UESPWiki:Community Portal/Archive 51

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Community Portal discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

ESO: Lighthouses and Ayleid Ruins

Currently, we have an ESO place category called Lighthouses, based on their usage of the Lighthouse POI icon, which also contains some Buildings that are lighthouses. This goes against the standard of not mixing up POI types and Building types. Additionally, half of the places which use that icon aren't even near the sea; Greenheart is a tower in the middle of Greenshade, Riverwatch is a beacon in the middle of Cyrodiil, and The Lost Fleet is a ship graveyard in Coldharbour. I would suggest that we rename this category to Beacons, and shift into here some other watchtower/beacon POIs like Crown Point. We can then set up Lighthouses as a category to only contain lighthouse Buildings.

Also on renaming categories, there has been a discussion on Ayleid Ruins to rename that category to Elven Ruins, considering there are a number of locations with that icon on Auridon, and those are Aldmeri rather than Ayleid. I'm just mentioning this one in case anyone has any more opinions to add. --Enodoc (talk) 11:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm fine with elven ruins, and moving lighthouses to beacons seems good as well. However, adding places to the Beacons category that don't have theicon will result in the same problem of having mixed POI types and Building types, so I'm agains that. -- SarthesArai ^Talk 14:07, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

I agree with SarthesArai. Elven Ruins definitely make sense, and it would enable us to create a category/page with a list of places which use that icon separate from Online:Ayleid Ruins, which list places that are actual Ayleid ruins and do not necessarily use that icon. Or we can just decide to scrap the latter category/page altogether.

Beacons (or Towers) also make sense, although if we go that way, the category should also contain only the places with this specific icon, and another one for actual beacon-like buildings can be created if needed. --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 17:16, 4 November 2016 (UTC)

Both suggestions are good. I'm fine with recategorising places like Crown Point, since we're already doing that with other unmarked places. If we wanna change that, it should be done across the board. Doing so seems like more hassle than it's worth; completing the building/POI divide is more important than unmarked categorisation in my opinion. —Legoless (talk) 01:57, 5 November 2016 (UTC)

Categorising places without the specific POI icon is something we're already doing; for example, Farwatch Tower is under the Forts/Towers category, Goat's Head Oasis is under the Groves/Marshes category, Thorn Lodge is under the Estates category, and numerous delves are under relevant Ruins or Caves categories. I used Crown Point as an example since it fits better by function into Beacons rather than its current categorisation of Forts. There may be other Towers that would also be more appropriately put into Beacons rather than Forts, but the point here is to keep POIs like Crown Point in a POI category, and separate from buildings like Northpoint Lighthouse or Vulkhel Guard Watch Tower, which belong in a building category. --Enodoc (talk) 12:56, 15 November 2016 (UTC)

Unknown rulers in TES2: Daggerfall

Most of TES2: Daggerfall is randomly generated, as are the names of the rulers of the vassal states in Hammerfell and High Rock, except those where the rulers' names are hard-coded. In the template, this has been solved by entering "An unknown Baron" or "An unknown Duchess" or whatever the title is under "Ruler".

As it turns out, it seems the randomly generated rulers' names turn up the same each time. If the random generation consistently turns out only one possible outcome, it is for a common player indistinguishable from hard-coded information, and might as well be documented rather than "An unknown Baron" or "An unknown Duchess".

If Gilpta (which is clearly a randomly generated Redguard name) consistently turns up in-game as the Baron of Abibon-Gora for all players each time, then the template stating "An unknown Baron" is not correct. Observations seem to confirm it is Gilpta each time. The same with Lhertta (also clearly a randomly generated Redguard name) who seems consistently to turn up as Duchess of Pothago.

This fact has so far lead to discussions on the talk pages of the user Athf and of the region of Abibon-Gora. —MortenOSlash (talk) 08:41, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Does this apply to every single randomly generated ruler name, or only some of them?

• If it's all of them, I would suggest putting the name in the template, as that's more useful, and then mentioning the setup in the Notes, something like "Unlike the rulers of the main kingdoms, whose names are hard-coded, the ruler names of the smaller city-states are technically randomly generated. However, each ruler name actually only has one possible outcome, and will therefore always be the same for any given state."
• If it's only a few of them, I would suggest keeping the current setup, as that's more consistent, and then putting the name in the Notes, something like "Unlike the rulers of the main kingdoms, whose names are hard-coded, the ruler names of the smaller city-states are randomly generated. However, the ruler of <y> only has one possible outcome, and will always be <x>."

--Enodoc (talk) 10:04, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

I'd agree with Enodoc. If we really want to document the outputted names, I think they need to be rigorously tested by at least another person.--Jimeee (talk) 10:19, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

That's the issue - the names are always the same. They're technically randomized, as in they're based on locations and suchlike. Problem is, the locations and suchlike are always the same, so the 'randomized' output is always exactly the same. - KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 11:17, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Does that hold for every single one of the 30-or-so "Unknown" rulers? --Enodoc (talk) 12:14, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

I still have my old DF savegame lying arround on my harddrive somewhere, and I might be willing to compile a list of all ruler's names for cross-checking (though I might take a while). -- SarthesArai ^Talk 17:20, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

The most important question is, how can one tell a certain NPC is the current ruler and not just some male/female courtier, just by appearance because he/she looks ruler-like? The data for all NPCs appearing in buildings and dungeons is hard-coded in BLOCKS.BSA, which faction a NPC belongs to and which flat will be used to display the NPC. And these NPCs appearing in palaces just belong to various factions and at best one of them belongs to the "Random Rulder" faction (faction-id 856). A ruler should at least be associated with the current region the palace is located. But this is not the case, simply because there is only one stock palace for Hammerfell and one for Highrock. All palaces in Hammerfall use the same stock building, the same is true for the palaces in Highrock. So you will always encounter the same NPCs in these two stock buildings and thus all NPCs one may define as ruler will look the same. Any male ruler will look exactly like another male ruler, the same goes for female rulers. You need an unique palace for every region to make this ruler thing work, then you can adjust the various parameters for the NPCs. So the game data simply does not define any of these NPCs to be a ruler. The unique rulers on the other hand use unique faction-ids and individual flats and thus really are unique. So game data and logic indicate that it is not justified to declare any of these NPCs found in places as "the ruler" of the current region. And to make this whole matter Daggerfall-like, the random ruler's name, you can get by asking for news, and the enemy/allies relations of the various factions change twice per game-year. So I'm recapitulating, it is not justified to declare any of these "random NPCs" as a ruler because neither in-game data nor game lore are justifying such a decision.--PLRDLF (talk) 21:20, 7 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi, I just tested the 'randomness' of all the names of the people in various buildings with 10 different newly created characters, and its been the same each time with each new game character. Going back to Enodoc's question, yes, everybody in the building will always have the same name no matter how many times you visit said location in however many different games you play. Sure all those buildings are stock buildings with every NPC inhabiting the building having stock names, but that shouldn't mean we not include them in the pages in question. The 'capital' of each region is always going to be the city with the same name (so says so on each region's article page), and all of these cities have palaces with rulers residing in them. Yes, they don't provide any in-game purpose but claiming that Pothago is ruled by an "unknown dutchess" is simply bad wording at best, and incorrect at worst. --athf (talk) 11:34, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

Having not played Daggerfall, I don't know the full details, but per PLRDLF's question, how do we know which NPC is the ruler, and not just a random noble? --Enodoc (talk) 11:39, 8 November 2016 (UTC)

(←) If I remember correctly from Daggerfall (it is years since I tried last, at least two computers) the rulers (with spouse) are always placed straight ahead from the entrance in the throne room in the palaces. Can anyone confirm? —MortenOSlash (talk) 08:04, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

The names of the NPCs were generated randomly (like most dungeon layouts), though the method used means anyone entering the building will see the same NPC with the same name. This is not the issue.

The question is, is Gilpta the regional ruler? He is not. He is, (at best) a city ruler. As PLRDLF pointed out above, this can be confirmed when you receive a message like "Lolinah R'aron is the new Baron of Abibon-Gora" (as I did) if the ruler of Abibon-Gora changes with the semi-annual ruler change. Gilpta was there before I got this message, and he was still there after I got the message.

Even in regions with static rulers (Baron Shrike, Lord Auberon Flyte, etc.) the regional rulers do not appear in the game. Again, as PLRDLF stated, the only regional rulers you may encounter in-game are the the unique NPCs (Gothryd, Akorithi, Eadwyre, and Gortwog). Echo (talk) 06:28, 28 March 2017 (UTC)

Patroller Nomination Guidelines

Currently, our patroller nomination guidelines require one month on the wiki and a minimum of 250 edits in content space. In the recent patroller nomination, a couple of objections were raised about these requirements. Given the responsibilities of being a patroller, I agree that those figures do seem a bit on the low side.

Without getting into too much detail, I can think of at least one case in the past where the one month guideline ended up not working out so well, but a longer period of time might have brought people to a different conclusion about whether the person should have become a patroller or not, so I definitely support making the amount of time on the wiki a bit longer. I'd like to suggest we raise that to a minimum of three months.

In terms of content space, I like Jeancey's suggestion of requiring 250 edits in gamespace (including Lore) rather than counting all content space edits. I'd suggest also including Template space into that figure, though, since template edits can often be an indicator of technical proficiency, which I feel is just as important as knowledge of our customary gamespace editing procedures. This would discount edits in the Category, File and UESPWiki spaces, most of which are likely to be trivial edits that don't require a lot of wiki knowledge or edits to talk-like pages (already excluded anyway).

Does anyone else have opinions on these or any of the other nomination guidelines? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:41, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

The numbers date back beyond the time when less than 50 people had even 1k edits, but even now there is only a maximum of 289 people who would not immediately be disqualified by the 250 edits (assuming every edit made was included in the count). That said, increasing it to 500 would still allow 185 people the chance to apply. Also, very few people ever manage more than 250 edits a month without the help of some project that requires lots of edits, in fact only 18 people have more than 250 edits in the last 6 months. In terms of 'content' I'm not sure file or category edits have ever been included, but perhaps clarification is required so no argument on a wording change.

In terms of the time, it is somewhat odd that a lesser role requires a longer period (autopatrolled at 3 months weekly activity) in order to qualify. Anything more than a month as a minimum would have to drop the daily requirement. Given the two guidelines that address this, the disqualification could be simply 'less than one month of editing', while the suggested minimum could be '3 months of weekly activity or 6 months of more sporadic activity'. The two suggestions allow for less active users to be able to help and are largely there so there is a large pool of edits from which to evaluate someones compatibility. I don't like a required 3 months limit, while 2 months seems contrived. I do recognise that the period when a new game is released often allows for new users to very quickly reach the limits, so perhaps adding a '3 months after a new game release' line would make sure new applicants were here to stick around.

To sum up, an increase in the number of edits required would almost certainly prevent anyone from reaching it within one month, and should be high enough that even if someone does there is more than sufficient areas to evaluate their judgement. Increasing the suggested minimum time to three months is a good idea, but leaving it as suggested still allows someone to oppose a nomination on time, grounds while not disqualifying otherwise acceptable nominations. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 02:34, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm not against increasing the time required (or even edit count). However, truth be told, I can't see how the outcome is going to be very different from what it has been, and that is because voting is required. To take an example, if a majority had thought AlphaAbsol is not up for the task we would have opposed regardless of his time here/edit count. Since these two parametres do not really determine anything for me personally, changing them will not do that either. The bigger problems are patrollers becoming inactive and the need for more editors (which we cannot do anything about). Tib (talk) 04:16, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

Being the editor who was recently made a patroller, I feel a little strange responding here, but I'll still give my opinion. I personally think increasing the required amount of edits would be a good idea, as well as giving more specific information about what namespaces these edits must be in. I think 300-500 edits would be a good amount (some number between those). As for the name spaces, obviously all gamespaces would count, as well as Lore. I think Template should also be added as a namespace as it is one of the most advanced namespaces, requiring quite a bit of markup knowledge to edit (with the exception of minor edits or maintenance edits). File and Category probably shouldn't be included, as well as UESPWiki.

With regard to having a required amount of time, I feel like with a requirement of 300-500 edits it would not be necessary to increase the time spent on the wiki. If an editor could possibly make 300-500 edits in a month or just over a month, this shows that this editor probably has sufficient knowledge of the wiki to be a patroller (assuming most of those edits were not tweaks/maintenance).

Overall, I think the time requirements don't need to be changed, but it might be a good idea to increase the content requirements to 300-500 edits in gamespaces, Lore, and Template. AlphaAbsol (talk) 05:06, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

The guidelines for Autopatrolled are at least one month of near-daily activity, or at least three months of at least weekly activity, and a minimum of 200 edits in content namespaces or 500 total edits. I would say that as a base, Patroller needs to be more than that, as it is a much greater responsibility (taking responsibility for everyone's edits rather than just your own), so I would suggest a guideline of 500 edits in content + Template, with a disqualification of less than 300. As for timeline, I would say keep the guideline of about a month of near-daily activity or six months of at least weekly activity before being nominated, but have a hard requirement of at least two months, to give people a chance to settle in and learn the ropes.

I thought "content space" only included gamespace and lorespace anyway, but I guess it also includes Books, General, and the TESxMod namespaces, which wouldn't technically be considered gamespaces. There's probably no need to exclude those, so as long as "content namespaces" is actually defined, I think "content + Template" would be fine for the guidelines. --Enodoc (talk) 10:25, 11 November 2016 (UTC)

(←) After three weeks I think its time a course of action is justified. In one week, if not rejected, I will make these changes to the nominations guidelines.

