Rappelz Wiki is dedicated to players of Rappelz Epic 6: Navislamia.

See also w:c:vsk:User talk:Najevi

[edit] Possible loophole in Terms of use

w:Terms_of_use#Advertising says "No user shall remove the advertising, or sponsored search features from the wiki in a way which means other users can not view the advertisements." It does not (currently) say anything about moving them to the top of the page. What do you think about this solution? User:Drennan/monaco.js Top banner ads look much more acceptable to me this way (they would probably look far less acceptable to advertisers, though). It's also possible to move the ad between the page bar and the main heading (this version). Drennan 10:26, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Very resourceful! Ad placement looks better with your script. It complies with the TOS. I can only see the effect on 300x250 block ads because I am not seeing any banner/leaderboard ads at all. I do not know why that is. You have my vote of support! najevi 10:43, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Hm. Ethical and policy questions aside, I already noticed a technical problem with this solution in IE6: tables don't move up in the page when the ad is moved. I suggest we leave it at that, top banners the way they are displayed now are already a great step forward from the right-hand box ads. Drennan 10:46, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Fair enough. Not attracting unwanted attention is a good strategy.

So it sounds like you are seeing banner ads even on the Rappelz Wiki pages? I don't know why but I have not seen a banner ad since Monday or Tuesday of this week. I have AdBlock and NoScript disabled and yet I see no banner ads at all! (and no white space where they should be either!) The only block ads that I am seeing are from GoogleSyndication - the relatively plain text type ads.

I suspect that my OpenDNS filters must be blocking the domain(s) serving up banner ads - it does this much like a huge hosts file would only with zero effort onmy part to maintain it. When I last checked I did notice that wikia-ads.wikia.com had been added to a block category named Advertising and of course I have that block enabled. It is not convenient to disable the OpenDNS block categories because it affects all users behind my router. najevi 10:58, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the banner ads are still there. I had to remove media.fastclick.net from my hosts file to be able to see them. Drennan 11:15, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] A more "Rappelz-y" skin

May I ask you to evaluate the skin I have been working on? I used UI elements that match the UI in the game. To test it, copy the contents of my Monaco.css over to yours and clear your cache. I've also been experimenting with a full dark skin, but I think it makes article content difficult to read, and usability should always be more important than eye candy. Drennan 12:52, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

I like what I see in Firefox 3 RC3. (I have no ads in my view.) I especially like the scroll-like frames you have placed around the widget boxes. That is right on the money wrt following the Rappelz theme.

• With this skin the stylized "wikia" logo could also become the same shade of brown/khaki as either the dark background or the lighter font color that links appear in. The "GAMING" and "MORE" butons could follow the same color scheme to complete the transition away from blue/sapphire.

• The grey-blue like background in the header, LH sidebar, bottom and what little you can see of the RH margin gets broken at the site logo and a horizontal strip the height of the log continuing to the right of that logo and behind the article content area. Is there a reason why that horizontal strip has a white background?

In IE6 (I never upgraded to IE7) it looks just as good with a couple of notable differences:

• The site logo is not centered as it was in FF
• The frames for two widget boxes (Shout Box and Problem reports list) extend to the next widget box. I'll post a screen shot if you take a look with IE6 or IE7 but don't see the same effect that I have described.

I like the fact that the article area is left white. I especially like the fact a that images from in-game that are used within an article match the widget box frames and the color theme for your new skin.

Once again, a great job!

Do you think that the main page deserves any special attention? A new comer Zoero is keen to help but frankly with what you have done to the skin I am not so sure his help is needed on the skin - maybe on some attractive background image for the main page and that's it.

najevi 03:05, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

With this skin the stylized "wikia" logo could also become the same shade of brown/khaki as either the dark background or the lighter font color that links appear in.

Yes, of course, I'll change the colour of those too.

The grey-blue like background in the header [...]

Hm. The whole page has a white background, there shouldn't be anything grey-blue. Can you provide a screenshot of that please?

