User talk:Davidy22

Hi Davidy22,

Just a quick thanks for helping roll back so much of the vandalism. Per your recent log comment, yes, there has been a recent spate of vandalism; before yesterday, it was the odd spammer that I've had to remove. But with the advent of Click and Drag, there's also been an insurgence of ip-based vandalism. I'm hoping this is just a spike owing to the popularity of the comic, but I'm with you; if it doesn't die down, something more drastic is going to have to be done.

But again, thanks for helping...

-- IronyChef (talk) 14:17, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Please don't

Please don't create the redirects to explanations that haven't been created yet. It breaks the next and previous buttons, and gives people that are browsing through the explanations the false impression that the site is more complete than it is. lcarsos (talk) 06:41, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I'll stop then. Didn't know that. Davidy22 (talk) 07:17, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Davidy22, the spam connoisseur

Congratulations on transcending from being annoyed at all spam to recognizing the truly beautiful works of spammage from the rest of the cruddy heap. We should throw a party, lol. lcarsos (talk) 16:33, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey, it *was* a well written bit of spam. It was one of those copy/paste types of spam, except it was nicely formatted and coherent all the way through. It was informative too. A great change from the mindless template drivel or gibberish that we usually get. Davidy²²(talk) 23:11, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

== Just asking ==:::Mostly cuz that didn't work when it was on the main page, and calling attention to specific comics has worked exceedingly well. Davidy²²[talk] 06:57, 11 February 2014 (UTC) Was there a reason you deleted most of the List of all comics? lcarsos (talk) 05:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

What on- shi-

I was adding comic number 1132, and the preview was really slow, so I copied everything in the edit box and refreshed the page. I think half of the page hadn't finished loading in the edit box, and I only copied the first half. Derp Davidy²²(talk) 08:21, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

I figured it was something like that. lcarsos (talk) 04:56, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Just so you know, it happened again. But SlashMe fixed it. lcarsos_a (talk) 18:07, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Mother of fracking- I'm going to figure out what's causing this and I'm going to fix this. Godammit. Davidy²²(talk) 23:20, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Durr dee-durr, and now I've done it. Thanks for spotting that. lcarsos_a (talk) 07:22, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

Ahem... You gonna finish that?

Have you taken a look at the front page recently (say within since you created the 1134 redirect)? lcarsos_a (talk) 05:42, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

I have it open right now. Please don't ninja me again. Davidy²²(talk) 05:44, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

*Sits tight and twiddles thumbs* Actually, if you've got this I'll go back to the pitiful bit of literature I'm calling this year's NaNo. lcarsos_a (talk) 05:53, 14 November 2012 (UTC)

The Anonymous editor of 1132

Has been 50.0.38.245 all along. For a while he changed his signature to be a userpage that didn't exist, and wasn't a registered user. He has now changed it back to being the IP address again. Just thought I should do some out-of-band communication about that. If you want to change your last comment about the anonymous user, that would be good. (I almost offered to edit it for you, but then realized the subject we're talking about, and decided that if 50.0 ever learns about looking at the edit history and diffs, I don't need to be called a hypocrite as well as a banhammer wielding BOFH) lcarsos_a (talk) 03:35, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Broken mirror...

Sorry for the "ninja"... I guess we probably don't need 2 versions of the image though... Feel free to distill the explain part...--B. P. (talk) 07:15, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Godammit, I even had the window open waiting for the article. The definitions can be merged into one paragraph, and wiki magic will explain how the comic works. Davidy²²(talk) 07:20, 19 November 2012 (UTC)

Fooooooooor He's a Jolly Good Fellow...

You are the man, man. Keep it up! lcarsos_a (talk) 06:50, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Seconded. Great work, you deserved the milestone! --Waldir (talk) 12:26, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Please take a look

...at this. Nothing new to you, I suppose (spam fighting can be quite hard if we're overly cautious on every step), but I'm dropping the note just in case :) --Waldir (talk) 17:52, 25 November 2012‎ (UTC)

autoblocking suspicious users

Once again, it looks like auto-blocking users that have suspicious usernames would require someone with more power than we have.

However, I very nearly blocked those three when I noticed the account creation. But, I didn't because I thought they might be legitimate users with stupid usernames. But now I've read up on Wikipedia's block policy and from now on I'll be posting {{uw-blockindef}} (which I've bungled fantastically right now, but shortly should be working) which should allow the rare legitimate user (with bad taste in usernames) to reclaim their good account, but allow us to block bad people.

You're ever friendly, massive toddler of an admin, lcarsos_a (talk) 03:41, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I've also just found this page Wikipedia:Administrators' how-to guide which I will be reading very thoroughly and beginning to use this blacklist. lcarsos_a (talk) 04:16, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Hum. A great many of these templates could be condensed into a few bigger ones, but at least the documentation links are there for us to use. Also, you do know that Template:UserBox already exists, right? Davidy²²[talk] 04:55, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, crud. You switched, I switched. I do like the one we had better, mostly because of the descriptive labels and the nice thick borders. The name's in convenient CamelCase too. Davidy²²[talk] 05:18, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

As a general rule I loathe my shift key, using more keys to achieve the same goal is wasted time, and I could be called ruthless about wasted time. Saving a single keypress seems petty. But I had a CS professor point out that by specially crafting what you have to type (creating shortcuts) saving a keypress here and there can add up to saving several thousand keypresses every 8 hours, which over a long enough quantity of time can equal hours and days. That's my long winded explanation for why I like using {{userbox}} instead of {{UserBox}}.

Also, I like the wikipedia userboxen, it's more flexible. And that allows anyone who comes over from Wikipedia to know how to work userboxen here too. That's my case for it. I hope you agree because I don't want to have to push my shift key, but I'll take your input, and if we end up in a tie, we might ask Waldir to tie break for us, as he'd be a neutral third party. lcarsos_a (talk) 06:44, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

In CS, I learned that descriptive variable names and easy to recognize naming conventions can save heaps of debugging time. I personally like the CamelCase version better because it uses variable names like left-bg instead of id-c for the background color in the box on the left, which makes the template self-documenting and easier to grok for a new user who's just reading the source. Davidy²²[talk] 07:58, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

I was asked to comment. Here are my thoughts:

• Regarding CamelCase, it is indeed a neat convention but we don't use it elsewhere on the wiki. In fact, MediaWiki itself, in its early versions, used to rely on CamelCase for linking, but moved to the free-form, space enabled link syntax, which is better in many cases. Not everything converts nicely into CamelCase. So while I appreciate the argument to use CamelCase as the template name, I think the regular case version fits the wiki better. Besides, redirects are cheap and work well, so if the CamelCase title redirects to the lowercase one, whoever wants to use the CamelCase version can still do so seamlessly. Not an issue, therefore.
• I agree with Davidy22 on the parameter names. In fact, the code of the template can be arranged in a more readable form (using whitespace and indentation) so not only its uses can be deciphered, but the template itself too. Renaming parameters is a simple matter, especially for templates with not many uses as these are, which means there isn't a lot of replacements to perform.

In summary, I think the two templates should definitely be merged and the best features of each kept in the final version: the title being Template:userbox (with redirects from Template:UserBox and Template:Userbox), and the parameters using intuitive names as {{UserBox}}.

