Wiki Note=" on both branches to explain what's happening.

but maybe Rahv has a better suggestion....
Mikey thinkin (talk) 16:59, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

Unfortunately not. It's the same with "Ask what is going on" ... two branches of the same name, apparently there's a hidden lock/unlock condition.

In any case, I've added an empty branch to "Welcome to Whitsun!". If you click on it, the wiki will prompt you to create a new page. If you're unsure how to proceed, just copy the contents of the other page and adjust as needed.
Rahv7 (talk) 17:45, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you,

Totally unrelated, how do create things like 3-? in numbered lists? As I'm currently working on the speculations about Whitesun page however a few of the levels have the same description.

Asarta

Edit: And how would I make link to the other version so I can make it clear which page is replaced(I'm thinkin of |Wikinote= This option replaces(former option) after that one is played for the first time and |Wikinote= This option is replaced by (new version) after you play it once) How would I link to the right pages in place of new and old version?

But thank you for the empty branch. I must admit though that I made the new page by shamelesly copypasting your source and changing the description
Asarta (talk) 17:48, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

You have to explicity type the ranges, automatic numbering doesn't work in such cases.

Regarding notes, you can write:

|Wiki Note = This branch replaces [[other branch name]] after playing it once.

Or something similar :)

(And no worries about c/p'ing, the important thing is that everythings's added to the wiki!)
Rahv7 (talk) 20:30, May 11, 2020 (UTC)

Sorrry for the late reply(In my timezone it was night) but thanks for the help
Asarta (talk) 04:50, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Another Question, how does category:Trimmed work exactly when and how should I apply it?(by the way sorry for the many questions)
Asarta (talk) 07:07, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

No worries about the questions! I've recently explained the Trimmed-category to another user, please take a look here: https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Thread:66007
Rahv7 (talk) 10:50, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

But on apage like Ask what's going on (2) I've obviously trimmed text but I've trimmed them before I saved them for the first time so you can't find untrimmed text anywhere in the history. Should I still apply Trimmed then? And(I've also asked this on Admoan page) should I apply the seasonal template only to top level pages (like De Gustibus in Whitsun or also on all options of that storylet.
Asarta (talk) 10:57, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

And several of the De Gustibus options have a wrong from direct on their pages. They still link back to the original de Gustibus page. What should be done with that. I dont want to relink them to the new page because that would break the old one but right now its seriously confusing
Asarta (talk) 10:59, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

1. If the page never contained I trimmed content then you should not add the Trimmed category

2. Seasonal template should go on all the branches 

3. For Degustibus, for the branches that are in common between the two versions, we should replace

"|From Card/Storylet title = De Gustibus"

with

"|From Card/Storylet title = De Gustibus, De Gustibus in Whitsun |From field formatted = yes"
Mikey thinkin (talk) 11:16, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you
Asarta (talk) 11:19, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

"|From Card/Storylet title = De Gustibus, De Gustibus in Whitsun |From field formatted = yes" For me this completly breaks the link. could you perhaps change one option as an  example
Asarta (talk) 11:25, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

I updated the comment as the auto linking was messing with it
Mikey thinkin (talk) 11:26, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

There you go, I edited violet amber as an example :)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 11:28, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you will apply it to the rest of the options. Shall I also add the De Gustibus banner?

Edit: I've added the new link and Whitsun template to all options under De Gustibus in Whitsun

and the De Gustibus template to all options that were also availebal during the old De Gustibus Edit: I've also done the whole Bring Up your Egg I hope
Asarta (talk) 11:30, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Weird images

Hi Rahv7, Do you have any idea whats up the category Sartorial Augmentation. For some reason some items are using different images than the card they link to. Asarta
Asarta (talk) 12:07, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Can you please check if this is fixed now?
Rahv7 (talk) 21:14, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

No, I'm still seeing this

]]]]
Asarta (talk) 04:49, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

Oh, I see!

That's not an issue. The wiki shows random images from those page near the link. The important thing is that it works correctly the other way around. I.e. that the image for Sartorial Augmentation is correct if you visit those pages.

I've adjusted a few of those pages, though, because the {{[[Template:Unlock|Unlock]]}}-template should only be used on unlock-conditions, not on lock-conditions.
Rahv7 (talk) 09:30, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

Okay, wasn't sure how that template works and it looked wrong to me. Thanks for the explanation. By the way have you seen the discussion between me and Adnoam on the subject of new Item category for whitsun. You might have valuabele information for that
Asarta (talk) 09:38, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

Proofread article

Hi Rahv7, Could you perhaps proofread this article which I just created and offer me some advice?
Asarta (talk) 13:24, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

I took too long before I looked at this but Adnoam has fixed a few things. Maybe take a look at the changes.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:16, May 12, 2020 (UTC)

Editing Category:Whitsun

Hi Rahv7, I was interested in updating the Whitsun page as it is a bit empty right now. What kind of information would normally be put on such a page, do you have a example I could look at? Asarta







Also shouldn't the guide piece of that page be moved to a new Whitsun guide page. As all the other seasonal pages I've looked at(Like Christmas) do not seem to have such an explanation page
Asarta (talk) 10:24, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

You are right, usually the Category:Whitsun page would just contain some generic information (if that) and details on the progress and what to do should be moved to a separate guide page.

For all other festivals we also have a page on the history and changes of the festival, see here for example.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:10, May 13, 2020 (UTC)

For now I have changed the main page to this and added Whitsun(guide) could you check these to see if they're up to wiki standards(and also tell me about the many spelling errors I no doubt made)
Asarta (talk) 07:19, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. I've moved the page so the name is more consistent with other guides: Whitsun (Guide).

In general (and to match other similar content), we'll want:

* A general Whitsun page telling briefly what the holiday *is*.
* A guide to help navigate the event's content (which you've created).
* eventually, a Whitsun (historical) page to document changes in the event from year to year.
Adnoam (talk) 08:40, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

Okay, I saw you updated the main page(I really like it). But we don't need Whitsun (historical) until next year? Also did you see my post on your wall?
Asarta (talk) 08:48, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

Yes, Historical can probably wait until next year.
Adnoam (talk) 13:05, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

Faction (Guide)

I saw that were currently missing an overarching guide for Factions. As I quite enjoyed writing the guide for Whitsun I'm willing to try write that one as well. However I'm not sure what should and shouldn't be mentioned. What do you think? I was thinking about writing a short introduction about what factions are, a note on Connected/Favours and Renown and a short piece about rewards for renown. Anything more I should add?
Asarta (talk) 10:55, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

I have for now created this Factions (Guide). I havent linked it to the rest of the wiki however. What do you think?
Asarta (talk) 11:59, May 14, 2020 (UTC)

Somehow I missed this post before. The guide seems fine to me. Nice work.

I've removed the table at the end and instead transcluded the existing renown items table. That way, the actual content exists only in one place and is inserted into multiple pages (incl. your guide). Should any changes be required, only that one table needs to be updated.
Rahv7 (talk) 08:07, May 27, 2020 (UTC)

Updating Administrators

Hi Rahv7, I recently noted that the list of Administrators on several pages (such as Editing Guidelines and Fallen London Wiki:Administrators) are really outdated and don't include Adnoam you and several others. if you're okay with it I would like to add the missing Admins and note that you and Adnoam are the currently active ones.

Editing guidelines also predates templates such as {{IL}} and needs an update to reflect changes like that and has svera sections that could do with a bit more explanation. I would be entirely willing to do this but considering the importance of the page I thought I should seek Admin approval first

--Asarta (talk) Eggs are all-- 07:02, May 26, 2020 (UTC)

P.S. On the topic of Fallen London Wiki:Administrators this page kind of needs a complete rewrite as apart from the list of Administrators it still uses the Fandom base template which mentions all kinds of things we don't do on this wiki. While I could do parts of that several sections require a Admin to ensure they accurately reflect the current state of things
Asarta (talk) 07:02, May 26, 2020 (UTC)

Oh, updating those pages seems like a good idea indeed! Thank you for that!

I wasn't even aware that the Fallen London Wiki:Administrators-page existed. Do we even need that? I guess those are mostly general wiki for wikia/Fandom guidelines.
Rahv7 (talk) 07:59, May 27, 2020 (UTC)

Fallen London Wiki: Administrators seems to be used on a few pages and category's (it is linked in Category: Site administration and on a few pages I can't remember out of the top of my head). But seeing as you're okay with it I'll update the pages. Done

Edit: Could you please take a look at Editing Guidelines#Rewards because that information seems seriously outdated and I lack the knowledge to fully update it
Asarta (talk) 08:07, May 27, 2020 (UTC)

Wiki Policy !

Hi Rahv7,

I've just updated Fallen London Wiki: Administrators to make it more about our Wiki and update the list of administrators. This includes this Wiki's policy on promoting Bureaucrats and Administrators. I've written that part as far as I understand it but as I'm not an Administrator I won't make a definite statement on policy. I've for now added a Wiki Note explaining this but could you review the page as soon as possible please.

Kindly, Asarta

P.S. I'll send a similar message to Adnoam

P.P.S are you okay with me changing the link on the Main page from Category:Guides to Guides as Guides includes the same information but sorted neatly into Sections
Asarta (talk) 09:32, May 27, 2020 (UTC)

You can definitely adjust the link to the guides-page.

I'll have to take a look at the other page when I have a little more time. In any case, many thanks for updating it!
Rahv7 (talk) 08:24, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've made some tiny changes to the last part of the page. I've left the disclaimer for now in case Adnoam also has suggestions. Thank you again :)
Rahv7 (talk) 09:57, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've made another minuscule change because you accidentally forgot to remove a be which meant that it said: "be become an Admin" I've removed the be so it now says become an Admin which seemed a lot more logical.
Asarta (talk) 10:29, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Updating editing guidelines

Hi Rahv7 (what is the inspiration for your username anyway, I really like it but it seems so random)

Are you okay with me updating Editing Guidelines to reflect changes in our Wiki and expanding sections such as Disambiguation to make it more user-friendly and concentrate information on that page. On that note could you personally take a look at Editing Guidelines#Rewards as that section is so outdated I can't make sense of it anymore (it definitly predates {{IL}} and seems to even predate at least the current version of {{Action}}?

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 13:12, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Oh dear ... you find all the wiki pages I wasn't even aware existed :)

I've updated the rewards-section. I hope it's not too confusing for players who are not aware how wiki-templates work. It doesn't include all the details because I'm afraid that would get too complicated for a short guide. But the important things are there.
Rahv7 (talk) 13:46, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Yes I saw your update perhaps you should include a link to {{Action}} to make it clearer. Are you okay with me updating and restructuring the rest?

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 13:48, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Of course, please go ahead!
Rahv7 (talk) 14:02, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Editing Guide section on gender inclusive language

Hey! I recently realized that there's a fair few pages on the wiki that are all written with just male pronouns. I have gone and fixed one of these, the professions guide, changing the language to the singular they, but I was wondering if it would be possible to add a section in the editing guide about using gender inclusive language, with the goal being to encourage everyone who wants to make changes or new pages to write in an inclusive way. I would be happy to help with said section. 







Male-only language can be fairly alienating for non-males, esp amab trans folk, so this would be a really good thing to have. 
DarthPoseidon (talk) 16:41, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

While I'm not Rahv7 I'm going to offer my opinion here, I completely agree with you. I'm a male but I do agree that this should be changed. While I'm nor sure how big a problem it is on the wiki (Most pages use either you or player or (most of them) don't even talk about the reader. I'll add a section to editing guidelines. If you want to please continu updating pages (do try and give an edit summary even it is something generic like: changed male pronouns to gender inclusive so I know why you are editing all the pages).

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is concealed

Edit: Editing Guidelines#Gender inclusive pronouns
Asarta (talk) 16:53, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Will do. I didn't see the option for edit summaries but next time I will use them. Thank you!
DarthPoseidon (talk) 17:01, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Edit summaries are found either on the dialog box that pops up when you click save page (if you use Visual Editor) or an the right hand of the screen directly underneath the button for minor edit (source Editor)
Asarta (talk) 17:42, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Hi there, for guides or anything else that is not directly quoted from the game, definitely use non-binary pronouns. I'm fairly sure both Adnoam and me are using those as a default, but feel free to make adjustments wherever you notice male/female pronouns.

For text quoted from the game, it's a little more tricky. You could add a variable-like description like the one Failbetter use ("the pronous of [gender-pronoun] preference") but that has the disadvantage that the character limit is reached sooner because we cannot automatically subtract those from the char count. I'm not sure what's a good solution for that.
Rahv7 (talk) 18:02, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Rahv7 that anything not directly quoted from the game should use non-binary pronouns (In the rare cases he/she is actually used I for one almost always use you which is non-binary anyway). Text quoted directly from the game should in my opinion just use the pronoun the person who quoted it encounters. While I understand that this will lead to cases in which some people might be offended I think the alternative wold either be inserting something like he/she/they everywhere massively reducing the amount of content you can actually quote or we would get cases in which people disagree with the current pronoun change it have it changed back et cetera leading to conflicts. Therefore just using the pronoun which was seen when the text was recorded is in my opinion the best decision.

