Haldarn

Hey Techno, cheers for touching base!

No worries. Message me on here or on Discord if you need anything!

p.s. Did you folks ever end up making the mobile-friendly changes (which I remember were mentioned on Central a while back)? If not, that's something I can help with at some point.

I did float it to a couple of the active admins on the site to see if they were interested, and let them know to contact you back then, but honestly I think that they are more focused on their own projects, which are key to getting the encyclopedia completed data-wise or ensuring clear explanations in articles.

Personally, as I mentioned at the time, I am not a fan of the current mobile implementation due to its limitations and formatting restrictions, though I do keep an eye out in the hope it'll evolve in the future to something functional and appropriate to the site.

It was a big hit to lose Monobook support, and we lost regular and advanced contributions from our oldest and most technical editor because of it. Ironically, he would have been the one happiest to work on a Mobile layout.

That's fair, and sorry to hear about the lost support from Monobook being removed. Makes sense that the admins of the time were busy-- there's a lot to do! If I can help with the mobile skin in any way, let me know...

Sounds good. Noticed you'd not been doing much tech-heavy editing in the last 9mo or so; hope you're doing well! :)

Yep, I've just been busy with other things. I think the loss of the Monobook skin kind of put me off of editing for a while and killed any momentum I had on the projects I was working on.

I think you misunderstand. We're not affiliated with BG Wiki, we're the admins for this site. It's our responsibility to make sure that contributions follow the guidelines for this site.

Please also show a little more respect to those who are actively contributing to the upkeep and maintenance of this site in your discourse with its admins.

Thanks! :)

I still maintain, even after my discussion with people over on Community Central, that by far and away the better solution to mobile use is to use the one-time Desktop Site link at the bottom, or ask your browser to "View Desktop Site".

Tooltips work on my mobile fine under Chrome with longpress. The layout is actually better than Oasis on desktop because it moves the siderail underneath the page.

And until Mercury becomes even slightly aesthetically pleasurable, I don't intend to spend any time developing pages for it (ie moving away from tables to structure design templates) as Wikia have requested. They did open channels to say they could provide assistance to anyone of our admins who wanted to do so, in case you felt the urge - I have also let Toast know - details are in that thread^^

Oh, no, you're absolutely right. The mobile site is breaking all kinds of rules when it comes to good web design - I haven't seen much worse. I'm only interested in fixing things that are very broken on mobile, like the tooltips showing up all the time and the infoboxes being all kinds of broken. I'm not too concerned with making it look good on mobile, because they make that pretty much impossible (no stylesheets, stripping inline styling, etc.).

I'm also moving away from using tables in templates, but that has more to do with the flexibility that styled divs provide; the mobile site functionality is just a bonus.

Wikia stopped supporting the forums on 30th April 2017, when they were taken offline permanently.

Wikia do host the archive of the forums which is only available to download via Torrent, at about 2.5GB. I just checked and it's still available.

It is a phpbb archive, so I believe in order to browse them in their original format, you'd have to upload the archive to a phpbb server, whether that is local or online. If you're just after information and don't mind crawling unformatted text, you may be able to do so just from the archive itself.

If you'd like the torrent file, feel free to drop me a private message on our Discord server with your e-mail address and I'll send the .torrent file to you (I can't upload it here).

If you have current queries, rather than being after old posts, our Discord server is your best place to ask! :)

I've been thinking about that template too and I was curious why you used an image background instead of a combo of border-style: border-radius: attributes to do the border with rounded corners that should scale better for taller boxes (like NPCs)

Nice, what needs to be done to make this work with {{Infobox NPC}}?

Not something I would have mentioned had it not come up, but I'm not a fan of those NPC infoboxes at all. I don't understand why they include a couple of bits of information under the picture away from the rest of the data, and usually requiring a scroll-down to get on screen. Always seemed to me that the info in the 'box' should just be listed at the top of the character page with the image on the right. The infoboxes themselves just seem gimmicky (certainly not useful additions to an article as per Wikipedia proper) and a different style to the rest of the site (the other thing that jumps out at me like that is the shield size boxes).