--Waldir (talk) 17:06, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. The wikicode looks god-awful ugly though, who's up for cleaning that thing up? Davidy²²[talk] 00:03, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

If you guys do the merge, I can clean it up afterwards :) --Waldir (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

separate section for title text

I agree that in the two instances you removed the section header for the title text, it wasn't justified, but in some cases it does make sense. See here. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 15:27, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

No more imagesize

I made a comment on Template Talk: comic#Imagesize, essentially imagesize isn't necessary, and I've changed the {{create}} template to not include it. So rejoice, and forget imagesize ever existed (until the bug gets fixed). lcarsos_a (talk) 03:02, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Bah, what was that parameter good for anyways? Clicking on the image should take you to the XKCD site anyways. What user cares about the image pages that the template currently takes you to? Davidy²²[talk] 06:20, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

That's an interesting point. It's technically doable. But I think there should be a way to access the comic images (granted, I'm not sure why exactly, but I'm not comfortable leaving them "orphans" —linkless— either) --Waldir (talk) 12:08, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

There's the list of all comics page, and we could make the titletext link to the image page or something. I dunno, any excuse to kill imagesize. Davidy²²[talk] 12:16, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

To clarify, linking the image directly to xkcd has nothing to do with killing imagesize. That, for what I understand, has already been done. Good point about the list of comics page. I'll wait for more comments before implementing the change in the image link target. --Waldir (talk) 12:35, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Imagesize isn't *quite* dead yet. There's still four or five comics that still use it. Permission to upload the thumbnail versions of those comics, as we do with the other large comics, and end that broken thing once and for all? Davidy²²[talk] 13:05, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't like the idea of uploading smaller versions of images. We ought to be able to use mediawiki's own image scaling abilities as soon as we can do some testing in the wiki setup and make the image scaling issue go away. Apart from that, what exactly are the problems of imagesize, again? I haven't followed the discussions about it, sorry. Feel free to give me pointers to the appropriate places where the issues have been discussed. --Waldir (talk) 13:17, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Please move pages

I'm noticing that when someone creates a new page with the wrong title you're just copy/pasting the content onto the new page. Please don't do that. Please use the move page feature on the drop down of the page, that way we can keep the edit history for the page intact, and that way it doesn't look like you created these oddly poor quality pages. Thanks much. lcarsos_a (talk) 00:49, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Righty ho. Davidy²²[talk] 02:09, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry

I have been working contra u by routinely adding a white line above the categories. I instantly raise white flag! And say good night! -- St.nerol (talk) 00:40, 7 January 2013 (UTC)

Trivia placement

Cheers mate! Please check the comment I made some time ago in the section you started, "Section style and usage" on the Proposals community page. –St.nerol (talk) 23:10, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

If you disagree with the trivia placement between explanation and transcript, why don't you say so, and explain why? –St.nerol (talk) 14:50, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

I made a section for discussion of this, so that we can come to some agreement: explain xkcd:Community portal/Proposals#Trivia and transcript. –St.nerol (talk) 15:18, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Moved to explain xkcd:Community portal/Coordination#Trivia and transcript placement –St.nerol (talk) 23:05, 6 March 2013 (UTC)

Jurassic Park category

Hi, you wrote you don't like how I created a new category for Jurassic Park. I thought it appropriate: there's a *lot* of references to Jurassic Park and/or velociraptors in the comics. And not all reference are to both... But what did you not like? Thanks for enlightening me! Kaa-ching (talk) 09:07, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

There's a lot of categories on this wiki. When adding categories to a page, it can get extremely difficult to make sure that you've gotten every category that applies to the comic. For regular editors, the amount that we have to remember when maintaining pages is already quite onerous; more categories hurt our dinky heads. If you're willing to steward that category, go ahead, but you'll have to remember to put in the explanation pages yourself when you find a comic that it applies to. Davidy²²[talk] 09:36, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

OK. Kaa-ching (talk) 08:26, 1 February 2013 (UTC)

220: Philosophy

Actually, what happened was: This being my first new page edit, I copy-pasted the format from another page, and then edited all the information to fit the correct comic. Then I realized I'd forgotten to remove the date of the original page's comic, so I did so. *blushes* No trolling intended, just a newbie mistake. Is 2/7/07 the correct date for this comic? Ekedolphin (talk) 11:23, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Oooh. I thought you had gotten the date then removed it after seeing earlier rants concerning omitted dates. You can check a comic's date by clicking on the "All Comics" button in the sidebar on the left. All dates are in YYYY-MM-DD format. Davidy²²[talk] 11:37, 28 January 2013 (UTC)

Yep. I see that now, and now that I know it's there, I create new pages straight from List of all comics. No offense taken. Thanks for the useful advice! Ekedolphin (talk) 05:52, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

Character names in transcripts

Ah, I see now that you've been cleaning up after me, adding character names to transcripts instead of "Man", "Woman", et cetera. Now realizing that's the wiki's standard, I'll endeavor to do that myself from now on. Thanks for your patience with the new guy. Ekedolphin (talk) 07:40, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

It's k, just doing maintenance. You're really prolific, do you write all of those yourself or are you getting those explanations off the forums somehow? Davidy²²[talk] 10:38, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

I write them all myself. It's been some time since I've looked at the xkcd forums, actually. Sometimes I get a little help from Wikipedia when a particular detail escapes me. But you'll notice I don't make an attempt to explain the math ones. *laughs* Ekedolphin (talk) 02:16, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

My unexplained hobbies.

I just want to make sure that you are getting this, but I restored "My Unexplained Hobbies." You can now explain them. Greyson (talk) 14:47, 11 February 2013 (UTC)

Shweet. Davidy²²[talk] 00:44, 12 February 2013 (UTC)

I suck at wiki stuff but am a real human - sorry for the confusion. -- ‎Schmammel (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

No matter. Also, see the blue box above the talk page edit box for instruction on how to sign your posts. Davidy²²[talk] 04:55, 19 February 2013 (UTC)

About your new admin powers

Actually just the rollback hammer. I've learned this after being burned a few times.

Rollback will actually not revert just the one edit you are looking at, but will go back until it hits a revision that wasn't done by that user, so its useful for pure spam accounts, but if you're just undoing a single edit, you may still want to use the undo tool.

Also, once or twice I actually had it revert all the way back to the last patrolled edit, which meant it actually got rid of the edits of a few anonymous editors too.

Just a caution that with great power comes great responsibility.

--lcarsos_a (talk) 04:11, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Oh damn, did I do that? Welp. Davidy²²[talk] 04:28, 22 February 2013 (UTC)

Removed Level 2 headings from Discussion page

Hi, I noticed you removed the level 2 headings in the discussion of comic 1188. I'm guessing it's the application of some formatting rule established on this wiki, so I'm curious where I can find a list of these standards that I should adhere to, so I don't make such a mistake again in the future. Jfresen (talk) 15:10, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not really a formatting convention, more of a workaround to technical limitations of the wiki. The way discussion pages are embedded into comic pages, headings in talk pages cause breakages when tables of contents are spawned. It's ugly and bad and it's the reason why we delete discussion page headers. Davidy²²[talk] 15:33, 20 March 2013 (UTC)

Captcha help

This thread was moved to explain xkcd:Community portal/Admin requests#Captcha help.

RE: Signature

Sweet, thanks David. Omega ^{Talk • Contribs} 14:51, 28 March 2013 (UTC)

Time is hard...

... and not only that, she also is, just like her sister Gravity, a heartless b**** :D Thanks for taking care! :) Caranhyas (talk) 09:41, 4 April 2013 (UTC)

Feedback

Hey David. It's nice that you're so responsive to requests such as those at Mediawiki talk:Sitenotice (or this one), but please take also a moment to report the request as completed, as that not only provides feedback to the requester, but is also a reference for the future (which removes the need to dig through the relevant page's history if, for example, one decides to check whether a request ever got implemented), and exemplifies desired behavior for future administrators. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 21:53, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Alright. Was just trying to get through everything quickly, and forgot to reply to those requests. Davidy²²[talk] 23:55, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

262 correction: Thanks!

Hi there!

Unfortunately, I was not aware that I had incorrectly created the page for xkcd 262. Thanks for fixing that. My only question is whether the page "262" should be redirected to xkcd 262 rather than just showing the deletion template.

Thanks,

Milar Kayne (talk) 07:02, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

The page "262" and all other pages consisting of only numbers are used internally to handle page linking. You don't really need to worry about them, you just need to know that making explanation pages in those numbered pages is baaad and that the create templates in the List of all comics will set up everything relevant for you. Davidy²²[talk] 08:14, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

So all of the xkcd comic pages theoretically "exist" on the site, but not all have connected pages? Also, how do I create a new page from the "All comics" page? Thanks for being so patient--I really want to be able to contribute meaningfully here. Milar Kayne (talk) 20:27, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

No, we just link to the xckd comic pages. The numbered pages handle links between explanation pages. On the "List of all comics" page, there are (create) buttons next to all the red links; click those to start explaining those comics. Davidy²²[talk] 00:12, 8 April 2013 (UTC)

OK thanks for explaining! I'll try to do better next time :). Milar Kayne (talk) 01:36, 10 April 2013 (UTC)

List of unexplained comics

Thanks for the vote of confidence - hoping it'll encourage more contributors! Sean (talk) 21:50, 22 April 2013 (UTC)

New sections in comic talk pages

Re this correction (especially your edit summary!): while there is the "Add topic" tab at the top of talk pages, you'll get new sections added to comic talk pages too.