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 19:10, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

New shop doesn't use pennies

Since Template:Shop automatically adds the Penny category, Mr Chimes' Lost & Found gets this category despite not actually being a use for Pennies. The same is true for Penstock, actually.

I'm not sure what the best solution to this would be. Removing the category from the template and adding it manually to all the other pages? Adding some sort of field to enable or disable it?

I don't really want to edit templates myself, scared I'll break everything. (At least this one is simple enough that I can sort of understand it.)
Cactusorange (talk) 21:26, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've added an off-switch for the Penny-category to the {{[[Template:Shop|Shop]]}}-template. It's a bit of a workaround, but at least that way I only needed to adjust two shops instead of all of them.

I've also added the "Memory of a Tale"-category for Chimes' shop, so it's listed as a use on the item's page.
Rahv7 (talk) 22:04, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! The item page is just a bit slow to update, it seems.
Cactusorange (talk) 22:14, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

It looks like there's something in the template adding "{{#if: no" to every shop page now.
Cactusorange (talk) 22:36, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Whoops! Should be fixed now.
Rahv7 (talk) 22:49, May 28, 2020 (UTC)

Problem with Looked Upon Fondly

Hi Rahv7,

For some reason Looked Upon Fondly isn't properly recognizing Your False-Star as an use despite that page having Category: Looked Upon Fondly attached to it. i then looked at that Category but it doesn't seem to actually exist but no create Category link is available on Looked Upon Fondly which seems to suggest that page does have an Category attached to it. Any idea what is going on?

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is concealed
Asarta (talk) 07:17, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 may know more but there are occasional glitches to do with the order of when pages are created. So if the quality page was created before the use was added it can get "stuck". But not always... I am not exactly sure myself about the cause but have encountered it several times.

In this case I created the category page (which still didn't add the uses to the quality page). Then I edited the source code of the quality page and saved it without making any changes, just to "refresh" it. Now it works
Mikey thinkin (talk) 07:25, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Okay
Asarta (talk) 07:26, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm doing the same thing: If the page isn't recognised, I open the editor and save immediately again without any changes. Usually that helps fixing the problem.
Rahv7 (talk) 08:25, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Navbar edit - Lodgings

Hello!

Some time ago I disambiguated the two notions of lodgings - the location Your Lodgings (which can be travelled to on the map and which has storylets and an opportunity deck) and what StoryNexus calls Domiciles (the specific homes that you can buy and which determine the size of your hand), which are now more explicitly documented in Lodgings and Category:Lodgings.

However, the Navbar under "Places" now points to Lodgings (Domicile), not Lodgings (Place). I can't edit the Navbar (requires admin right). Could you make the edit, please? It should now point to Your Lodgings
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:35, May 29, 2020 (UTC)

Hi there, I've changed the link to Your Lodgings.

Is it possible to put the link to Lodgings on that page somewhere closer to the top of the page? Maybe beneath the category and moves link? I would imagine that a lot of players clicking on "Lodgings" in the NavBar might actually be interested in that page and the wiki note at the end of the page might get overlooked most of the time.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:39, May 30, 2020 (UTC)

Good idea! I moved the note to the top
Mikey thinkin (talk) 22:22, May 30, 2020 (UTC)

Deleting Ambitions (page)

Hi Rahv7,

The page Ambitions has in my opinion always been a bit weird and not really providing anything, its just contains one fancy table and that's it. I've just finished writing Ambitions (Guide) which contains a far better in explanation. Therefore Ambitions provides in my opinion only a distraction and I therefore propose we delete it as it has become obsolete, but might still confuse people reading the Wiki. What do you think?

Kindly,



Asarta



He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 16:39, May 30, 2020 (UTC)

Hi there, I've changed Ambitions into a redirect to your guide. Cheers!
Rahv7 (talk) 21:28, May 30, 2020 (UTC)

Transclusion of table between various Ambition related pages

Hi Rahv7,

The table under Ambitions (Guide)#Ambitions is shared between Ambitions (Guide) and Beginner's Guide#Ambitions. I know it is possible to somehow share that table between pages but haven't got a clue how. Could you do that please and explain to me how it works?

Kindly,



Asarta



He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 05:14, May 31, 2020 (UTC)

Of course. You first add the content you want to share between multiple pages into a separate page, in this case Table Ambition Attributes. Then you can include the content of that page anywhere else via the ":" operator.

I've done this for the attribute table, so you can take a look how it works in practice.

Cheers!
Rahv7 (talk) 09:51, June 1, 2020 (UTC)

It's worth mentioning that it's by far not the only way but it's probably one of the simplest.

One nuance: tables are categorised under Category:Tables but in order to do that you need to wrap the category in noinclude tags (otherwise any page which includes the Table page would also be categorised as a table). I edited Rahv7's page so you can see an example of that
Mikey thinkin (talk) 10:38, June 1, 2020 (UTC)

Copying Reddit Answers?

Hi Rahv7,

Around a month ago you gave several in-depth answers in one of the small questions threads about the Laboratory (specifically [1]. Do you mind me basically copying those answers to University Laboratory (Guide)? which I'm currently writing after people keep asking about the Lab.

Kindly,

Asarta

He whose face is obscured
Asarta (talk) 11:53, June 2, 2020 (UTC)

Yes, of course. Feel free to copy that over.
Rahv7 (talk) 16:04, June 2, 2020 (UTC)

Text not showing up?

Hi Rahv7,

I just finished Throw in a coin and take a drink however the succes text and title refuse to show for the second succes. When you look in source mode they are there but the page still says incomplete article. Could you look at that please?

Cheers!

Asarta
Asarta (talk) 07:04, June 20, 2020 (UTC)

There was a typo in the success title/description fields ("success" was missing the second s). I fixed it
Mikey thinkin (talk) 07:20, June 20, 2020 (UTC)

Quality change descriptions

Hey, what is the preferred way to document quality changes with custom descriptions?

For example on certain pages I see the format

{{Gain|Skeleton in Progress}}Change description (sets [[Skeleton_in_Progress|]] Skeleton in Progress to level - level description)

However on the same page (see Make something of your Thorned Ribcage) another format is also used:

{{Gain|Skeleton: Limbs Needed|now = 4 x}} (Change description)







Which one should I use? It's a shame there isn't a template that can handle all the data while still putting the description in the same place as in game. 

Also, what is the difference between Increase and Gain? What does Discrete = yes do (in terms of layout)?
Mona37 (talk) 19:56, June 25, 2020 (UTC)

Hi! I believe two options you propose are two different things. The first one sets the quality to a certain value, the second adds a fixed number of items/qualities (no matter which value the quality might have had before).

My personal preference is to use the first if applicable. For the second, I would leave the change description and only add it to the page for the quality. The reason is that the description might be different for different players or different stages of the game, with the only fixed thing being the number of items/levels you get. Attar or Lab Prestige are probably better examples of this than the one you posted, but the basic principle still applies.

Regarding the "Discrete"-flag: We set this to "yes" if a quality doesn't use change points but only discrete levels. Examples for this are Attar, Favours, Skeleton Limbs.
Rahv7 (talk) 22:29, June 26, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarification. I've been using the first one where it's relevant, when I'm certain the final value is a fixed outcome, so that's good at least.

But I'm still not sure about the specific use here on the linked page. I would indeed only add the change description if the outcome is fixed, because as you said it will be different for each player. An example is [[The_Prestige_of_your_Laboratory|]] The Prestige of your Laboratory, for which the description is only kept on the quality page itself.

But on the linked page the quality for [[Skeleton:_Limbs_Needed|[[File:Skeleton_in_Progress|] Skeleton in Progress ensures that, so you always end up with 4 either way. So in short, I don't see why in the case of "now = X", it would not use the first format, if that's the preferable one. What do you think?

And I'm aware what a discrete quality refers to, and I suppose it's useful for categorization, but I was specifically wondering if it actually does anything on the user end when added to the Gain template. My understanding was Increase is for non discrete qualities ({{Increase|In Corporate Debt|+2 CP}}), and Gain is for discrete ({{Gain|The Prestige of your Laboratory|1 x}}). So I'm just not sure what the Discrete flag on the Gain template accomplishes. I guess I should just always set it to yes?

To make things more confusing, in game the message "An occurrence! Your X quality is now Y!" is sometimes also used for discrete qualities, but can only be accomplished on the wiki by the Increase template (which doesn't have a Discrete flag)!
Mona37 (talk) 09:32, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

Ah yes, there are a few cases where it's not clear for the player whch one is used. If it's always set to 4 in case of the limbs, I would probably prefer the first template, personally. (I.e. change description and the quality effects as note for clarification.)

Looking at the pages where you can gain "Limbs Needed", it seems to be done consistently the other way around (I've just changed it for Build on the Mammoth Ribcage because it was the only page that did it differently). Really, that is fine, too. I wouldn't worry too much about.

Adding the "Discrete"-tag within a {{[[Template:Gain|Gain]]}}-template mostly doesn't do anything. Technically, automatically adds this page to the corresponding "Sources"-page (in this case Category:Skeleton: Limbs Needed Sources). However, if the quality itself is set as "Discrete", all gains are added to the Sources page anyway. So it's safe to remove. (And honestly, off the top of my head I'm not sure when it would be useful to set the tag for a non-Discrete quality. The option to use this tag was only added last week, so presumably, there's a reason for it being there. I just have no idea what it might be.)
Rahv7 (talk) 09:59, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

Alright, thanks a lot, I'll stop worrying about it too much. I've made another change to the Mammoth Ribcage page to have the Gain use "now =", because that's what is consistent with all the other pages for starting a skeleton.

I would still rather have all of them use only Gain (+? x) without any change description, or all use Gain (set to x) and have the change description in front, because I think the current use is contradictory. Either you have a fixed outcome and use the same format everywhere with the description in front, or you assume it's an increase independent of the starting value (even though other factors ensure this is always 0) and leave the change description out.

But I'm probably obsessing way too much over such details, so I'll leave it :)
Mona37 (talk) 10:30, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

Oh I had left a message for Mona37 but didn't see this discussion. 

Rahv7, I don't think it's true that "if the quality itself is set as "Discrete", all gains are added to the Sources page anyway". If the quality is set to Discrete then the quality page will link to the Sources category, instead of the Gain category. But what goes into the Gain/Sources categories isn't controlled by the Quality template but by the various Gain/Item Gain/Increase templates.

I added the Category:Qualities_with_both_Gain_and_Source_Categories maintenance category specifically to highlight and check for this inconsistent usages.

I added the discrete flag to the gain to the Gain template so that people wanting to use the Gain template can file the quality gain under the Sources category for Discrete qualities. (otherwise we are forced to use "Item Gain" template, which is fine for historical pages but it's obviosuly confusing for non-Items so I think it makes sense having a non-Item template to add a Sources category). Without the Discrete flag Gain template will add a Gain (not Sources category)

Edit: Going forwad I would like the Gain template to be used *only* for discrete gains and the Increase template *only* for the pyramids (CP) changes. At that point the discrete flag would indeed be redundant. But since, historically, so many non-Discrete qualities had used the Gain template I implemented the flag so that the functionality is unchanged with historical uses if you don't set it.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 11:58, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

I changed a bunch (well, a lot) of the source pages for Discrete qualities with Gain categories and some of the Pyramidal with Sources as well, so all sources/gains are listed on the correct page. But they're not dropping off the category page even if the Gain category is empty so it's getting hard to find which ones I missed. 

I also left all instances of "an occurrence" with discrete qualities alone, waiting until the Gain template supports that.

I think ideally Gain should always add to Sources by default because it's supposed to be the quality equivalent of Item Gain. What's the reason discrete qualities have a Sources category instead of Gain category though? I guess because of the widespread use of Item Gain?
Mona37 (talk) 22:02, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

@Mikey thinkin: Thanks for pointing that out. I think I confused {{[[Template:Item_Gain|Item Gain]]}} and {{[[Template:Gain|Gain]]}}. When I made the adjustments on the page mentioned above, I not only removed the "Discrete"-tag but also changed "Gain" to "Item Gain", so obviously everything worked out fine. I just mixed things up when replying to Mona. Sorry for the confusion!
Rahv7 (talk) 22:21, June 27, 2020 (UTC)

Mona37, there are two reasons why the the pages are not dropping off even though the category is empty

1. it's a weird bug due to heavy template use. After you've cleared the category you sometimes need to edit the source of the Quality page and then resave it without making any changes. It "reboots" the template/category code and the pages drops off

2.In some of your messages in this chain (and maybe the other one too) you copied the wiki code directly (I think) which means that the quality gain category is being assigned to your *comment* and hence the category is not strictly speaking empty. If you could edit your comments by wrapping the wiki code in < nowiki > tags (without the spaces) it should hopefully remove the categories from the comments.