• Active on the wiki—The community needs to know that the wiki will benefit from your actions after becoming a patroller, so it is recommended that a candidate have a period of roughly three months of weekly activity before being nominated, or a longer period of at least six months of more sporadic activity.
• Less than 250 edits in content space—A minimum of 250 edits in content and/or template namespaces will allow the nominee's knowledge of many different aspects of wiki markup to be judged. Content namespaces are defined as the gamespaces (eg Skyrim:) and lorespac, however, all talk pages are excluded. A breakdown of edits by namespace can be found by entering a username here.
• Less than one month on the wiki—At least one month of editing is deemed necessary to have adequately learned the policies, procedures, and guidelines used on the wiki. In the event of a new game release there will be a two month requirement for any new accounts registered between one month before the games release and three months afterward.
• Recent nomination—If a user has been nominated with his or her consent and that nomination was either rejected or withdrawn, that nominee will not be eligible for another nomination for three months from the date of the rejection or a withdrawal if votes have been cast. This exclusion does not include nominations rejected due to any of the other immediate disqualifications.

To explain the changes: first, in the suggested bracket, the one month of daily activity is gone, I've moved the weekly requirement to 3 months and made the 6 months a more judgemental 'sporadic' definition. The daily activity over one month isn't a helpful suggestion, and consensus is leaning towards a longer period anyway (plus its a suggestion not a requirement). We have many users who would probably be worthy of a nomination but because of the 'real life' phenomenon often can't meet the weekly activity requirement, and as a judgement call I don't see this as a massive factor in determining if someone can do the job, only whether the wiki will benefit having another 'semi-active' patroller.

Second, in the immediate disqualifications, I've refined the wording to include template and then defined 'content' as gamespace and lore. I've also left the 250 edits alone, as in the 3 weeks since this discussion started the 18 users that made more than that in the last six months are still the same 18. Only 5 have made that amount in the last month, and about a dozen of our current patrollers and admins have edited in the last six months but not reached 250. Raising the number, when it excludes maintenance edits already would make it almost impossible for newer users to reach without the benefit of a new game. Not only that but raising it to 500 would only omit 3 users over the last 6 months and 1 user in the last month (compared to 250 edits), a negligible amount in my book.

Third, I've omitted the 'daily activity' part from the time required as it means nothing when its removed from the above. I've also added a longer requirement for accounts made around the time of a new release. We have a number of these high edit count accounts that come during a new game, make a pile of useful edits, then disappear into the ether. Better to make it a little harder for them to occupy our time with a meaningless nomination. Most accounts of this nature are made around the time of release, sometimes before, so I wanted to catch them with a four-month window, one before three after. I thought about a 3 month requirement was a little harsh and there is still the suggested 3 months for those who wish to use it.

Fourth. I've added an exclusion for nominations that really should not have been made. We've had a couple of these nominations and once or twice agreed to ignore the rule when the user met the requirement before the timeline. These were usually cases where the edit count was not sufficient and the nomination was immediately pulled (sometimes with votes cast). I think I have the wording right as I think its an unfair punishment to someone who might have only miscounted or got a date wrong. It should really only be rejected nominations that require time before renomination. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 02:11, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Looks good to me. Although I would still prefer a hard requirement of two months on the wiki across the board (rather than just around the period of new releases), since a longer time period seems to be the initial purpose of the discussion. This would ensure that the nominee has had enough time to learn best practices. With a hard requirement at two months on the wiki, and a guideline of three months weekly editing, those who are voting would be better placed to make an informed judgement, if, for example, in those two months the nominee had edited almost daily. A month of daily activity could still technically be sufficient under the current proposal, but may not actually be enough for someone to have really experienced a broad enough spectrum of the content. Two months would also give a better perspective on someone's stickiness (ie, their commitment to sticking around). --Enodoc (talk) 10:01, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

The daily activity has been removed, leaving it at a simple month required, but as I've tried to show, its almost impossible to get the required 250 edits (without a new game or huge project) inside six months, nevermind one. The basic standard is usually taken as the lowest suggestion, therefore increasing the assumed basic standard time to 3 months, and anyone undercutting that would almost be required to prove they were good value for it, as the removal of the 'month of daily activity' removes any standardised way to undercut the time. I don't feel daily activity shows or proves anything more than weekly activity does. If the time were increased to a required 2 months I don't feel it would be necessary to have that extra month around new games. Voters are entitled to reject a nomination based purely on the suggestions. The suggestions are taken from common arguments against nominations and are usually indicative of what the community deems necessary in order to successfully pass. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:54, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks for picking this up, Silencer. I've had other things going on, and forgot about this completely! – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 19:08, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

Bethesda Pinball

Per this, do we actually want to bring this Skyrim "pinball table" into the scope of the wiki? We haven't really covered cameos before, such as the TF2 Skyrim item from the Steam pre-order, or the various TES Easter eggs in other Bethesda properties. That said, this seems to be officially supported and marketed by Bethesda as a product. Based on the other products from this developer, it doesn't seem to be a standalone game on most platforms; on Steam and Xbox Live it's treated as DLC to "Pinball FX2", but on PSN it's for "Zen Pinball 2", and on Android and Apple products (and the Amazon PC download?) it's "Zen Pinball". It seems this developer just has a slew of pinball games and the Skyrim table will be available on all of them.

Is this something the wiki should cover? —Legoless (talk) 18:41, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

If it's just an extension to an existing game, I would say probably not. It doesn't seem to be a separate DLC anyway, just one part of the 'Bethesda Pinball' pack. --Enodoc (talk) 19:17, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps, but the Skyrim table seems pretty robust for a pinball game. It looks like it actually has a rough facsimile of the Skyrim gameplay loop, i.e. inventory, sidequests, and upgrading your character to complete the main quest. If their other products are anything to go on (see this video for example), it looks like it even has cutscenes. The developer's various pinball games seem to be more like platforms for these "table" games than anything, especially since they're freeware; looking at Pinball FX2 on Steam, I'm not even sure it comes with any free-to-play tables.

The fact that it's part of a pack with other Bethesda IPs is a bit weird for our purposes, but there aren't any actual crossovers so we needn't cover the other two. —Legoless (talk) 02:28, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

(←) After playing a few minutes of the Steam version, it definitely seems like a robust TES game. It even has a character creator and a narrative. If we cover the likes of Oblivion Mobile, I think we ought to cover this as well. —Legoless (talk) 23:17, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

To be clear, you aren't taking the piss on us right now, right? If you are serious, by all means. I'm going to say "do not include it on the sidebar", collapse TES Travels and this into "Othe Games" and put that on the sidebar. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 23:35, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

To clarify, it is still very much a pinball game, but from what I've seen it definitely looks like a valid spinoff for our purposes. If you need convincing, I'd recommend looking at some gameplay footage. This video shows off first few minutes of gameplay as well as some "combat", although it isn't in English. I definitely agree with keeping it off the sidebar, considering it isn't even standalone. An "Other Games" page sounds like a good idea to me, since it would also allow us to list TES Travels and cancelled games on a single hub. —Legoless (talk) 23:46, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

One Tamriel: Mages and Fighter's Guild dailies

I'm preparing a quest hub page, similar to how we did with the Dark Brotherhood Contracts. Any suggestions for the page names? Since the Mages Guild quests are called "Madness in ..." and Fighters Guild quest "Dark Anchors in.. ", I'm unsure what to pick. Tib (talk) 20:24, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

"Madness in x" or "Madness in Tamriel" maybe? Hard to come up with an appropriate page name when the game doesn't give us anything to go on. Maybe something generic like "Mages Guild Dailies" would work better. —Legoless (talk) 20:55, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Haha, I think Madness in Tamriel would be quite funny. Dark Anchors in Tamriel would sound quite okay, as well. But I hope to hear some more thoughts about this! Does anyone strongly feel that generic name would be more appropriate?? :< Tib (talk) 21:07, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

"Madness in Tamriel" and "Dark Anchors in Tamriel" sound good to me. That goes quite nicely with the AvA hub pages Capture Keep, Capture Resource, Scout Objective and Capture Elder Scroll, which were just named by using the generic collective term. You could also have "Madness in Zone", which would potentially be considered 'more accurate', and would directly follow the same naming style as the AvA missions, but that doesn't sound as good as "Madness in Tamriel". (On that note, if I had gotten to the Dark Brotherhood contracts first, I was planning to name them "Contract: Zone" and "Contract: Zone Spree", before we decided to put them all in one page.) --Enodoc (talk) 21:21, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Just a side note - Enodoc, you are more than welcome to change anything about the DB contracts. I'm just really glad that we managed to collect all the information and that was the most important thing for me: now that it's done, it can certainly be adjusted. Tib (talk) 22:42, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

(←) A question.. right now I made tables for each alliance, but technically we don't really have these anymore. Should I go with just one table? There's only 16 locations alltogether, which could be okay in one table. Hmm, a second question, could it be possible to add the quest icons for these items so that the table doesnt look so.. boring? :( Tib (talk) 20:27, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

One table will be fine, since the Mages Guild is neutral and doesn't follow alliance divisions. What icons are you thinking of? It probably wouldn't be necessary to clutter the table with icons, but you could certainly add {{Item Link}}s to the items if you want the table to be more interesting, and those will include the icons. --Enodoc (talk) 21:11, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

"Planned Features" category

Would we be able to get a Planned Features category for confimred upcoming updates (player housing, Volunidai's Manor, etc) and have it accessable from ESO's main page please? I'm sure it'd make things a little less cluttered. --Rezalon (talk) 03:43, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

I've added Player Housing to the World Information section of the main page for now, so that it's accessible. Other upcoming features, like the unconfirmed Vvardenfell, will be added to the Zones list if confirmed, and teased future content is already listed here. What sorts of things are you envisioning for this category, and how would it be maintained and presented? --Enodoc (talk) 14:50, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

One year, four thousand edits - challenge me!

Time is flying by so fast... It's been great to be a part of this community and I've gotten to know some members a little bit better. Thank you all who have helped me out with all the questions and explained things to me! Well, with the Christmas nearing, I really need to work on getting on Santa's good side, and I need your help. More precisely, I've decided to take a few requests for the Online namespace.

If you have anything you'd like to see being added, information or images, something you maybe have noticed but do not have time for or cannot do yourself, let me know! No huge tasks though please! I really hope I can get some requests haha, it would be fun. Post here or on my talk page! :) I think I'll do it throughout the December, because I'm not even sure right now if and how many requests will come in. We will see :) Cheers, Tib (talk) 14:32, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

I think Jeancey had you beat for his first year. Man's an editing machine and could probably do a thousand a day if he felt so inclined! *whispers conspiratorially* don't tell anyone I said this, but I think he might legitimately be a machine and not a man* Anyway, congrats on a year and almost as many edits as I've got since joining in Sept. 2011! haha :) -damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 15:59, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Collections pages always need updating if you're looking for work! I don't even wanna think about how much data we're missing from ON:Pets by now. Filling out blank NPC pages is also a big help to the namespace. —Legoless (talk) 17:46, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

*coughcough* I think I actually had 4000 edits in my first month, If I remember correctly.... I have plenty of things for you to do, but I think they fall under the huge projects heading.... Jeancey (talk) 20:40, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

Transformative Instancing in ESO

I don't think this was ever discussed before, but we should really have a page explaining "transformative" instances in ESO. These occur when a certain quest-based instance of a location transforms the area significantly, usually for time-travelling purposes or whatever. All of this occurs without ever leaving the overworld, so you can walk out of this instanced scene simply by getting too far way. Eagle's Brook/Lord Velian's Plane are a good example of this, or the time-travelling quest at Glenumbra Moors. These places hardly qualify as "realms" or even distinct locations, but explaining this mechanic would be a good step towards documenting those locations fully. —Legoless (talk) 15:55, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

I think it's part of the larger mechanic called "Phasing", that in general allows some overland regions to have different "versions" (like Bleakrock Village, where the pre-quest phase contains the villagers, and the post-quest one contains the covenant enemies). It's explained in short in the fourth paragraph of Online:Megaservers, though a separate page would be in order. -- SarthesArai ^Talk 16:37, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Yeah, that's exactly what I'm talking about, but in regard to very significant changes. I dunno if every occupied city or temporary screen filter needs to be listed. —Legoless (talk) 16:58, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Then we would have to craft criterias as for what we list and what we don't, and I don't think we can make out a cut somewhere. And contrary to you, I do think all phasing locations should be listed somewhere, as phasing also means that a character who has already cleared that location can't meet one there who hasn't. -- SarthesArai ^Talk 17:09, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

It'd have to be a very comprehensive list to include every quest where phasing occurs. I was thinking a good cut-off point would be having to step through a portal to transition. As far as I can recall, that should cover every major location change. —Legoless (talk) 17:19, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

That is really a good idea. I think it should include both temporary (eg. time travel) and permanent (clearing locations) cases. In general, like SarthesArai, I think it should cover every case when two players being in the same location can't meet each other (assuming they're in the same zone instance). Phased locations seem to exist only in starter islands, the main 15 zones, and possibly Coldharbour - I've never seen any in Craglorn, Wrothgar, Hew's Bane, or the Gold Coast. --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 18:46, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Item Links for Quest Items

Is it possible to use the {{Item Link}} template for quest items? I've tried every combination of parameters I can think of, but all of them just produce an "Unknown Item". I think the IDs for these are not the same as for normal items. — TheRealLurlock (talk) 16:56, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

The quest items part of the esolog has been broken for months and months. When you search for an item (eg Agolas's Journal) then click View Quest Item it goes to the home page despite having the correct url. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:02, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure those are related problems. The quest items ARE available on the esolog - where do you think I got all the data to make Quest Items? But I think the Item Link template doesn't work with that part of the database. — TheRealLurlock (talk) 19:40, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm sure they are related which is why I mentioned it. No-one even suggested they were not available on the log so I'm not sure why you are saying that. Just a simple comparison of any other item with a quest item in the log shows that there is some difference in the way they are treated, which could mean they are incompatible with the current Item Link template, or that something is indeed wrong with the log. A quest item does not generate an icon because it uses a .dds file, whereas all other items use .png. The 'link'/'itemlink' is not a link, and neither is the 'name' part of the entry. Maybe none of this is the problem with the template compatibility, but getting the log search fixed is something that can only benefit. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 20:30, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, this is possible since my 5th May edit. As shown in the template documentation, class=questitem is what you need to add to switch it to showing quest items: {{Item Link|Orb of Discourse|class=questitem|id=3922}} Orb of Discourse; {{Item Link|Altmer Cache of Blades|class=questitem|id=5444}} Altmer Cache of Blades. --Enodoc (talk) 19:22, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Templating Help for ESL

While ESL is going to be a pretty light namespace regardless, it needs a few things done to it before we can say "jobs done". Per this conversation, I need help with creating or finding a suitable template/table to display card information in a user friendly way. I experimented with this briefly here. But what I want requires a bit more involvement. I would like a table with bigger icons, the ability to display a card's magicka cost, attribute, power, health, rarity, and card text, and dialogue presented on the table. This done, we can sort our articles by keywords (such as strength, intelligence, that sort of thing), and display the content in a manner our users will probably find the most usable. Getting this done will also simplify our requirements for future updates, less work to include any new content.