Perhaps reducing them to ; headings is a better alternative that still marks a new topic.

Just testing that I have the right formatting character

Yes.

Of course this won't fix the automatically supplied heading from the "Add topic" tab, but then we do still want that functionality in other talk pages, like here... Mark Hurd (talk) 03:25, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Ooh, the semicolon does that? You learn something new every day. Noted. There might be a way to change those controls at the top, I'll look into that. Davidy²²[talk] 03:50, 26 April 2013 (UTC)

Time frames 1008-1014 have an artefact in your upload

In your uploads "under the ground" between frames 1008 and 1014 there is a grey horizontal line with unmoving "ticks" while the terrain does change above. This is not reflected in the live hash for the only hash in this range recorded so far. Mark Hurd (talk) 10:55, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Hrm, I've just been pulling the images from the xkcd site and uploading them straight. Imma check on this. Davidy²²[talk] 11:29, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, it's not just you, the geekwagon.net/projects/xkcd1190 has it too. Randall must have had a snafu that he's fixed. Mark Hurd (talk) 12:47, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

Time1190 - but sometimes I also have NO time

I did register in here mainly for 1190, I am sure you did see this. This weekend I will work on a script giving me an easy update for the next day template, for now I am doing manual.

THANKS for your great job on all the other comics!

I just do need more TIME...

And I am not native English, so I am still happy about everyone correcting me.

Archive discussion I did start here Talk:1190:_Time

--Dgbrt (talk) 21:29, 10 May 2013 (UTC)

I actually already have a script to do that. I thought you had made one of your own though when you were filling in for new days, so I was just letting you go ahead with that. Here's my script: [1]. Change the variables at the top of the script, run it and copy/paste the output into the page for time. The fields should be self-evident, but ask me if you have any questions. Davidy²²[talk] 00:38, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Oh, PYTHON - I prefer Perl or just a simple bash script.

So I will ask Randall for a translator for Python to Perl ;)

And tomorrow I hopefully will have some more time, your script is helpful.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:53, 11 May 2013 (UTC)

Just for fun I did the script in PERL. Here is the link: template--Dgbrt (talk) 19:29, 12 May 2013 (UTC)

And sometimes I do have time

Just tell me what I did do wrong (I will follow you...). I am still new to WIKI syntax, it is still new to me. But I am learning as you can see. And after all that I will write a Perl Script with a missing close paren...

I like jokes but I also like a clean Wiki here!

--Dgbrt (talk) 23:38, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

Uh, the explanation for that page is a wee bit thin for the size and complexity of the comic, and it uses terms like the hibbert curve without defining them. It's not enough of an explanation to cover the whole comic. Also, there were a few missing categories and a bunch of trailing spaces in the transcript. Davidy²²[talk] 23:46, 23 May 2013 (UTC)

"a wee bit thin for the size and complexity of the comic" so sure this is still incomplete (I just did forget to add that template). Oh, and we have so many more complex comics with a need for more explanations. And while I am still not native English, which does mean I have to goooogle fore many memes, I am hoping I can support this wiki. I just try to do my best - any help on me is welcome! --Dgbrt (talk) 00:12, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

And I'm pretty sure they're all tagged as incomplete too, so all is well. Davidy²²[talk] 02:17, 24 May 2013 (UTC)

User talk page deleted?

Hey there, apparently my talk page was deleted because the only content on it was "buttsex", which is fine, but I just thought I should let you know that I did not add that ;). Can I restore my talk page blank? --Mynotoar (talk) 11:39, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Yeah, sure, I saw the edit log when I deleted it. Do whatever you want with your user page. Davidy²²[talk] 11:50, 25 May 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete explanations

Hello Davidy22, I will stop creating incomplete new pages even when I think it's good idea to have a page for each comic here and work afterwards on all those incomplete ones. The pages Help:How to add a new comic explanation and List of unexplained comics should clarify this issue. Furthermore there are many more incomplete comics here not marked as incomplete so you can't find them here: Incomplete explanations. I am trying to give my best to support this wiki--Dgbrt (talk) 17:44, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

One add: I am not a youngster, my first computer was a C64 and the next one was a IBM compatible PC 286 (512 KByte main memory, 20 MByte hard drive). And right now I'm just trying to encourage other people to help here. But I don't want to fight against windmills.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:24, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

I wasn't making any implication as to your age. It is actually harder to track incomplete articles than nonexistent ones - the wiki has no way of automagically detecting them the way it automatically provides red links for missing explanations. We have the incomplete tag, but people delete it from pages that still haven't quite been explained completely, and I sometimes forget to tag a new incomplete explanation as incomplete. Also, the fact that some incomplete articles exist that are not tagged as incomplete does not justify the creation of more stubs; if you find an unsatisfactory explanation, mark it as incomplete yourself. Davidy²²[talk] 23:15, 3 June 2013 (UTC)

Various requests

Could you delete the spam page User:Inkovic and block the user who created it? And delete Talk:283: Projection as well, since it was apparently created by mistake?

Also, 1225: Ice Sheets is still missing a transcript. Could you help add it? And 266: Choices: Part 3 and 267: Choices: Part 4 lack explanations, but have been removed from the List of unexplained comics. Should we re-add them to that page, or create some basic explanations for them? --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 20:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete articles are marked as incomplete, we'll deal with all the unsatisfactory articles on this wiki after we have a page for every comic. Still not an excuse to make more stubs, mind you. Did all the rest though. Davidy²²[talk] 22:08, 17 June 2013 (UTC)

Please block spammer 70.50.106.152, he did kill 1190 Time.--Dgbrt (talk) 08:53, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

Looks like a mistake. Not ban-worthy. Davidy²²[talk] 10:24, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

This was the only edit he/she ever did. I am hoping this will not happen again, that big page was really hard to load.--Dgbrt (talk) 10:32, 18 June 2013 (UTC)

The main page needs to be edited, as the recent deletion of the List of unexplained comics was recently deleted, making the wiki comic count one less than the actual number. Also, could you delete Talk:List of unexplained comics and File:a matter of some gravity.jpg? The former is an orphaned talk page, and the latter was superseded by File:A Matter of Some Gravity.png. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 20:19, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Done. Davidy²²[talk] 02:08, 20 June 2013 (UTC)

I created an explanation for 1228 (Prometheus). What I wrote didn't appear for a few minutes and then when I tried to check why, I found you'd deleted a page, but the text I wrote then appeared where I was expecting it. Your comment on the deletion referred to "a thing on the front page" I should have read. I looked for this "thing", but I've still no idea what I did wrong, or what happened with all the page creation / deletion jiggery pokery. I created the explanation after clicking a box which told me to do so if I wanted to provide / improve the explanation. I apologise for my mistake, but perhaps it would be better not to put boxes on the main page which invite edits if those edits end up in the wrong place? 87.115.172.168 08:55, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

I manually create the comic page and set it to show up on the front page usually within an hour of every new xkcd comic. The explanation pages for every comic follow a naming convention, with the comic number followed by the comic name. We also make a few redirects for the wiki to use to make the back/forwards buttons work. In addition to that, every explanation page has a template; note how every other page on this site has a particular look to it. The page that you created didn't follow any of that, so I deleted it and copy/pasted it to the correct location. The thing on the front page that I was referring to was the correct explanation page location that I had created 21 minutes earlier. Davidy²²[talk] 09:06, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation - quite a manual process! I didn't realise I was creating a page - it looked to me like the page had already been created (which it had, it seems) and I would just be editing the empty section for the explanation. Now I realise that the "please edit" box should have shown up in the editor, perhaps alarm bells should have wrung. Nevertheless, I'm still wondering if it would be better, if possible, to somehow remove or modify the "please edit" box when it appears on the main page so it doesn't create an incorrect new page when one already exists! 87.115.172.168 09:29, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

Thank You,

hopiakuta DonFphrnqTaub Persina hopiakuta (talk) 09:03, 21 June 2013 (UTC)

There are a couple of xkcd comics that link to an extra image on the site when they are clicked. On this wiki, most of the time, the explanations just contain a direct link to this image. However, sometimes, users upload the secondary images and link to those. This is rather inefficient, especially since some images are too large to be displayed directly after they are clicked on the wiki. So, I was wondering if you could delete the few secondary images from the wiki. They are: File:lakes and oceans large.png, File:na make it better.png, File:subways large.png, and File:lojban translated.png.