(Historically FBG did not use many discrete qualities. Qualities used to either increase by CP or be set to an explicit value. So the very early wiki had no need to support discrete qualities. Then as FBG expanded the use of discrete qualities, wiki editors repurposed Item Gain template since it was a rare enough occurrence at the time it probably didn't seem worthwhile to change the templates. Or maybe those editors weren't comfortable with templates; not sure exactly. Eventually that snowballed)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 00:01, June 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've updated the Gain template to take "occurrence" parameter (see Steal one of the coins, for example). It still has the "now" parameter as well since both are possible.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 22:02, June 28, 2020 (UTC)

Great, that should cover everything. Tomorrow I'll try to go trough them if there is anything left. Except SMEN because there are still a few pages of the old SMEN with CP gain, maybe that should be split up?

By the way, most of the "Pyramidal qualities with Sources" appear to actually be miscategorized discrete qualities, while the "Discrete qualities with Gain" are there for us in the Gain template without Discrete flag (and some for use of Increase to get the "occurrence" message). Is there any example where the Gain template would be used for actual pyramidal qualities instead of Increase? It seems to me if you use Gain you always want it to go into Sources just like Item Gain, would there be any issues with that?
Mona37 (talk) 23:12, June 28, 2020 (UTC)

There are a few ... Glasswork, Advancing the Liberation of Night or A Criminal Record come to mind. I mean, you could use the Increase-template for those but if you want the wiki to display it like the game does, then Gain is necessary.
Rahv7 (talk) 16:35, June 29, 2020 (UTC)

Do you have an example of such use? Going through the pages for Glasswork, Advancing the Liberation of Night and A Criminal Record I can't find a single one that uses Gain instead of Increase.

edit: Found it, there is just one, Lay a tribute of memories before the Fingerking. I guess the problem is the Increase template forces "Quality is increasing…" message even when a custom text is entered, so you have to use Gain to get around that limitation.

Looking at the code, Gain doesn't output any text when no parameter for amount is entered, but Increase defaults to the former text. I'd say that is just an oversight and Increase could be made to behave the same. The only problem is some editors may have used the Increase template without filling in the amount, relying on the default "+? CP" text to show it needs to be filled in. These cases could be detected and fixed though.
Mona37 (talk) 21:29, June 29, 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure about the wiki, but changes to Criminal Record or Liberation of Night in-game are always displayed in a way that would require the Gain-template. Adrift in a Sea of Misery, too, now that I think about it. I'm not sure about Glasswork, but a lot of cases it is displayed like the example you linked. Players probably only have not added it to the wiki like that. (I know I used the Increase-template because it seemed to make more sense.)

Please don't get me wrong. This is purely about the aestetics of the whole thing. Technically, you could probably use Gain in all of the above cases (and apparently it's been used in the majority of cases already).
Rahv7 (talk) 22:27, June 29, 2020 (UTC)

No I completely agree it should be possible to show it on the wiki like that, even though it doesn't appear to be used much.   

My argument is just that the templates could be changed so that Increase supports every use case for pyramidal qualities. This removes the need for Gain in this specific use, which would be good because in every other case (the large majority) Gain appears to be used for Discrete qualities, causing issues with categories if the Discrete flag is not set (this could be the default). 
Mona37 (talk) 08:47, June 30, 2020 (UTC)

Yes, that would indeed be a useful change.

Unfortunately, I don't have much time currently to look into that. Gain and Loss are widely used. In fact, Increase and Drop both use them in their current definition. Probably other templates, too. Changing them is probably more work than you'd expect because things might break all over the place.

If Mikey thinkin would like to look into it, they are very welcome to do so. If not, I will likely do so in the future but not at the moment.
Rahv7 (talk) 09:54, June 30, 2020 (UTC)

Hey, I have made an example template that works just like Increase, but also supports a "Change description" parameter.  

Here's an example page here https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/User:Mona37/Sandbox with the examples grouped by 2: the first one uses the Increase template, the second one uses the template I made with the same parameters. The difference is it doesn't spit out WikiText when you use it wrong (displaying an error instead) and it allows you to set "Change description" (see the Liberation of Night example).

I wrote it in Lua because WikiText is an absolute mess to read and maintain with complex templates. Template is here https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/User:Mona37/Sandbox/IncreaseTest and module is here https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Module:Sandbox/Mona37/IncreaseTest (modules don't work in user namespace).

I can't figure out how to make it show the input boxes for parameters in the Visual Editor though.
Mona37 (talk) 18:37, June 30, 2020 (UTC)

It's a very impressive piece of work, Mona37! Some thoughts:

- I empathise that Wiki Text templates are messy. Your Lua code is very nice and legible. That said, I am concerned that it creates increasingly high hurdles for future wiki editors. Even the existing templates is something that people don't really want to touch. Something that's so overtly coding will probably narrow the number of tech-savvy editors more.

- That said, I am not inherently opposed to Lua and certainly we already have some Lua-enabled templates. However, if we *do* go down Lua route my preference would not be to have a WikiText-based Gain template and a Lua-based Increase template. If we are breaking out the Lua in the first place we might as well (imho) create a single general quality gain template that's Lua based and then have discrete and pyramidal gain templates be WikiText wrappers for that. That way we can ensure that pyramidal and discrete qualities are treated consistently.

- I think "Change description" is probably too long. "Description" (or even something shorter like "text" or "message") is probably sufficient

- In other Lua scripts on the wiki, whenever the script throws an error we generally want to capture those pages in a maintenance category. (e.g. see Module:ItemList). So I'd imagine that the "Error: Missing parameter 1" case should have a category.

- If we are re-writing the template anyway, I think we should review the use of the "Quirk cap" parameter. It was intended to be used for Quirks and has Quirk-specific checks. But in fact people often use it for a generic quality cap. So perhaps this would be a good opportunity to have a generic (non-Quirk) cap parameter in addition to the Quirk one?

- This is a fairly far reaching changes and as Rahv7 pointed out it would need to be implemented super carefully and the actual sequencing of implementing it thought through carefully and separately from the quality of the code itself.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 19:05, July 1, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks for your thoughts! I basically tried to reimplement the existing template exactly in Lua first, if you'd want to actually move to something like this there are certainly improvements to be made. It's just an experiment I did to see how doable it would be. Renaming parameters and adding to a script error category would be minor changes. I really like your idea to write a single quality change module.  

While I agree on one side moving to Lua might be a barrier for some editors, there is another side to this as well; when I saw the current WikiText template at first my reaction was just WTF and I noped out. (edit: don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the actual work done on these, it's just that the syntax is hard to read and even attempts to format the code to be readable adds even more mess to it). When I read Lua is an option I was willing to give it a try. I don't think templates are a thing that a lot of editors really touch (correct me if wrong), and it's not a change you would just do without consultation, so I personally think the positives outweigh the negatives. I'll leave that to you though.

I still don't know how to make it work in the Visual Editor though, when I try to insert the template it says "This template does not have fields to edit." When I copy the currently used template into my sandbox it also does that, so I'm not sure what's going on, but since it's a module there has to be a way to define those for the editor? On wikipedia it uses TemplateData for that but fandom does not support it apparently. I only edit in source but this could be a real problem.
Mona37 (talk) 19:41, July 1, 2020 (UTC)

The more I think about it the more it doesn't seem like such a bad idea... In fact, I've been wondering whether we should actually use the proposed Lua-based mother-module for Item Gain as well (ultimately). That way we would be able to tag qualities that erroneously use item gain template.

But we could do it in stages, starting just with the Increase template.

Having said that, I am not a mod. So it's probably not up to me to be left to... What I suggest is that unless Rahv7 has concerns is that we take this to a blof post. I suspect there won't be much of a discussion but at least it will have been "aired" in public.

Re: Visual editor. I honestly don't know. I never use the visual editor. As pure speculation however, I suspect you'd need to have the wrapper template explicitly accept arguments (via the the triple braces). I think each argument that a template accepts (via the the triple braces) becomes a box.

P.S (Thank you for putting so much work into tuding up the Discrete/Pyramidal maintenance categories. I've just "emptied" the Discrete with Gain one! Btw, Intimate with Missionary and Intimate with Revolutionary are, unusually, of different type. The former is discrete but the latter is pyramidal. There is a particular level of the latetr that's gained via CPs)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:19, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Like Mikey, I would prefer a regular template over a Lua script. Both because of accessability and general safety (I'm not really familiar with Lua and am not sure what kinds of mischief are possible when using it). But if it's a Lua script we have then we can definitely consider using it. And of course we can do a blog post about it.

A few general questions on this:

* the Lua script would be wrapped in a template, correct? So if we ever decide to switch to a template again, later, that'd be fairly easy?
* what happens if somebody adds nonsense parameters? Like, an image that doesn't exist or a parameter that doesn't make sense (e.g. "42" on a yes/no tag). Does it behave like when doing that using a template or can terrible(tm) things happen?
* regarding security: I have to idea how powerful Lua actually is. Could you potentially add a routine that spies on users? Or copies files? Forwards to a different website? Templates are basically just formatting (for the most part) and I am a little afraid that Lua could pose as a backdoor for some of the aforementioned terrible(tm) things. (To make things worse, changes do not show up in the wiki-timeline.)

Just a few thoughts off the top of my head.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:50, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

I can address your safety concerns. Lua is just the scripting language used for this stuff, what it's allowed to do depends purely on the implementation (by Fandom in this case) and not the language.

These are scripts that are executed on the server when a page is requested, and any text/html that is output from the script is then served as the page content. So any output that comes from a module has the same effect as just editing that same thing into a page directly, in that sense it can't do anything more harmful than you could by vandalizing a page. It's really just a more complex and structured way to process text, like wiki text template does but using a script language instead of a pattern processor. Both things don't happen on the client's computer, they only see the final output.

As for the data a Lua module has access to, that is only what the implementation (the Fandom server on which it runs) deliberately provides to it, and even if they wanted to implement functions that leak user data (like files) they could not, because it'd also require them exploiting a serious security problem in the browser to obtain it in the first place.

Basically the module just sees wiki specific stuff like the parameters used to call it, page titles, etc, the same kind of stuff a template has. You also couldn't store/send anything anywhere except show it to the same the person viewing that page.

Parameters that aren't used simply do nothing. Nonsense data in parameters will either do nothing or be treated as the default, depending on how the module is coded. If you expect an image and it's a non-existant one the module doesn't care, to the code it's just text and it will happily output the link to the missing image anyway.

Edit: they would be wrapped in a template so to the editors using it the change would be invisible. If you ever wanted to switch back it would be just a matter of pasting the old template code back in there.

Mikey, I don't use the visual editor either but I was thinking maybe some editors rely on this to fill in templates and it wouldn't be nice to break that. If you explicitly put the parameters in the template wrapper I guess it'll work but I could not get it to when I was testing mine. Could have just been a problem with being in the user namespace, it does work for all other templates after all.

And sorry if I mistakenly changed one of the intimate with qualities. I'm in the middle of moving right now so I am very busy, but it's great these are getting cleaned up. Last I checked there were still a bunch of Discrete qualities that are in Pyramidal by default, I hope to get to that soon. This got me thinking there may be qualities categorized as Pyramidal that have only a Gain category (like only using the old occurrence message from Increase), but are actually supposed to be Discrete qualities with Sources. Not sure how to detect such cases though.
Mona37 (talk) 20:43, July 10, 2020 (UTC)

Faction Templates

Hi Rahv7,

As I've also commented on Adnoam's Wall (Faction Templates). I've created some rough Templates for documenting factions on their pages. These Templates currently live on User:Asarta/Templates/Template1 and User:Asarta/Templates/Template2 and examples are live on User:Asarta/Sandbox. Could you take a look and tell me if they work please? (And if not why not)

Thanks in advance,

Asarta
Asarta (talk) 13:24, July 2, 2020 (UTC)

Hi there,

many thanks for the work you are putting in. To be honest, I like the current layout of faction pages more. They nicely prioritise what players are usually most interested in. The additional information on your template is just one mouse-click away via the category-page. I'm not sure if adding direct links to favours/renown/connected to the existing faction pages would make sense. It's certainly possible, but on the other hand those pages are not terribly useful themselves and only collect all pages related to the category. So actually adding them to the faction page might end up being more confusing than helping. Sorry!

I am not actually sure why Mikey thinkin didn't formalise the current layout via a template. It would make sense to do that.

