Talk:Pathfinder Wiki/Archive 2

Bullets in Did You Know

Is there a way to fix those bullets. It's just bothering the heck out of me —This unsigned post was made by Tomlib. Please sign all posts with ~~~~.

They're displaying correctly for me. What is it you're seeing that is bothering you? — Yoda8myhead (talk) 20:27, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

In Chrome they are black instead of blue and in IE9 they are outside the bounding box tomlib (talk) 13:24, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm using Firefox 16.0.2 and the bullets are to the left if the left box line as well. I tend to make my checklists this way @ work, so it never bothered me.. -- Cpt kirstov (talk) 15:21, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Red links on front page

Two still exist for areas that sound quite fun that I assume were yoda8myhead's ideas:

• Help desk – Ask questions about using PathfinderWiki.
• Reference desk – Serving as virtual librarians, Pathfinder Chroniclers tackle your questions on a wide range of subjects.

Both sound like fora to me - was that the idea?

Can we get them set up? Establishing a forum is beyond me I'd think --Fleanetha (talk) 18:02, 19 January 2013 (UTC)

Bravo Yoda8myhead - they both look good and are really useful additions to the wiki. I wonder if we could advertise them on the front page this week as they may get missed being a long way down the page - perhaps in a 'Did You Know?', or a banner like we had for the Thank you message after the Ennies? Plus I have desperately wanted to add something daft as a question today, but I have been very good and refrained. --Fleanetha (talk) 19:51, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I don't know about that, but we can certainly tweet and make Facebook posts about both new features. — Yoda8myhead (talk) 02:22, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

New and Notable

I've been handling the updating of this section of the site since we implemented it a year (or more?) ago and have just been sort of doing it as there was space. Today it came to my attention that different screen widths can result in this box stretching beyond the "edge" of the page and look sort of ugly, as it protrudes past where the parchment background ends. Does anyone with a bit more coding knowledge know a way for it to a) bump things onto a second line after a number of images that fit on the viewer's screen or b) simply cut off any images that wouldn't fit? I'd rather err on the side of including fewer images (one per product line and only those released within the last month) than have to deal with what happens when there are more products than most browsers have room to display. — Yoda8myhead (talk) 03:52, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Mobile browsers are outside of my knowledge (I know how to do what you suggest for regular browsers). It might be easier to limit the number shown. Proof of concept: User:FoiledAgain/sandbox. The next couple of months are crazy with the releases stacking up; I got carried away, I suppose :) -- FoiledAgain (talk) 10:17, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I don't think there's anything wrong with a few products not making it on the front page. This section was added not so much to be an all-inclusive listing of what the "current" new releases are as it was to add some color to the main page and spice it up a bit. If we took it back to a single row of 5 titles, does anyone have a problem with there being leftover products that never got featured? Another option would be to try a switch function to swap out what images were shown at a given time based on the time the page was loaded. We did that at one point with an add to vote for the site on the ENnies.— Yoda8myhead (talk) 20:17, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Limiting it to 5 sounds good to me. -- FoiledAgain (talk) 22:27, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

I think I've just about got the wrapping thing solved. The code is a bit uglier, but it should still be fairly easy to navigate. —Aeakett (talk) 01:04, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Did you implement the change? I'm not seeing anything different on the main page itself, just noticed the change to Common.css. — Yoda8myhead (talk) 02:20, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

Not yet. As usual, when I think I've almost got a problem solved, I'm only about 50% done. The main page's layout is quite a bit more complicated than my proof of concept, so there are a bunch of little layout issues to take care of. Nothing major, but I want to get everything sorted before I hit save. —Aeakett (talk) 13:09, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

OK, it's six weeks later but I've finally got this fixed. Go ahead and put as many things in New and Notable as you like... it should wrap fairly intelligently now. Also, I fixed the portal lists in the header to that they no longer drift off the side of the page when it's too narrow. —Aeakett (talk) 17:59, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

I was actually looking for a way not to wrap but to just not display a second row if someone's looking at the page on a narrow screen. I worry that with the potential for unlimited rows, we're going to flood the main page with product covers and push the useful stuff that appears below it completely out of view. As it is we're already dangerously close to having the New and Notable sections appear below the fold. I don't know if what I'm looking for is even possible, but in the meantime, this is way better than what we had. Thanks!

On a different note, do you know a way to make the Featured Article box always take up the same vertical space as the News and Blogs boxes so that there's no white space there at the bottom of the left column?— Yoda8myhead (talk) 18:24, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

In New & Notable at the moment I cannot see the artwork for Demons Revisited. I have looked at the coding and it looks fine, however? Is it just me? --Fleanetha (talk) 18:24, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

I've been thinking on this, and an idea hit me today on my drive in to the office. What if we make the New & Notable section a vertical column a single image wide going down the right-hand side of the page? This will allow us to put any number of images there without it breaking the flow of the page, and it might draw people to scroll down the page and see some of the other content that's currently being lost below the fold. Anyone have objections to this? If not, I'm going to do some test layouts to see how it looks, likely this weekend.— Yoda8myhead (talk) 20:14, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Inspired and simple - let's do that as it cracks two things at once! Good luck. --Fleanetha (talk) 14:50, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

Front Page

A few points to make about our front page post its redesign which I hope might improve it even further. I am not amending as there may be reasons for this and, as this is the front page, I am not going to be BOLD.