Here's a layout using a couple of things... Teilsa The ffxi-box class, our iconic ffxi-table, and me playing around with nested collapsibility with gradient fills to represent an NPC's complete dialogue tree.

I considered using a border with a radius, but I decided to stay faithful to the original intent and used an image border. I used the border-image property, which is a CSS3 (relatively new) thing that's designed specifically for this purpose and will expand to whatever size is needed.

Updating {{FFXIbox/Begin}} and {{FFXIbox/End}} should fix {{Infobox NPC}}, though {{Infobox NPC}} should probably get a revamp anyway. Unfortunately, I won't have time to work on anything until Tuesday, but I'll try to find some time next week to get it all updated.

I also noticed that the {{TrustNPC}} changes I made now make Trust pages look odd for a different reason, so I may want to try out some other things before I convert {{Infobox NPC}} as well. I wish I knew exactly what formatting/styling mobile strips - it's really annoying playing a guessing game.

I think the idea of the FFXIboxes/Infoboxes was to emulate Wikipedia's Template:Infobox person, which they do, though the information is pretty limited. As for the styling, I guess Gahoo (or whoever; Gahoo uploaded the border images) decided they wanted to have a fancy border to spice up the page and be different from Wikipedia (something that mattered way too much to some of the old admins).

I don't particularly mind the infoboxes, though I think they would be better utilized if NPC pages had some actual meat to them (descriptions, quotes, etc.) instead of being an almost blank page or just a list of links. If we were to make changes, I'd move the notes section to be first, above the "Involved In..." sections, and encourage NPC quotes and descriptions with a stub template/category.

Have added visible equipment to Teilsa for a bit more meat too.

Hmmm... I think I prefer the classic infobox, at least at this stage. I like the addition of the appearance and equipment fields, though. The infobox information is typically less important, so I don't actually mind it being off to the side (and it looks even better if you add an introductory paragraph to round out the space).

That dialogue section is pretty impressive - neat use of the collapse sections. Although, I think I'd like it better if the choices were a little more compact. Also, those gradient dialogue boxes are tempting me to set up a CSS class that emulates one of FFXI's text box styles.

I'd also either make the first dialogue visible by default or add a quote or two above the dialogue boxes. That's probably going to be introduction dialogue in most cases, but some NPCs might have some more fitting quotes.

Nice work overall, though.

Teilsa

I've reverted to the classic infobox border around the picture. I've kept the information previously within the infobox with the other information to at the side. I've added an introductory paragraph, as suggested. I hope that's what you meant!

Re Dialogue, I've left the initial dialogue and options visible. I've popped a random quote at the top (this particular NPC isn't known for her dramatic speeches...). I've compacted the choices by moving the duplicated text to the top of each section, which streamlines somewhat.

I have a minor annoyance idk if you can help with in relation to the initial dialogue and response having no space between them. A standard line-break is too much space, but you get a decent half-line break if the text is part of an indented paragraph (:). However, on that top line there's no indent, so I'm left with either no space or a big space :(

With regards the existing {{Infobox NPC}}, the information items

• starts missions =
• starts quests =
• involved in missions =
• involved in quests =
• involved in events =
• notes =
• historicalbackground =

I feel should be formatted to appear in Sections underneath the initial information/picture part of the page, as per the example (dialogue can be added as part of the Infobox template with a bit of work), as this aligns somewhat with the appearance we see on Item articles. What do you think?

Sorry, I've not taken Monobook into account doing this. :/

Ugh, and all of these mouseover images and collapsible sections fail miserably on mobile. I kinda want to ask Wikia if they'll turn the mobile option for the site off altogether, now that we're in an age of larger screens and tablets.

I like that a lot better - nice improvements. It looks ok in Monobook. The dialogue section is a little weird and the table at the top looks a little stretched, but it's not awful.

Yep, that's exactly what I meant by an introductory paragraph. There's not much to say about Teilsa, but other NPCs might have a decent chunk of text there.