In addition, I suggest that some unused files also be nuked. File:combination vision test fullcolor.jpg was superseded by File:combination vision test fullcolor.png. File:22 pieces.png was uploaded by a user who apparently just wanted to show off his Tetris skills. File:2008 christmas special original.png is an xkcd comic before it was updated, which I doubt is necessary to include on the wiki. File:starsmove.png doesn't seem to serve any useful purpose. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 23:50, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Na make it better and the translated lojban do add to the comic. The two larger versions of comic images and the junk files have been deleted. Davidy²²[talk] 01:12, 14 July 2013 (UTC)

I think you might have forgotten to delete File:22 pieces.png. And 404: 404 Error was created by mistake and also needs to go.

Also, could some admin tackle the issue that involves thumbnails not displaying properly? Dgbrt suggested this fix. Perhaps it could be tried? --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 16:00, 18 July 2013 (UTC)

The 404 page needs to exist for the previous/next comic buttons to work properly. It also explains why comic 404 is missing, which may be confusing to some xkcd readers. Mostly the forward/backwards buttons though. The scrap image is gone, and I'm looking into the proposed fix. Davidy²²[talk] 12:21, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Nope. The page 404: 404 Error is a duplicate to 404: Not Found . I just did a redirect there because I can't delete it.--Dgbrt (talk) 17:58, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Whoop, deleted. Davidy²²[talk] 23:08, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, but there is still the discussion page. I did the same redirect there.--Dgbrt (talk) 23:26, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Spam at 1190 Time

Hi, IP 68.100.149.94 is still doing annoying edits here. I do not like that.--Dgbrt (talk) 18:38, 22 June 2013 (UTC)

Su Doku

Hi Davidy22, I'm trying to enhance explains. People do read and understand shorter explains more easy, but the link to the details must be always included. I just did add the incomplete tag because my edit is maybe not complete. Everyone is welcome to help. But please keep short as possible, otherwise people won't read.--Dgbrt (talk) 13:19, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

That explanation is hardly too long. Our explanations should be self-sufficient, with the links there just to provide further context on things that we talk about in the explanations. A description of the format of sudoku is an important part of the explanation for comic 74, as the comic deviates from it in a notable way that not all visitors may recognize, be it because they haven't heard of sudoku before or because they aren't particularly familiar with the puzzles. There's a wee difference between cutting information and condensing the wording of a passage, and what you did with that explanation leads further towards cutting content. Davidy²²[talk] 13:45, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

I prefer explains people will read. The wiki link for Su Doku is already there but I will work on a small explain soon.--Dgbrt (talk) 15:07, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

What, three full paragraphs is too much for people to read? Three full paragraphs of a complete explanation are better than a paragraph and two sentences of incomplete description? I'd rather we follow the name of the wiki and actually explain the comics. Davidy²²[talk] 15:41, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

Read my version completely, I did adopt your hints on explain Su Doku and did some more polish. PLEASE just read before you undo! Tell me what's missing but I still prefer a more simple explain. --Dgbrt (talk) 16:10, 2 July 2013 (UTC)

You made a complete explanation incomplete in the name of simplicity. At least you bothered re-adding the relevant information back in post-hoc this time. Davidy²²[talk] 02:03, 3 July 2013 (UTC)

1190 Time pictures after major changes

Hi, any ideas to get new file uploads here? After your change we have some silence...--Dgbrt (talk) 00:55, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Geekwagon, Aubronwood and many other sites keep archives of past frame hashes. We can look up our last hash and upload all proceeding images here. I did that for the first 500-odd frames, until people started doing it faster than me. I'll probably start again since other editors seem to be on holiday. Davidy²²[talk] 02:43, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

You did upload all the images manual, is this the new way to do this? I thought your scripts don't like file names like 1234a, 1234b..., so do you not use a bot to upload the images? Further more: Since hashes from other sites do not map to the new naming here I think we have to document them here. But it seems I'm just running against windmills.--Dgbrt (talk) 19:01, 6 July 2013 (UTC)

Post-hoc scripts; instead of an image archive littered with special cases, scripts need only iterate in numerical order. It's slightly more difficult to upload, but it's a consistent naming scheme for future use. Davidy²²[talk] 02:03, 7 July 2013 (UTC)

1190 Time pictures - Do you use a bot or not...

...it seems not - why? Lazy as I am! You're not like this.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:27, 12 July 2013 (UTC)

I have a script to help with backlog uploads, but then I also manually upload new images while I'm awake and am near my computer. Davidy²²[talk] 05:14, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

What do you think about a bot? My computer is downloading the images by 24/7 so an upload here should be possible. But first I will start some tests at my local MediaWiki installation.--Dgbrt (talk) 12:56, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

A bot would be nice. Slashme's Slashbot actually did time image uploads, but he stopped cuz electricity bills or something. We could ask him if he's willing to share. Davidy²²[talk] 13:31, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

I am thinking about a bot like DgbrtBot. I never have done this before (WikiBot) but I know the fucking manuals and while Randall does not like Perl I will use this language ;). Tomorrow I will start some tests at my local MediaWiki and then I will need an account for a bot.--Dgbrt (talk) 14:53, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Outage from Friday to Saturday

Did you recognize this, every error was just a "access denied for user ... on database ...". This board was dead for 24 hours.--Dgbrt (talk) 23:32, 21 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep, purged cache to fix it. Not currently in a place with perfect access to internet though, so I'm not quite as fast with that as I usually am. Davidy²²[talk] 01:33, 23 July 2013 (UTC)

The same happened yesterday. Do you have chronic disk space/quota shortage? --Chtz (talk) 13:13, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

Yep. We added a donate button and the sidebar ads when these issues started happening - a few days after time - to buy better hardware. Money comes slow. We could probably stand to upgrade mediawiki and PHP too sometime. Sometime. Davidy²²[talk] 13:43, 25 July 2013 (UTC)

User RouterIncident and a bunch of templates

Hi, I'm hoping you have had nice holidays. We all do need recovery. But it's bad when no active admin is available here.

Please delete that citation template, or just enter a link to 285: Wikipedian Protester. Please delete also this categories: "All articles lacking reliable references" and "Articles lacking reliable references". We still have the incomplete category, that should be enough.

BTW: RouterIncident is maybe also on holiday, no action the last days. --Dgbrt (talk) 17:04, 28 July 2013 (UTC)

I could not find these categories you speak of in the page creation log, but citation needed is gone now. Davidy²²[talk] 08:01, 29 July 2013 (UTC)

Please move some pages and edit the "List of all comics"

I can't move pages here, but this should work:

{{comicsrow|1245|2013-07-31|10 Day Forecast}}

• the correct page must be: "1245: 10 Day Forecast"
• the title must be: "10 Day Forecast"

So I did not save this update because it would result into corrupt links:

xkcd.com/1245 | 10 Day Forecast (create) | number / title / talk | 10_day_forecast.png | 2013-07-31

Please help, or give me the power to do this on my own.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:03, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Ooor instead of deviating from the title on xkcd, we could use an excellent feature to the comicsrow template put in by Waldir. Davidy²²[talk] 21:20, 1 August 2013 (UTC)

Uh, I didn't know this feature.--Dgbrt (talk) 08:03, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Template:Verification needed

This template is unnecessary, please delete it.--Dgbrt (talk) 08:03, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Please also delete the templates behind this non existing categories:

• Wikipedia pages with incorrect protection templates‏‎ (2 members)
• Wikipedia protected templates‏‎ (2 members)

--Dgbrt (talk) 08:07, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Holy dependency hell. Purged the lot. Davidy²²[talk] 12:42, 2 August 2013 (UTC)

Can you nuke Talk:404: 404 Error? You forgot to delete it when you got rid of 404: 404 Error.

