Scratch Wiki talk:Community Portal

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Logging server faults

See dedicated subpage
kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 09:38, 4 July 2020 (UTC)

User Talk Pages

Resolved ^{(since 30 June 2023)}

What are user talk pages for? Kpoovakan, Wiki Editor and Scratcher. Learn more about me at https://scratch.mit.edu/users/kpoovakan/ or at
Kpoovakan (talk | contribs) 00:59, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

1. User talk pages are used for sending a message to a specific user.
2. Why is your signature so long? It breaks off ito 3 lines, and the custom signature guidelines say that custom signatures should only occupy one line.

2tables TalkContibutionsScratchEdits (789) 01:19, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

Their signature is just the normal scratchsig, they've just written stuff in front of it.

Adzboy • Talk • Contributions • Scratch Profile 16:11, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I think they meant the whole "Kpoovakan, Wiki Editor and Scratcher. Learn more about me at https://scratch.mit.edu/users/kpoovakan/ or at" part.

mybearworld • Talk • Contributions • Profile 17:52, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

Why is there a rule that you cannot create any of the subsections of the main page as AF subpages?

Resolved ^{(since 15:30, 15 July 2023 (UTC))}

I don't see why this should be a rule...
Ilikecereal1 (talk | contribs) 14:21, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

All corresponding subsections are on the joke home page itself; the rule against creating the subpages is likely to keep them in one place.

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 15:30, 15 July 2023 (UTC)

How can I have a different username on the Scratch Wiki?

Resolved ^{(since 22:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC))}

I've been referring to myself as BobRocks20 since 2020 and while I know you can't change your username on the Scratch website (with some exceptions), I want to have my current wiki username changed to reflect my preferred username. I know one wiki editor whose username in the wiki is different from his Scratch username and his name is Jammum so I guess that means its possible to do that. If so, how?
Cutebross260IsBack (talk | contribs) 21:26, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

As far as I know, it's not possible unless your Scratch account username was changed (this happened to me). Afterwards, an admin will change your Wiki account name. The Wiki admins don't change usernames for request or for personal preference. Jammum's Scratch username differs from his Wiki one because he originally requested an account on his @Jammum Scratch account, however later moved to his current one @SausageMcSauce. So he never really had a username change; he just moved accounts.

KangaCoder talk • contribs • profile 21:57, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Oh, okay. I've been wanting to move accounts for a while but I can't do that...it's a long story. Thanks for telling me.

Cutebross260IsBack (talk | contribs) 22:08, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

Talk page inactivity

I have noticed in the past few months that very few edits have been made to talk pages across this wiki. This includes the Community Portal, where there has been a two week gap between edits, and a week's gap between this being posted and the last revision. The number of active users has not decreased massively (78 at the time of writing), so are users less interested in posting on talk pages, or might the welcome page on talk pages be often overlooked? There might not be an actual reason for talk page inactivity; these are just some theories.
Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 17:06, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the reason is no one is interested in talking is because they just don't want to go through the effort of checking the talk page for replies when they ask a question for an article. For example, I had sent a message on some talk page about half a year ago, and I didn't get replies after two months so I just did the edit. Most people just prefer to edit it and let other people revert/undo it if it shouldn't be there.

The Diccustion Invitation page exist but then most people see the invites after the discussion has been finished by two people. Thing is, no one is encouraged to make talk page edits. I remember there was this user who edited 90 percent main pages, and they were congratulated for having all mainspace. There was also a user who only had 7 userspace edits [they left the wiki], the rest were all mainspace and talk pages, but no one recognized them for it.

I think people would edit talk pages more if we gave them a incentive to check talk pages.

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 04:22, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Another theory involving talk page inactivity, even though it might be a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy, might be that they become less visible/abundant in Recent Changes through a first major decrease, then resulting in an even higher decrease in posts.