Cheers, rahv
Rahv7 (talk) 10:42, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Oh thats also fine by me. In that case are you okay with me stripping away the information we don't use right now from the Template and using it like that (which just means that we'll keep basically the same layout only in Template). Because the main reason I did all this work is that all the different Faction pages right now are all slightly different. Some use bold here some use bold there some just don't include options which that Faction doesn't have some make a note saying it doesn't have that etc. I would really like to get at least that standardised. I would keep my Connections Template mainly intact because I think that the added notes are useful in explaining why those are different form the main Factions. What are your thoughts on that?

Also an entirely unrated thing. Shouldn't trimmed be cleaned ou soonish? It has over 150 items right now some of which are quite old.
Asarta (talk) 10:55, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Hey Rahv7, to be honest Favours are one of the main things I would look for on a Faction page. Sure, there's a link to it in the category page but that's not very intuitive if you're not familiar with how the wiki works and it's in a different place on the page for each faction.   

I agree those Favours pages are not that useful on their own, but their Sources category is. However I'm personally not really a fan of putting information on Category pages and would prefer those to be kept only for categorization, because it's not the first place players will go to find the info unless they know their way around the wiki. I don't really ever go to a category page directly anyway, only by clicking through (and searching for Favours will send you to the main page).   

Wouldn't it be nice if the Favours page itself had a list of repeatable sources (and ways to spend) with a short description for each like some of the Category: Favours Sources pages contain now, and then tell you to check the Sources category if you want a complete list? That would make the pages more useful and it'd make sense to link to them from the Faction page. 
Mona37 (talk) 12:10, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

After seeing the contrary points of view I feel we should let the community decide. I've created a blog asking for opinions and will be inviting other editors to join the discussion. I've already included most of your comments but please leave any further comments there.
Asarta (talk) 15:00, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Judging from other blog posts like the last one Optimatum posted about the new shops you'll probably not get much engagement there. This kind of decision is ultimately up to the people that have been maintaining this wiki for years, but getting more opinions can never hurt.   

Is there any other way things like this are being coordinated? Like the discussion we had about the Gain/Increase templates I wouldn't mind working on that but it's not something I would just decide to implement myself. And I don't know if it's worth my time if no decision is made. 
Mona37 (talk) 16:22, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Mona37 wrote: Judging from other blog posts like the last one Optimatum posted about the new shops you'll probably not get much engagement there. This kind of decision is ultimately up to the people that have been maintaining this wiki for years, but getting more opinions can never hurt.   

Is there any other way things like this are being coordinated? Like the discussion we had about the Gain/Increase templates I wouldn't mind working on that but it's not something I would just decide to implement myself. And I don't know if it's worth my time if no decision is made. 

Yeah I haven't seen a real way to do that just yet. I've just spammed most contributors who have been active in the last few weeks.

Note to Rahv7: Wouldn't it be possible to use the Magic Word combined with a new page to create a proposals page? I was thinking something like Fallen London Wiki: Proposals or Fallen London Wiki: Discussions
Asarta (talk) 16:45, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

@Asarta: If you want to formalise the current faction layout into a template, you have my full support. RE: Discussions: Isn't that technically what the feeds on the main page are for? Or the "Forum"? I realise that both are not optimal, I'm just not sure that a regular wiki-talk-page that requires editing is a better solution.

@Mona37: We can absolutely add a link to the favours-pages. The fact that these usually don't list repeatable sources but are instead just a collection of page-links was the main reason why I thought the link would not be useful. But that's not a hill I want to die on. We can just add the link and hopefully everyone's happy :)
Rahv7 (talk) 21:01, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

@Rahv7, to answer your earlier question about why I didn't formalise it as a template at the time. We were working on it together with Adnoam and they were trying some various tweak in their sandbox. And then we both dropped out for a while and it fell byt he wayside...
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:32, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, that explains it then :)

I'm pretty busy myself currently, so I can absolutely understand that happening.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:52, July 5, 2020 (UTC)

@Mikey thinkin, Do you mean User:Adnoam/Bohemians? Because I actually used that to partially design my Template.

@Rahv7 The mean reason I think that a wiki page would be useful is that it:

# Is much easier to follow.
# It allows for far more structured responses. As an example this is how the responses on a normal Thread look:



Original question

Response 1

Response 2

Answer to Response 1 and 2

Answer to Answer to 1 and 2

Response 3

and so on, which can make it hard for someone who drops later in too follow what is going on. The same goes for Discussion; you can only leave one level of reply. On a wiki page however you can also leave replies like this: (Using letters to indicate top level responses and numbers to indicate the order of the Responses)

Original text

Response A (1)

Response to A (3)

Response to that (4)

Response to that (5)

Response B (2)

Response to B (7)

Response C (6)

Basically its much easier to leave a response to a response by simply adding one colon more. In the Message Wall/Discussion system you instead make do with quotes to indicate who you are responding to; this makes it far harder for someone who joins the discussion later to understand who is talking to who.

3. On a wiki page its much easier to use wikitext/templates this allows for the use of templates for voting purposes creating something like {{<span class="new">Support</span>}}/{{<span class="new">Against</span>}}/{{<span class="new">Neutral</span>}} to make it easier to quickly see what someones decision is.
Asarta (talk) 04:56, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

@all After looking around in Raising Favours it appears as thought that page simply uses {{#lsth:Category:Favours: <Faction name> Sources|Notable Sources}} to call in a section on the Favours pages called Notable Sources. I would therefore propose that we either:

* Remove that section from the Source pages and move it to the main Favours page under a new section (example at User:Asarta/Sandbox) or,
* That we simply use {{#lsth:Category:Favours: Bohemians Sources|Notable Sources}} to call that section in.

My personal choice would be to do option 1 and simply move them; this prevents duplicate text and preserves what in my opinion is the goal of Category pages, namely to serve as an elaborate collection of links rather than a Guide-like page.

This will however require either a rework of {{[[Template:Quality|Quality]]}} or a simply non templated section as I imagine adding all that layout would be complicated. In that light simply adding an invoke seems easier to code. I will leave that consideration to people who are beter at templates than me however.
Asarta (talk) 07:15, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

Hi Asarta, yes I meant that sandbox. I know that's what you used as your starting point; that's why I was so easy to please :D

As for transcluding Notable Sources, I am *not* in favour of doing it on the main quality page. Quality pages should be for documenting the quality, from a game-mechanical PoV. We actually spent a lot of effort tidying up a lot of that last year as there was little consistency between what went on a quality page, what went on a category page and what went in the various guides. There is even a large outstanding project involving Category:Storyline to differentiate Story, the quality, and the more narrative notion of storyline progression (which is currently merged on most old Story pages)

I would suggest instead that "Notable Sources" are moved fully to the Factions page, or the faction guide page or something. They shouldn't really be on the Sources category page anyway. The latter, being a category page, should have minimal content. It can have a wiki note or a link pointing to the new location of "Notable Sources" of course.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 08:08, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

@Mikey thinkin I agree, I've made updated my example on my sandbox in the Bohemian filled in test.



@All Something else entirely Adnoam mentioned something that I completely forget namely that you can use the parameter {{#ifeq:}} to whole pieces of a Template. So both Templates are now merged inside User:Asarta/Templates/Template3 using the parameter |Connected which can either have yes (which used to be User:Asarta/Templates/Template2 or no(which used to be User:Asarta/Templates/Template1).

As a question to everybody, are we in agreement now? I believe I've taken comments in account. I will also ask the same question of Adnoam
Asarta (talk) 12:08, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

As for not putting notable sources on the quality page but somewhere else, that seems fine to me. Being consistent is more important, the main issue I had with where they are now is that mini guides shouldn't belong on category pages. Seems we all agree on that. 
Mona37 (talk) 15:23, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

Mona37 wrote: As for not putting notable sources on the quality page but somewhere else, that seems fine to me. Being consistent is more important, the main issue I had with where they are now is that mini guides shouldn't belong on category pages. Seems we all agree on that. 

Agreed thats why I've put them under Favours on the faction page for now
Asarta (talk) 15:24, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

In general it looks good. One comment I'd make is that I am not sure that notable sources necessarily need to be part of a template. It might become hard to maintain. A very large and potentially constantly changeable chiunk of content such as "Notable Sources" isn't ideal as a template field.

It might be perfectly fine if most of the page is regulated via a template but Notable Sources is just a free-form section after the template is invoked.

A *speculative* alternative (I haven't tried something like this so I don't know how well it would work, if at all), is to have a sub-page for notable sources. So you'd have a page Bohemians and a page Bohemians/Notable Favour Sources. The template could then check if the subpage exists; if it does it would transclude its contents into the main page; if it doesn't it could display a text inviting readers/editors to create one (similarly to how when we create a new quality but a quality category doesn't exist there is a link and text explaining how to create one). Then editors would only need to maintain the free-form subpage when and if the notable sources changes, without faffing about with formatting the template field.

But maybe that's too complicated for the pay-off..
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:17, July 6, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote: In general it looks good. One comment I'd make is that I am not sure that notable sources necessarily need to be part of a template. It might become hard to maintain. A very large and potentially constantly changeable chiunk of content such as "Notable Sources" isn't ideal as a template field.

It might be perfectly fine if most of the page is regulated via a template but Notable Sources is just a free-form section after the template is invoked.

A *speculative* alternative (I haven't tried something like this so I don't know how well it would work, if at all), is to have a sub-page for notable sources. So you'd have a page Bohemians and a page Bohemians/Notable Favour Sources. The template could then check if the subpage exists; if it does it would transclude its contents into the main page; if it doesn't it could display a text inviting readers/editors to create one (similarly to how when we create a new quality but a quality category doesn't exist there is a link and text explaining how to create one). Then editors would only need to maintain the free-form subpage when and if the notable sources changes, without faffing about with formatting the template field.

But maybe that's too complicated for the pay-off..

I tried it out but I ran into an insurmountable problem almost immediately; The formatting is never going to look good. Even thought this problem is also partly present in the current Template that Template still does a lot (base colons, collapsible etc) for you. Asking people to edit an blank page and then do the wikitext right first try just won't work. i tried it and even I needed to cheat using copy/paste and I designed the thing. So I think its just too much hassle even though doing it on a subpage would have an host of benefits (easy editing, easy invoking!) I just think it could cost far too much time to be worth it.
Asarta (talk) 05:19, July 7, 2020 (UTC)

I am not sure I entirely understand the concern about formatting. Here is an example I put together almost exclusively out of the code you wrote (I had to tweak it a bit because of how name spaces work on user pages): User:Mikey thinkin/Bohemians. It looks, as far as I can tell, the same as your current example which uses {{{Favour Sources}}}. I had to do no "cheating" (to my mind at least) - only copy the content to the subpage. Any formatting you'd do on the subpage (bulletpoints etc) you'd need to do inside {{{Favour Sources}}} anyway.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 07:44, July 7, 2020 (UTC)

@Mikey thinkin. Good point. My main concern was actually about two things: the collapsible list and the base formatting. However you have included the collapsible stuff inside the Template and I just realized that we (ie the persons who designed/saw all the examples by me) will do the base formatting so that later persons can simply operate inside the provided template. However one problem I ran into in is that right now the parameter {{{Favours}}} simply doesn't appear if it has no input. However the Sources show up way either as the Sources or as a prompt to create that page. I'm going to take a look and see if I can fix it.

Update: Fixed it by plugging the whole {{exist| etc}} into the {{#if: {{{Favours}}} part of the Template. I also fixed a far more serious problem because I by accident used |Connected parameter twice, once for the switch and once for the Connected: part of the Template. I've fixed this by renaming the second Connected to |Connections. I've done all of this on User:Asarta/Templates/Template3 where I've copied your tweaks to.
Asarta (talk) 10:02, July 7, 2020 (UTC)

Okay I'm going to give everyone one more day to respond and after that I'll assume we're in consensus and implement it on the wiki.
Asarta (talk) 04:47, July 8, 2020 (UTC)

I guess I have two substantive comments. 1) I am not sold on just having two chunks of code pasted together (one for Connected, one for Renown) when much of the structure is shared together. I think it would make more sense to have a single flow and then for the fields that differ (such as the wiki note or the Renown Items section) to have if statements. Also I wouldn't make this unnecessarily restrictive. Sure, the current Connected factions don't have an opportunity card but who's to say the the Widow won't get one, eventually? When you drop these restrictions then even more of the structure is in common between the Connected and Renown versions,.

2) I don't see an obvious benefit of having both Connected and Connections template arguments and I do see the prospect of confusion. If the purpose of Connected is to switch between the two modes (either entirely, as you have, or per section, as I suggest) then why not use Connections for that? If an editor provides a Connected quality that should be enough for the template to treat it as a Connected faction. If no Connected quality is provided it should be enough for the template to conclude that it's dealing with a Renown quality. To my knowledge there are no Connected factions without a Connected quality.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 22:02, July 8, 2020 (UTC)

Missed a lot of the discussion. But I agree with Mikey: remove the duplicate code and assume that if "Connected" is not set to "yes" then the favours/renown system is used. Check for single tags (like connected pet or opp-card) and adjust the output as needed. (If it helps, I did that a lot in the {{[[Template:Fatestory|Fatestory]]}}-template.)