Also, any update on the thumbnail issue? They are still not displaying correctly See unused files. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 22:03, 9 August 2013 (UTC)

Deleted. Thumbnails are a bit trickier, seeing as Jeff is the only one who has direct access to the server. Still plugging. Davidy²²[talk] 02:08, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

For some reason, the wiki places the Main Page in the same categories as the current comic. This should be fixed, as the only category it should belong to is the root category. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 16:30, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

FYI I have answered User:Oneforfortytwo on his talk page. Mark Hurd (talk) 19:01, 17 August 2013 (UTC)

One more thing: Can you edit 1190: Time and remove all links to images after 2973:00? Seeing as there will not be any more of them uploaded, and some of them are showing up on the wanted files page. Also, can you restore the deleted image File:starsmove.png? Originally, I thought there was nowhere to put it, but I realized that I can link to it at 1190: Time/Pictures. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 06:04, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Done. Davidy²²[talk] 06:51, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Oh, can you delete 1360: Old Files/info? Also, could we possibly get a page where people can post pages to be deleted? That would make it easier to report them. --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 19:47, 28 June 2014 (UTC)

Can do. Davidy²²[talk] 23:59, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Mkay, deleted the page, was in the process of making the page when I recalled that explain xkcd:Community portal/Admin requests and explain xkcd:Community portal/Proposals tend to be the pages used for proposing deletion of pages. Page deletion doesn't come up incredibly often, although I could create the page if people really want it. Davidy²²[talk] 01:25, 30 June 2014 (UTC)

I found Category:Pages to delete. Although you can't explain why to delete a page. Perhaps a template would be more appropriate. Speaking of which, can you delete Category:Commissioned, File:16px-BlackHat head.png, File:spirit rewrite unknown author.png, File:tongue awareness.jpg, all of these uploads, and the Lorenz uploads here?

By the way, User:DgbrtBOT is not selecting the xkcd.com licensing choice when uploading new comic images, causing all of them to show up in Special:UncategorizedFiles. And User:Dgbrt appears to have gone AWOL. Is there any way we can contact him and get him to change his bot?

Finally, I think there should be a category for the pages listed here. Maybe helper comic pages, seeing as there is a helper comic images? Or comic subpages? --Oneforfortytwo (talk) 23:47, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

The template template:spam automagically includes the delete template. We used to have a delete template, but it literally saw no use. The black hat head is the site favicon and the tongue awareness image is used in an explanation. The others seem justifiable though. I'll submit a patch to dgbrt that oughta fix the image categorization thing. Comic subpages oughta be a fine name. Davidy²²[talk] 03:19, 4 August 2014 (UTC)

Time animation—a little help maybe?

About the animated Time GIF, I actually prepared one right away at the end, but I haven't been able to get it to upload here, even though it's rather less than the stated size limit, 12 MB out of I think 40 MB. If anyone can suggest what might be going on, I'll be happy to try it out. I did ask in the XKCD forum, but didn't get any help there. Just in case it was a temporary thing, I'll go give it a shot here again after I post this. Wouldn't want to save face or anything if it actually works all of a sudden, after all.—KarMann (talk) 20:03, 20 August 2013 (UTC)

Clean explains

Oh, I did some reverts (undo) today again, I'm not happy:

• Ninja Turtles still belong to NASA
• Bullsh.. sorry
• Duplicate on some chess jokes
• Math
• And math again at some statistics (Increased Risk). <- ok, or (Increased Risk.)

While you do fight against spam, I simply do fight against some similar windmills. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:04, 27 August 2013 (UTC)

Many of these were hamfisted ones that were targeted at one change, and reverted everything else contained in the same edit. Some of them were legitimate, some of them seem to show minimal effort to look at context before you edit. It's getting to the point where it's actually kind of disruptive now. If something is not in your area of expertise, don't revert like you do currently. There's a reason why rollback privileges are not given to all users. Davidy²²[talk] 03:37, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

1269: Privacy Opinions‎

This edit war is useless. The add is just TL;DR. And I'm sure even you did not read it all. Please keep explains as short as possible, otherwise people don't read. For understanding my post read this (read it all, there is a final statement at the bottom):

According to the title, the comic is about “opinions on internet privacy” in general. Six positions are offered as options. Four of the positions are tagged negatively by the author by their subtitles alone: the Crypto Nut, the Conspiracist, the Nihilist, and the Exhibitionist, all of which have negative valences in contemporary English. That the viewer is encouraged to identify negatively with these four positions is further encouraged by the content of the panels, as those characters are depicted either as having such boring lives that they have no need for privacy (the Crypto Nut, the Nihilist), or as being crazy (the Conspiracist, the Exhibitionist).
A fifth position, the Philosopher, is tagged somewhat ambivalently by the author: Megan is depicted as boring her interlocutor, yet in the title text, the author admits that he is usually the Philosopher. Also, “Philosopher” in vernacular English is neutrally valenced, potentially having the ability to expound either wisdom (sophia) or sophistry. It is also a synonym for Sage, the sixth position. As the author condones his own movement from Philosopher to Sage, he thus indicates that the Philosopher is to be viewed negatively, even if it is a tempting position to hold.
The title of the sixth position, the “Sage”, is positively valenced in contemporary English, and the author in the title text states that once he obtains a “burrito” – i.e., a “real” thing, he switches from the Philosopher to the Sage. The internal evidence presented thus far therefore is entirely consistent; the author encourages the reader to identify with the Sage.
By presenting five negatively tagged positions followed by a positively tagged sixth and final one, the author follows a rhetorical commonplace of listing and refuting a number of positions one by one, concluding with the favored and best one, which is not refuted and should be accepted both on its own merits and by virtue of being the last one standing. The comic therefore implies that no other (significant) positions exist.
Having completed the rhetorical analysis of the comic, we are now in a position to understand the meaning of “Internet Privacy”.
Panels #3 and 5 directly reference the American NSA. Panel #5’s “exhibitionist” also references Google, but the characters in the panel appear to be NSA agents (one wears an official cap and they are viewing the exhibitionist on an official, government-looking monitor). Likewise, the focus of the “Nihilist” is that the joke is on the people who gather the data, rather than those who are subsequently able to make use of it (such as Facebook’s users rather than "Facebook" itself; i.e., Facebook's employees and, by extension, its advertisers). The content of the actual data is only mentioned in panels #2, 4, and 5, and in each panel, it is suggested that it is meaningless or trivial. The Sage underscores the notion that any data known about him does not bother him, and therefore must be meaningless or trivial. The reader is thus encouraged to believe that it does not actually matter whether others discover personal data abou t him/her.
The comic is therefore what social theorists call *reductive*, because it reduces the range of possibilities of “Opinions on Internet Privacy” to an artificially and simplistically narrow subset; in this case, individuals concerned with government or corporate agencies using data that they have gathered on individuals, and the futility of worrying about such things. The comic does not admit the possibility of other “opinions on internet privacy” – namely, that individuals might have legitimate concerns with governmental or corporate uses of their data, let alone other individuals’ access to data that is assembled and distributed by corporations such as Facebook. The comic likewise does not consider the possibility of individuals having more interesting lives than the characters depicted, and therefore very real concerns about their privacy due to the activities that they engage in that are potentially more career limiting (should they be discovered) than obsessing about cryptography or eating a burrito.
The comic is “functionally” reductive, as opposed to “intentionally” reductive, because the reduction is the function or effect of the comic for readers who read it straightforwardly (such as the poster who claimed it was “about” Edward Snowden), whether or not the author intended this reduction to occur. There is not enough internal evidence in the literary text (i.e., the comic) to maintain that the author intentionally excluded other viable opinions on internet privacy; it could be that they are just not on his radar. For example, we do not have enough information in the comic to claim that the author is against civil rights; it could be simply that he doesn’t often think about them. Likewise, it would exceed the evidence of the comic to claim that the author believes that schoolteachers who use the internet to facilitate legal but frowned-upon sexual behaviors should lose their jobs if they are found out due to internet privacy breaches; it could be that the author simply hasn’t bothered to worry about these matters if they don’t affect him personally. This adjudication – whether the comic is “intentionally” reductive or not – may only be made on the basis of external evidence; that is, data known about the author from sources beyond this comic.
Use of such external evidence – historical, personal, psychological information about an author – is valid in determining the meaning of an author’s text, and is increasingly viable due to the accessibility of information about an individual on the internet today.
Additional observations about the comic follow. 

