User talk:Dvgrn
Just discovered conwaylife.com thanks to a link sent by Alan Hensel.
Have just been trying to sort out a possible new feature for Golly 2.1, as it happens (see the golly-test discussion thread). Koenig's Object Database is one possible place to look up small patterns, and it looks as if conwaylife.com might be another.
There's also the (probably separate) question of where to put larger engineered patterns, and collections of patterns, that people might want to download and look at. Might be possible to build this functionality into Golly to some extent, also, along with the reverse lookup function.
The main trick here is to somehow avoid the inevitable dead-link problem, as people's individual web sites move or go offline. Presumably Golly either has to point to a permanent central location where *all* the available collections are stored -- or at least there should be an index page in a central location, which can be updated as things change. That way it won't be necessary to keep downloading the latest version of Golly to avoid dead links.
- Welcome! If you'd like to be able to access the database used by our site, you're of course more than welcome to. RLE files are generated by plugging in a pattern name to a URL like the following: http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider.rle, where of course you replace "glider" with the name of the pattern you want (in lowercase, no spaces or special characters). You can similarly get Life 1.05 or Life 1.06 files if you so desire by going to something like http://www.conwaylife.com/pattern.asp?p=glider_105.lif. In order to make patterns actually searchable from within Golly (or have the patterns auto-propagate in a menu within Golly or something like that), I could write a simple script that outputs a plaintext list of all the names of patterns in the "official" database, or a plaintext list of all the patterns, along with their RLE header comments if that would work well for you guys.
- I also already have a script coded that allows people to save their patterns to the public ConwayLife.com database. It takes in an RLE string, a pattern name and optional comments and saves it online, so if you can send a POST request to my server from Golly, then you could have a "save online" option (though the current set-up makes the public database easy to overwrite - someone could come along and save another pattern under the same name as yours, thus overwriting it).
- I'm currently the only person with access to modify the "official" database, but I'm sure I could code a form that allows some of the more interested Life gurus to "log in" so that they have access to modify the official database if there's an interest in that. Nathaniel 19:38, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
LifeWiki:Tiki bar
Howdy! The LifeWiki's lacked a central discussion page so far, so I've gone ahead and created the LifeWiki:Tiki bar as a friendly place where the community can get together to discuss things in a relaxed atmosphere. You're cordially invited to join in!
The first discussion I started is on how to best integrate the LifeViewer applet (LV:Viewer) that is now available on the LifeWiki thanks to User:Nathaniel's efforts.
See you at the bar! Apple Bottom (talk) 11:22, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Small-infobox disease
Saw you mention said disease here --- I take it that's referring to the embedded LifeViewer? Yeah, worth investigating; I may take a look tomorrow, assuming that I'm less tired then and that nobody else has yet. Apple Bottom (talk) 21:28, 8 September 2018 (UTC)
- Just took a look, BTW, all the relevant LifeViewer configuration snippets (/default and /oscillator) are loaded as they're supposed to, on oscillator pages. Neither contains any specific instructions regarding zoom level or GPS, of course, so articles lacking viewerconfig infobox lines will default to rather small and hasty LifeViewers. This could be changed, using the above templates.
- Or is that "disease" something else after all? Apple Bottom (talk) 15:57, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
- I'm not entirely sure. Thanks for doing a review, and I think things will just keep getting better from here. It was just that I thought I remembered setting up buckaroo as an example of the use of LifeViewer in an infobox. Now that I look back at the history, I think what I was remembering was my addition of RLE:buckaroo as a sample for Template:Reflector. The embedded viewer has all the right LifeViewer config, but I guess I didn't think to go look at the actual buckaroo article and add viewerconfig there. Silly me.
