Re-making a Wiki: The New LSL Portal

Wikipedia isn't the fastest web application in the world, but there is certainly a difference between the two. There CAN be reasonable reasons for the difference though. The actual web application code is only one aspect; there is also bandwidth, load balancing, and several other factors that can contribute to speed or lack thereof. Architectural infrastructure can be a pain.

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe that the wiki shares a server with much of the rest of the website if not all of the rest of the website or at least that used to be the case, it might not be now.

I thought that most of the infrastructure for the homepage and wiki and such were hosted on old sim hardware or otherwise underpowered machines..

I know it does cache the articles because sometimes i have to use the purge action for when it gets out of sync.

There is something most definitely wrong with how they have the wiki setup. The category issue is most strange (articles being listed in the wrong categories).

The wiki last I heard is run on two servers managed by a hosting company. It is my deep suspicion that this is what causes the category issue (improper locking during database writes, or something like that). I guess I'm saying the DB isn't thread safe.

As to why it's so slow I really don't know.

A lot of the reason why I prefer rpgstats, is that the layout on the main page is just so much more intuitive.

The official one feels incomplete, and yes it feels a little sluggish.. but mostly it's just easier to find a command I don't know the name of, using rpgstats.

I only go to the official when a command isn't listed on rpgstats.

and i wish i never gave him the source material, it causes confusion and fragmentation

???

I don't get that one, Osgeld.

sigh, ok the saga again

once apon a time there was one wiki, and it was good

then the lindens blamed a security hole on said wiki and killed it leaving us nothing at all

except i was already starting the lslwm at the time

i botched the very fist lslwm in june of 2006 making it unusable for online viewing

but since we had nothing i put it up for everyones local use (it worked fine in windows)

then (i forget the name) offered to port and fix it so there was a online reference

and i agreed, thus the rpg stats wiki was born

so now there 3 wikis, none containing the same information

the old official unsupported one
the new official one

and the rpg stats one, which linden labs posted to god and all his creation as the official mirror of the wiki (and not giving me the least amount of credit eventho the origins of rpgstats was a weeks worth of work, which if you cant tell still highly pisses me off to this day, altho i will admit the owner put their fare share into reformating the data)

now you might say, "well you have the lslwm" but i never put it in a format where it could be treated like the official wiki, where users could at will add and delete info from it

rpg stats causes confusion and fragmentation becuase its not synced up with the official one, and since LL decided call rpgstats the offical mirror theres just some users who will spend all day posting info into that "botched half assed port" and turn around and complain about stuff missing in the official wiki, leaving poor jane noob in a cloud of crap

honestly i wish lslwiki.net (since its not maintained) and rpg stats would vansih, leaving 1 source for lsl scripting

it was easier, quicker, and better maintained when all the lsl users were focuced

Don't forget:
http://slhomepage.com/lsl/HomePage.htm

Until the new "official" wiki is more easily navigated, I'll stick to rpgstats (which most closely approximated the original Linden Wiki's layout.)

It's really not about the politics (which to me, have no place in determining which manual to use).. For me, it's all about which is easier to use.

yea thats becuase i spent a week coping it, thanks (mutters some bad words and leaves)

The sad part is, those other wiki's WOULD just die off.. if some contributors hadn't become sour-sacks and refused to allow their posts to be imported to the new official wiki. Were it not for the actions of a few, we truly could have "One Wiki To Rule Them All"

Who those people might be, I have no idea. But they did our community a great disservice.

That's why sites like rpgstats live on, because the old examples, the old Q&A's... in many cases really do explain the functions perfectly.

no thats not the issue, its users refusing to help and contribute to THE ONE wiki, dont like the navigation, dont like missing info? go help instead of prolonging the issue, this has been going on since 06

and for the record it wasnt the users, most who were still active and available granted permission, it was the old hats that couldnt be reached, and the licencing agreement of the wiki software that caused the whole issue

and its better safe than sued ... eventho it would never happen

the disservice is refusing to accept the offical wiki, ignoring it and then complaining that its not to your liking

Wouldn't it be nice is people could state a personal preference for a reference source, without being insulted?