Any help towards making or setting up a usable template/table for this will be massively appreciated. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 20:15, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Like I said elsewhere, something similar to {{Online Skill Link}} would work best for transclusion purposes. That might be a good place to start. —Legoless (talk) 20:41, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

I make no claims on having any special design skills, but how's this for a simple table? Note: I updated {{Legends Card Summary}} a few times to get it to save the necessary data, so if you decide to play in my sandbox and try values other than those that are there, it'll probably be hit-or-miss whether you get legitimate data or things like {{{power}}} in the table. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:39, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

That would serve very well, yes! If we got something like that working (ideally, it also linking the name to the Legends article in question), we'd have a really excellent way to present this material. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 00:59, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Good work with this! Only issue is that it if values are undefined (such as power), it breaks. I would recommend it display some form of "not applicable" if there is no health or power value. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 03:51, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Edit: Additionally, while it's a more minor request, rarity sorting should be based on how rare it is, not alphabetically, if that can be implemented. That's everything I particularly want right now, I know Alarra would like a hideimage, hideattribute variable to be included so that this template could be repurposed for a complete card list (it's extremely resource intensive with images, so doing a complete list, instead of lists based on keywords, would be browser breaking). --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 04:13, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Done. I used minimal as the parameter name, and it strips off both the image and the ability. Let me know if you actually need separate hide parameters for each. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 06:58, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Probably would be a good idea to have them separate (and type/subtype should be optionally shown/hidden too). I imagine, for instance, that on a type (e.g. Creature) page or subtype page we wouldn't need to list the type/subtype since that's what the page is about, but we would want to list the attribute/class; likewise on an attribute/class page we wouldn't need to list the attribute/class but we're gonna want to list a type/subtype to know if it's an action, a creature, etc. ~ Alarra ^(talk) 11:08, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

What we really want as well is something that doesn't have to be put together manually, using some generation procedure like #listsaved (or, if we were to install a new extension, DPL or SMW). --Enodoc (talk) 19:27, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

(←) Okay, I've separated the minimal parameter into individual ones. To follow {{NPC Data}}'s convention, I used skip<whatever> for the parameter names. And yeah, I was wondering if #listsaved might come into play here. As I recall, it's somewhat limited and often ends up not helping, but it might be something to try on various pages. Let me know if there are any other changes needed. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:35, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

There are still some errors, some attributes are not transcluding and there seems to be an issue with transcluding type in some cases as well. See Legends:Argonian#Cards for an example of both these issues. Although, once this is resolved, it'll definitely look better. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 23:02, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Edit: per later testing, it appeared to be some odd caching error. The template works fine now. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 23:15, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

1. listsaved almost works, using that Argonian page as an example:

{{#listsaved:Card Data|subtype=Argonian|namespace=Legends|name|cost|attribute|class|power|health|rarity|image|ability|type}}

#listsaved

	Name	Type	Attribute					Text
	An-Xileel Invader	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	4	5	3	1 Common
	Archein Elite	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	4	3	5	2 Rare	Lethal
	Archein Guerrilla	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	4	2	4	2 Rare	Lethal
	Archein Venomtongue	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	4	1	4	2 Rare	Lethal Slay: Gain +1 max magicka.
	Argonian Recruit	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	1	1	1	1 Common
	Argonian Veteran	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	3	3	1 Common
	Black Marsh Centurion	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	6	4	8	1 Common	Veteran: Guard
	Black Marsh Prodigy	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	1	1	2 Rare	Veteran: +4/+4
	Black Marsh Warden	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	4	2	2	4 Legendary	At the end of your turn, summon a 1/1 Argonian Recruit. If you have 7 or more max magicka, summon a 3/3 Argonian Veteran instead.
	Blackrose Herbalist	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	2	4	3 Epic	At the start of your turn, heal another random friendly creature.
	Blackwood Alchemist	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	1	4	1 Common	Gains +2/+0 when your max magicka increases.
	Blackwood Distiller	Creature (Argonian)	Scout	4	3	4	3 Epic	Pilfer: Gain three magicka this turn. Slay: Gain +1 max magicka.
	Brotherhood Suspect	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	1	2	4	3 Epic	Last Gasp: Your opponent draws a Completed Contract.
	Captive Swims-at-Night	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	1	0	2	4 Legendary	Guard Immune to Silence Permanently Shackled. Move at the end of your turn. Last Gasp: The Treasure Hunters Win.
	Fighters Guild Recruit	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	2	1	2	1 Common	Prophecy, Guard, Lethal
	Great Moot Squire	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	1	1	2	1 Common	Veteran: +1/+1
	Guild Recruit	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	2	1	2	1 Common	Lethal
	Guildsworn Apprentice	Creature (Argonian)	The Guildsworn	2	1	2	2 Rare	Prophecy, Guard Summon: Draw a card.
	Helstrom Footpad	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	2	3	2	1 Common
	Hist Speaker	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	2	2	2	1 Common	While Hist Speaker is in play, your max magicka is increased by 1.
	Imbued Argonian	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	1	1	3	1 Common	Guard When Imbued Argonian is Consumed, give the consuming creature +1/+1 and Guard.
	Invoker of the Hist	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	6	3	6	4 Legendary	Veteran: Restore your magicka.
	Mages Guild Recruit	Creature (Argonian)	Intelligence	2	1	2	1 Common	Summon: Reduce the cost of an action in your hand by 2.
	Preserver of the Root	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	4	4	4	3 Epic	+2/+2 and Guard while you have 7 or more max magicka.
	Red Bramman	Creature (Argonian)	Scout	9	5	5	4 Legendary	Summon: Silence and Shackle all enemy creatures in this lane.
	Sails-Through-Storms	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	6	5	5	4 Legendary	Pilfer: Summon the top creature of your deck.
	Shadowfen Priest	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	5	4	4	3 Epic	Summon: Silence another creature, or destroy an enemy support.
	Shadowscale Hunter	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	3	4	3	2 Rare	Veteran: Move.
	Shadowscale Partisan	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	3	2	2	1 Common	Lethal Summon: +0/+2 if you have another creature with Lethal.
	Sly Marshblade	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	2	3	2	2 Rare	Last Gasp: Draw a card if you have 7 or more max magicka.
	Soulrest Marshal	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	6	4	4	2 Rare	Summon: If you have more health than your opponent, the next card you play this turn costs 6 less.
	Stalking Shadowscale	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	3	4	1 Common	Slay: +1/+1
	Stalwart Ally	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	3	3	1 Common	Summon: +0/+2 and Guard if the top card of your deck is .
	Steel-Eyed Visionary	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	2	4	4 Legendary	Veteran: Set each friendly creature's power equal to its health.
	Stormhold Henchman	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	2	2	2	1 Common	+2/+2 while you have 7 or more max magicka.
	Sun-in-Shadow	Creature (Argonian)	House Telvanni	5	4	6	4 Legendary	Summon: Permanently Shackle another friendly creature to draw an action of your choice from your deck.
	Swims-at-Night	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	4	2	2	4 Legendary	Summon: Put a random 0-cost card into your hand. After you play a 0-cost card, Swims-at-Night gains +1/+1.
	Thieves Guild Recruit	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	2	1	2	1 Common	Summon: Draw a card. If it costs 7 or more, reduce its cost by 1.
	Thorn Histmage	Creature (Argonian)	Scout	5	2	4	3 Epic	Guard Summon: Gain +1 max magicka. Gains +1/+0 when your max magicka increases.
	Tree Minder	Creature (Argonian)	Endurance	3	1	1	1 Common	Guard Summon: Gain +1 max magicka.
	Twin Lamps Consul	Creature (Argonian)	Agility	3	2	4	1 Common	Plot: Lethal and Guard.

If we can work out a solution for that {{{1}}} issue, that would do it. --Enodoc (talk) 23:29, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Note, I'm still seeing issues right at the moment. Any help with that would be massively appreciated. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 00:38, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

After some finagling, I managed to get a repeatable solution. From what I can see, the page doesn't want to rebuild the info being transcluded, so the additional fields often don't appear correctly. To fix this if you see it, purge the source page, then the page the information is being transcluded to. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 00:46, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I fixed the {{{1}}} issue. As for the caching, I was getting that intermittently on the docs as well (it displayed fine when looking at the template page, but not on the /Doc page itself). Thanks for investigating how to fix it! – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 01:47, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

(←) The {{Card Data}} template seems good so far. Here's my thoughts on it: The template should take its type (e.g. Support, Action, Creature) and only display the power/health if it's a creature. In addition, if it's a support card it should display uses/ongoing (in the same column). Right now, I think that instead of (or accompanying) the text saying the attribute, it should show the symbol for that attribute. As an ornament, it could display some sort of symbol for unique card. Also, we should have some sort of tooltip template, similar to {{Item Link}} for when a card summons another, in the following format: "Name; Cost; Power/Health (if applicable); (ability, with <br>s converted to commas or somesuch.); (uses, if applicable.)" The style I have suggested mimics the way that cards in the game do that, e.g. what you get if you hover over Ungolim the Listener in-game. - KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 07:53, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Legends Card Template

There were a number of things that were changed or left open-ended in developing the {{Legends Card Summary}} template, and I'm wondering if I should do a quick bot run to update them and then simplify the template. Since I don't play Legends or contribute to the space beyond basic fixes, I'm looking for opinions of those who do.

• name: no longer necessary in most cases, can be removed if it matches the page name.
• power/attack: these are redundant to one another, should I just change them all to power?
• health/defense: ditto, change to health?
• class/attribute: similar situation here, but they're technically names for different things and the text that says "Class" or "Attribute" is updated based on which parameter is used. Should one of these be renamed, should they both be renamed into something that covers both concepts (e.g., classattribute or something shorter with "Class/Attribute" as the text), or just leave things as they are now?
• flavortext: we assumed that some cards could have flavour text in them once things were out of beta, but this doesn't appear to be the case, and the parameter is unused. In this case, there would be no bot changes necessary, but should I remove this from the template itself? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:54, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

We should drop power/attack to just power, health/defense to just health, leave class attribute alone (use the appropriate one per the situation), and remove flavortext and name. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 01:01, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Okay, this is all done. There were two cases where the card name didn't match the page name that'll need to be checked out: Renowned Legate and Tower Alchemist. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 05:38, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

Those were just a case of missing updating text I copy-pasted, so I've updated those pages. Thanks for catching those! ~ Alarra ^(talk) 20:05, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

One Tamriel: Mages Guild and Fighters Guild Storylines

It has been suggested on the ESO forums that the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild story quests are no longer gated by Guild Rank 1-5. I don't have any characters in the right place to easily check, so could someone look into this, please? I think it would be odd if they decided to do this without also editing the Thieves Guild and Dark Brotherhood quests too, so they should probably also be checked, but given that there are now dailies for MG and FG, I would have though it unnecessary to remove the rank gating since the dailies allow you to rank up quicker. And yet, they definitely did remove the 5-level gating for the Main Quest, so it's certainly possible that this has happened. Thanks! --Enodoc (talk) 11:42, 10 December 2016 (UTC)

Save Named Values Template

For those of you who have been using the Save Named Values template, most of the former uses of this template have now been replaced by other templates. About the only things left are one-off uses, like saving the patch number in Online:Patch, and the various URLs used by {{Stored URL}}, which would not really have been simplified or improved in any way by converting to a different template.

Specifically, the new templates are: {{Book Data}}, {{Faction Data}}, {{Mod Icon Data}}, {{Project Data}}, and {{Skyrim Achievement Data}}. I think the template names are fairly self-explanatory, and for the most part, parameter names are just straight substitutions for the names used by Save Named Values, with parameters that were redundant to the page name being removed. The exception is Faction Data, which got a substantial overhaul/simplification—see this change, for example.