The rest of my comments are just suggestions on streamlining:

* I would also skip irrelevant sections of the page completely instead of writing a note (like, no Connected-faction has renown items, so I'd probably skip that section entirely if "Connected=yes").
* As a personal opinion, I rather like short tag names. I'd probably use "|Conflict1" instead of "|Conflict Card1". And "|Pet" instead of "|Connected Pet". It's not particularly important in this case because the number of times this template will be used is limited. So if you prefer the longer names, leave them.
* If the "Faction"-variable is not set, something is inherently wrong and it'd probably make sense to give a more aggressive error message ... setting the incomplete-tag or something.
* I'm not sure why the "|Renown"- and "|Closest to"-tags need to be set separately. If not "Connected=yes", you could automatically generate a link to the renown page. Letting users set these tags (i.e. repeat the faction name) is just one more source of errors.
* Likewise, it should only be possible to set Renown-items if not "Connected=yes".

The first issue aside, these are all just suggestions for small adjustments. Overall this is really nice work. :)
Rahv7 (talk) 23:32, July 8, 2020 (UTC)

Those are great points, Rahv. In fact, it shouldn't even be necessary to explicitly provide the quality names for Favours, Renown, Closest to or Connected. The page name and the Connected tag should be sufficient to deduce these automatically. (There might be some complication with inconsistent use of the use of the definite article across these, but if it's the only issue I think it's solveable)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 23:55, July 8, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote: Those are great points, Rahv. In fact, it shouldn't even be necessary to explicitly provide the quality names for Favours, Renown, Closest to or Connected. The page name and the Connected tag should be sufficient to deduce these automatically. (There might be some complication with inconsistent use of the use of the definite article across these, but if it's the only issue I think it's solveable)

The problem I ran into while trying that was that right now for Faction pages we use the prefix Faction: making it look like Faction: <Faction Name>. However all the Favours/Renown/Connected pages have <Favours/Renown/Connected>: <Faction Name> as their structure. Is there anyway to tell the Template to get rid of those prefixes? because otherwise I don't see a way to have the Template automatically add those pages. Because normally I would have used Favours/Renown/Connected: {{PAGENAME}}, but I believe that the Faction: prefix screws that up. Also setting |Connections automatically means there is no easy switch anymore forcing the Template to use a |Connected switch anyway
Asarta (talk) 05:04, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

You can do all kinds of string-operations with PAGENAME (incl. cutting off the beginning). We are doing this for the {{[[Template:Item_Sources|Item Sources]]}}-template, for instance, if you want to take a look. Also here's a wiki help page on the topic.
Rahv7 (talk) 08:44, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

@Rahv7, thank you. I will back in a few hours when I've read all those pages. Don't get me wrong I like it, but there I go into the rabbit hole yet again.
Asarta (talk) 08:48, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

Asarta wrote:

Also setting |Connections automatically means there is no easy switch anymore forcing the Template to use a |Connected switch anyway

If Connections are set automatically then we would need a Connected tag, yes. My original comment was about avoiding having to use *both* and before Rahv made their suggestion.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 11:12, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote:

Asarta wrote:

Also setting |Connections automatically means there is no easy switch anymore forcing the Template to use a |Connected switch anyway

If Connections are set automatically then we would need a Connected tag, yes. My original comment was about avoiding having to use *both* and before Rahv made their suggestion.

I'm currently working on it using the old |Connected parameter in a few places (Wiki Note at the beginning/Favours/Renown/Renown Items) instead off at the beginning of a what was a whole template
Asarta (talk) 11:14, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

@All. Okay I've spent a few hours immersed inside wikitext and I've managed to incorporate both Templates in each other and automated Favours/Renown/Connected. I also made Renown items only show up for non Connected Factions and the Wiki Note only for Connected factions, using the |Connected parameter which has to be set to either =yes or =no. Live tests can be seen at https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Faction:_Benthic?diff=prev&oldid=297910 and https://fallenlondon.fandom.com/wiki/Faction:_Bohemians?diff=prev&oldid=297901. Could all of you check them out and give your opinion? I've also taken Rahv7's advice to heart and shortened a few of the parameter names.
Asarta (talk) 12:46, July 9, 2020 (UTC)

I like it. The Favours, Renown and Closest to are only added if a page exists for it, right? I'm thinking of Fingerkings (not sure if that counts as a Faction) that has Favours but not the other things.
Mona37 (talk) 21:14, July 10, 2020 (UTC)

Mona37 wrote: I like it. The Favours, Renown and Closest to are only added if a page exists for it, right? I'm thinking of Fingerkings (not sure if that counts as a Faction) that has Favours but not the other things.

Yes, only if it can find the page, otherwise it will simply put Renown: This faction has no Renown levels., Closest To: You cannot be [[Closest To|]] Closest To with this Faction. etc. That's the reason it uses {{#exists
Asarta (talk) 04:57, July 11, 2020 (UTC)

So time for my new favorite question: Are we all in agreement now? I believe I've done everything suggested but the last time I said that Rahv7 and Mikey thinkin dropped another ten suggestions.
Asarta (talk) 05:44, July 12, 2020 (UTC)

Two (and a half) comments :-)

1. Your template seems to have default values for the Connected tag (for example, you have {{{Connected|yes}}} and {{{Connected|no}}} instead of {{{Connected|}}} in both cases). Is that intended?

- I am not sure it should have any default values. The default should be "no", I think, as that's the majority case but as you'll see below you don't even need to check explicitly for "no". So having an empty default makes more sense to me

- Even if you do want a default, it doesn't make sense for some bits of the code to assume that the default is "yes" and for others to assume it's "no". It will never be the case that both (defaults) are true so one of them must be redundant.

- The "no" case doesn't need to be checked for explicitly. For example, currently you are doing this:

 {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|yes|add connected-specific stuff}}<br> {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|no|add renown-specific stuff}}

But you could do it all in one:

 {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|yes|add connected-specific stuff|add renown-specific stuff}}

2. So did you opt back for the {{{Favour Sources}}} approach over the transclusion approach? It's completely fine if you have; just checking it was intentional because the example you gave above doesn't actually provide any content for the |Favour Sources = tag

2.5 If it wasn't intentional and you are planning to use the transclusion approach - when you move the template from the User name space to the main wiki namespace - you might want to try using PAGENAME instead of FULLPAGENAME (the only reason I used the latter in the example is because of the "User:" part of the template page name)
Mikey thinkin (talk) 22:00, July 12, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote: Two (and a half) comments :-) 1. Your template seems to have default values for the Connected tag (for example, you have {{{Connected|yes}}} and {{{Connected|no}}} instead of {{{Connected|}}} in both cases). Is that intended?

- I am not sure it should have any default values. The default should be "no", I think, as that's the majority case but as you'll see below you don't even need to check explicitly for "no". So having an empty default makes more sense to me

- Even if you do want a default, it doesn't make sense for some bits of the code to assume that the default is "yes" and for others to assume it's "no". It will never be the case that both (defaults) are true so one of them must be redundant.

- The "no" case doesn't need to be checked for explicitly. For example, currently you are doing this:

 {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|yes|add connected-specific stuff}}<br> {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|no|add renown-specific stuff}}

But you could do it all in one:

 {{#ifeq: {{{Connected|}}}|yes|add connected-specific stuff|add renown-specific stuff}}

2. So did you opt back for the {{{Favour Sources}}} approach over the transclusion approach? It's completely fine if you have; just checking it was intentional because the example you gave above doesn't actually provide any content for the |Favour Sources = tag

2.5 If it wasn't intentional and you are planning to use the transclusion approach - when you move the template from the User name space to the main wiki namespace - you might want to try using PAGENAME instead of FULLPAGENAME (the only reason I used the latter in the example is because of the "User:" part of the template page name)

@Mikey thinkin



# I've now fixed this, all the parts now use your version
# No as far as I'm aware? Did I by accident include it in my test? The Template these days still does #if: the page exists transclude it, otherwise add redlink and ask users to make said page.

2.5 Yup but well User tests. I've fro now switched it back over to PAGENAME
Asarta (talk) 05:08, July 13, 2020 (UTC)

Hm, I must have hallucinated it. It does indeed seem fine now that look again... Sorry!



i don't have other comments at the moment. The pagename point will be easier to verify once the template is not in your user page.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 07:12, July 13, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote: Hm, I must have hallucinated it. It does indeed seem fine now that look again... Sorry!



i don't have other comments at the moment. The pagename point will be easier to verify once the template is not in your user page.

Yes although the two times I tried it on a real page it seemed to work. I'm just going to wait if Rahv7 has anything to contribute.
Asarta (talk) 07:46, July 13, 2020 (UTC)

Okay Failbetter just messed up this whole system by giving Fingerkings both Favours and Connected. I've now done a quick and dirty fix using {{#ifeq however we appear to have no faction page for them and I'm not sure if we should have one? They don't have an Item/Pet/card or Conflict Card.
Asarta (talk) 08:18, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

It seems like maaaybe they are becoming a faction but also I guess we can wait and see...

Here is a possible suggestion for how to deal with these (increasingly common) edge cases. I haven't really though though it in detail, just throwing it out there...

1. We go back to Asarta's original layout where Connected/Renown/Favours/Closest-to had their own fields 2. But instead of taking the actual quality as values it would simply check if that field is set to "yes". If yes, it adds the section of the page. If something other than "yes" (including empty) it does not 3. But then we set *defaults* to mirror what's happening now. So in *most* cases it's sufficient to just set Connected to "yes" (or not) and the template will just work out what's included and what's not. But it's always possible to *override* those defaults.

So for Fingerkings, you'd set "|Connected=yes" (which would automatically exclude Favours, Renown and Renown items) but then we override "|Favours = yes"

Admittedly it's a major change (yet again). But it might give us more flexibility going forward... But as I said, just throwing it out there. Definitely something for others to chime in on!
Mikey thinkin (talk) 19:14, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

Mikey thinkin wrote: It seems like maaaybe they are becoming a faction but also I guess we can wait and see...

Here is a possible suggestion for how to deal with these (increasingly common) edge cases. I haven't really though though it in detail, just throwing it out there...

1. We go back to Asarta's original layout where Connected/Renown/Favours/Closest-to had their own fields 2. But instead of taking the actual quality as values it would simply check if that field is set to "yes". If yes, it adds the section of the page. If something other than "yes" (including empty) it does not 3. But then we set *defaults* to mirror what's happening now. So in *most* cases it's sufficient to just set Connected to "yes" (or not) and the template will just work out what's included and what's not. But it's always possible to *override* those defaults.

So for Fingerkings, you'd set "|Connected=yes" (which would automatically exclude Favours, Renown and Renown items) but then we override "|Favours = yes"

Admittedly it's a major change (yet again). But it might give us more flexibility going forward... But as I said, just throwing it out there. Definitely something for others to chime in on!

I'm nor sure what you mean? So you're saying we should roughly keep this Template but allow us to provide an extra parameter to override the default settings? I'm not sure how that would be implemented but I might take a look. (Although probably tomorrow, its getting to late to do advanced templating.) However if you want to do something before that feel free. (although I would request that you do it on User:Mikey thinkin/TemplateTest to stop my notifications from getting flooded by the tens of edits these changes usually take)
Asarta (talk) 19:19, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

Hi, I am finally catching up a little. I'm sorry I haven't answered earlier.

As a personal opinion, I would not add Fingerkings as a faction at the moment. Yes, there's a quality called "Favours:Fingerkings" now, but that does not make them a faction. This is similar to "Connected:Glass". Failbetter have explicitely said they're not a faction and it's just an unfortunately name for the quality.

If you do add Fingerkings to factions, they're a super special case and if I'm reading this correctly there're already some special cases and workarounds you're working on because of this. So, yeah, personally I wouldn't do that. At least for now. (If there were any major changes in the game over the last two days or so, that I am just not aware of, please ignore everything I said above.)

I've also taken a look at the updated template and based on reading the source code it looks good to me. The only change I would make (personally), would be changing the tags "Renown item 1/2/3" to something like "Renown10 item", "Renown25 item", etc. This would have the advantage that you can output a formatted list and it's hard the mess up the order by accident. If you don't feel like doing that, just ignore my suggestion. As mentioned before, for a template with limited use cases this isn't that important. I assume the TemplateTest on Mikey's page is what this looks like when used?