And when you did complete all that readings maybe you can summarize it, just in a way a reader would read.--Dgbrt (talk) 18:15, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

PRO TIP: explainxkcd is not guessxkcd.--Dgbrt (talk) 18:19, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

I did actually read it, and goes well past merely defining words in the comic. It covers writer's craft and all of it is derived from valid analysis of text from the comic. There's maybe a couple of excess words that I edited out, but length is not a bad thing. I read it the first time, and it was a valuable analytical contribution to the explanation; I question the value of flat-out reverting major edits that significantly improve pages. Davidy²²[talk] 18:33, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

First sentence is mapped to the title, the TL;DR section is at the bottom. OK?--Dgbrt (talk) 19:10, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Uh, you cut the passage in half and split it up when it was referring back on itself? And you're accusing me of not bothering to read it? Davidy²²[talk] 19:26, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Uh, Oh, Ahh, I did not delete any content, I just asked about improvements. Read my comments, still much smaller than this adds.

Are you happy when people do not visit this site again because the explain is bullshit? TL;DR... I still prefer articles people will read.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:49, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

I know you didn't delete anything. You cut it down the middle and pasted half the passage at the end of the article, with little regard for flow or structure. That's not a valuable edit, even if it's a smaller change than the initial passage addition. Having short explanations is not worth cutting out valuable information. Cutting out content that's irrelevant to the comic, yeah. Cutting out false relations and waffle, that's fine. Don't cut out well-written analysis.

Also, I'm noticing concurrent issues being raised against your edits again. Consider editing and working on top of edits instead of straight reverting them, and avoid antagonistic language. You already have one warning from the last time this happened. Davidy²²[talk] 21:59, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

I still disagree. The list of panel explains is overruled by a massive amount of text before. This is still not a helpful explanation.--Dgbrt (talk) 06:58, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

It's not a helpful explanation for those incapable of reading or scanning a sizeable passage of text. It contains all the relevant information in a coherent and laid-out manner, with a bullet pointed list to draw attention to the frame-by-frame explanations for those who want to skip the intention and analysis. Davidy²²[talk] 07:26, 30 September 2013 (UTC)

Advertising

My Firefox AddOn NoScript did block the external page "projectwonderful.com". The untrusted picture [2] does not belong to "explainxkcd.com". Then clicking the picture brings me to this link: explain_xkcd:Advertise_Here. But, I still do not see any advertisement here at all, only this "wonderful project world", what's wrong?

I would like to pay here for a link to Randall's store (he doesn't know), but it has to be an internal picture to an external link. A user action is required, ask Randall about this security. External clicks do count, embedded content to external sites is a real insecure solution. Many modern browsers will not allow this. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:51, 1 October 2013 (UTC)

The image does belong to us, it's just served by project wonderful when no advertisers are currently bidding on us. The word "advertise" used in the link title is in the verb form, not the noun; that page describes how to advertise on our site. That page contains our advertising guidelines and a few links to our project wonderful bidding page. There, you can create an account and bid on any of the four regions we have on offer. Our minimum rate is USD$3.8 per day, and they let you link any image to any site. If you still can't advertise with us, post imgur links to screenshots to show me what you're doing.

Have you not said in the past that you are an employed software developer? Instead of advertising a site wholly unaffiliated to you, why not ask your boss to try his hand at advertising on explain xkcd? It's cheaper than most advertising outlets, and we have a large and valuable audience for your average technology company. Your company can probably easily muster the ~$15 per day needed to advertise in all our available regions, and the process takes about as long as creating an account on any other site on the internet. Davidy²²[talk] 07:13, 2 October 2013 (UTC)

A database error has occurred...

I did clean the cache, it seems no admin is required to fix this damn problem. Site was down but available now again. I will also talk to JEFF about this.--Dgbrt (talk) 14:54, 3 October 2013 (UTC)

New server coming soon. Hopefully these DB issues will stop... forever. --Jeff (talk) 16:39, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

IP Users

I still do not like this mess: User:108.162.216.45 and User:50.151.2.168. Users have to register for this.--Dgbrt (talk) 11:18, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

No they don't? User:70.21.5.28. The page takes up so little space, it's not worth forcing them to do something they may not want to do. When our IP friend wants an account, they will make that choice on their own. Davidy²²[talk] 16:35, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Someone else will use the IP 50.151.2.168 in the future. If that user also likes xkcd and explainxkcd he will find a history he never has done. Still a mess. Nevertheless you can be sure that I never will edit this without admins permission.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:39, 8 November 2013 (UTC)

Question: — or -

You're changing — to -, even while it looks to me like a (typical American) loooong dash at the picture. Original transcript by Randal on 752 is "Do you--", so I don't understand some of your latest edits. I'm changing &mdash to — ( on Linux). I did opt for removing the double spaces after a sentence, but is this dash also history? Like miles... --Dgbrt (talk) 21:01, 22 November 2013 (UTC)

Eh, I just do it because it's only one character in the original comics. I don't actually have easy access to an mdash on my keyboard when I'm editing, I'll probably bind that to a key for future use. Davidy²²[talk] 00:12, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

My question was just: Is "—" wrong or not. You know I am German, but my OS and much more programs are running on English. That's because all that translations are just annoying. Nevertheless, at 752 the original transcript shows this: "Blonde: Do you--". this should be a long dash. And you did change many &mdash to "—", I just want to understand how to behave on this.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:17, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

There isn't really a codified grammatical rule for the length of a dash. It's mostly stylistic, but it seems to be a rather common convention that a short dash is for joining words, and a long mdash is for punctuation dashes. Again though, it's not on the keyboard and the vast majority of people probably don't pay attention to dash length when reading. Davidy²²[talk] 21:41, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

You did introduce this in the past, my keyboard gives me on "ALT GR + SHIFT + -" just a "—". but we still have to decide about a rule on this. "-"--Dgbrt (talk) 22:22, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

Extension:Comments

Have you thought about trying Extension:Comments? It was recently updated (July 2013) and looks like it would make commenting the explanations much more user-friendly. Could you make a little experiment to see if it works well? Say, install it so we can test and see if it works well? I'd be willing to help in the conversion of current comments to the new format, and we could even make it a long-term goal to eventually bring back all the comments from the blog :D --Waldir (talk) 16:24, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

I did edit the incomplete template, ERROR is not correct. But a hint to the missing reason is great.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:24, 23 November 2013 (UTC)

From prior experience, the comments plugin does generate a lot of meta-pages with scrambled names that made me prioritize other things over it, but I can totally run it for a few days to see how things go. In a few weeks, my free time will skyrocket and I should be able to install and monitor the plugin then. Davidy²²[talk] 08:40, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

Hey Davidy. I wonder if you're able to try this out. If so, let me know how I can help!

On the other hand, I am disappointed to hear that the comments extension doesn't integrate neatly with mediawiki. Are you aware of any similar choice that may be better-behaved? --Waldir (talk) 17:33, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

New comics BOT

I think that BOT is doing the job right now. Maybe there is a possibility to install it on this server, not much but some PERL modules are required, it should work on any OS. Nevertheless since I could see the updates in general did happen at 04:00 UTC I will implement a new script starting at 04:00 UTC, polling again after that again. But since I don't want to poll xkcd too much that poll would stop after fifteen minutes. Then there will be just a five minute schedule, until a new comic is found.

BTW: $text .= "{{comicsrow|$comic_num|$date|$comic_name|$picture_name}}\n"; means I will always add the optional parameter for the picture. Not all picture did work properly in the past, so I decided to include this parameter to get a working picture link on the main page. Any suggestions are welcome. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:50, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

I have an idea for that, but I have a metric buttload of things that I need to do by the end of this week. I've seen comics come out several hours late so I think polling for four hours would still be apt, and I'm sure Randall's server could handle us polling him a little faster. Having a explanation page up at the same time as a new comic is really huge. I believe I have a solution for the comicsrow problem, but I also don't know Perl. I could probably figure it out in a weekend though. Davidy²²[talk] 01:19, 27 November 2013 (UTC)

Incomplete tag at main page

Am I wrong, or is every new comic complete at the main page in the future? --Dgbrt (talk) 23:16, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

When we include a comic page on the main page, templates and categories are preserved. While that's good for page layout and the like, it's not so good when we have templates that impart their categories upon the inheriting page, like the incomplete template did. It was tagging the main page as incomplete whenever the newest comic was marked as incomplete. Davidy²²[talk] 23:27, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

Yezzz, I understand. But presenting a new incomplete page in this way is not good. The counter has to be adjusted. But I'm serious on this and maybe some noinclude tags may help. While the main page should not be counted, the page it presents, if incomplete or not (<-the problem), should presented at the proper state. My bot will cover any solutions for further uploads. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:40, 9 December 2013 (UTC)

What counter? The counter on the main page doesn't take into account the main page itself, and the transcluded page is shown in its entirety, save for the discussion page and one category. What's the problem here? Davidy²²[talk] 00:37, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

I don't mind about a 24 hour ban...