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 08:47, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

(another addition) Some proposed changes to articles through the talk page would are becoming more difficult to implement due to this phenomenon, due to needing the agreement/consensus of multiple users, which might be more than the unknown number of users who regularly watch talk pages.

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 08:50, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

According to what I've seen, there are around 7 people who comment on talk pages.

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 15:17, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I have noticed this, too. I have become much less active due to the lack of talk page activity. The lack of activity makes it hard to get stuff done that needs consensus. It also makes it hard to know what is needed there. So I went to checking the wiki a lot but not doing anything to not checking the wiki at all. I have previously signed up to discussion invitation, but I got removed due to inactivity. The main Scratch website has also seemed to get quiet, too.
-unsigned comment by Ideapad-320 (talk | contribs)

I would say talk page activity is secondary to mainspace activity, for sure. There's a reason we focus on mainspace contributions. S:BRD also defines Discussion (talk page edit) as subsequent to both Bold (mainspace edit) and Revert (mainspace edit).

I think there are a number of solutions to talk page inactivity, each with their drawbacks:

Technological - add Echo or some other method of notifying people when they are replied to. Drawback is that this requires technical effort and possibly an overhaul of the skin.
Cultural - people should use their watchlist more and ideally turn on email notifications if that's their forte. Drawback is that this requires a community cultural shift.
Procedural - start using discussion invitations much more eagerly, perhaps as soon as topics are posted. Drawback is that this may be annoying to some and also puts more burden on those posting on talk pages.
- Perhaps the MassMessage extension and/or a bot could help with the latter. More discussion needed.

Bear in mind also that it's currently summertime. A lot of our activity in general happens during the school year since that's when people use Scratch (at school) and thus the Wiki. Another solution may simply be to wait.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 02:52, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Quite a few of these ideas seem useful for proposed solutions to increase talk page activity; I have a few comments about a few of them:

For the Echo proposal, there has been an attempt by Jvvg to implement it, although it was eventually oversighted and needs re-implementing again due to 1.39 skin updates.
S:DIS's activity, I think, is starting to slow down, but I think it is still useful to invite participating users into discussions; I think it could be promoted more.
Now replying back to something in my original post, I mentioned in one of my posts that one possible reason for talk page activity decrease could be users oversighting the welcome tutorial (although I do not think anything can really prove it). I think the welcome pages as a whole seem a bit wordy (some content comes from an old Wikipedia tutorial) and some of it could be updated to mention some Wiki procedures, so would a Welcome tutorial overhaul be useful?

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 08:29, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Certainly couldn't hurt to overhaul the Welcome tutorial. Please propose it in a separate topic and perhaps make a S:SWP out of it.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 02:05, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I might think of creating a topic about a welcome re-haul eventually (I might also bring up the inactive Scratch Wiki Adventure and whether it is still feasible).

Another thing regarding S:DIS, I think a promotion of it should be added to the Community Portal help box. I recently added the list of unresolved non-CP discussions (although I think no changes in activity were made).

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 10:38, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Add `image-rendering: pixelated` to the pixelated emoji

As visualized in User:Mybearworld/Demo, the emoji can get a little blurry when scrolling. Could someone who has the necessary priveleges surround all the pixelated emoji with <span style="image-rendering:pixelated">...</span>?
mybearworld • Talk • Contributions • Profile 18:10, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Now

also looks pixelated - not sure if that's that great.

mybearworld • Talk • Contributions • Profile 06:53, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't have the time to exhaustively test each emoji, and given my vision my judgement may also be flawed. Can you go through each one and determine which should and shouldn't be pixelated? Then I can make the necessary edits.

Note also that I haven't edited the individual emoji templates like {{smile}} etc., which {{e}} uses. Those can be updated with your more detailed investigation.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 07:00, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

The forum emojis (

,

) are really the only ones that need changing, as they are actually made to be pixelated.

mybearworld • Talk • Contributions • Profile 07:11, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

New navbox suggestion

I am proposing a new 'Scratch Events' navbox for pages in Category:Scratch Events and subcategories. I am mainly proposing this because several of the Scratch Camp pages link to several of the other Camp pages, which some of them might be inconsistent, and it might be useful to link from other non-Camp events from others.