Let me say again that I really appreciate all the effort. I feel bad that currently I'm not around as much as usual. But you're doing great work!
Rahv7 (talk) 21:01, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

I am definitely on board with adopting a "wait and see" approach on Fingerkings. If they become more of a faction we can review any template tweaks at the time.
Mikey thinkin (talk) 21:06, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

Okay I believe we have consensus then. I'm going to wait another 24 hours just to give someone a chance to run in and stop me if i'm accidentally also destroying the world with this Template and afterwards I'll implement it on the wiki at large.

Edit: After implementing Rahv7's suggestion I found I have no patience left so I will go ahead and implement it on the wiki at large.
Asarta (talk) 04:51, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

I found I have no patience left

Haha, I can completely understand :D From what I've seen so far it looks really good and I've not seen any signs of any destruction so far.
Rahv7 (talk) 12:28, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

All factions have now been converted. One problem I did run into is that for the Constables and Tomb Colonies we don't have an Closest To Category which broke the Template causing it to say you couldn't be Closest To to them. I've for now fixed this using a new parameter called |Closest To which when set to yes will display: "Closest To: There is not yet an [[Closest_To|]] Closest To Category for this Faction." How where the categories for the rest created (ie do we have an Template that is acting up or should I just do them manually)?
Asarta (talk) 12:30, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote:

I found I have no patience left

Haha, I can completely understand :D From what I've seen so far it looks really good and I've not seen any signs of any destruction so far.

Yup. Like it has all been very educating and I now know a lot more about Templating but after a certain point you just want to mass-edit pages with it and get the satisfaction of it actually doing something.
Asarta (talk) 12:33, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

Asarta wrote: I've for now fixed this using a new parameter called |Closest To which when set to yes will display: "Closest To: There is not yet an [[Closest_To|]] Closest To Category for this Faction."

I suppose the pages for created manually. I can just do that right now, there is no need to introduce another flag.

Edit: Ah, you were faster than me :)

Edit2: Is this a problem on my side or do the faction pages all appear to be empty?
Rahv7 (talk) 17:56, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

Asarta

I suppose the pages for created manually. I can just do that right now, there is no need to introduce another flag.

Well if you want to..

Edit2: Is this a problem on my side or do the faction pages all appear to be empty?

My fault, accidental misuse of onlyinclude tags. Should be fixed now

Edit: the problem for at least the Constables seems to be there is such a page (Category:Closest To: The Constables) however we use Constables on the rest of the wiki which means that the template breaks. I believe we should simply move all content from Category:Closest To: The Constables to Category:Closest To: Constables because thats the name the rest of the wiki uses.

Edit2: Faction: Tomb-Colonies has a similar problem, its Closest To category is called Category:Closest To: Tomb-Colonists instead of Category:Closest To: Tomb-Colonies. Should I just move all content of those two to the right place?
Asarta (talk) 18:08, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

I am in favour of moving to ensure consistency, but if we move, we'd need to check that pages linking to the current spelling are corrected
Mikey thinkin (talk) 19:00, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

It's times like these when I wonder how all of that works on Failbetter's side. Probably "the Constables" is just a displayed name for that one specific level of "Closest to".

I've created the two missing category-pages and just made them redirects to the existing pages. I also added image links for the aliases, just in case. If we're lucky that's all that needs to be done. It seems to be working on my side.

Edit: I removed the "closest to"-flag from the template and the problem persists. I don't really know why, though. The code should check if the page exists. And it *does* exist (it's just a redirect, but that shouldn't matter). Still, it's not recognised. Any ideas what could be the reason?
Rahv7 (talk) 20:09, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

The problem is all Closest To X pages redirect to Category:Closest To X (not sure why). The template looks for the former, which works in all other cases because there's redirects. I added a redirect from Closest To: Constables to Category:Closest To: The Constables and it works now. However the name is displayed incorrectly as Closest To: Constables, you'd need to fix that in the template.
Mona37 (talk) 21:55, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

I thought I had tried that as well. Maybe there was a typo or something. In any case, many thanks for fixing it!

I don't think it's worth changing anything in the template. It makes no sense to handle these special cases when clicking on the link will forward you to the correct page anyway. It's an inconsistency in Failbetter's choice of level descriptions and fixing those tiny issues is just not worth it for that one link.
Rahv7 (talk) 23:04, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

I agree if there isn't a universal solution. I did some research and couldn't find any way to get the page title of a redirect target using a wikitext template ({{PAGENAME}} doesn't follow redirects), so unless someone knows how to do it I guess the only way to fix it is by manually catching these two cases. Which would be messy. 
Mona37 (talk) 09:14, July 16, 2020 (UTC)

No idea if this is an appropriate place to comment - I just noticed that the Raising Favours#Raising Specific Favours section has been broken by moving all those notable favour sources to their own pages.

I'll see if I can fix it - but my initial attempt with just replacing the page name doesn't seem to be going well - possibly the {{#lsth: macro is only including the first entity it finds at the target?
Dagforth (talk) 13:48, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

I'll see what I can do quickly. And this is probably indeed the best place to ask this
Asarta (talk) 13:54, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've tried using {{: instead of {{#lsth: and that seems to go better.

I've saved a change just modifying the Bohemians entry as an example. What do we think of introducing the collapsible div?
Dagforth (talk) 14:02, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

I unfortunately enough seem to have overridden with my own edit using {{: everywhere. Feel free to continu experimenting however!
Asarta (talk) 14:06, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

Now I see you've fixed it properly. Thank you!
Dagforth (talk) 14:08, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

Dagforth wrote: Now I see you've fixed it properly. Thank you!

No problem. Could you perhaps implement your collapsible idea again on the Bohemian part though? It seems interesting and I would like to see it in action
Asarta (talk) 14:09, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

Asarta wrote: No problem. Could you perhaps implement your collapsible idea again on the Bohemian part though? It seems interesting and I would like to see it in action

I'd basically gone looking for other things that included the new Notable Favour Sources pages to figure out what macro might work better and found the new(?) Faction template. From that I copied the {{: and since that was using a <div class="mw-collapsible"> section around the included list I thought I'd cargo cult that too.

Turns out the [collapse/expand] part doesn't line up horizontally with the headers, so it's not terribly nice looking. Overall I think I prefer not having bits magically hidden in most cases.
Dagforth (talk) 14:17, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

I've used a slightly different way to collapse the lists. Could you please take a look if this looks okay to you?

If you don't like it, feel free to revert my changes.
Rahv7 (talk) 20:33, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: I've used a slightly different way to collapse the lists. Could you please take a look if this looks okay to you?

That looks much better than the way I did it. Two thumbs up.
Dagforth (talk) 21:24, August 28, 2020 (UTC)

Updating Places Global navigation?

Hi Rahv7 I recently noticed that the Places part of the navigation bar is lagging behind the actual places in the game; it misses Parabola,Railway content (only Ealing Gardens has been released but we know that more stations are coming) and the Laboratory. Shouldn't it be updated with at least the Railway and Parabola?

Edit: In a similar vein Whitsun is missing from the Seasonal events.

And something else entirely (yes, I've found another thing I need to ask you). By searching for Fallen London Wiki: I've found a few other pages which could use an update:

* Fallen London Wiki:Templates, should probably be merged with Templates. The first covers a few general templates ({{[[Template:Disambig|disambig]]}}, {{[[Template:Wikipedia|wikipedia]]}}, {{[[Template:Sandbox|sandbox]]}} etc) while the second is the semi-maintained list of the personal templates of this wiki. (note to self: update Templates).
* Fallen London Wiki:Protected page reads more like an admin how-to Guide than an actual Guideline.
* Fallen London Wiki:Policy acts as an interface for the Category:Policy category which has no wiki-native pages in it (the only pages are Fallen London Wiki:Policy and Fallen London Wiki:Privacy Policy which just links to Fandoms Privacy Policy.)
* Fallen London Wiki:About was probably created when Neonix created the wiki and has not been updated since.

What should we do with those pages? Some of them seem useful to me (such as Fallen London Wiki:Administrators and Fallen London Wiki:About (once properly updated)) while some others Fallen London Wiki:Protected page among others are in my opinion useless.




Asarta (talk) 08:15, July 10, 2020 (UTC)

And yet another unrelated thing, I noticed that a few Templates (such as Template:A Particular Day in the Neath, Template:Spoiler among others) are currently classified as being Infoboxes. Shouldn't they be classified as Notices?
Asarta (talk) 12:33, July 10, 2020 (UTC)

Thank you for all of these.

I've added Whitsun and an "Endgame"-category to places. Currently, it lists Lab, Base-Camp, Bone Market, and Ealing. A general bullet for the railway content is difficult. We could link Involved in a Railway Venture but it's not really a place. In general, the railway content is more a storyline than a place. I think adding Ealing Gardens is a good first step. We'll see what Jericho Locks looks like. If there's also so much content, we can add it as a separate place.

I'll take a look at the other pages when I have a little more time. Feel free to remind me if I forget. (In general, reddit is a better place to reach out than the wiki.)

Regarding the page-templates: I'm not really sure about these. I remember that we changed some a few years back and suddently things looked all weird on mobile. In any case, I've checked the various other "banners" for festivals, SMEN, etc. and they're all categorised as "Design". Does changing the template have any consequences you are aware of?
Rahv7 (talk) 21:25, July 14, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: Regarding the page-templates: I'm not really sure about these. I remember that we changed some a few years back and suddently things looked all weird on mobile. In any case, I've checked the various other "banners" for festivals, SMEN, etc. and they're all categorised as "Design". Does changing the template have any consequences you are aware of?

No I just like them being properly classified, but if the wiki has used Desgin for now I'm also happy to simply roll with it
Asarta (talk) 04:45, July 15, 2020 (UTC)

Regarding template:Places

As failbetter games has now made an decision regarding in which places the outfit is locked I've for now re enabled |Outfit = no. However because of the small amount locations in which the outfit is locked I would actually prefer if we got rid of |Outfit = yes entirely or make it the default option. What do you think?
Asarta (talk) 16:51, August 10, 2020 (UTC)

I was actually going to suggest the same thing :)

It absolutely makes sense to only mark the few locations where outfits are locked. Are you going to take care of this? I'm awfully busy today and tomorrow.
Rahv7 (talk) 17:22, August 10, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: I was actually going to suggest the same thing :)

It absolutely makes sense to only mark the few locations where outfits are locked. Are you going to take care of this? I'm awfully busy today and tomorrow.

Sure are you okay with me making the current text for yes the default text?
Asarta (talk) 17:29, August 10, 2020 (UTC)

I've made yes the default option and removed (I hope) all the |Outfit = yes parameters. I've also removed Category:Outfit needs checking from all pages and marked it for deletion.
Asarta (talk) 07:45, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

I wonder if we even need Category:Outfit unlocked, if that's the default behaviour for 90% of locations. Maybe just have Category:Outfit locked would be enough as a sub-category of Category:Places?
Adnoam (talk) 07:53, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

Adnoam wrote: I wonder if we even need Category:Outfit unlocked, if that's the default behaviour for 90% of locations. Maybe just have Category:Outfit locked would be enough as a sub-category of Category:Places?

Perhaps but I think its clearer this way and make it easy for users to find more places in this category. (its also really useful for changes like this because it allows you to easily find pages which need changing)
Asarta (talk) 07:59, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

I also see you changed Template:Places to not include Outfit unlocked. I disagree with this change as it doesn't make it clear if it can be changed there are it just hasn't been filled in. Could you please change that back?
Asarta (talk) 08:18, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

Ah, the category is back. So hopefully everyone's happy now. Thanks for marking all the locked locations!
Rahv7 (talk) 09:18, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

Asarta wrote: I also see you changed Template:Places to not include Outfit unlocked. I disagree with this change as it doesn't make it clear if it can be changed there are it just hasn't been filled in. Could you please change that back?

Locations with locked outfits are very much the exception to the rule. Similarly, we don't write on all Action pages that they cost 1 action - just for those few who have a different action cost.

The default behaviour is as it has always been - outfits can be changed at any time. There's an exception in a handful of locations, and this is now noted by the template. Why add more text to all these pages which doesn't add any new information?
Adnoam (talk) 09:28, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

I am with Adnoam here. Places are already very complicated to code and document. There are a LOT of parameters. Ways to reduce the cognitive load are good, imho
Mikey thinkin (talk) 10:43, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

In that case I defer to you two.
Asarta (talk) 11:26, August 11, 2020 (UTC)

Regarding the inclusion of Hinterland scrip in Money-Making

I don't think we should include it in the main page but rather as a subpage of money-Making (called something like Money-Making/Hinterland Scrip) and then link to it from Money making and the Guide page. This keeps money-Making dedicated to Echoes while still making the Hinterland Scrip page easily accessible.

What do you think?
Asarta (talk) 16:15, August 12, 2020 (UTC)

We can definitely do a separate page. Over the past weeks I've been desperately trying to find good sources of Scrip and thought other players will probably be interested in this, too.

