With our last thread on this subject dead for two months, I've created a new one for this specific proposal.
We had left off with a general acknowledgement that the main page was in a sorry state, and we removed some of the worst offenses. I now have a fully functional demo of a proposed replacement. This thread is to discuss any potential issues or preferences for changes to that demo. All editors are welcome to edit freely.
There are a few small known issues pending before it should be implemented:
Four of the six suggested Portal pages do not yet exist.
The two Portal pages that do exist need lede sections written.
We should formalize consensus guidelines for the length of the News and Upcoming sections. Currently, News cuts off approximately one month into the past, and Upcoming runs until the furthest known release date of an upcoming product.
We may also want to formalize guidelines for which events belong in the Upcoming section. I simply combined the known release info for upcoming products with this calendar. I could anticipate an argument for other information, such as expected preview season dates.
The code in the demo is somewhat cumbersome, and much of it can be exported to standardized templates before it is implemented on the Main Page.
I would very much like to change the wording in the Main Header, "A Magic: The Gathering Web Portal". "Web Portal" is a horribly dated phrase, and I think it undermines our credibility as a current, accurate information source.
Please confine discussion to this thread, rather than wiki talk pages, to help maintain a thread of conversation.
First things first... I really like it.
It looks great and I like it very much.
Perhaps we can just write "MTG Salvation Wiki" because that is who we are. If we want a subtitle we can use "The unofficial Magic: The Gathering wiki", but I think this is unnecessary.
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I don't mind going ahead and calling ourselves the unofficial MTG Wiki; after all, there is no other English language MTG-dedicated Wiki out there as far as I know.
We do have a Wikia cousin. They surpass us in raw article count, partly by virtue of having articles for individual cards. However, we have an advantage in depth of coverage, and in pagerank. For game-related terms, we're usually among the top three results (higher-ranking pages are typically Wizards-owned), while Wikia is sometimes as far back and the second or third page.
Anyhow, that's all beside of the point of simply killing the phrase "web portal". =)
One way or the other, we'll wait to hear from the rest of the regulars, at least. If anyone else out there in MTGS-land would like to chime in, we'll listen to folks who don't frequent the wiki, too!
EDIT: Oh, and Sene, I pinged you via other channels, and I'm not sure you saw. Would you be up for drafting a organized play portal, since that seems to be your realm of expertise?
Yeah, I had not. I haven't been particularly active on Slack recently; or, for that matter, this site.
I had not seen that Wikia. Strange, seeing how much googling I do, but I suppose they don't really have what I'm typically looking for; they didn't even have a page for "Grand Prix", and the pages they do have seem to be of substantially lower quality than ours. In any case, the point is taken.
Organized play portal, eh? I could probably do that. Incidentally, I'd decided that this day would be the one where I resume my wiki work (I've been very busy with real life for a long time now, but this busy period is now over), so I could certainly look into that. Just give me a few days.
By the way, seeing as there is an ad (hrrmph) in the upper-right corner somewhere - I can't see it due to adblock - I guess we should have the navigation and the header box fit around that. Right now, the page essentially starts after the ad, so there is a lot of wasted space.
I never new there was another wiki besides our one... O_o
The ad on the side is annoying I can tell you especially on smaller displays it makes the side hardly readable. I actually poked a curse guy if they can remove this thing and put it elsewhere.
However it does not appear on the main page and not on Crov's page either. I am not quite sure what suppresses the ad, but perhaps we can add similar logic to our infoboxes, now that I am think about it.
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The I investigated the ad behavior a bit. Specifically the one which is inserted into the article top right.
They show on the Portal pages. However due to the Portal structure it just causes the whole article to move down a bit. So it should look fine on all machines.
The main pages does not show this ad. So there everything stays intact there.
The really interesting thing is that it also does not appear on Corv's user page. I looked into this a bit further and it seems that the ad is does not show on User and User Talk pages. So it can be selectively suppressed. I have just no clue how.
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It's probably not within our control. I suspect the wiki software is set up to blacklist the Main Page and certain namespaces, like User.
To be clear, I can think of a few methods, some trivial, that would effectively block ads for all users. However, much as I hate ads, I think that's a business decision that goes above our heads. Looking for means of letting the page layout gracefully degrade when ads are present is another story.
Production portal, in my mind, collects articles for all of the WotC staff and artists, the stages of design, the eras of design, just about any topic Maro has written about in his Nuts and Bolts and "Designing Setname" articles, design skeletons, as-fan, quick pointing, the FFL, the Storm Scale, subpages on individual set design stories, playtest stickers, pre-Alpha playtest cards, Unglued 2 and unprinted mechanics, misprints, the Reserved List, printing and publishing companies, print sheet math (lies right on the border between product and production).
Just noticed that the 'edit' buttons on the flexboxes do not work properly. I will add some Categories to the Story portal and perhaps I will start products.
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Started a Product Portal. I focused strongly on the Block sets since these are the main releases. I think Ideally the first two boxes would be one box with two columns, which wraps itself.
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I am not sure about the metagame portal. I am not even sure if we have enough articles in any organized form to start this portal on its own. I would suggest moving this information into the 3rd column of Organized Play which currently has the empty judging column. There is an extra Judge Wiki and Website which we could mention in the introduction section, because I think we are probably not the first address for these sort of things and should just provide proper direction.
The Products Portal and the Organized Play Portal still need and updated Category list at the bottom. If we have this, we would then have currently 4 Portals ready.
If we remove the Production and the Metagame Portal from the suggested main page and the navigation bar. We could roll it out the new main page and add the additional Portals as soon as we cleaned out and organized the respective sections.