I've done a fair bit of testing and spot-checking, but if anyone spots any issues resulting from the conversions, please let me know. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 16:40, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Discord

In an attempt to counteract a lowering in chat activity (not membership, for the most part, but actual use), and our growing number of chat services, we now have a Discord. Discord is pretty useful as a choice in the place of IRC, Teamspeak, and Skype, with a pretty versatile and easily customized set of tools for managing the whole thing. Please follow that link to join ours, we are sitting at about thirty members strong at the moment, and it'd be beneficial to have more people who can have rights passed out to them there. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 23:02, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

While we're on the topic of Discord, does it make sense for us to continue the practice of having wiki and forum staff as automatic Discord staff? We've always done it that way on IRC, and to a point, the logic makes sense (those who are trusted users in one can generally be trusted in the other), but I'm not sure if there should necessarily be a direct correlation between the two. Using myself as an example, I'm an administrator here because I've been around for a while and know what I'm doing. On Discord, on the other hand, this is my first time using it, and I'm often fumbling about trying to figure things out. I'm not so sure it makes sense for me to be an administrator there. While I could certainly just have my own rights changed, I see this as more of a policy issue rather than something specific to me.

Would it make more sense to have the policy be something along the lines of staff on the wiki and in the forums initially get slightly elevated positions in Discord (whatever gives the ability to block unruly users, let's say), but anything above that is based on merit/experience/whatever? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:04, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Rights could be granted upon request, perhaps? If someone knows what they're doing, they can offer to help out. —Legoless (talk) 00:08, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, to be fair, the ranks are named and users are sorted by what their wiki rank is. It's not like they were pressured into the roles. AKB seems to have just said "Wiki admin? Admin group! Patroller? Patroller group! ESO Guild Member? Sure!" Not sure what they deserve or if that's anything more than just a random name, but it seems like arbitrary sorting. I wouldn't be opposed to some sort of system, though, as back in early 2012 when I joined the IRC for the first time, it happened to be the week after I became a Patroller, so on day one or two I was learning on the job how IRC commands and being a HOP worked and trusted to be somewhat in charge if needed.

Actually, now that I think about it, across the board I wouldn't see some kind of throttle on who gets rights as a problem. To be fair, the users ARE trusted by the community, as they were voted into their roles on any of the uesp.net sites, but there's nothing wrong with declining the rights if they aren't proficient with them (though by the same note we could just trust them to not do anything if they aren't confident with it). Basically, I'm not bothered by some kind of change to how rights are given (though I personally am a veteran Discord user and feel like keeping my fancy rights), but at the same time I don't see the status quo as an issue, considering in my 5 years participating in IRC I've not seen anyone come in just to blatantly be abusive and malicious about their brand new rights.

Edit - Apologies, I meant to hit "Preview" not save, since I've got more to say. If there were to be changes, I'd think we should just streamline everything. Between that silly greeter bot giving fake XP for meaningless "Novice", "Journeyman", etc ranks, Atreus's silly "Atreus" rank, the Admins, Patrollers, Guild, etc, we have huge lists of fairly meaningless ranks that make navigation of users fairly annoying. Perhaps it could be streamlined to "Adminstrator", a generic "Moderator" rank (which is effectively what the "Wiki Patroller" rank is) where an admin can elevate at their discretion a users to be in charge in their absence (whether that be Patrollers, trusted Userpatrollers, trusted forum people, etc), and then figure something out about the ridiculous joke ranks that take up space. Basically, I think that every group needs a specific purpose, and we don't need a million name groups just for the sake of them.

The one stipulation I would have should be that any elevated ranks should be reserved for trusted and active members of either the wiki or forum, not just random Joe the Schmuck who joined from Facebook but has no ties to the community, for instance. Most of those other ranks, particularly being sorted just for being in the guild, I think are pointless and give the impression of a non-existent hierarchy of who's more special than others. If the guild members or other not-actually-elevated users want to be special and chat, they can chat in a channel dedicated to that particular game, but they don't need a special rank. That goes for all of the ranks that are there but don't actually provide a function or anything other than a recolored name, I'm not calling them out specifically to be scrapped on their own.

-damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 00:34, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

If you aren't comfortable using any of the rights attached to your role, simply don't worry about it. It also gets us around the common issue with elevating some users to specifically be chat moderators, which is a fairly common problem in other communities due to those users poor conduct. If you happen to learn how to use your role's rights, that's fine, but it's not expected of anyone, it's just as much a way of showing respect to that user as it is of actually managing the server. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 00:41, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Damon, I asked for the Guild Member tag so that I could do "@Guild Member" and contact everyone who's in the ESO Guilds in a single action. This is useful as a way to inform these people of important information without bothering anyone else. Otherwise, I would have to remember who is in the Guild (not always easy, since not everyone uses the same @name on Discord that they do on ESO) and individually PM each one. It isn't a "rank", it's a tag. baratron (talk) 00:05, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

Utilizing the General Namespace

Hello, IFW here. A year ago I talked to Minor Edits, Legoless, and Jimmee about a couple of things in regards to the general namespace. One of them is creating a General Uutak Mythos page for the project I created, which a few of them suggested. The other is to create pages for the recent lore interviews with ESO (Interview with Three Argonians, New Life Festival Interview Parts I & II) and other recently done things (Translations of the Calcermo Stone). Just wondering if anyone is cool with that. I was also wondering if it is alright if I create the markdown pages in documents and then leave a link to them either here or somewhere else for someone to copy paste to the wikia as my home internet situation is kind of shoddy (I do most of edits or web surfing via my phone, not computer) if that is alright. Hope you all have a good day. IceFireWarden (talk) 00:18, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

We definitely need the Calcelmo translation on the wiki - maybe on Lore:Dwemer Alphabet? Per this discussion, we're fine with hosting interviews with Schick. I think the discussion about Uutak got tangled up by the LA canonicity debate last time, but considering we have pages on other fan projects like Tamriel Rebuilt and ESOTR I don't think it should be an issue. Linking to markdown documents should be fine, just ask an editor to help or post a request here. —Legoless (talk) 00:33, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Okie dokie then, I'll start work on them immediately. Do you all have all the markdown coding in a list or something so I can write the texts already in markdown format? And do you mind if I make a Uutak Mythos Overview page, as well as addendums pages for the Uutak Mythos Bible, Echmer race, and Yneslea as it is in the UM? Or is that another discussion you will all have to vote on?IceFireWarden (talk) 01:35, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

You might find some of these links useful, in particular our Quick Editing Guide which goes over wiki markdown. I'd be weary of including too much in-universe info in the General namespace, since fanfiction is usually hosted in userspace. Personally I wouldn't object to a few subpages in the General namespace to go over the important topics, but I think we may need broader consensus. —Legoless (talk) 01:48, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

The Kurt Kuhlmann translation is already on the wiki at Lore:Calcelmo's Stone? --Jimeee (talk) 09:19, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

(←) I don't see the rationale for including fan-created lore projects. As I understand it, Tamriel Rebuilt is included primarily because it uses the Morrowind game engine. If we start having General pages on Uutak, we should also have General pages on C0DA. --Enodoc (talk) 10:10, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree with that line of thought. We should have articles about C0DA in General space, along with this. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 13:59, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

There is always a danger when including fan-created projects that give credence to small obscure theories and lore that really have no place in a logical persons head. That said, when projects build a suitably large following within the Elder Scrolls community, we do ourselves a disservice by ignoring them completely. If we even have just a single overview page with links to the project, we can snaffle a decent proportion of the traffic flow looking for more information on those projects, and therefore have them looking at our pages rather than any of the other places with Elder Scrolls information. It was much easier to include Tamriel Rebuilt as because it used the base games and they could then be filtered off to the corresponding TesMod spaces. If we do create these overview pages they should all be clearly marked as fan-created and unofficial, just to avoid any issues. After a bit of searching I am happy to accept Uutak Mythos as large enough, and C0DA certainly has a wide enough audience to be mentioned. The translation for Calcelmo's Stone has been added to that page, and is just OOG lore, not a project itself. I do wonder if we would be better creating a new 'Main' TesMod space (and maybe the Tes1Mod and Tes2Mod spaces while we're at it). While I understand that it still has the 'mod' part in the name, not all modifications are software (eg the lore interviews for ESO are OOG but official modifications of lore). I believe if we were to do anything more than just an overview page (eg General:Uutak Mythos/Echmer) the general namespace is not the place to do that. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 14:43, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I'd agree with Silencer. An overview page on C0DA and the Uutak Mythos in the General namespace, with external links (or to user namespaces) going to the respective bulk of the content is sufficient. --Jimeee (talk) 14:57, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

That sounds good to me. A page on C0DA is long overdue, and having a place to host it on the wiki means fewer discontented editors trying to add it to lorespace articles. I'm not sure we need to go so far as to make a new namespace for fanfic and developer interviews; General and userspace should do the job. Also, I think it's fair to say that we should treat "lore projects" on a case-by-case basis going forward. C0DA and Uutak are large, community-driven projects. If I decided to start worldbuilding tomorrow, I think that still firmly belongs in userspace in the absence of specific consensus. —Legoless (talk) 17:03, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

I agree with just summary pages for large, well-known projects: Legoless basically stated my thoughts exactly. ~ Alarra ^(talk) 20:49, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Homestead on PTS

Today! Just so you're all aware...

Once the patch notes are up we can coordinate what we need to be doing to add stuff, and make sure the Homestead page is up to scratch. --Enodoc (talk) 13:51, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Agree! Maybe I could offer to add some images. I was also thinking of working on the introductory quest page and the NPC that gives it. There will be so many items invlved with furnishing, plus the crafting... seems like we need some tables to present all that? You can also ask if there's anything you'd like me to work on, maybe that is easiest, because I just don't have any focus right now. Tib (talk) 12:55, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

A quick summary of some of the bigger things:

Homestead

Quests and other prerequisites - what are they?

Previewing function - how does it work?

Housing Editor placement and decoration functionality

Furnishing vendors and other in-game sources (ie, rewards)

Furnishing crafting plans, and integration into existing crafting system

UI system functions - collections screen, crown store, setting access permissions

Update 13

Master Crafting Writs and the new Writ Voucher currency

New motifs (four)

Tel Var merchant update

Cyrodiil Border Gate vendor overhaul - some vendors removed (need to identify which ones)

Cyrodiil towns - new quest rewards, change to some of the vendors' wares

A number of skill changes, including reordering of a number of lines' Actives

--Enodoc (talk) 13:26, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Don't forget we can sit on chairs now! Phoenix Neko (talk) 13:50, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

PTS is live now! Phoenix Neko (talk) 21:20, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

The flavour quotes on the house pages need to be switched over to use the loadtext param. I changed some of them over but I underestimated the time commitment for that much copypasta. —Legoless (talk) 23:05, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

(←) I think there would be some value of having images of the crafted furnishings, as the small icons are maybe not always so clear and you would want to see what it is you are crafting. On PTS currently some icons are showing something completely different, like a general furnishing icon which leaves you completely clueless as to how the item looks. But... 2000+ items. Not sure how to approach this task, is it even realistic? I was checking some smaller objects, and wondering if I should group similar objects and take images of 5 objects (same type) together or something. Tib (talk) 16:16, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Well, this PTS is probably our best chance of ever getting those images. Maybe start with the rarest/most expensive? It's probably not essential to immediately grab images of a thousand common objects. —Legoless (talk) 16:48, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

ESO Loading screen artwork

Just floating this idea to see if there is any interest. The ESO loading screens contain some absolutely incredible artwork, and I think it would be a crying shame not to document these in some form after the servers shut down x years in the future. I propose simply having a dedicated gallery page (or something similar) that organizes them all. I originally thought about incorporating it with Online:Loading Screens, but I think it's best to keep them separate.

I think capturing just the images, and no floating load text would be ideal. I wouldn't have a problem contributing images myself, but they problem is I play on Xbox, so I cannot hide the text, plus my screenshot are only 1280x720, which isn't the best.

I know Davey used to post humongous .zip files with various images etc, and maybe the original loading images are in there somewhere? Does anyone know? If so, then the hard work is done, and its just a case up uploading them. Any thoughts? --Jimeee (talk) 19:05, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

The loading screen page you linked already has a gallery with the raw artwork. In fact, we even have a page for old loading screen artwork which was removed (including from beta!). Those pages haven't been updated in a while, so you could help upload the new ones if you want. The most recent loading screen dump is here. —Legoless (talk) 19:35, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Holy crap i'm an idiot.--Jimeee (talk) 19:37, 3 January 2017 (UTC)

Vvardenfell map image help

I've recently come across a large datamined top down image of Vvardenfell in ESO, and it's pretty nicely detailed and high res. I would like to upload it, but it's too large for the server to allow me to, I think the image is around 22MB. Could any admins give me some advice as to what to do? Would also like to know if it would be possible to add an interactive version that I could annotate using icons, similar to something like [1] Thanks for the help! Contraptions (talk) 09:32, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

What's the res of that image? Try an external image editor to optimise it and shrink it down a bit (to 10, if possible), then upload it through content3. That has a 50 MB limit (and is what I use to update my Cyrodiil map, which is 7 MB). Using content3 with it as it is at 22 MB could theoretically work, but I wouldn't bet on it being usable once it was here. If the link doesn't work, you'll need to type http://content3.uesp.net in the address bar directly. --Enodoc (talk) 10:26, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks Enodoc, but when I follow the link or type it in it just redirects me to the main page. Contraptions (talk) 11:13, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Hmm, try going direct to http://content3.uesp.net/wiki/Special:Upload . The page will look the same, but the limit should be higher. --Enodoc (talk) 11:49, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! It worked when I used that page. Contraptions (talk) 12:22, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

I tweaked the thumbnail creation settings on Content3, so the image now has a thumbnail (at least on Content3...it may take a while before it shows up on the main servers, though, if at all). Don't edit/purge that page on of the main servers, though, or you'll break it again. If the image is actually going to be used for anything, it should be resized, as generating thumbnails for something that big takes a long time. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:41, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

ESO: Overland Sets on zone pages

Hi everyone. I'm putting this here so we can get a general consensus about whether overland sets should be documented on the zone pages. As an example, the Glenumbra zone page would contain information about the three overland sets there (Bloodthorn's Touch, Wyrd Tree's Blessing, Hide of the Werewolf), and would also contain information about where to find the different pieces of these sets. The main reason for this is so that people can see what sets they can expect to get from the zone they are currently in, for example. It would be a bit of a tedious job, but I'd be happy to do it if we can come to an agreement as to if we should include the sets on the zone pages.