The page is currently stored in my sandbox for drafting.
Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 10:49, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Support, this makes it easy to view the various events without having to go into the cat itself, which not many viewers do.

KangaCoder talk • contribs • profile 23:42, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

Update the Scratch News to include the new SDS!

As soon as they made the announcement for Beaches and Seashells on the website I decided to make the needed updates, but I can't include the new SDS thing to the News. Can a higher-up do that for me, please?
cutebross260IsBack ( Talk ⍨ Contribs ⍨ Scratch (BobRocks20) ) 23:19, 16 August 2023 (UTC)

Done

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 01:17, 17 August 2023 (UTC)

Scratch wiki is extremely slow right now

Currently the wiki is extremely slow. It is taking a long time to load pages (sometimes 5 seconds or more). Recent changes is taking 20 seconds. The parser profiling data for this page shows a CPU time of .444s and a Real time usage of 5.32 seconds.
Ideapad-320 | Talk | Contribs | Scratch 00:57, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

I think the problem was on your end, because the pages were loading fine yesterday for me.

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 05:31, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

In the future plase report this on Scratch Wiki talk:Community Portal/Logging server faults instead of the full CP. But also sometimes the Wiki is just under heavy load for whatever reason and it's usually a good idea to wait a while before trying to make further requests.

That being said, parser profiling showing 5 seconds is concerning. I'll bring it up but I doubt there's anything we can do without a repro case.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 06:07, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Search this talk page and it's archives not working

The Search this Talk page and it's archives button on the Community Portal doesn't work correctly. If you type something into the box and press the button, it brings you to a search page that says 'Only searching in pages whose title starts with "Scratch Wiki talk:Community Portal#"'. However, there are results outside of the Community Portal.
Ideapad-320 | Talk | Contribs | Scratch 16:51, 19 August 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, that box hasn't worked since several MediaWiki versions ago. If you happen to find a way to fix it I can put the fix in but I don't have the bandwidth for it personally.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 06:05, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

There probably is no longer an option for searching subpages on the search page anymore in vanilla MediaWiki, but the functionality is available in a MediaWiki extension called AdvancedSearch, according to MediaWiki's website, but is requires some extra software other than MediaWiki extensions to be installed along with it.

Jammum (💬 Talk - ✍️ Contribs - 🐱 Scratch) 07:58, 20 August 2023 (UTC)

Why not remove the option for it then? It's just adding to the page size and confusing some wikians (like me).

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 10:24, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

On an article about Tone Indicators

I would like to hear your thoughts on the creation of this article. To contribute, go here.
cutebross260IsBack ( Talk ⍨ Contribs ⍨ Scratch (BobRocks20) ) 14:08, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

nvm

cutebross260IsBack ( Talk ⍨ Contribs ⍨ Scratch (BobRocks20) ) 15:11, 1 September 2023 (UTC)

List of FPCs is outdated.

The list of front page curators is outdated. It says that the current curator is DragonCatSloth, but their shift has finished, and the current FPC is bessi_official.
Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 06:06, 7 September 2023 (UTC)

Unless the FPC schedule has changed, DragonCatSloth only began their shift on September 4, three days ago. Were they unable to complete their shift?

Anyway, per my recollection, WikiMonitor checks the current curator daily. It should update at some point soon.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 04:19, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Turns out the FPC schedule has in fact changed. I've updated Curator (front page) accordingly.

kenny2scratch Talk Contribs Directory 04:55, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Well, Wikimonitor was probably going by the old start date, because now the FPCs start on Wednesdays. The list of curators is still on DragonCatSloth. See this.