The site logo is not centered as it was in FF

That is a Wikia bug. I have reported it days ago — no one seems to care.

The frames for two widget boxes (Shout Box and Problem reports list) extend to the next widget box.

Yes, I noticed that and I'll try to work on a fix. Luckily, neither of those widgets appear by default.

Thank you for taking the time to list these errors. About the main page… I'm not sure what kind of background image you were thinking of. I've seen Zoero's work on the forums (he has several threads where he's selling his forum sigs for in-game stuff) and to be honest, I'm not very impressed, but if it's something nice, sure, why not. :)

By the way, the Google Maps version of the Rappelz Map works now. I'll try to add some markers and maybe area layers before enabling it in the global javascript.

Drennan 04:32, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

of-white frame background is most noticeable at bottom of white BG article area

Screen shots of the blue-grey frame background that I see.

Second shot red arrows show the white horizontal band the height of the logo.

horizontal band same height as logo has a white background

As for main page BG image. What I was imagining was something as feint as the inner portion of this image which appears at the gPotato web site. Not the solid colors of the two characters at far left and far right just the feint semi-transparent style image behind the main page navigation links. Images of characters are perhaps not as interesting as images of mobs and other in-game creatures. A decent image of a white dragon is sure to attract interest. The only image I have seen is this one of a hatchling. It's fairly lo-res though.

Rappelz Map

Great news on that. Does the google map view display or accept coordinates? It might be a complex request but if the map view could center on a location based on it's coordinates then that might prove to be very useful when describing fast-spots or farming areas or spawn points and the like. In game the chat line command that returns your coordinates is: /position

najevi 06:36, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Oh, okay, you probably disabled "enable administrators to override your skin choice". You should use the Custom theme for Monaco.

The map has its own coordinate system, but it would probably be possible to translate those into in-game coordinates with some Javascript. It's not top priority for now, but I'll look into it later. Drennan 09:27, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. That looks better now and I see the butons at top and stylized wikia follow the same colour scheme now. All good. najevi 10:03, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Rappelz map

Just an update: markers can now be added to the map using either in-game coordinates or longitude and latitude. Our next problem is hosting the map tiles (about 7 megabytes in 1200+ files). I uploaded them to a free hosting service for now, but if I add the map to the site Javascript, we will soon exceed the maximum bandwith usage allowed. Drennan 12:54, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

I assume you are referring to site bandwidth usage for the free file hosting service. Why not host the files on Wikia's servers?

I am not aware of any limit on Wikia site bandwidth or site size for that matter. I can find the database size info at http://wikistats.wikia.com/EN/TablesDatabaseSize.htm and our 1.2MB total database size growing to 8.2MB or even 9.2MB should not attract attention given the current size of other Wikia sites ranging up to 153MB. I don't find any daily usage stats (i.e. that would suggest bandwidth) at http://wikistats.wikia.com/EN/TablesWikiaRAPPELZ.htm though.

I have just looked at your monaco.js and see how the map tiles need to be served from the one folder. Perhaps that is a special request that Wikia will satisfy for us. They might even accept a request to directly copy files across from http://rappelzmap.drivehq.com/ and save you the upload of ~1200 map tiles.

I imagine that all we need do is ask Danny (User_talk:toughpigs) for permission to host the map tiles on the Wikia servers. With their current focus on creating attractive sites that people love to visit I doubt the response will be a negative one. najevi 23:16, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Hm. That would be a great help indeed, I suppose it's worth trying. Drennan 05:07, 30 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Your problem with accidentally rolling out menus

Try this:

#navigation a {
	display: inline;
	line-height: 24px;
	padding-right: 20px;
}
 
#navigation a:hover {
	display: block;
        height: 24px;
        padding: 0 0 0 8px;
        margin: 0;
}

I think it does exactly what you want. Drennan 22:17, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

You are a knight in shining armor, Sir Drennan! Many thanks. najevi 22:20, 4 July 2008 (UTC)