Maybe use an easier name, though ... something people will remember. Do you think Hinterland Scrip (Guide) would be okay?
Rahv7 (talk) 20:34, August 12, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: Maybe use an easier name, though ... something people will remember. Do you think Hinterland Scrip (Guide) would be okay?

The problem with that name is that it sounds more like a Guide about Hinterland Scrip than an guide to making it, maybe Hinterland Scrip-Making so it is nice and consistent with Money-Making?
Asarta (talk) 04:48, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

It would be good to have a guide explaining how to get Scrip. However, it shouldn't be on the same level as the Money Making guide, since Scrip grinding is not as prevalent in the gameplay. I mean, people always need to know about how to get echoes, because its a versatile currency, but Scrip is only useful for very specific activities/purchases.

A HinterLand Scrip Making guide seems to me as closer in nature to a theoretical Bessemer Steel Ingots Making guide than to the Money-Making guide.

As a start I'd suggest writing relevant content in the Hinterland Scrip page itself (there are several items for which the item page includes some free text on ways to get the item, and also in some Favours pages).
Adnoam (talk) 08:02, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Created Hinterland Scrip-Making in the meantime.

Personally, I dislike walls of text on regular wiki pages. A short note is okay, but extensive analysis like on the overgoat card always seems misplaced (to me, at least).

Given the Upper River Exchange, I would also argue that Scrip is the same as Echoes. Only in the Hinterlands, though. With the third station released this week and more stations planned to be following later this year, its importance will only increase in the future.
Rahv7 (talk) 08:18, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Yeah, it's currency at eh Upper River Exchange. But only a handful of items there are actually useful for buying (even if bought just to collect them). It's very limited currency.

But I don't object to having a separate page as a guide.
Adnoam (talk) 09:17, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

I agree here with Rahv7. Hinterland Scrip is a currency even though it isn't used as much as penny's but its still a currency rather than an item. So I still think the page should be closer to Money-Making than a guide about Bessemer Steel Ingots which should be closer to Item Grinding (Guide).
Asarta (talk) 10:55, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: Personally, I dislike walls of text on regular wiki pages. A short note is okay, but extensive analysis like on the overgoat card always seems misplaced (to me, at least).

Completely agree, I've actuality collapsed that section so the page is more readable
Asarta (talk) 11:21, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: Personally, I dislike walls of text on regular wiki pages. A short note is okay, but extensive analysis like on the overgoat card always seems misplaced (to me, at least).

I agree with this, but it does touch on a long-standing issue with the wiki about how finding out how to best grind an item – or even get it at all – can be difficult for inexperienced users. Or even if you want to make a guide to a specific item, where to put it. So while the guide on Whirring Contraption to me feels out of place, I don't actually know where it should go so it can be linked to, either.

(For the Overgoat I think just collapsing it is a good solution though, since it's specific to just that one card.)
Cactusorange (talk) 17:33, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps (just throwing it in here as I like subpages) create subpages to the main page (like Whirring Contraption/Obtaining or Whirring Contraption/Sources or Whirring Contraption/Getting?) listing the sources there and then write a new part to {{[[Template:Item|Item]]}} using #exist: to include a link to it if such a page exists? This would also remove the need for Item Grinding (Guide) which despite the great work by Fynnkaterin always seemed just too ambitious to work and become over encumbered by massive amounts of tables. This also improves visibility and ease in reaching those resources as right now nothing on a items page indicates the presence of that Guide while in this new system they would be one click away
Asarta (talk) 18:51, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

Unless the page becomes huge, why keep at a click away instead of showing it on the same page? The beginning will still be formatted by the regular Item template, so it will be concise and with standard formatting. But that part is relatively short. After that, we should be able to show more information on that Item.

Besides keeping the pages clean (which we should), we need to ensure the wiki is usable and useful, and not just to power users/players. A common criticism by casual players is that the wiki has plenty of data but that it's very hard to actually find what they are looking for (often "how to I get more of item X, if my stats are Y?")
Adnoam (talk) 19:44, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

For the Whirring Contraption example I would actually argue that the page does become huge. Less than 20% of the page content is what you would actually expect to find there, the other 80+% is information you may or may not be looking for. Personally, I would favour Asarta's suggestion of creating a subpage or linking a guide or something similar. And while I can live with exceptions like the Contraption-page, it's not something I would like to see on every other item page. (I'll mention that - in my opinion - the Contraption guide also includes a lot of hand holding, personal opinions and unneccessarily detailed analyses. But that is not the issue here. Part of it is also outdated after last week's update.)

For Hinterland Scrip, I still think it's a different issue as Scrip is the currency in the Hinterlands and is used everywhere. Adding the currently missing skeleton-grind will probably double the length of the page. For subsequent stations, it is likely that other interesting grinds need to be added. Putting all of that on the regular Scrip-page would be completely disproportional.
Rahv7 (talk) 20:59, August 13, 2020 (UTC)

I've agreed that I'm OK with the separate Scrip grinding page.

As for the Contraption - indeed, the explanation can (and should) be updated, but that's besides the point of where to place it. As long as the top of the page is in the same format for all Items, I wouldn't sate that the rest is "information you may or may not be looking for". I can't determine that for the average unkown wiki reader (perhaps that is *only* what they are looking for? Maybe the item description text is useless to them and the *only* want to know how to get that item?)
Adnoam (talk) 07:39, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

I can't determine that for the average unkown wiki reader (perhaps that is *only* what they are looking for? Maybe the item description text is useless to them and the *only* want to know how to get that item?)

That is true having been a wiki reader myself I at least always missed such information on those pages.
Asarta (talk) 10:26, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

For a lot of items it's difficult to provide this information because various sources unlock at various stages of the game and/or only under certain conditions.

With Whirring Contraptions it's reasonably easy because there are only four viable sources in the game (one of which - in the Parabolan Base-Camp - isn't even mentioned in the guide). The three where details are given unlock all at roughly the same time (when you become a PoSI or a short time later).

Yet, despite having this unusually compact set of sources and conditions, the guide covers two screens of text.
Rahv7 (talk) 14:47, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

And is outdated as the Arbor grind is dead
Asarta (talk) 15:04, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

I think a general railway guide might be useful in the future. Many of the sections would link to other already excellent guides (eg. bone market, railway board), but other sections could include grinds for the necessary items. This would be a perfect location for a Bessemer Steel/Railway Steel guide, a Hinterland Scrip making guide, etc.

Of course, newer railway content may make Hinterland Scrip grinds much more complicated. In that case, it will need it's own dedicated page anyways.
Yang573 (talk) 16:23, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

Well I think that a Hinterland Scrip page is necessary but such a general Railway guide does sound great
Asarta (talk) 16:30, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

What I'd thought about a while ago is whether it'd be beneficial to have a field in the item template for a quick summary of sources. The intent would primarily be to link to other guide pages and have a rather short explanation. It'd be more flexible than Asarta's suggestion of subpages; if needed a subpage could be linked there, but it would also be possible to use for items which don't need their own guide, just a pointer to another one. Then The Minister of War could link directly to Associating with Radical Academics for example, without the user having to open the Sources list, click on one of them, and navigate backwards to find that page. Having to do that is only mildly inconvenient for me, but can be quite a barrier for newer uses.

On reconsideration I'm not too against just sticking the guide at the end of the page like with the Whirrers, it just seems a bit ad hoc; unusual and unstandardised. And for examples such as the Minister, it feels rather bulky for something that's just linking to information already provided on another page.
Cactusorange (talk) 17:08, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

Cactusorange wrote:

[...] it'd be beneficial to have a field in the item template for a quick summary of sources. [...]

I was tempted to add this to the template. But given your example, wouldn't linking to the Radical Academics storyline just confuse somebody not used to navigating the wiki even more? Or generally speaking, would linking to an extensive guide that is not obviously dealing with acquiring a certain item type be more confusing than clearing things up? Even if details on grinding said item might be found somewhere in there?

I totally see your point, I just don't have a good idea how to do this in a way that is both user- and contributer-friendly. But if anyone else comes up with a solution for this, we can totally do it.
Rahv7 (talk) 23:52, August 14, 2020 (UTC)

I think there's a definite need for a "curated" set of sources, separate from the comprehensive lists of sources that currently exists. Whenever I look up something like a Tier 2 item that I need, I have to sift through dozens of non-repeatable story or card options that give out an incidental item in order to fine the two or three options that are actually grindable. 

I think there's several different use-cases here, which might be better-served by different guides. The first use-case is distinguishing repeatable or grindable sources for items. The second use-case is "optimal" grinding, which often requires a Guide instead of just a link when the process is convoluted. The third is associating the item with the initial step to acquire the item, instead of the final action that actually rewards it, where the wiki reader has to work backwards a good deal to find out what's going on. 

I think the first can be addressed with merely a list of links to actions. The second may not need a template--most guides are going to be paragraphs of text, rather than heavily templatized. This can live on the bottom of the item page when short, and the curated-source-list can link to full-blown Guides where appropriate.

The third one is less clear. In the particular case of the Minister, it makes sense to associate it to the Storyline represented by that quality. There may not always be something so clear-cut to link it back to. In any case, I feel like you still need to orient yourself in order to connect the dots back to how to obtain the item, which is back to the original problem.
PSGarak (talk) 03:43, August 15, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: wouldn't linking to the Radical Academics storyline just confuse somebody not used to navigating the wiki even more?

If it is just a link to the page, yes. But I was imagining you could fill in the field with a short explanation, something like "You can get the Minister in the overzee Court of the Wakeful Eye upon your first visit, or for [[Tribute|]] 240 x Tribute if you already picked another minister. The Court is unlocked by pursuing the Associating with Radical Academics storyline to level 20." Even if that page isn't superb as a guide, it's still reasonable at the moment as a way of finding out how to progress; I'm primarily focusing on how to best lead users to the helpful information we have already got, since writing new guides is a lot more effort. A guide to getting a Minister is almost entirely covered by a guide on how to progress the Radical Academics storyline (and possibly a guide to getting Tribute), which are best covered on their own pages.

Rahv7 wrote: Or generally speaking, would linking to an extensive guide that is not obviously dealing with acquiring a certain item type be more confusing than clearing things up? Even if details on grinding said item might be found somewhere in there?

It'd vary a bit based on the circumstances. If it's a page that contains info on different items (like PoSI Item Crafting) you could link to the specific header. If it's a specific reward of a grind like the War of Assassins, the explainer text would say that it's one possible reward of that grind when linking it. Maybe there's other situations I'm not thinking of, but I hope that it wouldn't be too hard to convey with a flexible open text field.

Something similar might be useful for item uses as well. A perennial question is "Which items are okay to sell" and having a short easily-digested explanation of uses could help with determining the answer for a specific item. Or it could answer the question of "Why would I even want a Minister of War anyway?"
Cactusorange (talk) 13:46, August 15, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks to both of you for your detailed (and nicely structured) thoughts on this. I wasn't thinking of curated (freeform) text originally, so that was a misunderstanding on my side. I'm a little worried about freeform text becoming outdated without anyone noticing but we will see how it works out.

As a test case, created a {{[[Template:Source_Guide|Source Guide]]}}-template that can be added to items (similar to {{[[Template:Item_Actions|Item Actions]]}}) and I've added Tuxi's text to The Minister of War. For now the template consists just of two tags:

* "Guide" - which is used for the Minister of War expample
* "Grind" - which would be used for repeatable ways to get an item

We can refine these two tags or add additional flags or whatever.

Could you please let me know what you think of this? This is just a first idea, so if you have any suggestions how to change or improve this, we can absolutely do this.
Rahv7 (talk) 14:53, August 15, 2020 (UTC)

I was originally envisioning a field for the Item template, but with the guide/grind distinction a separate template is needed, yeah. Any thoughts on Uses guides too? If it's a good idea, maybe Source Guide should instead be called Item Guide, with fields 'Source [Guide/Grind]' and 'Use [Once-off(?)/Repeatable]'. That Use distinction seems a little silly for the Minister of War, which has one repeatable and one storyline use, but it'd be very nice for something like Searing Enigmas. There's maybe one issue with it leading to a lot of headers on the page – even more so if the item also has Actions tied to it – though that might just be my own sensibilities.

Maintaining a lot of guides is an issue, yeah, though that's more as a result of having lots of guides (because of having made them easier to add) than with the system itself. I'm not sure what's the best solution then. The actual categories will always have the most up-to-date information the wiki has to offer (naturally without any analysis), but pointing that out at every guide just seems kinda stuck up to me. Maybe it's enough just to add a disclaimer if a guide is discovered as outdated, though that would leave it without such a disclaimer until someone adds it (wiki comments are usually pretty quick to point out stuff like that, though). I've added {{[[Template:GuideNeedsWork|GuideNeedsWork]]}} to the Whirring Contraptions page for now, does that look okay? (It might also be an idea to have a category for guides that need work, for easy listings of what you might work on.)
Cactusorange (talk) 13:57, August 16, 2020 (UTC)

Cactusorange wrote: Maybe it's enough just to add a disclaimer if a guide is discovered as outdated, though that would leave it without such a disclaimer until someone adds it (wiki comments are usually pretty quick to point out stuff like that, though).

