GTA Wiki talk:Profile Tools

Profile tools
Hullo!

I hear members of this wiki are very interested in Wikia's new profile tools - as seen on Halopedia and now also FFXIclopedia. GTW is very high on our list of wikis to get the new stuff, especially with the upcoming launch of GTAIV. Therefore I have arrived to help organise this with you :)

Our current plan is to roll out the Profile tools - that is, Profiles, Avatars, Awards, Gifts, Friends and Userboxes - first, along with a tool called Site Scout. (There are more, but they will not be available until later.)

In order to organise this we need for users and especially admins to take a look at the help pages linked above, read up about it and be prepared for the changes. We would also like to talk about when you think you would be ready for the tools - around the end of next week is best for us. There will be a few things to set up - links to the help pages, announcements and some backend stuff. Not too big, but better to be in place in plenty of time.

Hope this brightens your afternoon! Kirkburn (talk) 19:41, 11 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Thanks for bringing this to us Kirkburn. I'm sure that at least some of these features will be a great addition to GTW. User Profiles definitely contain some improvements. Avatars are good, Site Scout is good, and Gifts is probably a good way to forward our our current Project:Medals system. Userboxes will be good so long as it is as powerful as our Template:Userbox. I'm always hesitant about increasing the social importance of easily-enhanceable statistics (such as edit count). Is there a simple way to show a users main-namespace and total edit counts on their user page (no more prominent than on SiteScout) rather than using Awards? Gboyers (?) 21:43, 11 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Hey, thanks for taking a look! I've been updating the help pages with more images - please check out Profile tools and related links. For awards I understand the worry, but it is a fairly "quiet" feature - the main people who will see them are the users themselves. Parading them is unlikely to become an issue as they only appear on a user's profile page. As for edit counts, you can check up your own on Special:Editcount. However, I don't know of a way of showing that on pages with the current extension.
 * The user box tool is pretty powerful, but you will probably need to test it out to really see - you should be able to try it on http://fp030.sjc.wikia-inc.com/wiki/Special:UserBoxes Kirkburn (talk) 13:44, 14 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Okay, that all looks good. Since this appears to totally replace the user pages, is there still the level of customization, or is it simply a binary choice between the social space and the wikimarkup space? And what will happen to existing userpage content? Next question is about moderation - do staff have administrative access to these systems (eg avatars, userboxes, user's profile content), and if so, which? Gboyers (?) 13:12, 14 April 2008 (EDT)


 * That should mostly be answered by this part of the user profile help page. The users have the option of which is shown by default, whilst the other is always accessible. When you say "staff", who do you mean? If you mean the site admins, yes, they have a lot of control over the stuff, such as approval and deletion rights - it's not fully comprehensive at the moment, but it is being worked on. If there are problems, there's always the techs. Kirkburn (talk) 20:08, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

We're hoping to do this as early as tomorrow (the 16th), will you be okay with this? Kirkburn (talk) 17:11, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Yep - please go for it. It shouldn't be a problem, as I haven't heard any negative comments, only the above concerns. I'll start compiling some documentation once it's in place. Gboyers (?) 19:01, 15 April 2008 (UTC)


 * We've got a test site running on http://beta.gta.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page to check for bugs before it goes live. Kirkburn (talk) 15:25, 16 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Links you'll want to add to MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar:


 * Special:SiteScout | Real-Time Activity
 * Special:Random | Random Page
 * Special:Random/Image | Random Image
 * Plus a sitenotice about the new features, and links to the help.wikia pages. You should have several default gifts available, and we are making all admins giftadmins and commentadmins. You may also notice several new (unused) namespaces such as poll and video, ignore them for now. Kirkburn (talk) 15:50, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

The new stuff is live! I have added the above links to the sidebar, created custom fields for the user profiles (see the help.wikia article for info). Enjoy! Kirkburn (talk) 17:28, 16 April 2008 (UTC)

Stuff for the Main Page - these extensions can be placed on your main page or community portal to "surface" social activity on a wiki. The first two are used together, as only one or the other will ever show.

It seems that the edit count per-user has been totally reset. It is only counting edits since the Profile Tools were installed. Does this not disadvantage the users who have worked so hard thus far? Would it be possible to process the existing user stats, whether or not awards are issued retrospectively, or at least update the number of edits in the user's profile (so future milestones are given the correct award)? Gboyers (?) 09:51, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

Poke about getting the above stuff on the Main Page - it's probably the easiest way to present it to the community at large. :) Kirkburn (talk) 17:31, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Phase two!
We've enabled some more new features - new-style polls and video uploads.

See w:c:help:Help:Polls (new) and w:c:help:Help:Images and Video for info on them. Kirkburn (talk) 15:31, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Since the poll lengthened the right side of the Main Page, I have added the above profile stuff to the left side. Perhaps it could go at the top of the column? Kirkburn (talk) 20:26, 23 April 2008 (UTC)