Some time in the past week this effect no longer appears. Is there anything changed about the site monaco CSS that might have affected this? Perhaps related, though I am not sure ... I notice that the link-suggest list is able to be stepped through using the down arrow key at other wikis but not at this wiki. Might there be something unique about this sites CSS that is defeating that behavior? najevi 01:16, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Site developers changed the base CSS for Monaco a bit. A revised version (which also fixes another problem related to the new job icons in the menu):

#navigation a {
	display: inline;
	line-height: 24px;
}
 
#navigation a:hover {
	display: block;
        height: 24px;
        padding-top: 0;
        padding-bottom: 0;
        margin: 0;
}
 
#navigation a em {
        position: static;
        padding-left: .5em;
        right: auto;
        top: auto;
}

Drennan 08:38, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Re: "Wikia New Style"

Hi Najevi.  I came here via the redirect at central, so feel free to move this question if you don't want non-rappelz threads here.  You wrote:

Sometime in mid-2009 we'll be going through a similar ordeal as studies then show that fewer than 5 people out of every 1000 are *not* using ad filtering tools or intelligent DNS servers. (NoScript, AdBlock, Proxomitron, OpenDNS, Hosts file, etc.)

In your opinion, would it be difficult to write a browser extension that auto-loads Special:Random every five minutes or so?  People could run it while they were asleep or away from their computers, like one of those Folding@Home programs.  The advertisers would make more and more money as the extension was distributed to more users, so Wikia wouldn't have to change its policy in 2009.  Everybody wins.

Ryan W 02:49, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

I do not understand why this would be of benefit to advertisers, wikia users or Wikia. I assume it is intended to increase advertising revenue. I do not think that Wikia's revenue from impression ads is dependent upon the number of page views however, my understanding of their business model may be wrong.

To answer your question, I do not think it would be difficult. najevi 04:20, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for responding, and yes — if the number of page views doesn't matter, then obviously I am barking up the wrong tree here...    Ryan W 18:50, 11 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Monobook & Monaco

Hello Najevi! I want the monobook also as an option to set as a site-default. For the time until this is possible, I'm making a monaco customisation to look like monobook. I thought maybe you are interested... It's not yet perfect or so, but it's still in development. (If you want to answer, please do so at a talk page of mine somewhere, so I see the "new messages" bar.) Greetings, SPQRobin 19:58, 23 July 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Ads

Hellooo... Anybody home?? You have a great looking wiki here. I see you managed to create some kinda system that lets ya see ads only if ya wanna. Just wondering how you got about doing that. We wanna use a similar thing in our wiki. Are there any permissions required from central command? And may I say, your skin looks like ... So GOOD. Oh, by the way, I'm from the Diablo Wiki. Can't ... seem to use ... damn interwiki ... links. Oh well... :) waiting eagerly for reply. "Fear me... Part deux!!!" (f")f <-- Mobokill 11:24, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Credit for the NewMonaco skin and the "Close Ad" feature go to Drennan. Wikia staff have been invited to comment and have chosen not to respond with an explicit yay or nay. A reasonable person would infer that Wikia staff find nothing about this "Close Ad" feature that violates the current Terms of Service. See also Advertising in content area & Possible loophole in Terms of use for discussions of this subject. najevi 15:06, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

Thanx for the links and the reply on the whole. We just wanted to know whether central command supported or opposed this kinda ad-block thing. And you gave a very satisfying answer. Thanx again and may your wiki grow well. "Fear me... Part deux!!!" (f")f <-- Mobokill 17:24, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

[edit] go widescreen

I feel really dumb - I had found out that all it takes is to add a class to body, and tried to achieve that with JavaScript. The corker is that of course you can permanently add the formatting in that class to the body tag via your own personal .css, and I didn't realize that then.

Anyway, I like the tips on your userpage. I learn a lot each time I "help" you (doing mass edits by export/import is something that I'm likely to try soon). I want to point you to w:c:guildwars:Forum:Coding and invite you to contribute.