...but after that I did try to do some more talks here: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php?title=User_talk:Mrarch&curid=13771&diff=55110&oldid=55109 DELETED! I'm still the pest here, or what? I'm still hoping you will understand my actions here. I'm working much on the health of this board, talking to Jeff and many more here. And Mrarch just did delete my message. I'm German, so it could happen that I do use a sentence which could be interpreted different to my meanings. BUT: I just want to support this site as much I can do. --Dgbrt (talk) 00:49, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Oh nuts, didn't see that. I though he was just setting up his own user and talk pages. I'll leave a notice. Also, try to cooperate, and practice your English. There are a few naunces in his arguments that you're gliding over. Davidy²²[talk] 02:45, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

And oh nuts, we need some more people to review all the updates here. We have many new people here, doing great edits, but sometimes a correction is needed. I will still do this here, but you can be sure I will be much more polite when an edit-war does happen. I don't mind - xkcd is just fun. That counts! --Dgbrt (talk) 00:26, 14 December 2013 (UTC)

BOT uploads at the comic list

Hi, I can remove that "Picture.png" add, but I think it's more safe to use this optional parameter. Sometimes upper case and lower case did cause some problems. I'm trying to prevent this by providing the image link my BOT did upload here.

On January 1 my BOT did fail because the picture was not accepted at this Wiki, and my BOT stops on every unexpected error. The BOT doesn't understand Randall and so, when the BOT is running on problems it simply does nothing.

I've had serious problems to connect this site since a few deys, I don't understand why, but my BOT is doing it's job as planed.

Looking forward to some translations...

--Dgbrt (talk) 22:04, 6 January 2014 (UTC)

Hm? What cases cause it to fail? Imma make this work. In cases of ambiguity, we could always err on the side of caution and include the parameter. Davidy²²[talk] 00:54, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

The BOT did fail on January 1. because the "PNG" was in fact an "Adobe XMP" format and the upload was rejected by this site. A BOT barely can't handle this unexpected mess. This requires human action and the BOT stops further actions. The optional parameter will be posted anyway; if BOT doesn't fail.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:13, 7 January 2014 (UTC)

Incompleteness Tag.

My browser (Chrome) is showing that 137: Dreams is the incomplete comic of the day. I used the tags there as the page instructed. Did I use them incorrectly? (possibly it was supposed to be in the main page edit instead of the discussion? I am fairly new here)This is the algorithm now. 19:10, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

The explanation page is already tagged. Tagging the discussion page marks the discussion page as incomplete. Davidy²²[talk] 19:31, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

I did edit this discussion page with a nowiki marker. And ‎Anomulus please sign your comments in the proper way, it's much more easy to discuss with an user instead of just a date. --Dgbrt (talk) 22:41, 12 January 2014 (UTC)

I did move some comics back to the incomplete section, a full explain is still more worth than a 0% ratio here. Nevertheless I am still thinking, not really working, on a German translation. But just because the ratio looks great here I will focus on that translation soon. Stay tuned...--Dgbrt (talk) 23:18, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

If our numbers are right, a very healthy portion of our visitors should be German and you shouldn't have to be concerned with taking on the entire burden of translation. It's probably good to be conservative with the incomplete tag, it reduces the burden on of research on translators if they only have to change the language. Davidy²²[talk] 23:33, 2 February 2014 (UTC)

Incomplete Explanation of the Day

Some thoughts:

• explain xkcd:Incomplete Explanation of the Day: No need for the daily update, it's also still at the top.
• MediaWiki:Sitenotice should contain a link to this: Incomplete explanations.

--Dgbrt (talk) 18:43, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

It takes very little extra effort to also update the project page, so I just do it anyways. The incomplete explanation of the day is supposed to be a focusing effort, to finish off one comic at a time. A link to the list of all the incomplete comics wasn't working, which is why I started drawing attention to individual comics in the sitenotice. Davidy²²[talk] 19:55, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

So tell me what's wrong with this link: Incomplete explanations. In my opinion this could be still placed at the top.--Dgbrt (talk) 20:26, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

Mostly cuz that didn't work when it was on the main page, and calling attention to specific comics has worked exceedingly well. Davidy²²[talk] 06:57, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I don't understand, there was a similar link in the past.--Dgbrt (talk) 21:13, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

And in the past, that link had almost no effect on the incomplete pages count. Davidy²²[talk] 23:54, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

I just did remove a typo

:"1930s" has "Santa Claus is Coming to Town". a

If you can not accept my typo correction on that simple damn "a" I will give up here. And I'm not sorry. --Dgbrt (talk) 00:40, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

In the same edit I removed whitespace from the page, as is not immediately obvious from diffs but can be seen from the edit size numbers. The "a" has been gone in each of my proceeding edits, as you can see in the revision log if you would care to read it. Autoreverting is bad. Davidy²²[talk] 00:57, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

1037: Umwelt

Hi, I'm sorry. But as my comments did say, some texts maybe helpful; but I can't fix all that layout issues. The individual pictures are still great, some ideas on that edits are nice, but it does not work in the full context. And those massive edits don't give both of us a way to review them all. I just did that revert because it doesn't work. --Dgbrt (talk) 22:09, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

The layout is still broken... I don't like edits without using a preview to verify a proper layout — and I do not like massive edits no one can follow.--Dgbrt (talk) 22:22, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Image resizing will be fixed soon. Give it at most three weeks. Davidy²²[talk] 01:37, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

New admin proposal

Please take a look here. Cheers, Waldir (talk) 18:36, 4 March 2014 (UTC)

Template:comic

Isn't this just a revert and a freeze to a former revert done by me? Others did play then again on the main page appearance, but changes at this should be only possible for people not experimenting. The entire main page has to be protected. That page isn't a playground.

And on that admin discussions on me: My most posts are related to language, layout, and something — and I still don't like all those esoteric explains on ASSes, PENISpumps, ... But an admin has to work mostly on different issues.

Randall does primarily focus on "romance, sarcasm, math, and language.". Randall does more, so the SEX category is here, but I think we have to focus on the "primarily focus" at the headlines on explain pages first.

My advice here: Do NOT try to enhance well working templates, other statements are much more important.

--Dgbrt (talk) 00:18, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

It's not quite a revert, he changed how linking works for the first comic page, added jump links to the first and last pages and attempted a few fixes. I just fixed a few omissions that he made. Admin work usually tends to be focused on non-content stuff, yeah, but I feel like those people maybe probably might be right. Innuendo in comics not explicitly mentioning sex exist. Davidy²²[talk] 03:03, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Mail send

It's still not easy to find important mails, I nearly lost yours but now you got a reply. Your issues needs a test, I will do that soon. And sorry for this three month late reply. Maybe I have been blind, I just found your message today.--Dgbrt (talk) 23:46, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

The site GitHub.com did send a message to me from "David ???(possibly your surname)" but the address was in fact [email protected]. So this reply was stupid by me because that mail will never reach you.

Please send me a notification here because I don't visit that GitHub site on a regular base. Last visit was two or three months ago. It's just a backup for myself and available to everyone who likes.

Your request could remove links to GIF or JPG files, so I decided to include the picture link always because it does work on that template. Dynamic comics are much more complicated and my BOT stops to post any update here if something went wrong. I'm still thinking about a better logging on that, My idea is still: If the BOT decides not to post chaos here it should save any content for later manual analysis. But that's a big deal because Randall's comics are so different...

Nevertheless the BOT covers most comics just in time, I know people are happy on this — and when the comic is too sophisticated, it just stops to prevent chaos here.