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I agree, Metagame is the portal furthest from completion. Most of what I'd imagined going into it has been assimilated by other categories, leaving only the task of creating a historical record of the decks being played in each format with each season. That's a lot of work, and without someone dedicated to it, I doubt it's worth starting right now.
As far as a third column on Organized Play, that could certainly work, but it should be said that there's no obligation to use the same layout for each portal. Compare, Geography, History, and Science. As long as the layout allows for the core components, they can be reshaped at will.
And I like the idea of cutting it to three portals and launching it.
I moved the theory concepts into Organized play (in place of the The Judging column). It is basically on a quick guide on deck construction. As I mentioned before the metagame part of the wiki is not quite there yet so I removed it from the navigation until we get enough material to get things running.
I liked the little set Icons you added Corv I just switched to the set template. I also added Production and this Forum to the front page since we decided we are discussing the wiki stuff here it is a useful link to have.
One thing I realized is that the flexbox ignores the width statement on the Products page since I wanted a two column block article and it looks that with 3 flexboxes the template just spaces out evening regardless of the width setting.
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We had left off with a general acknowledgement that the main page was in a sorry state, and we removed some of the worst offenses. I now have a fully functional demo of a proposed replacement. This thread is to discuss any potential issues or preferences for changes to that demo. All editors are welcome to edit freely.
That demo is here.
There are a few small known issues pending before it should be implemented:
Please confine discussion to this thread, rather than wiki talk pages, to help maintain a thread of conversation.
It looks great and I like it very much.
Perhaps we can just write "MTG Salvation Wiki" because that is who we are. If we want a subtitle we can use "The unofficial Magic: The Gathering wiki", but I think this is unnecessary.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I don't mind going ahead and calling ourselves the unofficial MTG Wiki; after all, there is no other English language MTG-dedicated Wiki out there as far as I know.
Anyhow, that's all beside of the point of simply killing the phrase "web portal". =)
One way or the other, we'll wait to hear from the rest of the regulars, at least. If anyone else out there in MTGS-land would like to chime in, we'll listen to folks who don't frequent the wiki, too!
EDIT: Oh, and Sene, I pinged you via other channels, and I'm not sure you saw. Would you be up for drafting a organized play portal, since that seems to be your realm of expertise?
I had not seen that Wikia. Strange, seeing how much googling I do, but I suppose they don't really have what I'm typically looking for; they didn't even have a page for "Grand Prix", and the pages they do have seem to be of substantially lower quality than ours. In any case, the point is taken.
Organized play portal, eh? I could probably do that. Incidentally, I'd decided that this day would be the one where I resume my wiki work (I've been very busy with real life for a long time now, but this busy period is now over), so I could certainly look into that. Just give me a few days.
The ad on the side is annoying I can tell you especially on smaller displays it makes the side hardly readable. I actually poked a curse guy if they can remove this thing and put it elsewhere.
However it does not appear on the main page and not on Crov's page either. I am not quite sure what suppresses the ad, but perhaps we can add similar logic to our infoboxes, now that I am think about it.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I'd guess there's a logic to it - only showing on article pages, perhaps.
They show on the Portal pages. However due to the Portal structure it just causes the whole article to move down a bit. So it should look fine on all machines.
The main pages does not show this ad. So there everything stays intact there.
The really interesting thing is that it also does not appear on Corv's user page. I looked into this a bit further and it seems that the ad is does not show on User and User Talk pages. So it can be selectively suppressed. I have just no clue how.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
To be clear, I can think of a few methods, some trivial, that would effectively block ads for all users. However, much as I hate ads, I think that's a business decision that goes above our heads. Looking for means of letting the page layout gracefully degrade when ads are present is another story.
Edit: And the Story Portal introduction.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
We certainly should avoid red links on the main page, though.
One minor thing: the portals show up as uncategorized pages!
The production portal would be quiet small, I think. Shall I make a stab at it?
Where does the Reserved list go?
Reserved List goes into Production, I would think. Since it is in essence a re-print policy nothing more.
I would categorize the portal under [[Category: MTGS Wiki]].
PS: I took a stab at the header.
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Off the top of my head.
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They're really part of box-header, iirc. Flexbox is just for evenly spaced elements.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
I am not sure about the metagame portal. I am not even sure if we have enough articles in any organized form to start this portal on its own. I would suggest moving this information into the 3rd column of Organized Play which currently has the empty judging column. There is an extra Judge Wiki and Website which we could mention in the introduction section, because I think we are probably not the first address for these sort of things and should just provide proper direction.
The Products Portal and the Organized Play Portal still need and updated Category list at the bottom. If we have this, we would then have currently 4 Portals ready.
If we remove the Production and the Metagame Portal from the suggested main page and the navigation bar. We could roll it out the new main page and add the additional Portals as soon as we cleaned out and organized the respective sections.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!
As far as a third column on Organized Play, that could certainly work, but it should be said that there's no obligation to use the same layout for each portal. Compare, Geography, History, and Science. As long as the layout allows for the core components, they can be reshaped at will.
And I like the idea of cutting it to three portals and launching it.
I thought the metagame portal would be a nice place for theory concepts.
I moved the theory concepts into Organized play (in place of the The Judging column). It is basically on a quick guide on deck construction. As I mentioned before the metagame part of the wiki is not quite there yet so I removed it from the navigation until we get enough material to get things running.
I liked the little set Icons you added Corv I just switched to the set template. I also added Production and this Forum to the front page since we decided we are discussing the wiki stuff here it is a useful link to have.
One thing I realized is that the flexbox ignores the width statement on the Products page since I wanted a two column block article and it looks that with 3 flexboxes the template just spaces out evening regardless of the width setting.
Hands to the sky
Give a round of applause
For the great Miss Y!