The dialogue section is a lot better. I'm still not completely sold on the brown choice boxes (it might just be something to get to used to), but I like them more now that they're more compact.

As for the ordering of information, I was thinking notes should be above the quests/missions, since some NPCs are involved in a lot of quests/missions and it makes their page look like a giant list until you scroll down. I know that the quests/missions are what people come to the page for, but it seems more natural to have information about the NPC come first. Although... If we're adding an introduction section, I bet most of the notes could be moved there. If the notes section was just technical stuff, I wouldn't mind it sitting below the other sections.

And yeah, I noticed that the tooltips are completely broken on mobile - it doesn't respect "display: none" at all, apparently. I believe there's a CSS file just for mobile, though. If we can't get the mobile site disabled, we might be able to do some tweaks when needed.

Oh, and regarding the annoying space issue: add style="margin-bottom: 0.5em" to the table that you're using for a dialogue box. Margins are like padding, but they're outside of the element instead of inside and the "0.5em" means half a font size of space. If you want to avoid using a description list (the : list) to indent the dialogue boxes, you can also use margin-left to indent it manually.

Ooh, thanks! :)

Thanks for highlighting that. Changes to the {{Abundance}} template have meant that it requires zero values, whereas those you'd mentioned were left blank which generate the formatting error.

I've corrected the messes you pointed out, but I'm going to ask User:Karuberu to take a look at the 'Divided by zero' default message on those Abundances that are 0|0.

Thanks ^^

I was following until "I should note that while..." - I'm not sure your meaning on explicitly wrapping sections. I understand the example of section edit errors, having run into those every now and then.

What I understood; Basically every Item page now needs to begin with: {{Item Sections}} and we'll have the pre {{Item Header}} appearance of section edits, plus the collapsibility.

Quick question; would you prefer Section headers that aren't covered by {{Item Sections}} (eg How To Obtain, Notes) to be added to {{Item Sections}} as we come across them, or just to be added as additional {{WrapHeaderSection}} lines on an item's page? The former might help in standardisation.

Quick question 2; do I need concern myself with {{WrapHeaderSection}} <wrapper-class> for standard usage, or is that reserved for advanced formatting that I haven't conceived yet?

So based on that, and yup I can see it working well on your Sandbox, I don't follow the bit about the functionality only being useful from time to time and needing explicit wraps normally. Sorry for being dumb!

Sorry, that's on me - I could have explained that a lot better. You got most of it, though. Replace the {{Item Header}} headers with regular headers, include {{Item Sections}} on the page, and you can get the fancy functionality of {{Item Header}} without losing section editing or experiencing any of the other quirks of {{Item Header}}.

It was poorly explained, but by explicitly, I just meant manually wrapping the sections in a div like this:

<div class="someclass">
==Header 1==
Content
</div>

As opposed to using {{WrapHeaderSection}} like this:

{{WrapHeaderSection|Header 1|someclass}}
==Header 1==
Content

Both will do pretty much the same thing, but the {{WrapHeaderSection}} method has worse performance (it might cause slowdowns if used too much on a single page) and the script won't run until after the page is fully loaded, so you might see some things shift after fully loading. It's probably not a big deal in most cases, but it's something to keep in mind.

RE: #1: I think it's safe to leave out the other item sections, since they don't need any special formatting like the Statistics, Other Uses, and other sections do. {{Collapse Sections}}, which is included in {{Item Sections}}, ensures that all of the header sections will still be collapsible, without having to be specified by a {{WrapHeaderSection}} in {{Item Sections}} (or otherwise). I don't think we have any other reason to wrap them in a special class, but maybe I'm forgetting something?

RE: #2: So, all {{WrapHeaderSection}} does is wrap a header and its following section in a div and add a class to the div. The wrapper class param is just the class that's being applied to the wrapper div. This can be really useful for styling purposes, but essentially all it does is turn this:

{{WrapHeaderSection|Header 1|someclass}}
==Header 1==
Content

Into this:

<div class="someclass">
==Header 1==
Content
</div>