--◄mendel► 23:16, 7 November 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New description

Hello, can you maybe change the description for skill Divine Flash' effect? It doesn't work like that formal words you put there. Caster get immune to all melee attacks but not skills related to P.Atk.

Im new here ,so i dont really know how to put a link to my name.

Robinrob 03:44, 23 December 2008 (GMT+1)

You figured out the use of four tildes easily enough, well done!

I chose to respond to this at the talk page for that dat template. Every wiki article and template has a talk page whic can be accessed by clicking on the Discussion tab located at the top right of the browser window. That is the best place to have a discussion about the content of a specific article. A short note at a user's talk page such as:

• Heads up - I have posted a question/request about Divine Flash skill effect description at Template talk:Skill/Divine Flash

is then appropriate to get the attention of a specific user.

TIP: If you are not already using it then please note the Recent Changes link in the LH navbar. Whenever I visit this wiki the page I select from my browser's autocomplete list is not the wiki's home page but rather:

http://rappelz.wikia.com/wiki/Special:RecentChanges

najevi 04:44, 23 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Main Page rename

Since you seem to be the most active admin, I wanted to let you that I just renamed the Main Page to Rappelz Wiki. I've been assigned with stopping by all the top gaming wikis and making sure their main page is named (Game Name) Wiki instead of Main Page, for search engine optimization purposes. If you admins decide you don't want the keep the new main page name, you obviously have the right to revert, but I would strongly suggest keeping it so that even more people will find this wiki. Cheers. =) JoePlay (talk) 20:24, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Why so many templates?

First of I wanted to say thanks for the welcome! ;-) I have only been playing since January but already love the game and the people I meet. My only problem atm is that I can't run it at home because our laptop doesn't have video card good enough and the pc doesn't have the cpu to handle it. My husband, User:Tildar, is a fanatic of Linux and was doing work on the Dofus wikia til he lost interest in the game. He helped me make a template for the Grand Quest List which is currently linked on my page. I was hoping you could have a look and tell me what you think.

My issue with this wikia atm is that there are sooooooo many templates, especially for skills. That to me seems to be more work than really needs to be done. Why not create one generic template and use that? Maybe it may not be as pretty as the current one to start but with enough know-how it can be. Maybe its just me but I think it is a bit of an overkill. My husband and I run a wiki site for our Dofus guild http://radlit.zapto.org. We have made it as simple as possible for our members to edit pages. I just think that is what needs to be done here.

Thanks for any input. ;-) --ToiTiger 14:05, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

It is great to see new blood coming to this wiki, and particularly people like you who have direct or indirect experience with other wikis. I have looked at User:ToiTiger/project_template_grand_quest and plan to provide feedback at that article's talk page if that's OK.

Why are there so many templates? (especially for skills)

You aren't the first to ask but I can't remember where or how I answered before so, here goes ...

I forget the exact count but there are over 300 skills (we can expect that number to grow when new skills for at least 15 new 3rd jobs are announced) Many of those skills are accessible/usable by more than one job.

1. There are currently three presentation styles for presenting job skill data. Back in May 2008 there was a third format based on the familiar Infobox that was popularized by Wikipedia - but that presentation format has been deprecated.
   • Anticipating that the optimal format for presenting skill data would be something that would necessarily evolve over time I did not want to have contributors laboriously visiting over 300 articles about skills and another 27 or more articles about jobs to make table layout and/or format tweaks.
2. I did not want contributors having to track down every job page that uses a skill (e.g. "Armor Mastery") in order to update or correct the same data on every related page.

With the above points in mind it seemed highly desirable to implement a method for storing the skill data in some central database that was both easy to edit and easily queried.

The result of several weeks of consultation, trial and error is the current system of skill data record templates and skill presentation templates.

About 8 months after it's inception and 2 months after the last big revision effort (Epic5 Part2) had completed it was pointed out that regular article pages in the "Main" namespace could have been used just as easily as pages in the "Template" namespace. (Of course, at this point we are only talking about the namespace container and not the sheer number of data records necessary to hold the data for 300+ job skills and present the data on 27 job pages and another 300+ skill pages.)