While we're discussing this, we should also decide if rare fish gained from the zones and lorebooks gained from the zones should be documented on zone pages as well, for the same reason. AlphaAbsol (talk) 05:19, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Sarthes and I are working on set pages, and we're updating as we go. We're doing overland sets in the same way as Dungeon sets, e.g. "Its three overland sets are (set) (set) (set)." I, personally, like to do that after finishing the three sets belonging to the zone as a mark of completion. See City of Ash as an example. That's just what the two of us have been doing, but from what I've seen it seems to be accepted. - KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 05:25, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Ah, cool. If you're doing that, what I will do is document the fish and lorebooks from each zone, because I think that's important information that should be included on the zone pages too. AlphaAbsol (talk) 05:31, 11 January 2017 (UTC)

Chat

AKB has asked me to change the "Chat" tab in the top bar to point to Discord. Given the activity of Discord and inactivity of IRC, that certainly makes sense, but it's not as quick of a change as it might seem. I'm not even sure we can put an external link as a tab, but I'll look into it. Before I go experimenting, though, is there anyone that still feels we need the old Chat tab around for any reason? It would be easiest to simply remove the extension that puts it there and not worry about it after that, but if anyone still wants a link to IRC, I can look into adding it as a Gadget. I think that would be doable. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 18:35, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Question: Is the IRC being 100% decommissioned in the near future? Because I still use it regularly, and I have taken and answered questions from new users and had discussions with people several times in the last week alone. I think as long as it's still being used, it's got some merit existing in a visible location, even if it's only secondary to Discord as far as activity goes. -damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 19:02, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

To answer your question with a question, are people using the Chat tab to get there? I know I never have, because I hid it ages ago. I just start up my chat client and pop into IRC from there. But how I use things and how others use them may be different. If people are still using that tab to join IRC, then I have no issues leaving it there, or maybe moving it to the sidebar if that's preferable. I just don't want to do something totally unnecessarily if nobody's using the built-in chat client anymore. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 19:15, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

Looking back at my IRC logs, even if they don't talk and just join then leave 10 minutes later, it's fair to say that we have numerous connections to the IRC channel from regular users who just want to pop in via Webchat. Most of the hardcore users like ourselves have special clients to do the job, but Webchat still sees numerous connections a day from users who are popping in and out to either look or ask a question. -damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 19:28, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

If you cannot set external links as a tab at the top, we do have a Discord page, like what the "chatroom" link on the sidebar links to. I'm in favor of swapping out the top link, and perhaps leaving the Chatroom sidebar link as-is (so it's not hidden altogether but urges people to use Discord instead.) ~ Alarra ^(talk) 19:51, 31 January 2017 (UTC)

I would say that users who are "popping in and out" of IRC to see what's going on or to ask questions should be encouraged to be popping in and out of Discord instead. If the top tab can't be directed to an external link, pointing it to UESP:Discord would probably suffice. Alternatively, maybe it would be possible for Dave to set up a new Special:Discord page to embed a Discord widget into, and then the top tab could point to that. --Enodoc (talk) 00:36, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

Adding Discord turned out to be simplicity itself, so I just turned it into a Gadget that's enabled by default. You may have to do a hard refresh before you see it. Those who don't want the tab can simply disable it in their preferences. So far, I haven't done anything with the existing chat tab, pending a clear direction to go. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 01:29, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

(←) Change "Chat" to say "IRC" on the tab and then let them sit side-by-side for the user to choose either way, whether they want to use IRC or Discord? -damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 03:15, 1 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Damon's suggestion of renaming it to IRC. If I can, and I think I can, what about turning the tab into a gadget like Discord, only an opt-in instead of an opt-out? The reality is that the IRC is fairly inactive these days whereas Discord is fairly active at the moment. In that context, I think we should be encouraging people towards Discord, since people are more likely to get their questions answered, and also more likely to stay for conversation. Still, as long as we have staff like myself and Damon who are going into IRC from time to time and are willing to monitor it, I think we should probably keep that as an accessible option. If it dies out completely, and there are no staff in there either, that's a different story. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 01:51, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I spent a LOT of time in IRC. Even during my two years away from the wiki, I was in IRC almost daily. But the IRC's activity has been seriously waning. Our new Discord server sees far more conversation in one day than IRC did in a week. Discord also has the benefit of unifying our communities - the wiki, the fora, and the online guilds. However, there is one thing that I have yet to see in Discord (but was a regular occurrence in IRC): a random user popping in to ask a quick question about the wiki, getting his or her response, and leaving. IRC is more readily accessible to a new user than Discord is, solely because of our webchat client (with Discord, a user has to make an account just to ask one question...). So my recommendation is this: leave both the Discord and Chat tabs on the header, rename the Chat tab to IRC, set the IRC tab to link to UESPWiki:IRC instead of webchat, and slap a notice at the top of UESPWiki:IRC that states "While IRC is still in use, users may find more activity and quicker answers for their questions at UESPWiki:Discord". Let the choice fall on the user, but make it clear that Discord is the preferred chat client at this time.Nicholas Lee Dust 02:12, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I would say that ease of use for IRC is an argument for it not to default to hidden. Discord is fine and good if you want to stick around in that community, but not everyone wants to make an account and download a client to chat with when they have a quick-access option like IRC that they can just hit "Go!" on and it works. Unless there's a deliberate, guaranteed intent to disband and decommission the IRC channel in the future, I don't see why we have to hide it away by default on that tab, which would likely certainly cut traffic to nil, because most people who visit have visited via that chat tab and not by finding an obscure IRC page and address.

I think the pros and cons of both should be clearly outlined, and both should remain visible to allow the user to make the decision. Do they want to pop into IRC for a quick chat that doesn't take any login credentials if they don't want them and can where they can find a few older users (like myself, Rob, and some of those non-ranked users who will chat back if they see conversations firing up) still regularly coming and going, or do they want to go through an account creation process and run through the hassle to set up a Discord account if they don't already have one and then linger in the server idle all of the time and not actively participate because they went through all of that just to ask a question, but don't want to otherwise be actively involved in the community? Both have pros and cons, neither choice - whether to join IRC or Discord - is a bad choice, and if both services are available to the user and sanctioned by the UESP, why not have both publicly available? -damon  ^{talk ♥ contribs} 03:01, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

You don't have to set up an account to use Discord. It certainly encourages it, but if you don't fill in an email address or password, or just choose to "Skip Setup", you can get to the server without any credentials aside from a username. --Enodoc (talk) 10:31, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

That's a game changer Enodoc. I was 50/50 before, but If users can ask questions just as easily in Discord, then it makes sense to direct people to it. Have two different chat places only divides the userbase. Discord works very well on smartphones, and given such a huge volume of traffic is from the web, it should be the go to place. Personally, I usually had problems connecting to web IRC, which put me off. The whole thing seemed archaic.--Jimeee (talk) 12:22, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

The only downside is that it's not immediately intuitive that "Skip Setup" results in a guest account, and it does require an extra click or two. I've brought this up in feedback to Discord, so if anyone would like to go over there and upvote and comment that feedback, that would be great! --Enodoc (talk) 12:33, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I must say that being immediately pulled out of the wiki and dumped into another website is a bit jarring for a wiki tab. In the sidebar it's not an issue, but in the tabs such an action is a bit of a shock, as tabs are usually internal to the wiki. For the tab, I would again suggest use of a special page and embedded widget (kinda like Special:WebChat), just so that your initial destination is internal and you're more aware an external link is about to be followed. The widget theoretically shows activity too, so if people are looking for somewhere to chat and see the activity feed, that wouldn't be a bad thing (assuming activity stays up). --Enodoc (talk) 16:47, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

(←) Now that you mention it, it is a counter-intuitive behaviour, isn't it? Do we even want an IRC/Discord tab, then? Would it be better just to have one or both on the sidebar and avoid both the unexpected behaviour and the duplication of links? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 17:17, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

Only popping in to ask if the discord tab should be displaying on all pages, including special pages. No other tab, even the IRC tab did this to my knowledge. I'm not against it appearing there, except that when reading that even to ask one question requires an account, its hardly user-friendly and doesn't deserve that extra 'promotion'. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:18, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

As stated before, Silencer, you do not need an account. There is a guest function. And yes, I noticed that the tab was displaying on special pages yesterday and told RH in Discord. —likelolwhat ^{talk lulzy to me} 19:52, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

As a simple JavaScript, it will always display on any page, with the exception of your Preferences page and maybe one or two others that actively disable all Javascript. The IRC chat tab, being an actual extension, is able to use internal functions that pay more attention to context. If both are kept as tabs, I'll see what I can do to make them both behave the same...I suspect that would mean doing them both as Javascript and having them both show everywhere, unless of course we decide to do away with them both, as mentioned above. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 20:23, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm happy to have the tab(s) there, to keep it/them prominent, but would rather the Discord one went to an internal page like the IRC one does. --Enodoc (talk) 22:13, 2 February 2017 (UTC)

I agree that a tab redirecting to an external website can be a bit jarring. Maybe we could have the Discord tab link to UESPWiki:Discord? That way new users can read the rules before clicking the link on the page to join. And, I was also unaware that there was a guest option. With that information in mind, I do recommend the depreciation of IRC in favour of making Discord our primary chat medium. While there are a few users who remain in IRC, I agree that dividing the community is counter-intuitive and detrimental, and the bulk of us have made the transition to Discord.

My formal proposal, then, is to remove the chat tab entirely, rename the Discord tab to "chat", set it to link to UESPWiki:Discord, and allow users to join from there. Nicholas Lee Dust 05:09, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

I'm with Nicholas on that one. The few anons who are still active on IRC are likely directed there by the chat tab. If we remove it, I doubt there will be demand for it any more. If the non-requirement of an account is not that obvious for everyone, maybe we could slap a note like "Using Discord does not require you to have an account, simply skip the setup to join." on the Discord page? -- SarthesArai ^Talk 15:19, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

(←) Reading over the discussion, it seems fairly clear that Discord is the way people want to go. While there's a little support for keeping IRC, I don't feel it's strong enough to warrant keeping the tab, or even moving it to the sidebar, so I'm going to call it in favour of Discord only, at least in terms of prominent display. I don't think there's any harm in leaving existing IRC links/pages in place, though we should probably add Discord links to any pages that currently only mention IRC (e.g., Questions).

Since we link to our IRC client in a few places besides the tab, I'll keep the extension installed, but I'll prevent it from showing a chat tab. I'll also change the Discord tab to link to Discord rather than the Discord server itself. I won't change how/where it shows (per Silencer's point), since there's really no reason to hide it on pages like Recent Changes. The idea of a widget is still a possibility, but I didn't see anyone clamouring for it, so for now, people can just use their browser or one of the apps and we'll see if there's demand for it in the future. Did I miss anything? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:08, 3 February 2017 (UTC)

"Guildhall" or "Guild Hall"

While taking a look through the Online namespace, I have noticed an inconsistency. Some pages use "Guildhall" while others use "Guild Hall". It is a minor difference, to be sure, but still one that seemed to be worth exploring. My question is this: Does the game switch between using the space and not? Is there a reason we have used both spellings? If not, which version is preferred? I am not familiar enough with ESO to have a proper understanding of this, but I am hoping for some clarification so I can make changes as needed. Thanks. Nicholas Lee Dust 10:43, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Guild Hall is the name of a guildhall located in Nimalten. Tib (talk) 11:08, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Yeah it's literally different spellings used in-game. Same goes for Mages Guild Hall in Wayrest and Mages Guild in most other places. --Enodoc (talk) 12:04, 5 February 2017 (UTC)

Editor Spotlight?

Hey everyone. I had an idea to drive social media engagement and help bring more attention to editing the wiki. I was thinking of doing an Editor Spotlight, where we publically thank one of our hard working editors for all the effort they put in. I wanted to see if anyone else thlight this was a good idea. If so, I have a few logistics to work out. How would we choose the editor to be featured? I was thinking nominations. And how often would we feature someone? I was thinking weekly. What are your thoughts? Nicholas Lee Dust 23:11, 7 February 2017 (UTC)

I think it's unfeasible over any amount of time. First what qualifies, probably hard-work translating as edits. So how many edits, say 50 in a week, that's 7 people. How about 100 in a month, that's 17. Plus it's going to be the same people over and over again that qualify, there isn't the influx of new editors achieving high edit counts to make this a sustainable rolling thing. Also it is contrary to why people are here to edit; we work for the benefit of the wiki, not for our personal gratification or acclaim. There are plenty of worthy candidates for meritorious mention though, such as PLRDLF, WoahBro, Hargrimm, Minor Edits, Dwarfmp, Xyzzy, Holomay, Velyanthe, Somercy, Kitkat1749, and Brf. However, the one thing each of these people have is that they have made less than 100 but at least 1 edit in the last 6 months. I think the only workable reward scheme is the one we have (cookies and stars), which while not perfect still shows that you have been noticed and have impressed your peers, a far greater accomplishment than some random people giving false platitudes on a forum of self-induced hysteria (ie social media). Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 00:10, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) I'm unsure of how interested people would be, but I am not opposed to the idea. To make it possible, we'd need a few people interested in being interviewed. Additionally, these would probably be more interesting to the existing wiki community, then as a social media feature. On that note, I'll do one of these to add to the list. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 00:13, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Honestly, these sorts of awards are never a good idea, although results can vary depending on the maturity of the community. At my old wiki we had the "Member of the Month" award that was ultimately a waste of time for several reasons (including not enough active editors, bias, wiki-drama) and it was discontinued. Not implying that would also happen here (this community is more mature for starters), but I believe there is always that risk that other busy editors will feel slighted for various reasons. Most of people who are doing the great work on the wiki don't need a pat on the head. I'd agree with Silencer, the "cookie award" thing that is used now is perfectly fine without all the additional bells and whistles. --Jimeee (talk) 04:10, 8 February 2017 (UTC)

Well, how about introducing important members of the uesp (wiki, forums, guilds) to the social media? -- SarthesArai ^Talk 16:41, 11 February 2017 (UTC)

Colouring Links

After recent changes to our {{ESO Quality Color}} and {{FC}} templates, Enodoc pointed out to me that some of the colouring was now broken. Looking into it, I quickly discovered why. A lot of editors have been using template code like this: {{FC|green|[[Online:Online|text]]}}. Previously, this would do what you expected it to and display a green link; now, however, it just looks like a normal link: text. The problem with this method is that it relies on the wiki correcting what you probably didn't even realize was a mistake. Thankfully, we have an HTML code cleaner here that used to fix the problem, but only for the specific method those templates were using before I changed them. While the obvious solution might be just to revert to the old method, that's not desirable for a couple of reasons: first, we're not actually correcting the error, we're just bypassing it; but more importantly, the HTML <font> tag that the template used to use has been removed from the language as of HTML5, and will presumably stop working entirely at some point in the future.

