Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2011/August

blocked?
This message popped up as I was trying to edit:

"This action has been automatically identified as harmful, and therefore disallowed. If you believe your edit was constructive, please inform an administrator of what you were trying to do. A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: poop vandalism."

In Riots in England continue for a fourth night, please remove the phrase "the first confirmed deaths caused by the riots", since I couldn't verify that phrase. Do the same edit on Lead article 1, and also remove the time-sensitive phrase "last night". Ragettho (talk) 15:53, 10 August 2011 (UTC)


 * It wouldn't let me remove the phrase either, but I got around it by commenting the phrase out without removing it; that was allowed. --Pi zero (talk) 18:46, 10 August 2011 (UTC)


 * The bug in the abuse filter may be related to the fact that the article mentions Liverpool, which has poo in it. --Pi zero (talk) 19:15, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
 * THIS IS SPARTA SCUNTHORPE! If that's unrepairable in the filter, then I'm all for switching it off. Vandalism levels are so low, and Liverpool is likely to stay in the news. Blood Red Sandman  (Talk)   (Contribs) 19:18, 10 August 2011 (UTC)
 * Should be much better now. Whether it ought to be repaired a different way, or switched off, is another question.  --Pi zero (talk) 20:20, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia links in (old) edit toolbar
I know none (or very few) of us regulars use the editing toolbar, but I expect some less experienced editors do, and today I noticed that the Wikipedia link button in the old toolbar (the one that looks like an underlined Wikipedia logo) inserts, rather than article title. This should probably be fixed, if it's an easy job (although it's not a big deal). I don't know if the new toolbar does the same thing. I'll go check it out in a few minutes. DEN DODGE  George Watson  14:25, 20 August 2011 (UTC)
 * It seems the new toolbar doesn't have a feature for inserting WP links at all. DEN  DODGE  George Watson  17:21, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Portal "refresh"
I've done new templates for the top-level regional portals (Africa, Asia, Central America, Europe, Middle East, North America, Oceania, and South America). They've been done to be a very close derivative of the main page. You may need to do a hard refresh to get the title suppression to kick-in.

What doing this highlighted is that some would only list one article in the headlines section until Category:Archived was excluded from the criteria on the DPL. I then proceeded to waste time trying to differentiate archived from non-archived.

Here's what I would like:
 * 1) The ability to ask a DPL how many results it will return. (Eg.|mode=count and an integer is returned, not a list of articles.)
 * 2) The list of (currently 15) articles made up from two DPLs; C and A, where the number of articles in C+A is 15. Articles in the A DPL be displayed in a slightly different colour.
 * 3) The C+A functionality implemented on the main page; in this way, the bottom of a headlines list is faded for the archived articles.

Have prodded Bawolff on the count articles issue; but, dendodge is working on other portal/main page proposals. However, feedback on what's done to-date would be welcome. For example, what do people think of having a very faded region map as a background image on these pages? Or, where I've just snagged, and embedded, the existing lists of countries, what other ideas can people come up with for that part of the page?

You'll also notice I've switched to the new RSS form using Special:NewsFeed. --Brian McNeil / talk 03:18, 30 August 2011 (UTC)