• On my computer I have:

Welcome to 
PathfinderWiki,
the Pathfinder canon encyclopedia anyone can 
edit.
8,538 articles since 2008

That's 5 lines for not a lot of text and an awkward break at the end of the sentence. This further means the key elements of the page are all pushed further down. I also have a huge load of blank space to the right of this before we get the 3 column, bulleted list. Could we expand to the right so we get the text on 3 lines?

• secondly, we have PathfinderWiki in square brackets as a link. This just brings you back to the title page so in effect, our very first link, is redundant. I think we should remove it.
• Finally, Paizo Blog and News are quite long but about the same 'depth'; This week's featured article and Did you know? are again similar depth but shorter than Blog and News. This means I get an empty gap below Did you know? pushing New & Notable below the page fold. If we moved the similarly long articles to be next to one another that would raise up New and Notable. Alternatively, we could make it fit into the gap by decreasing its width?
• I do wonder (have we Google Analytics stats) if anyone pages down to see the good stuff below New and Notable as well and if not, how we could flag that material earlier?

Thoughts? --Fleanetha (talk) 19:00, 12 November 2013 (UTC)

What browser and resolution are you using? I see:

Welcome to PathfinderWiki,
the Pathfinder canon encyclopedia anyone can edit.
8,542 articles since 2008

Which makes it the same three lines as used by the bullet-ed list. With the speed that the news comes out, I would be good with lowering it to 2 stories at a time which at my resolution would make the free space before new and notable less than an inch. I do think that one of the smaller sections from below could fit in that niche (the help us out would fit best and give people the links on policies before they go too far into exploring) - Cpt kirstov (talk) 13:10, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Part of the issue with the current layout is that we don't really account for variable browser widths, and different screen resolutions can result in some strange display errors like you're getting, Fleanetha, specifically the odd gap in the Featured/DYK/RSS section. I believe there's a way to even out the boxes, even if they aren't full of text, but I don't know what that is.

As for being bold, feel free to make any changes you'd like to Main Page/editcopy, which is only seen if you go directly to it, and can be fiddled with to your heart's content without any negative effect on the visible main page. — Yoda8myhead (talk) 20:11, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

Year, the front page is a bot of a nightmare. Between variable browser widths and never knowing the height of those top four boxes it really makes things difficult. Every time I look at it, I seem to go in circles... maybe it's time to think about it again.

Fleanetha, what browser, OS and resolution are you viewing the page with? The layout you describe seems really wonky to me. —Aeakett (talk) 20:58, 13 November 2013 (UTC)

A picture paints a 1,000 words...so, here is what it looks like on my screen (the page fold is just below the new and notable as you can see plus the two large areas of blank).

Apologies though if this is mainly a problem for me then due to browsers - I wasn't aware of that, though the debate above is interesting. Currently I have Mozilla Firefox ESR v17.0.10 running on Windows 7 Professional SP 1 - this is what work provides so have to use this. I think ESR is a professional version of Firefox. Resolution is currently 1600 x 900 (recommended), which is the highest resolution I can get on my laptop.

Anyway I shall be bold and remove the pointless link to PathfinderWiki as I can remedy that. Comments about yoda's suggestion added above. --Fleanetha (talk) 14:50, 14 November 2013 (UTC)

The issue is that the container for that bit of text has a fixed width of 300px, but different fonts can push the text past that width. I added a line of CSS (white-space: nowrap; in the welcomeToPFW ID style) that prevents text in that container from wrapping, same as Wikipedia does for their welcome blurb. It shouldn't wrap now, though it may look slightly off-centered. Widening the container is an alternative but seems to add some empty space that makes it look a bit unbalanced. --Oznogon (talk) 05:20, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Link for "anyone can edit" in the welcome header

Any opposition to changing the "anyone can edit" link from Wikipedia's Help:Editing page to our own Help:Tutorial/Introduction? —Oznogon (talk) 23:34, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

I think that's a great idea. --Brandingopportunity (talk) 23:35, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

ditto --Fleanetha (talk) 12:06, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Done! —Oznogon (talk) 09:27, 31 March 2015 (UTC)

Don't associate the forums with policy discussions

To avoid ambiguity with the policy revision process page, we should not associate the forums with policy discussions on the main page as such: "For discussions about PathfinderWiki itself, including areas for technical issues and policies." -Oznogon (talk) 06:14, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

Randomized "Did You Know?"

On Pathfinder Wiki/editcopy, I've set up a way to display five random DYK items from our pretty large archive of past DYKs. Hopefully this is a better option than a static list of the last good set, and it can still be overridden by creating a DYK list for the current week if we want to spotlight a specific topic.

To add to the set of random DYKs, edit the source of DYK:Random. Here's an example of the randomized output that should change each time you refresh the page: DYK:Random/list

-Oznogon (talk) 01:10, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Copied this change to the main page since it's been working well in testing. -Oznogon (talk) 19:54, 21 December 2018 (UTC)