So, for reference, the correct way to colour a link with the FC template is: [[Online:Online|{{FC|green|text}}]]. This will display the green link you were expecting: text.

Unfortunately, a number of our templates have fallen prey to this issue over the years. I'm in the process of tracking them down and cleaning them up, but if you notice one before I get there, please feel free to fix it. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:42, 27 February 2017 (UTC)

UESP-related survey

Hi Everyone!

I’m a long-time TES fan (but mainly a lurker here), and currently a PhD student at Bond University in Australia. I’m really amazed by how much TES fans do around the series, in terms of modding, compiling data in wikis, producing fan films and more. More broadly, my research is actually about what cultural heritage organisations can learn from commercial RPGs in order to produce great culture-oriented RPGs themselves. A part of that argument is looking at Skyrim and showing just how much world-building detail is involved in its world, but then I’m also arguing that it’s crucial to collaborate with fans – to give them the necessary means to produce mods and other works around a given game, in order to push it even further.

To show this, I want to document who the TES fans are, and how they work. I’m limiting myself to two particular groups – the lore-oriented folks at the UESP and the modders who publish mods on Nexus Mods (yes, yes, I know some people do both :) ). Myself being a modder (not TES, though – Wing Commander) and game developer in past lives, I have a pretty good idea about how much work is involved in fan projects of any kind, and how much effort fans put into learning all the skills needed for these projects. Not to mention the time devoted to better understanding the lore of the TES universe!

My anonymous survey asks you to help document this by answering a bunch of questions about your experience as a TES fan, particularly in regards to Skyrim. If you have fifteen minutes to spare, please, pretty please answer my survey, and let others know about it, too! The more responses I get, the more interesting the results will be. And to thank everyone for their efforts, I will later on write a report from the survey for the UESP, so that as the TES community, we all know a little bit more about what makes us tick.

tl;dr – got 15-30 minutes to spare? Please answer an anonymous survey about what you as a TES fan do with the games, particularly in regards to modding (at Nexus) and lore-related activities (at the UESP).

If you agree to take part in this survey, please click the link here. The survey page is mobile-friendly, so you can also do it on your phone. Needless to say, should you change your mind, you can close the survey any time you like. Oh, and feel free to contact me at jmajewsk (at) bond.edu.au (or just respond here) with any other questions or comments about the survey!

Thanks in advance to everyone who decides to give it a go!

Jakub Majewski

(note to admins: yes, this is kinda advertising, but I did check with Daveh first before posting this)

— Unsigned comment by Quarto (talk • contribs) at 05:53 on 6 March 2017

Sent! Be sure to let us know how your research goes. —Legoless (talk) 20:28, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! So far I've had 43 responses, which is really good for just a couple of days. I'll definitely need a lot more, though, so I'd also appreciate help in spreading the word to other UESP users. And yes, I definitely want to provide an update later on about the results. I'm also planning, as time permits, to make a page here that lists all the academic research I've collected on the TES games. The series has definitely gotten a fair share of attention over the years. Quarto (talk) 07:58, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Always happy to help a compatriot in research :P --Vordur Steel-Hammer (TINV1K) 17:49, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

Thanks! For a moment, I was like... hey, how did you know I'm Polish... and then I looked at my name in the post above ;). Quarto (talk) 05:39, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

Update on how the survey is going: I currently have just over 70 responses. This is pretty good, but definitely could be better (optimistically, I'm hoping to get up to at least 200). The response rate has definitely slowed down in the last few days. If you're thinking about doing the survey, and simply haven't gotten around to it, it would be awesome if you could! If you haven't thought about doing the survey, please consider it! And finally, if you've already done the survey, please consider spreading the word about it - tell your friends, put a message up on Twitter or Facebook, and so on. I'm very much desperate to reach more Skyrim fans :). Quarto (talk) 06:08, 15 March 2017 (UTC)

Another update on the survey: I was actually planning to have the survey concluded by the start of May, but I'm going to keep it going for a few more days - until about the end of the week, I think. I've now got just under 300 responses, so even after I take into account various invalid responses (the survey software saves incomplete responses as well), I almost certainly have more than 200 good and solid responses by now. But I'd still really like a few more, so if you haven't done the survey before, and you think you might have 15 minutes to spare, please consider taking part! Quarto (talk) 09:02, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Bot the Second

I wasn't planning on bringing this up quite this early, but it came up on Discord today, and the conversation gained some momentum, so I thought I'd take advantage of that while it was there. As some of you may know, I've been unhappy with the framework behind HotnBOThered, which was developed by someone else, so a couple of years ago, I decided to write my own. That portion of the bot, which was by far the largest and most difficult to write, is now done. While there are nominally two more parts to go, those will go much faster and can be developed in more of an as-needed way, so I expect the new bot will begin to see its first use by the end of the year, if not sooner. By virtue of the new design, anything currently written for HotnBOThered will need to be rewritten, effectively making this a whole new bot. As such, it requires permission from the community (which I will seek once we've gotten closer to the point where I'm going to use it and have created a page for it that outlines the safeguards it has and so forth) and it should probably use a new account as well.

This brings me to the current problem: what do I call it? I swear, it's like picking out baby names! I'm at a loss, so I'm opening it up to the community. Most popular name wins, though I reserve the right to discard silly names...I will not call it Botty McBotFace just because that gets the most votes! :Þ Although we are free to make our own rules, Wikipedia has the following to say in regards to bot naming, and I think it makes sense: "The account's name should identify the operator or bot function. Additionally, it should be immediately clear that its edits are made by an automated account; this is usually accomplished by including the word "Bot" at the beginning or end of the username." So, those fun names people were suggesting on Discord, such as Jeanceybot and AKBot, are out as well. Keeping that in mind, I have a couple of thoughts, but feel free to add others:

• HotnBOThered: As discussed above, this probably isn't a good choice, but there's nothing absolutely forbidding it, so I'm including it as an option.
• HotnBOThered2 or just HnB2: Makes it clear that this is just the next iteration of HnB.
• Robby the Robot: This is similar to my real name and to a lesser extent, my user name, and it's reasonably obvious it's a bot. In most conversation, this could probably be shortened to just "Robby". On the downside, it's also similar to RoBoT, whose owner's name is also Robert, so there could be confusion there, and if we ever get an active user going by some variant of Rob or Robby, that could also be confusing.
• HoodBot/RHBot: Short and sweet, close enough to my user name to be obvious to most that it's mine, though new users probably wouldn't go from "Hood" or "RH" to "RobinHood70" without clicking through to the bot's page to figure out who the owner is.
• UESBot or UESPbot: These were suggested in the Discord chat. They're very generic and easy to remember, but don't tell anyone who the operator is by their name alone. Like HotnBOThered, they're also difficult to type due to the mixed casing. They have the further disadvantage of implying that the bot has some official status as the site's primary or only bot. That may be the de facto case right now, but the absolute last thing I want to do is discourage others from creating bots—I'd much rather have multiple bots active on the site, whether they overlap in duties or fill entirely separate niches. Still, I wouldn't veto the name if that's what people want.
• RoBOTHood: Satisfies the similar user name very nicely, though it's still got the mixed-case issue.
• Little John: Suggested by someone not on the wiki, it's easy to type and is a very creative suggestion that fits well with my user name. It fails the bot naming criteria, but then again, I think NepheleBot is the only bot so far that unambiguously followed the naming requirements. I suppose we could call it Little John Bot, but that sounds awkward.

Anything else people want me to consider? – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 03:11, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

My vote is for HoodBot. —Dillonn241 (talk) 03:17, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Other popular suggestions that are approved by me are Crouching Tigerboy, Hidden Bot, T.S. Elibot and Steve. Jeancey (talk) 03:22, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

I support Crouching Tigerboy, Hidden Bot wholeheartedly. KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 04:50, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Reading through the suggestions on Discord was cracking me up. I particularly like Bott Howard and Michael Kirkbot. RHBot or HnB2 would be the most logical, we could call it HotBotTed because reasons, but my vote at the moment goes to Tigerbot. --Enodoc (talk) 10:27, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

UESPbot1 works, easy for other users to enumerate upon in future. It's also horrendously boring. I like HoodBot or Tigerbot. —Legoless (talk) 16:34, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

You've already proved more than capable of handling a bot account so you have my vote to upgrade it to RoBOTHood. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:59, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Ooh, I like RoBOTHood. That one gets my vote. ~ Alarra ^(talk) 19:10, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

(←) I like HoodBot. It has a nice ring to it. Forfeit (talk) 22:43, 10 March 2017 (UTC)

Majority vote was for HoodBot, so HoodBot it is! I'll make a user page for it shortly. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 05:51, 14 March 2017 (UTC)

General: Uutak Mythos

So I was asked to create a general page for the Uutak Mythos, a community project I have been writing for the past 3-4 years. Since I don't have a stable internet connection I'll be writing the page in Microsoft Word with markdown format and will upload it to Google Drive via my phone, so someone can just copy-paste it to the wiki. The things I was thinking of including on the page:

• An overview of the entire project from its conception to today.

• An in-depth summary of Yneslea in UM.

• An in-depth summary of the Echmer in UM.

• An in-depth summary of Hrahndeyl, the Echmer god-hero central to the UM.

• Echmer and Yneslea concept art.

• A list of UM easter eggs in ESO.

• External links to required reading.

• Trivia.

Sounds good? Any comments or questions? IceFireWarden (talk) 23:13, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. —Legoless (talk) 23:25, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

Sounds good to me too! --Enodoc (talk) 23:28, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

>A list of UM easter eggs in ESO. - There are none. Phoenix Neko (talk) 22:09, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

There actually are some. I wouldn't quite call them easter eggs, but there are a few shoutouts. And that's just not me saying anything just to say it either. IceFireWarden (talk) 23:26, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

That's simply wishful thinking. It's too baseless for being included in the article. Phoenix Neko (talk) 00:28, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

(←) Here's IFW's article: General:Uutak Mythos. I haven't done anything to the content aside from a bit of formatting, so there may be a few other tweaks needed. --Enodoc (talk) 13:32, 1 April 2017 (UTC)

After a quick read-through, I think some parts of it could probably use more of a neutral tone, similar to the way the General:C0DA page is written; some of it reads a bit as self-promotion at this point (mainly the introduction and Concept and Development sections are where I got that feel from it). I also disagree with the inclusion of the "Easter Eggs": most of them are actually just parts that IceFireWarden himself wrote or in one case the answer repeating it as if the character isn't sure what it means (as an example, the Loremaster's Archive questions we had previously decided in an earlier CP discussion to not be considered official content since that part came entirely from the fan and not Zenimax). The contraband items one isn't firm enough to be called an Easter Egg either; it could very well be referring to normal giant bats or werebats. Most of the page, though - particularly the Themes and Idea section - looks good. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 02:57, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

Online Map Stubs

I noticed a discrepancy with ESO's treasure maps being marked as stubs. Some editors have removed the tag, probably assuming that no more information can be added to these pages. I argue, however, that all of them should remain stubs until a proper description and instructions to the treasure are included. Once this task is complete, they will be very similar to Skyrim's treasure maps.

If this is the consensus, then these pages should be marked as stubs if not already until the description and instructions are added. —Dillonn241 (talk) 04:30, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

I should probably point out what I consider a stub.. A de-stubbed page is not (necessarily) a complete page. It is a page where substantial information is in place, but it can be improved and changed. It is a very good, rational and healthy approach to stubs.