- There may be a few other similar cases where RLE:patternname was added, with the effect of downgrading an article's infobox to a small and hasty LifeViewer view -- but with any luck the number of "diseased" articles is decreasing now. The combination of infobox, RLE: namespace, and viewerconfig line in the article is really not too bad! I hope the system gets more widely used, as people get used to configuring LifeViewer and we start to have more good working examples available to copy from. Dvgrn (talk) 17:50, 10 September 2018 (UTC)
Question
May I ask for my position to change from user to admin? --Yoshi (Talk to me!) 18:45, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
- The current admin group is very small, and I think everyone is in favor of making it larger. However, trusted users can already do 99% of the LifeWiki editing work that admins do. The remaining admin-only tasks are situations where it's definitely possible to do some serious damage, either accidentally or on purpose -- deleting pages, deleting pattern files from the LifeWiki server, changing other users' permissions, etc.
- Now, it's very easy to set the admin flag for someone who has been doing good editing work for half a year or so, responds well to criticism and suggestions, and generally improves the wiki. For someone who only starting editing yesterday, it seems a good bit too early for that level of trust to have been established... but it's just a matter of time.
- I'm curious about some of your changes so far. A fair number of your edits (e.g., this one) seem to be (what I would interpret as) reformatting section headers and bullet lists in articles for better readability in edit mode. I haven't done a full survey, so posssibly there are more existing headers formatted like == [ArticleName] == than I remember. But I think that at least for the moment, it might be better if you didn't try reformatting all 2000+ articles with this same whitespace change, since it doesn't make any difference to how the articles are actually displayed.
- If you want to tackle a big reformatting project like that, a good place to discuss it first would be the LifeWiki Tiki Bar. That way there will at least be some understanding that you really intend to do a thorough survey and change every instance of these no-whitespace bullets and headers. It doesn't seem like an improvement at all if you might do only half of them and then stop -- probably better to leave things as they are, and avoid a lot of noise on the Recent Changes list.
- There have also been a few cases where an edit summary, most commonly "Simplifying page", didn't really seem to match the actual edit. It was more about moving a tag from top to bottom of an article, or vice versa (and, I guess, adding the abovementioned whitespace, so maybe that's what "Simplifying page" is really supposed to mean).
- Up until now everyone has been reasonably happy with stub tags where they are, at the tops of articles, so it would be helpful if you could use the edit summary to explain why it's a good idea to make the edit. It may not be clear to current editors what you're thinking, especially if you're coming in with lots of experience with standard syntax from another wiki (which won't always apply here). Dvgrn (talk) 21:16, 5 December 2019 (UTC)
Trash Wiki
Hello, I'm excited to proudly announce that a new wiki project has been launched today. Trash Wiki is a free encyclopedia where Wikipedia articles that don't meet notability ends up on Trash Wiki to be saved from being deleted. Trash Wiki - official website. Ooh, by the way, I burrowed this image for the logo. https://www.conwaylife.com/w/images/d/df/LifeWiki_trash.png. I hope that you don't mind. I'd love to have some help if anyone is on board. --Yoshi (Talk to me!) 12:34, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
- Please don't make a habit of copying the same content to multiple users' talk pages. If there doesn't seem to be a single good central location where a message should be posted, that's a fairly good indication that the message is basically spam and should not be posted at all.
- To be honest, I very much hope that no one currently working on the LifeWiki will have any interest in spending time on a new Trash Wiki project -- just because that would mean that less gets done around here. It might be a good idea to look into what happened to Includipedia (which seems like a much more positive-sounding name than Trash Wiki, by the way) before you spend too much effort on the project yourself. Are you aware of the Silly Things section of Wikipedia (where it seems the old Bad Jokes and Other Deleted Nonsense category has now come to rest) -- or the Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians? Dvgrn (talk) 13:41, 6 December 2019 (UTC)
To-do list and tutorials
Hi there, I've just noticed your to-do list and thought that some of the items have been addressed. Could you please re-check the section? (I'm not sure if I can help by redirecting "Engineless Caterpillar" to caterloopillar — am I understanding it right?)
By the way, I'd suggest advertising the tutorials on the main page (preferably on the line that says Overview · How to contribute · ConwayLife.com), as the tutorials has not got an easily accesible link and non-moderators cannot edit the main page. GUYTU6J (talk) 16:28, 17 February 2021 (UTC)