I did once write {{[[Template:Outdated|Outdated]]}} but that was mainly meant for personal use so its a bit flamboyant. I'll see if I can perhaps use parts of {{[[Template:Retired|Retired]]}} fro the color and add an category to it.
Asarta (talk) 18:05, August 16, 2020 (UTC)

Okay as my previous message doesn't seem to have gone through I've updated {{[[Template:Outdated|Outdated]]}} to look nicer, added a {{{Section}}} parameter and made it add Category:Outdated Guides. It now looks something like this:

{|
|width="50%"|
|width="50%"|
The following page is outdated and no longer reflects the current state of Fallen London. It should be used with caution.
Please help improve it
|}

with {{{Section}}}:

{|
|width="50%"|
|width="50%"|
The following section is outdated and no longer reflects the current state of Fallen London. It should be used with caution.
Please help improve it
|}

with {{{Current page}}}

{|
|width="50%"|
|width="50%"|
The following page is outdated and no longer reflects the current state of Fallen London. It should be used with caution.
Up to date information can be found at: example
|}

What do you all think?

Edit: Added image
Asarta (talk) 08:25, August 17, 2020 (UTC)

@Asarta: I like it, but maybe replace "It should not be used as a Guide." with "It should be used with caution." or something similar. Just because a better source for something became available, doesn't mean the previous grind should be avoided like the plague ;)

@Cactusorange: Originally, I had just added tags to the item-template but I soon realised that the guide-tag was dominating the whole page and made the souce much less readable. I will adjust things based on your suggestions, but I'm super busy for the next three days. So no idea how soon I get around to do this. If anyone else wants to do it, just go ahead...
Rahv7 (talk) 09:30, August 17, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: @Asarta: I like it, but maybe replace "It should not be used as a Guide." with "It should be used with caution." or something similar. Just because a better source for something became available, doesn't mean the previous grind should be avoided like the plague ;)

Done although it doesn't seem to want to update the previous page, it now looks like this:

{|
|width="50%"|
|width="50%"|
The following page is outdated and no longer reflects the current state of Fallen London. It should be used with caution.
Please help improve it
|}

Would an specific to-do tag be useful? I'm fearing that too many will make it very bloated.

@Cactusorange: Originally, I had just added tags to the item-template but I soon realised that the guide-tag was dominating the whole page and made the souce much less readable. I will adjust things based on your suggestions, but I'm super busy for the next three days. So no idea how soon I get around to do this. If anyone else wants to do it, just go ahead...

What do you mean exactly? As I'm always up for some rooting around in template code
Asarta (talk) 09:40, August 17, 2020 (UTC)

It looks pretty! One thing that I found useful with {{[[Template:GuideNeedsWork|GuideNeedsWork]]}} was that it encouraged people to update the guide, and let you write exactly what needed updating as a pointer. (Which also could make the outdated guide more useful by pointing out what precisely was lacking with it, so people could make up their own thoughts about it.)
Cactusorange (talk) 11:20, August 17, 2020 (UTC)

Cactusorange wrote: It looks pretty! One thing that I found useful with {{[[Template:GuideNeedsWork|GuideNeedsWork]]}} was that it encouraged people to update the guide, and let you write exactly what needed updating as a pointer. (Which also could make the outdated guide more useful by pointing out what precisely was lacking with it, so people could make up their own thoughts about it.)

I actually thought about adding it (and will probably do so soonish) but I was at first afraid of a bloated notice
Asarta (talk) 11:33, August 17, 2020 (UTC)

I agree with Cactusorange that adding a specific reason is super helpful. You don't have to read the whole guide or figure out what is currently wrong or missing.

(I very slightly tweaked your template to make the banner visible on the template page and to make it a little more compact. Feel free to revert the changes if you don't like them.)
Rahv7 (talk) 16:41, August 18, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: I agree with Cactusorange that adding a specific reason is super helpful. You don't have to read the whole guide or figure out what is currently wrong or missing.

Already did :)

(I very slightly tweaked your template to make the banner visible on the template page and to make it a little more compact. Feel free to revert the changes if you don't like them.)

No problem although I am thinking of re centering the text as I think it looks nicer that way
Asarta (talk) 16:31, August 19, 2020 (UTC)

New Wiki Manager

Hey Rahv7, I'm Tephra, the new Fandom Wiki Manager to replace Emptylord. If you need anything, feel free to contact me and I will get back to you as soon as possible.
Tephra (talk) 19:33, August 16, 2020 (UTC)

Deleting comments with Fate info

Hi Rahv7, Could you please take a look at/delete these [1] [2] two comments? The first contains explicit Fate text in direct breach of the no Fate rule while the second contains information about mechanical uses of Fate locked content.

Thanks in advance,

[unknown correspondence sigil]
Asarta (talk) 13:32, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

In a similar vein this one also kind of needs to go as it contains untrimmed text
Asarta (talk) 13:42, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

And the same goes for these: [1], [2], [3]
Asarta (talk) 13:49, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

I've snipped the Fate-locked text and the overly long text. I'm fine with a comment noting that there's an extra option available if you have a certain Fate-locked quality. That fact (without the text) does not violate Fate policy.
Adnoam (talk) 14:14, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

Adnoam wrote: I'm fine with a comment noting that there's an extra option available if you have a certain Fate-locked quality. That fact (without the text) does not violate Fate policy.

This touches on a discussion post from a bit over a week ago. I hope it's okay if I butt in here and direct your attention there, since discussions can be a bit hidden from the interface.
Cactusorange (talk) 14:37, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

I've replied there. Since we're writing on Rahv7's wall, I remember he got an explicit permission from FBG a while ago to actually create all the various pages for each of the individual Fate-locked stories, and these definitely document (via categories) what items they can provide.
Adnoam (talk) 15:05, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

Thanks, Adnoam, for taking care of all of these. And yes, I explicitely asked Failbetter about adding story-pages for fate-stories and if we are allowed to indicate which rewards are given by fate-locked actions/stories. They agreed on both points.
Rahv7 (talk) 18:41, September 7, 2020 (UTC)

Profession Template

Rahv7 have you seen this discussion?

Also:

u/rahv7
Asarta (talk) 15:57, September 10, 2020 (UTC)

I didn't. Thanks for letting me, this is pretty awesome.

Also: *shakes fist*
Rahv7 (talk) 19:18, September 10, 2020 (UTC)

And this one by me



u/rahv7
Asarta (talk) 04:18, September 11, 2020 (UTC)

Oh dear, it seems I've been missing quite some discussions.

I've just skimmed over the thread and have taken a quick look at your template. Based on what I've seen it looks good, but I haven't checked on the details.

Considering that the discussion has been going on for almost two weeks: If you want to go ahead, I would trust PSGarak that everything's fine. And if anything breaks, we can always revert the changes...

(Also, there are only ~30 professions or so, so even if the template requires some changes and we would need to touch every single page again, it's a manageable effort.)

Edit: One tiny thing: As a personal preference, I would prefer if you could add an empty line between item and payment and between payment and unlock again, so things don't look quite so crowded.

Btw, I think that the Unsigned Message text as a description is a good idea. Just saying ;)
Rahv7 (talk) 20:29, September 11, 2020 (UTC)

Rahv7 wrote: (Also, there are only ~30 professions or so, so even if the template requires some changes and we would need to touch every single page again, it's a manageable effort.)

You say that now but I can assure you that when you have to edit all of those and all associated category pages it seems like a lot more.

Edit: One tiny thing: As a personal preference, I would prefer if you could add an empty line between item and payment and between payment and unlock again, so things don't look quite so crowded.

added

Btw, I think that the Unsigned Message text as a description is a good idea. Just saying ;)

Oh I did use it for the ones that have a proper description there
Asarta (talk) 07:46, September 12, 2020 (UTC)

I see you've added these already. Very nice :)

As an afterthought, I would have added the links automatically, so the editior doesn't explicitely have to write "[ [...] ]" for both payment and item. Unfortunately I didn't notice that earlier. It's not worth touching all the pages again for this and it's unlikely any new professions will be added any time soon, so better leave it as it is now.
Rahv7 (talk) 21:34, September 12, 2020 (UTC)

Character limit for multiple tables

It is my understanding that the 250 character rule applies regardless of the number of separate varied text instances per piece of text. If that's the case, what would be the correct course of action in places like this? Stick to one description table per page? Make sure any possible permutation stays below the limit? Something else?
Tfftff (talk) 12:09, September 26, 2020 (UTC)

I don't think there's any official word on this. This didn't use to be an issue before Failbetter started including variable text in their stories. However, we could technically make disambiguation pages for every single of these pages, so I would argue that each separate entry in the table must not exceed the 250 char rule.
Rahv7 (talk) 13:44, September 26, 2020 (UTC)

Discord

If you use Discord, could you send me a message at Tephra#2372 There is something I wish to discuss with you in private.
Tephra (talk) 22:33, December 21, 2020 (UTC)

Bureaucrat

Hey, I’ve promoted you to bureaucrat, which means you can now promote admins (should you wish to do so). It doesn’t really make any sense not to do so, so I figure…
Aximillio (talk) 14:33, December 22, 2020 (UTC)

Many thanks! It’s nice to see that you are still around :)
Rahv7 (talk) 01:19, December 27, 2020 (UTC)

Templates for Social Actions

@Adnoam, @Aximillio

The existing Templates that we have for Social Actions don’t exactly seem to fit the mould of the new actions. In specific, they talk about “Accepting” the social actions, whereas the new ones are pretty intentionally designed not to need an explicit accept action. Is there a way to use the ones we have or should we invest the time to modernizing them?

There seem to be at least two different “sets” of social action templates. One around “Social Action” and one around “Social Actions.” The former looks like it’s mostly used for retired content? I’m not entirely sure. The latter looks more-recently maintained (meaning 2018 instead of 2014).

While a ground-up redesign would be some work, some benefit would come from using the modern helper templates like BranchHeader and QuoteSummary (which also does truncation and whatnot).
PSGarak (talk) 20:31, January 28, 2021 (UTC)

Or apparently, buried at the bottom of the pile, is “Social Actions Auto” which is actually exactly what we need -_- never mind.
PSGarak (talk) 20:54, January 28, 2021 (UTC)

Glad you found it =)
Aximillio (talk) 23:34, January 28, 2021 (UTC)

Personal sandbox

Hi! I’m fairly new to this wiki (and Fallen London in general), but I have a decent amount of experience with other Fandom wikis and wanted to do some experimentation with the templates here. I know Sandbox exists, but if I want to do some testing on a less cluttered page, is it okay if I make a subpage of my user page and use that? I’ve seen it done on other wikis, but I’m not sure what the policy is here.
Everlastingwonder (talk) 20:59, February 25, 2021 (UTC)

Yes, of course, that’s fine!
Rahv7 (talk) 17:35, March 1, 2021 (UTC)

The Monthly Opt-In and Invitation

Hello there!

If you haven’t already and are interested, make sure you opt-in for emails about The Monthly. There should be an email with info on that.

If you have opted in, be on the lookout for a new email about March’s Monthly times and the new survey! Will has been making some tweaks to the event this month and he’s excited to have you join him, if you can.
MannedTooth (talk) 19:23, March 17, 2021 (UTC)

Hinterland Scrip Making Guide Calculations for

Hi Rahv, I was wondering if you still recall the calculations that underpinned the 7.7 number for Cartohoards, given that Lab hasn't really had a definitive guide solving it come out yet. If you could point me to them, that'd be excellent. Thanks in advance,

Lux Horsea X (talk) 14:09, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

There's no definitive guide because there are so many variables to the Lab. We basically compared notes with a few other endgame players and noticed that you can - on average - complete a hoard in roughly 80 actions. Depending on the RNG it can be a few more or less but over 10+ Hoards it was ~80 on average.

You want a level 9 Lab, Hephaesta (because she gives Epiphanies) and you want a Visionary Student (because you can leave them to their own devices if there's no Ephipany at hand you don't risk raising disgruntlement).

It helps if you have 4 Assistants. It helps if you have a Secret College. It helps if you are a Correspondent. It helps if you have on of the skills on this card at a really high level. It helps if you have Cider so you don't need to worry about wounds gained from Unwise Ideas. (With all of these you can probably keep well under 80 actions total.)

Make sure you calculate ahead to play "Write up your findings" at the right time before the end. Same with cashing in Unwise Ideas. (Cash in Ideas after writing up because it clears your hand!)

I guess that's basically it. Good luck! :) Rahv7 (talk) 23:25, 13 May 2022 (UTC)