According to the edits by me and Jeancey, we remove the stub once the location info is in place. We could argue how detailed an instruction should be to be considered acceptable, in which case my argument would be that with such simple maps like ESO's, there's little point with overly detailed instructions. Otherwise, most of our quest instructions, or any instructions, could not be considered "proper" either :p Secondly, descriptions. Adding a description which does not even exist in-game, is by no means substantial and cannot be a part of a stub criteria. Are there even any ESO treasure map pages where descriptions are being used? If not, what would be the reason for using them? Not everything has to be like Skyrim namespace :)

While I do not have anything against descriptions as such, I myself will not be the one who creates 100 creative descriptions for something so marginal as an ESO treasure map. Lastly, I strongly feel, and have said it before (and others agree!), that it is unacceptable to have so many of ESO stubs 3 years into the game release, most of them which will likely never be worked on, nor complete, especially with our focus often directed to new content and updates. I'd much rather redefine the "complete", where possible, for example on simpler pages. And treasure map pages are definitely that... we can remove stubs with no dire consequences :-) In fact, I had a little plan of removing all those treasure map stubs once I've collected all locations, but have got distracted by other things. Tib (talk) 21:01, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree with Tib's sentiment. Those pages seem to have all the necessary info and shouldn't be marked as stubs. If someone wants to expand on them in future, that's perfectly fine, but there really isn't too much else to say about these maps. Ostensibly the only reason they even have separate pages is for image display purposes, and because that's how we did it for all books in Skyrim. —Legoless (talk) 21:22, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

In my first post, it sounds like I really want to add descriptions/instructions, but really I was just suggesting to wait for a mostly complete article before removing the stub tag. After looking over some more map pages and the previous replies (also from Jeancey on Discord), the general agreement is that neither descriptions nor instructions are necessary. The argument for having descriptions on Skyrim's maps is that they are technically books. However, there is no reasoning to keep the explicit instructions on Skyrim:Treasure Map IV, Skyrim:Treasure Map X, and Skyrim:Fort Neugrad Treasure Map. They are redundant with the map picture and a link to the exact location on UESP's Skyrim Map.

Rather than adding descriptions and/or instructions to all Online maps, I think it is best to continue as is and remove the remaining stubs. Also, those three Skyrim maps should have the Explicit Instructions section removed because it is pointless and only appears on 3/12 map articles. —Dillonn241 (talk) 22:17, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Infernal City/Lord of Souls collective nickname

The Infernal City and Lord of Souls are the two novels by Greg Keyes, and it's one story split into two parts, so all the pages (characters, creatures, items, places, etc) are shared aside from the individual books and their plot summaries. There isn't an official name to refer to this pair as a series, though: the only thing the book itself says is "An Elder Scrolls Novel". I'd like to come up with a name to refer to these two as a pair, for two reasons:

• 1) I would like to move Books:Characters and so forth to a more specific name (e.g. "Books:InfernalCityNovels/Characters") so it does not collide with the many other physical books (for instance The Improved Emperor's Guide and Kyne's Challenge, both of which have their own character pages.)
• 2) When listing creatures and plants on the Lore:Bestiary and Lore:Flora pages, since the books are just two parts of one story and all the creatures/plants are listed on a shared page, it would make more sense to just say that it appeared in this series and link to the shared page, rather than having to list whether it was specifically in the first book or second or both.

So, what should the collective name for these two (in the page name and on the lore:bestiary and fauna pages) be? Some options suggested were "Keyes Novels", "Greg Keyes Novels",and "Infernal City Novels". I think my vote would be for "Infernal City Novels", myself, as it leaves room in case Keyes writes any novels in the future and it references the plot a bit more. ~ Alarra ^(talk) 04:37, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

My vote is in favor of "Keyes Novels" for simplicity and because "Infernal City Novels" leaves out any mention of the second book. In the event that the author decides to write another novel or series, we can divide the various pages like characters into sections for each one. For example, the page Books:Keyes Novels/Characters would have a heading The Infernal City and Lord of Souls followed by [New novel or series title]. In the meantime, no headings are necessary. Considering how long it's been since the release of Skyrim, I doubt he is coming out with another series soon. —Dillonn241 (talk) 04:51, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

My first thought on seeing this post was why have one name for the two books, but the shared characters and lore make it case of extreme redundancy to keep them separate, as you point out. Also as time passes the need to move these pages from using the basic 'Characters' page increases as the likelihood of more more novels grows. Keyes Novels certainly seems a fair compromise, but, to be very blunt, until he dies there is always a chance he could write another, unrelated, novel. TIC and LOS have often been lumped together under the TIC name, and an alternate why to go, much like DLC for the games, is to have pages under the TIC name, and then redirect the same page under the LOS name to the TIC page. For example The Infernal City/Characters and a redirect at Lord of Souls/Characters. Any LOS-only characters could be tagged with a LOS subscript like the game DLC. This would allow us to keep the few pages that are not easily merged, such as /Plot. Putting them both together makes far too long a page name, and we already have and need the TIC and LoS main pages. Also as a reminder (for future reference), please keep any references to the chapters, as not all versions have the same amount of pages or the same page numbering; it's much easier to be able to go to a chapter and look chronologically than find a certain phrase that could be anywhere within 10 pages. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 10:51, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) How about "Umbriel Novels"? It keeps the same connotations as "Infernal City Novels" without omitting reference to the second book, and leaves the way open for any future Keyes novels that may or may not appear.

Unless you decide to go down the subpages route, in which case I would agree with Silencer that they should be subpages to The Infernal City. --Enodoc (talk) 10:56, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Just so we are clear... in terms of lore and references, I wouldn't agree to using a collective name for a source that appears in only ONE of the books. For example, Orsinium was sacked in the early Fourth Era according to Lord of Souls. I wouldn't want that reference to change to a collective one, because there is obvious value in keeping it specific. For a more general things, like places, flora and fauna that appears in both books - I would go with "Umbriel Novels" or "The Umbriel Saga/Chronicles" --Jimeee (talk) 11:31, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

The references would still refer to one of the two books, and the relevant chapter in that book. The current ref on Orsinium is just the book, and if someone questioned it I currently would have 348 pages to guess from. That should be narrowed down to the chapter as there are 11 (including prologue and epilogue). The reason I say "I" is that somebody else may have more or less pages to search from. There was another reference where something was questioned and the page number was different in my version of the book. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 11:48, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

Sure, I agree with including chapters. I'm a big proponent of lore refs being as specific as possible and reducing the number of "Events of <game/book>" type refs. --Jimeee (talk) 12:12, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

(←) My vote is definitely for "Greg Keyes Novels" or "Keyes Novels". Making up unofficial nicknames doesn't seem necessary to me, nor particularly encyclopaedic. —Legoless (talk) 21:18, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

All the three suggestions by Alarra sound rather fine to me. Well, if I had to rank them, then... Greg Keyes Novels, Keyes Novels, or Infernal City Novels. Hope it helps with consensus! Tib (talk) 21:43, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

The reason I went for the book names was that all book pages should really be subpages of the relevant book, and each subpage should then go into a category for that book (eg Category:Books-<Book Name>) to avoid over population of the Books category. This also avoids the need to type out the full name of the page in some cases, such as "Gathering Force: Arms and Armor of Tamriel Characters and Summary" which should be "Gathering Force: Arms and Armor of Tamriel/Characters and Summary" and can be typed as simple "/Characters and Summary" on the main page. Any name other than one of the two books would require a page under that name (an unofficial name btw) which would have to have some sort of meaningless drivel to excuse its existence while pointing to the two novel pages. The only way to avoid that is to not make them subpages but instead use that overly long naming structure. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 00:13, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

I must say I do prefer the subpage idea for organisational purposes, like we use for TR3. --Enodoc (talk) 09:11, 5 April 2017 (UTC)

(←) So looks like so far "Greg Keyes Novels" is the winning vote, although I'm kind of liking the idea of having "Lord of Souls" redirect to The Infernal City too, especially in the case of the actual page names. I just wonder if on, for instance, the Bestiary pages, if just having "The Infernal City" to refer to both would be confusing. Perhaps "Greg Keys Novels" for where it's listed there, linking to "The Infernal City/Characters"? I'm hoping to finish my documenting of the books in the next day or two, so I'll be ready to create the pages at point. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 01:20, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

It seems these pages have been moved to "The Infernal City/". Was the consensus here not "Greg Keyes Novels/"? It makes little sense to name merged pages after only one of the books. —Legoless (talk) 18:38, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

It did seem to be that way, including Alarra, but seeing as she is the only one doing the main editing part (and until now probably the only one who was moving pages), as well as this being her question, I guessed she changed her mind. I just wanted to clarify that I was only following what had already been done and was not acting against consensus deliberately. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:09, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I like where these have ended up. It makes more sense for them to be subpages of a page that exists, rather than being subpages of a non-existent page with a made-up name, like Greg Keyes Novels. I think it's fine as-is. --Enodoc (talk) 21:03, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

It would be perfectly easy to create a page at Books:Greg Keyes Novels if desired. It isn't a "made-up name" but a descriptive article title per WP:NDESC. What isn't appropriate is listing Lord of Souls characters on a page clearly titled "The Infernal City". It's a fiction to give that name any sort of precedence over the first; further, it gives zero indication to the reader that the article deals with two separate books (unlike, say, the original "Infernal City Novels" suggestion). Redirects are not sufficient clarification. I'm not particularly invested in "Greg Keyes Novels" specifically, but none of the other suggestions have received wide support, and it should be clear that we need some sort of collective term - per the very subject of this discussion! "The Infernal City" is not collective. —Legoless (talk) 21:34, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

At the time I made the page I thought that doing The Infernal City, with Lord of Souls redirecting to it, had about equal support and made the most sense. I'm pretty much fine with whatever, though I still prefer using some form of "The Infernal City" or "The Infernal City novels" (which is still my #1 vote) over "Greg Keyes novels". (I'm also ready to add the missing information to the Bestiary/Flora pages now, so I'll wait until we come to a consensus for that.) ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 05:18, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

"Infernal City Novels" seems like a fair compromise, but the reason I take issue with it is because the only commonality between the two books is the series title "An Elder Scrolls Novel", and I think we're all in agreement that it's suboptimal. Lord of Souls isn't an Infernal City novel, it's the sequel to The Infernal City. For illustration: we don't call the Harry Potter series "Philosopher's Stone Novels", but (on a Harry Potter wiki) it wouldn't be incorrect to call them "JK Rowling Novels". We don't have the luxury of a (functional) series name here, so I think a descriptive title is our best option. —Legoless (talk) 13:04, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Daggerfall Easter egg page and Arena Easter egg page.

The two first games from the main game series does not have any Easter egg pages yet. Still there are some few cultural references and possible Easter eggs in the games, but there have been nowhere to gather them. As there now is a renewed activity on these game spaces there might the time to list them on a page.

Like Skakmat is a contraction "Skak Mat", being Danish for "Checkmate". It is likely intentional, as the dragon facilitates the death of a king on a battlefield like a chess piece being part of a checkmate on the chess board. I am quite sure I have observed other similar references over time, but have forgotten about them as I had nowhere to note it. (Some might also be noted under different Notes sections or on talk pages. I do not remember.) —MortenOSlash (talk) 07:01, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

We've several times pointed out that proposed easter eggs were arround in these games, yet never noted them anywhere, as we lacked these pages. I'm for creating these pages as well. Should there not be enough content to fill a page for each game, maybe a merged page for both? -- SarthesArai ^Talk 15:58, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I agree, make it so. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 17:39, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I have now started the celebration of Easter by making a Daggerfall Easter Eggs page with Skakmat as the first entry. I also made an Arena Easter Eggs page but could not remember any Easter Eggs or appropriate cultural references to add there, so please add in. —MortenOSlash (talk) 08:02, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Adding Actual Author to Book Template

It would be helpful to include a mention of who the actual author was for our books, when and where that info is available. I propose a section is added to our template for that purpose. Jeancey brought up concern that we couldn't trust authors or couldn't know for sure, but when we have any official source claiming authorship, I think that's pretty good. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 17:38, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

I also have a concern about bringing in real world aspects to a prominent position on Lore and Gamespace pages. The lore pages are supposed to be in-world (with some exceptions for notes and such). Listing the Development Author at the top of the page next to the in-game author totally breaks this, for what I can gather is just a "fun fact" with no real usefulness in the lore section. My proposal would be to add a list of books written by a particular author to their General page. If they have written enough books that we know which ones they did, then they are important enough to have a General page about them. We've talked about expanding the General namespace, and I think this would make a great addition. Jeancey (talk) 17:49, 11 April 2017 (UTC)

100% agree with Jeancey. Same reasons. As far as I'm aware, we have no idea who the dev authors of the vast, vast majority of books are. I know MK recalled the books he wrote for Morrowind and Oblivion (from memory) on reddit, so that list was added to General:Michael Kirkbride. I think that treatment works great, but I can't see it happening for other devs. Maybe Schick (if there is some official list of what he wrote). --Jimeee (talk) 14:25, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I know of at least three authors who have come forward with their lists. Ted Peterson, MK, and also the beta tester who wrote King Edward. I vaguely remember seeing a dev claim a few of the OB books as well. Between just those three, I think you end up having the vast majority of the authors from at least Daggerfall and Morrowind having definite authors. --AKB ^{Talk Cont Mail} 14:39, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

I would say that real-world authors of books don't belong in lorespace unless it's at the bottom in a Notes section or solely for categorization. Lorespace is written from the perspective of an inhabitant of the world, and such meta content is not appropriate, particularly in a prominent position. --Enodoc (talk) 16:46, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

Well that's just great... my memory is going because I had no idea that Ted Peterson had a list on his page, even though it was me who added it. In any case, I still think the list system in place now is fine. @Enodoc I agree with your points, however the books pages don't have a notes section at the bottom like lore pages do, so I don't think adding them there would work. --Jimeee (talk) 17:03, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

That's just because books all have that weird formatting style that I can't find the source of. If I knew what was causing the formatting, we could work out how to 'end' the formatting and add stuff after the end of the text, including notes sections. --Enodoc (talk) 17:22, 12 April 2017 (UTC)

(←) @Enodoc: The book formatting comes from bad HTML practice in the Book Summary template. We open a <div class="book"> (or class="poem") and never close it again, letting MediaWiki (or maybe it's the code cleaner?) do it for us. To end the formatting, all you have to do is close the div. {{Non Book}} lets you do that in a lot of cases, though it's kind of useless if you're doing something like tables and what-not. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 02:47, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@Enodoc The question then is if we really want to add stuff after the end of the text, like notes sections. Personally, I prefer book pages to be abstracted, encapsuled entities - and as "non-article-like" as possible. Certain instances of footnotes, like on PGE1, are the exception. --Jimeee (talk) 10:36, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@RH Thanks for the explanation! Should we be doing something about that unclosed div, or is the software fix robust enough to always work?