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 10:00, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

An explanation of today's downtime

Hi everyone,

Over the past 90 minutes or so, the Wiki has been intermittently down. This was caused by me finally implementing a solution to the performance problems we've had the past few weeks. Basically, I found a bunch of outdated server software (PHP version and a number of PHP extensions) and updated it to newer versions. In the process, this completely erased everything we have in the cache, especially the localization cache. Running the Wiki with absolutely nothing in the cache is an extremely computationally expensive thing to do, and basically our server couldn't handle the load. This started to resolve itself on its own as cache entries started to get populated, but was going to take a long time before we were fully back up and running as normal. To avoid prolonging the problem, I took down the English Wiki, which has by far the highest traffic, while rebuilding the localization cache for all of the Wikis; if I did not do this, the server would not have been able to run the script to rebuild it under the load. We should be good going forwards and the Wiki does seem to be performing much better now. If any issues come up, please post them here, or if the Wiki is unavailable, on our Wiki forum topic.

Thank you everyone for your understanding, and apologies for the disruption.
jvvg (talk | contribs) 18:21, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

Scratch 0.x pages rework

There are currently 15 Scratch 0.x pages on the Wiki (plus an extra one that's a work in progress), although there are many more 0.x versions. However, making a page for every single 0.x version would be unfeasible and pointless since there are over 100 0.x versions that have been discovered. I suggest that pages should be made for versions in a specific time frame (for example, "Scratch versions from April to June of 2006") rather than pages for specific versions.
Ametz807 (talk | contribs) 22:16, 11 September 2023 (UTC)

My preference would be to only make pages on 0.x versions that introduce significant/major changes to the Scratch interface (e.g. 26May04); that way, the wiki isn't cluttered with pages about versions that are virtually identical and there's complete coverage of the hundreds of 0.x versions.

ssvbxx (talk | 399 contributions | Scratch profile) 13:23, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Recent Changes is temporarily unavailable

Hi everyone,

As part of the effort to avoid the 508 errors we've intermittently been getting, we have had to disable Recent Changes for now. Recent Changes is extremely resource intensive and my suspicion is that there is something that needs to be optimized with it that isn't currently optimized. We will look into this further and hopefully get it available to everyone again soon. Apologies for any inconvenience.
jvvg (talk | contribs) 01:49, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Oh, thanks. I was wondering what is up with the Recent Changes.

Vdiu | Talk | Contributions | Scratch Profile 13:37, 21 September 2023 (UTC)

Navigation

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Help the wiki!

Scratch Wiki talk:Community Portal

Contents

Bulletin Board for Not-Done Topics

Other Topics

About Scratch 3.0

Articles

About Wiki Management

Backend

Page Management

Rules

Interwiki

Community

Logging server faults

User Talk Pages

Why is there a rule that you cannot create any of the subsections of the main page as AF subpages?

How can I have a different username on the Scratch Wiki?

Talk page inactivity

Add `image-rendering: pixelated` to the pixelated emoji

New navbox suggestion

Update the Scratch News to include the new SDS!

Scratch wiki is extremely slow right now

Search this talk page and it's archives not working

On an article about Tone Indicators

List of FPCs is outdated.

An explanation of today's downtime

Scratch 0.x pages rework

Recent Changes is temporarily unavailable

Help the wiki!

Scratch Wiki talk:Community Portal

Bulletin Board for Not-Done Topics

Other Topics

About Scratch 3.0

Articles

About Wiki Management

Backend

Page Management

Rules

Interwiki

Community

Logging server faults

User Talk Pages

Why is there a rule that you cannot create any of the subsections of the main page as AF subpages?

How can I have a different username on the Scratch Wiki?

Talk page inactivity

Add image-rendering: pixelated to the pixelated emoji

New navbox suggestion

Update the Scratch News to include the new SDS!

Scratch wiki is extremely slow right now

Search this talk page and it's archives not working

On an article about Tone Indicators

List of FPCs is outdated.

An explanation of today's downtime

Scratch 0.x pages rework

Recent Changes is temporarily unavailable

Add `image-rendering: pixelated` to the pixelated emoji