A convenient side effect of using the Template namespace for data records is that the data field names and data field values do not register as hits whenever a user searches for such keywords as "magic" or "cast" or whatever.

• Each article describing a skill has a one or two paragraph plain english description where such keywords may freely be used and those articles may appear as results when performing a search. In other words, most casual browsers of this wiki have no business browsing the skill data record templates or skill presentation templates. For that reason they are nicely obfuscated by residing in the Template namespace. (You should note that considerable diligence was invested to ensure that these skill related templates are categorized. The same diligence was invested for the prolific number of templates associated with the Bestiary. That was a deliberate effort to ensure that special pages such as Special:UncategorizedTemplates would not be overrun by these 300 or more templates. On inspection just now I see that some experimental and/or interim templates are still there and I should certainly clean those up some day soon.)

I hope the above explains some of the reasons for such a prolific number of templates associated with job skills. If you browse the Watercooler forum then you will find more background and evidence of request for community input over the past year. There is another promising wiki based technology that is Semantec Media Wiki forms however that was still in it's early adopter stages when all of the above was being figured out. I avoided SMW in favor of the familiar and better documented template feature.

Having taken the time to explain all of that may I now ask

1. Does it matter that a large number of templates are used at this wiki? (whether that be for skills or for mob drop data)
2. Would things be any different (or better) if such data was populated directly into pages that reside in the Main namespace?

Once again thank you for your interest in the wiki. If you find any of the skill data presentation templates daunting (they daunt me and I wrote the blessed things!) then please do not hesitate to drop me a line. I had AlizarinHQ's collapsible detail presentation style in mind when developing those two table based views but there were a few specific improvements that I wanted to add. You can read about those design goals at the Watercooler forum. najevi 04:28, 21 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Najevi for correcting the categories and heirarchy list. I knew I was forgetting something but could not remember how or what it was. --ToiTiger 23:08, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

No problem. As you can see I needed a couple of iterations to get it right! najevi 23:17, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

[edit] SMW and more

I asked for links to your skill template system on central, I just found it. It looks very similar (actually a bit more advanced) than what I found at GuildWiki. I will be following with interest what your final take on SMW is going to be; your work so far is admirable. --◄mendel► 22:49, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

[edit] "Advertisement"

It seems Wikia tinkered with the thing that allowed ads to be identified as "advertisments" with the image and box. Any ideas? -- LordTBT ^Talk! 20:19, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

For Firefox users this Stylish script is your best remedy.

• For IE users Firefox is your best remedy!  ;-)

Quite a long time ago I decided that no amount of protesting/lobbying at Wikia would serve any purpose other than to possibly alienate me from Wikia staff upon whom I depend for various forms of support and assistance. Therefore leaving the choice in the hands of the browsing public is the best remedy imho. You could very easily take the CSS code from the link above and use it in common.css but, I think that would only serve as a lightning rod attracting unwanted attention to your wiki. --najevi 01:14, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

At the same time, Wikia staff depend on the wikis for ad revenue. It's supposed to be a fair relationship. I'm not for removing the ads as this script indicates, I think that violates TOS, however the dashed border and identification of the ad as an ad was perfectly fine, and now it's not possible. That irks me, considering there are many ads that look like YT videos. -- LordTBT ^Talk! 06:38, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

The words of the Serenity prayer come to mind. enjoy! --najevi 06:59, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

It seems as if the borders returned. -- LordTBT ^Talk! 22:21, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Thanks a lot for a warm welcome!

I really apprecited your warm welcome and glad to know that my contribution is helpful.

I'm playing in Thai server. Most of time, infomation I serched here is consistent with what I experienced; however, there are some events and corresponding items that do not appear in the wiki. Do you want me to add those in but with a visible note that item does exist in Thai server? Or shall I contribute only contents that I believe they are consistent with the other servers?

Is that any regulations for every contributor to follow?

Any comments or suggestions would be really appreciated.

Thank you and best regards, juacompe