@Jimeee That's fair enough. But if we don't put the writer at the end for that reason, and we don't want them in the header since that's too prominent a position for an out-of-universe name, where do we put it? --Enodoc (talk) 11:32, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

Enodoc, how about as a sort parameter for Lore:Library? You see how at the end of the alphabet they have a "by subject" and "by author" sort, so why couldn't we do a hypothetical "Library by Developer" page where all known works are sorted by the name of the developer who penned them? the raconteur ✉ 20:51, 13 April 2017 (UTC)

@Enodoc: I've never liked having an unclosed div, but about the only thing I can think of that we could to would be to add a {{Book End}} or some such thing that just closes the div, and then add that to every single book page. Seeing as the software has handled it correctly all these years, as much as it bugs me to have it as is, I don't really see a strong need to change it. Although, if we do decide to add notes, and create such a template in order to allow that to happen, people can always add the new template to book pages as they edit them, much like people change underscores to spaces or Image: to File:. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:14, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

(←) Would it not be easier to just note any authors using {{Non Book}} (example)? That's where we usually put "out-of-universe" notes on book pages, and there can't be that many books with confirmed authorship. —Legoless (talk) 00:25, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

I am also currently of the opinion that the real-life authors should not be on the book pages, however, I recognise that this trivia is quite interesting to know and would probably find it interesting myself when reading a page. I can't think of a solution, but I'd support the categories suggestion, as they at least are cheap and effective. Percentage-wise there would only be a small amount of confirmed authors, with Kirkbride having 25 listed on his page, but then each of those books has at least 2 pages (lore and namespace) and some of them are partworks (The Song of Pelinal, Varieties of Faith in ESO). The Monomyth is another example of the real author currently being displayed, but appears more relevant because of its circumstance of having no listed author ingame where one was given oog. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 00:54, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

UespVector Skin

Enodoc and I collaborated on a redesign of the Vector skin, which I've called UespVector, and I've just enabled it on the wiki. It's the same concept and style as the regular Vector skin, except that it's got all of the UESP customizations included, so it follows a beige theme instead of trying to mix the blue/silver/white theme from MediaWiki with ours, and displays the sidebar correctly. If anyone wants to try it, it should be good to go, though there may be places where additional customization is needed that weren't obvious at a glance. Please let me know if you find anything that still needs fixed. (I'm aware that the collapsible sections gadget is a bit odd-looking, since it was very much designed with Monobook in mind, but then again, sections are collapsible by default in Vector, just not quite the same way as the gadget. If anyone wants a Vector-specific redesign of the gadget, let me know.)

If things look very odd after the switch, try a hard refresh. On most browsers, that's Ctrl-F5 or Ctrl-Shift-R. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:07, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Minor Wiki Change

If anyone finds a big, red error message saying "Error: String exceeds 30,000 character limit." on any page, please let me know. If it says 20,000, purge the page and see if it changes to 30,000 or if the message goes away. Thanks!

Technical details: We had a really old extension, String Functions, still running on our wiki that has long since been merged into another one, Parser Functions, which we were also running. I've disabled the older one, but the new one has had code changes since then, and tries to stop us from doing the exact kind of insanity we're doing with things like {{LinkList}} and {{SurnameList}}. The default limit is 1000 characters, where some of our pages have lists that are over 20,000 characters. I've set it to 30,000 for now, which should hopefully cover everything. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 09:12, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

An anon reported a message of 1000 on Lore Altmer Names, about an hour and a half after this message, then immediately reported it fixed. Just an FYI, no need to reply. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 13:17, 30 April 2017 (UTC)

ESO Spell and Weapon Damage Link Templates

So a while back, Lurlock created and implemented the {{ESO Spell Damage Link}} and {{ESO Weapon Damage Link}} templates. I have a couple of concerns about them. The first is their legibility. On my screen, my eyes have some difficulty reading the bright colors against the website's pale background. My second is the source of the colors. They are hard to place at first; it is near-impossible to associate them with the statistics they are meant to represent. One would expect each one to be colored according to its corresponding resource (magicka, stamina), but instead they are colored, insofar as I can tell, based on nothing at all. I could not, for the life of me, find anywhere where that orange color represents weapon damage. (This concern is less pronounced in the case of Spell Damage). This coloring also makes less sense on set pages, because one would expect to see the color green on a stamina set, blue on a magicka set, and not the odd combination you would find on a bi-stat set.

My second concern is pages like Spelunker, which says "Weapon and Spell Damage". The template can only be used to color the latter part of the sentence.—KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 10:21, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

The colours come from the colour of the Spell Power and Weapon Power potions, I think. --Enodoc (talk) 13:14, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe Spell Damage does, but not not Weapon Damage. —KINMUNE ﴾TALK﴿ 22:56, 2 May 2017 (UTC)

ESO Morrowind Community Content Creation

I've received permission from ZOS to publish content relating to the following areas:

• Firemoth tutorial
• Vivec City and the first two quests (Divine Conundrum, In the Service of Vivec)
• Sadrith Mora and the first two quests (A Hireling of House Telvanni, Rising to Retainer)
• Balmora and the first two quests (Fleeing the Past, Of Faith and Family)
• Anything relating to the Warden class

I'll therefore be adding content to the wiki which is otherwise under NDA. Do we want to restrict editing on those pages to prevent possible leaks? Or maybe a banner tag? —Legoless (talk) 20:29, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

I'd suggest protecting them, and if there's anything to be added to these places, it should be done by you or another admin, to avoid any NDA breaches. -- SarthesArai ^Talk 20:43, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

I'd go with both protection and a banner. As you suggested in Discord, I think the banner should just be used to clarify that the page is posted per an agreement with ZOS. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 21:45, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

How does ON:Firemoth look? —Legoless (talk) 21:52, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Yeah the banner is a good idea! And naturally, protecting the page. So great to have ZOS considering us as content creators :) Tib (talk) 21:54, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Looks good to me. The only thing I might suggest changing is merging the text of the Pre-Release banner into the NDA banner, just to cut down on banner overload. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 22:01, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Add Warden's logo to Warden class page. Phoenix Neko (talk) 07:38, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

Yes, I asked specifically about Warden icons. We're allowed to upload them, but the files have to be extracted first! —Legoless (talk) 18:46, 4 May 2017 (UTC)

(←) Just an update on this, the following users have now obtained permission from ZOS: AKB, Alarra, baratron, Contraptions, Daveh, Enodoc, Jeancey, SarthesArai, Tib. There probably won't be too much more info going up other than the remaining quest walkthroughs until after the NDA is lifted. —Legoless (talk) 21:20, 8 May 2017 (UTC)

All protected pages should now be open to public editing. —Legoless (talk) 23:08, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

The Infernal City (et al)

I need a second opinion. Some time ago, the {{TIC}} template was created to make it easier to link to subpages of Books:The Infernal City. It's certainly easier to type {{TIC|Characters}} than it is to type [[Books:The Infernal City/Characters|Characters]], and it's in line with other pseudo-namespace templates like {{TR3}} and {{TR4}}. Nevertheless, the template never really took off, having only two current uses outside of its own documentation, both in User space.

So, do I leave the template as is, trusting that people will start to use it more now that there are more subpage links? Do I convert existing links to the template? Or do I delete the almost-unused template altogether and convert the two uses of it to full links? Oh, one additional point here: whatever we do for TIC, we'll probably end up doing in the future for Lord of Souls, assuming it develops subpages as well, at some point. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 23:07, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

Reminding people of its existence is the first step to getting it used. I think now that people know its out there it should stay, and having the bot change the links to the template will have it sitting in front of people even more if they go to edit the pages and see the much easier link method. I think it would also be fairly safe to assume a need for an LOS template. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 23:59, 5 May 2017 (UTC)

I really don't think the templates are going to get much use, unfortunately. The pages have barely been touched since 2011 and only small edits, and until this week when I finished it in my sandbox and started adding it to the actual pages we never had anything on Lord of Souls beyond the first chapter. Due to this evident lack of interest, and the fact that I've got a lot of information up there now so there's not a lot of things I can think of to add, I don't think there's probably going to be enough editing activity to make it worthwhile. (About Lord of Souls: The Infernal City and Lord of Souls are one story and share the same settings, characters, etc, and therefore share most pages (I'm making redirects such as Lord of Souls/Characters redirecting to The Infernal City/Characters) so there's nothing specific enough to LoS to warrant its own pages aside from the page about the book itself and its plot summary. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:58, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I wouldn't say there's a lack of interest, just a lack of action. The following is all predicated on the assumption that the above discussion on changing the page names leaves them at TIC/ and LOS/. The links could be done by bot anyway, and the reduced data could make a difference to the loading times of some of the longer pages, eg I added many links to Annaig but the page size went down due to using the template on the existing links. I think there are grounds for making pages such as The Lord of Souls/Anniag as redirects, for everything that appears in LOS but already has a page in TIC. Also, would it be possible to have the template auto-assume a capital letter at the start of every link, eg hob as Hob. I don't think there will be any pages with a small letter beginning. This would probably be useful in the other similar templates if they don't have it. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 19:18, 6 May 2017 (UTC)

I think it makes sense to keep the template then, and start putting it (or a derivative of it, depending on the naming discussion elsewhere) to good use. If nothing else, it would have saved a lot of bot edits if we'd been using it everywhere.

@Silencer: just to cover the other side of the reduced data benefit, there's always a trade-off with templates. The page size goes down, yes, but the processing time goes up, since it first has to parse the template, then parse the resulting link, rather than just parsing the link. That said, while I haven't done any kind of testing, I expect that for something like this, the trade-off is ridiculously negligible either way. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 00:53, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Update 12 Character Scaling in the Build Planner

Is there any way of adjusting the character stats calculated by the ESO Build Planner to reflect the scaling that was introduced in Update 12. At the moment the stats produced appear to be just the basic stats, rather than what players will actually see in-game. For example: My Level 20 Sorc/Healer's build is showing a Max.Magicka of 7,055 in the planner. but in game she has 20.214 (after scaling). It kind of undermines the purpose of the planner that the stats it calculates aren't what you actually get. == MrDidz == — Unsigned comment by MrDidz (talk • contribs) at 16:45 on 13 May 2017 (UTC)

Right now the builder is really only accurate for CP160 characters because of this scaling. I haven't worked out exactly how the scaling works and currently don't have time to but if I have a free day or two, or someone else can figure out the level scaling, I'm open to implementing it. -- Daveh ^(talk) 00:06, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

I've actually looked at the way the scaling works myself, but as you say its hard to work out what it's really doing and much of the evidence at the moment is nothing more than analogous observation. The only clues I've found are

a) that characters stats are scaled to a level equivalent to CP160, therefore the adjustment gradually reduces as the character levels and,

b) that item effects are scaled according to mimic their CP160 equivalent, based upon their assessed quality as shown by the star rating on the characters sheet.

However, as far as I know neither of these algorithms has been published and Zenimax seem to be playing it close to their chests as to how exactly they apply the scaling. Indeed, attempting to recreate this scaling using the basic stats generated by my character builds produces inconsistent results when compared against their ingame values. For example: Roselynne Dubious has a Max.Magicka build stat of 7,055, which is scaled to 20,214 (in-game). a multiplier of x2.8652019844. But increasing her build level in the editor to CP160, only produces a Max.Magicka of 11,613 even with a full Mundas+Divines bonus. So, something is amiss somewhere, making it very hard to rely on the Build Planner for accurate data. == MrDidz ==— Unsigned comment by MrDidz (talk • contribs) at 11:25 on 14 May 2017 (UTC)

Adverts

I can barely browse the wiki! Every time it loads a new ad, it drags me to the bottom of the page and won't let me leave for 5 seconds! Each ad is maybe only 10 seconds long, there's only a few of them, and it NEVER STOPS RELOADING. What is the point of running a wiki if you make revenue off of malicious advertising strategies which prevent users from even using your website?! This doesn't make me want their products, this makes me want to see every person who helped make it happen wind up homeless! 24.66.8.96 07:51, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

All ads come through google. There is limited scope for our owner to block ads, which translates as blocking only particular ads, whereas the problem is with all video ads. Google appear to be working on a fix for their chrome browser but not in general. The only solutions web-wide that are offered are turning off html5 autoplay and/or flash autoplay, though most ad blocker addons for browsers work most of the time. The solution here (on UESP) is to make an account and block ads, unless it is one or a limited number of specific ads which can be reported and subsequently blocked. All revenue from ads is used for server payments and upgrades/fixes, or channeled back into the wiki in other ways. Silence is Golden^{Break the Silence} 18:19, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

To add on to what The Silencer said, here's the instructions on how to report an ad. ~ Alarra ^{(talk • contribs)} 00:37, 27 May 2017 (UTC)

I tried playing with ad settings last week but since you're still seeing these ads I'm assuming it didn't work. I've contact Google support and we'll see if they can be of any help. If anyone seeing such an ad could post the ad contents/target that might help in narrowing down the issue. Some ads have "info" boxes in them you can use to get more information about the advertiser as well. -- Daveh ^(talk) 00:25, 28 May 2017 (UTC)

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