User talk:Slamlander

From The Heretic Knowledge Vault

Thanks for the work getting spells taken care of. I'd been meaning to get around to that for a long time, but reality always managed to intervene.

I don't have any experience with Imageshack and generally don't mess around with images, being both a highly non-visual thinker and fairly lazy. I don't see any reason why images couldn't be uploaded here directly, but it would probably be a good idea to talk to Impy before doing so. There are fragments from the strips that could be used for some of the templates, for sure. Two that come to mind are the dispel trap that Meji sets off, which could be used as part of Template:Gadget Header, and any of several excerpts from the Ian/Toren combat scenes, which could play the same role in Template:Spell Header. Go ahead and experiment. (Maybe set up a user sandbox? I have one for a "technology" article I was working on.) -- Graybeard 08:44, 23 January 2007 (CST)

• Did you look over the prototype protocols page? -- Slamlander 08:57, 23 January 2007 (CST)

Only glanced at it. She Who Must Be Obeyed is off at a musical gig tonight, so I'll have time to look at it later. -- Graybeard 19:46, 23 January 2007 (CST)

Spam blacklists

Some other wikis where I admin have a "spam blacklist" feature. Phrases appearing on the blacklist cannot be used in articles, and if someone tries to make an edit that includes one of the banned phrases, the edit is rejected by the software. Any idea how to set that up here? The MediaWiki software used here might be too old to have this feature, or it might not. As I've said previously, I'm not a fluent MediaWiki programmer, so I don't know how to make the necessary changes. Can you? -- Graybeard 11:13, 24 February 2007 (CST)

The difference compared to Wikipedia is that there are lots of articles there that would have a valid reason to refer to Vi*gra, C*alis, etc. Here (as on the others I help with where there are blacklists) there are essentially none. It would be feasible if the software supported it, but you're right, do nothing that screws up the store. Let's revisit this once things are modernized. -- Graybeard 17:33, 24 February 2007 (CST)

Winterphone/sysop

I've reverted that user's changes, but I don't think that it's appropriate to block him/her/it yet. There's a difference between being a spammer and a smartass. Some of the latter eventually become useful contributors. Suggest waiting to see whether there is more vandalism. Repairing this one wasn't hard at all.

I'd prefer to leave sysop/bureaucrat decisions to Impy, although I'd be very much in favor of you becoming one. At the moment there is so little traffic that I can handle things like this bit of vandalism, usually fairly quickly as I'm able to check status every day except while traveling -- and fortunately my professional travel has been light recently. However, we're planning a big, extended vacation in late spring that will have me off-line for long enough that an active backup would be a good thing. I'll have a word with Hilary. -- Graybeard 23:41, 5 March 2007 (CST)

I see that Impy has now made you a sysop. (Good. Right decision.) As far as I can tell, you, she and I are the only admins who actually do anything these days, although there are a few others who helped in the past. We should probably try to arrange a dialog somewhere, somehow to make sure that we're doing things in a consistent way. I'm open to suggestions. -- Graybeard 09:49, 10 March 2007 (CST)

CheckUser?

Any idea how to get the MediaWiki "CheckUser" function set up here? It would be useful in dealing with spammers. -- Graybeard 21:10, 10 April 2007 (CDT)

I see that. One week offline and we're getting clobbered.