--Dgbrt (talk) 21:41, 18 March 2014 (UTC)

File:lorenz-new.png

Moving this to File:lorenz.png does not work like my former updates, maybe it's some cache on the server. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:31, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Huh. I'll have to take a look at that. Davidy²²[talk] 21:45, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

The file on the server looks right. It'll probably update itself on the caching servers in good time. The distortion is annoying though. Davidy²²[talk] 21:49, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Can you clear the cache? The page 1350 still looks bad like my former reverted updates. But maybe we use this just a test for the servers. Uploads are easy, but updates are the hell. --Dgbrt (talk) 22:08, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Eff it, let's wait on it. Davidy²²[talk] 22:17, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

One idea: Try "Lorenz.png" instead of "lorenz.png". While WIKI is mostly case insensitive the servers maybe are. --Dgbrt (talk) 22:20, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

German page

Is it still possible to create a German page here? I'm complete (honestly mostly) on my investigations for presenting a proper German page. On a positive reply I will present some more details (maybe screenshots) of my local wiki and a plan on how to bring it up to public. And consider, this would not only be for German readers, we have Austria, Switzerland, and many other parts in Europe. I would be happy to support this, and my BOT would be too. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:37, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

It's still possible, gonna do it after we clear out all the incomplete pages as promised.Davidy²²[talk] 20:44, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

So then this never would be happen. --Dgbrt (talk) 20:50, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

No, because we'll eventually clear out our backlog of old, incomplete articles. Davidy²²[talk] 21:24, 30 April 2014 (UTC)

/r/xkcd sitenotice

May I ask why you've added a sitenotice about /r/xkcd? The /r/xkcd sub is controlled by /u/soccer, who links to racist, xenophobic and misogynistic content regularly. Randall has even spoken in support of a petition for /u/soccer to be removed as a mod (which of course didn't happen because reddit doesn't do that). /r/xkcdcomic is a non-hateful alternative, one that Randall supports, and it has more users than /r/xkcd. LadyMondegreen (talk) 13:19, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

If you look closely at the text and click on the link, you'll see that it actually says and links to xkcdcomic. Also, /r/xkcd is currently at 40000 subs and hit 10000 a few years ago. Davidy²²[talk] 20:38, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm, yeah, I'm not sure how I got that backwards, but I did. Someone pointed it out to me on IRC and I guess I didn't look closely enough. Sorry about that. LadyMondegreen (talk) 19:35, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

Any idea on this: A Smarter Planet

This should be mentioned here, but that article doesn't represent a comic from the main page. Maybe it should be merged to Randall? What do you think? --Dgbrt (talk) 21:17, 6 May 2014 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea. I'll put that on the list of things to do. Davidy²²[talk] 03:56, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, I've forgotten to post a reply here. I did put in a new template for this special issue because it's different to a common comic from xkcd. A standard comic template never can cover this. And when this template is complete it should be protected, but the resulting category page is still bad and I need help on this. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:55, 28 May 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, I figured that when I tried it myself. It might be a bug with parserfunctions though. Davidy²²[talk] 03:17, 29 May 2014 (UTC)

Do we have active admins here?

This site seems to be running into chaos. The former approved admins do not work that much here; and now I'm even missing you.

Maybe you are on holidays; if so, I'm just greeting with "Happy holiday". BUT this site still needs an admin.

You know I'm still looking forward on a German page for this, but this English page is still on my main focus. --Dgbrt (talk) 23:16, 9 May 2014 (UTC)

The image caching issue is caused by Cloudflare not refreshing the image that it serves as fast as we'd like it to. Outstanding admin requests and unsigned messages were left for one day. That's not inactivity. The only thing I saw being raised was the admin request, which was closer to a progress update to which you butted in with an irrelevant remark. The only conflict I see in talk pages is between you and other editors, and it's only mild disagreements and mostly civil discussion at the moment, so I'm pretty fine with it. Davidy²²[talk] 03:56, 10 May 2014 (UTC)

Minor edits

Hi, you are often doing minor edits like fixing some syntax or missing parentheses. If you would mark them as "minor edits" it could be ignored at the "Recent changes" page. Major changes could be found much more easier. --Dgbrt (talk) 21:29, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Incoming confirmation email: Domain of sender address [email protected] does not exist

Since the email address of incoming confirmation emails come from a non-existing domain, they are bounced so never reach me.

From the mail logs:

   2014-05-30T08:36:21.455368+02:00 snap sendmail[12564]: NOQUEUE: connect from vps.lunarpages.com [67.210.100.50] (may be forged)  
   2014-05-30T08:36:22.049902+02:00 snap sendmail[12564]: s4U6aLdn012564: ruleset=check_mail, arg1=<[email protected]>, relay=vps.lunarpages.com [67.210.100.50] (may be forged), reject=553 5.1.8 <[email protected]>... Domain of sender address [email protected] does not exist  
   2014-05-30T08:36:22.219369+02:00 snap sendmail[12564]: s4U6aLdn012564: from=<[email protected]>, size=2306, class=0, nrcpts=0, proto=ESMTP, daemon=MTA, relay=vps.lunarpages.com [67.210.100.50] (may be forged)

-- Jeroenp (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

You shouldn't need a confirmation email to contribute and use the site. Uh, that feature'll probably be turned off; how did you request the email that generated the above error? Davidy²²[talk] 02:21, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

Because at http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Special:Preferences it says:

E-mail address is optional, but is needed for password resets, should you forget your password.You can also choose to let others contact you by e-mail through a link on your user or talk page. Your e-mail address is not revealed when other users contact you.

E-mail confirmation: Your e-mail address is not yet authenticated. No e-mail will be sent for any of the following features.
Confirm your e-mail address

• Enable e-mail from other users
• Send me copies of e-mails I send to other users
• E-mail me when a page on my watchlist is changed
• E-mail me when my user talk page is changed
• E-mail me also for minor edits of pages

So I used this to send a confirmation email: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/Special:ConfirmEmail

Jeroenp (talk) 19:13, 31 May 2014 (UTC)

The lunarpages do not know to set up a proper Mail Server. My Mail Servers also would never accept this until I whitelist them. Sadly I still have to do this for some customers — also big customers in the US. Reasons because this mail isn't valid:

• dig vps.lunarpages.com:

;; ANSWER SECTION:
vps.lunarpages.com.	3600	IN	A	80.156.86.78
vps.lunarpages.com.	3600	IN	A	62.157.140.133

• whois 67.210.100.50:

The answer belongs to LunarPages.

• But 67.210.100.50 isn't a registered MX entry for the domain "lunarpages.com":

lunarpages.com.		300	IN	MX	0 sharpmail-new.lunarpages.com.

• which is:

sharpmail-new.lunarpages.com. 300 IN	A	74.50.25.50

I'm sorry, but fighting against SPAM is important and a proper Mail and DNS configuration is mandatory. Maybe those admins at LP do need some help and advise.--Dgbrt (talk) 22:06, 2 June 2014 (UTC)

If you don't have anything useful to say, don't say it. You don't have to be in on every single conversation on the wiki. The issue is being dealt with. Davidy²²[talk] 03:45, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

"Feeling old" category

Hello, Davidy22. I noticed that you deleted the "Feeling old" category I made a while ago due to being "tenuous, not significant enough." In the interest of becoming a better contributor to the wiki, could you explain further on significance for a new category?

I realize that there are various qualifications that a category has to fulfill, lest it only add clutter to the wiki. A category ought to be simple, memorable, and concise. It should refer to something within or about the strip, be deliberate, and be objective. And, ideally, it should apply to a fair number of strips. I figured that the four strips that included the motif of "character/Randall reflects on how distant the seemingly-recent past is" all used it significantly, as a central theme or as a punchline. I personally feel that Randall hasn't exhausted his use of this motif, and therefore it warrants its own category for future comics, saving time in future explanations and aiding readers of past explanations.

(My one personal issue with it is that the phrase "feeling old" does not feel concise or specific enough, but I couldn't think of a single word or a better two-word phrase to describe it.) -- 108.162.216.21 18:18, 12 August 2014 (UTC)

I hope you (Or Davidy22) don't mind me starting off this conversation. Categories are not meant to be used as a tag cloud. Categories are a concrete thing in the comic such as Category:Comics with color, Category:Red Spiders. They are not motifs or feelings about the comic. We don't have categories for happy comics and sad comics, and I can't think of a persuasive enough argument to allow them. Until there's a significant number of comics with "I feel old" or "I'm getting old" or "#FeelingOld" (eww) in the text, I'd hold off on trying to push this one through. lcarsos_a (talk) 05:55, 13 August 2014 (UTC)