I'm sorry you don't like my choice. No one is forcing your to use it.

If you would like to read about the wiki histories try this thread:
/54/f3/226577/1.html

There really isn't all that much difference between the main pages of the wiki's (they are all based off the same style, that of the old BadGeometry main page).

The LSL Portal lacks a lot of information on the subpages. We really need people to write connecting articles and text for the category pages.

Hey Strife, how 'bout whipping up a greasemonkey script that converts the LSL portal's "Ll"s into "ll"?

So LlSomething() would appear as llSomething, like god and nature intended.

All true, except for the OFFICIAL Wiki. It is missing a few categories which I refer to on a daily basis.

# Dataserver
# List
# Simulator (Environment/World)
# String (Text/Name)
# Teleport

I'm sure these commands can all be found SOMEPLACE within the wiki, but the categories are what makes a reference useful. And to me.. "ease of finding what I'm looking for" is key. I go to the wiki because either I can't remember what the name of a command is, or I can't remember how it's used. So very often I load up the "list" or "string" category and see what functions are available, and judge then which command is most appropriate to my task. Most often I can't remember if it's llGetSubString or just llSubString. (llList2String vs llListToString, etc)

That's why I don't use it. As to why others don't add to it and prefer to keep the older ones alive, I can't say. Personally I use what's easy for me. To me, the new wiki seems too complicated, and it's intimidating. The old categories made sense to me, the new ones, well it seems a lot more like reading the owner's manual of a car.

Add 'em.

Do you really want people who can't remember if it's llGetSubString, or llSubString trying to figure out how to add pages to the wiki?

(giggle)

Your point is well taken though.

Will do, except for Simulator which you will find as Region.

Simulator is a technical term referring to the entire simulation software running on the machine and encompasses all of the hosted regions on the server. We could have had two categories but that would have just confused the heck out of people.

I don't think we have a Teleport category as of yet, I'll make one.

The list on the mainpage is largely incomplete, there are around 90 LSL categories.

I've been using a GM script to fix the highlighting for a while. I've added this to that script, only required writing one line of code.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/28162

There are a few GM_addStyle lines commented out in the source that if you use the script with my tweaked wiki sidebar tweak script will make it look really good

All I know is that lslwiki, despite having a lot of good content, has the most evil wiki software ever.

edit: EVER!

This is embarrassingly trivial, but one thing I personally would really miss about lslwiki.net is that the function links are all listed on a single page, not two as in the official wiki. It's not like it's a deal-breaker or anything, but since I have to scroll the window up and down anyway, I sorta don't see the point of breaking the list into two pages. Unless there's a hard limit somewhere meta to the templates.

(I scanned through this thread looking for anybody else anal enough to mention such a thing, and scanned the page discussion on the wiki without seeing it. Anyway, just ignore if this topic is as ancient as it is obsessive.)

I think it is a hard-coded feature of MediaWiki. If you want to use the built-in categorization system, it uses its own style template, which is the same across all category pages. It hard limits them all to some value, like 100 or 200 or whatever.

Of course, one can always make a custom category page, but it would need to be updated manually every time something is changed or added. The nice thing about the built-in one, is that it updates itself automatically when you add an article to a category in the article itself.

Yes it's hard coded, I wish the categories weren't buggy. BTW, the templates handle most of the categorization stuff.

I hesitate to ask, as no one else has seemed to mind, but is there anyway in the template for the wiki at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LSL_Portal that the display font size can be easily increased for text in <pre></pre> and <lsl></lsl> tags?

I've been a reader my entire life, and now I spend a great deal of my working and casual life in front of a computer screen, and sadly my eyesight is becoming an early casuality.

The font size to display script code here:
http://lslwiki.net/lslwiki/wakka.php?wakka=dataserver

and here:
http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=Dataserver

seems somewhat more legible than the font size for script here:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Dataserver

Maybe it's just me?