Doom Wiki:Central Processing

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Archived discussions

 * 2005
 * 2006
 * 2007
 * 2008

Map Walkthrough Template.
I guess, it would make create a map walkthrough more comfortable, if we had a template for it. This way users would have an easy way to make a walkthrough without copy and pasting too much stuff from other walkthroughs, over and over again. Plus, this could define a kind of standard for walkthroughs. Maybe we need to discuss, what should be included in the template, cause not every point is needed. For example, my walkthroughs for The Lost Episodes of Doom don't use stuff like speedruns, for i have not found any of this. On the other hand, i added one point trivia for the second map E1M2: Fusion Power Plant (The Lost Episodes of Doom), to fill in some additional information about the map.--Cybdmn 15:52, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


 * You mean this? :>   For an example of how the various sections can be used in an article, see E1M4: Command Control.    Ryan W 20:51, 18 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Ah, thank you. I haven't found that, so i used another walkthrough (i think it was e1m1) as a base for mine.--Cybdmn 09:51, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Names
As i told at another page here, i think we should use complete names of persons throughout the whole wiki. To give an example: Here the creators are called Chris Klie (Christen David Klie) and Bob Carter (Robert Kiana Carter). I think the usage of complete names would made the wiki more consistent, otherwise we sure need much redirections.--Cybdmn 07:58, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No objections on typesetting grounds (and redirects don't affect the performance of the site one way or the other; Wikipedia has had megabytes of discussions about that). The only tricky case might be when a person contributes to the Doom community using a handle, doesn't want their real name publicized, but then someone discovers it.  Perhaps some of our web forum veterans can comment on how that is typically handled.    Ryan W 21:19, 20 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The privacy is a good point, and it should always be handled with care, no doubt about it. I can remember a case at our games database, where a developer from the old amiga days contacted the webmaster to ask for removing his name, cause it seemed to be a stopper for his further career. Such cases are really delicate. Who knows, if a certain community member want to stay anonymous? And, it is a well known fact, that a information in the internet is not easy to pull back, not in times of the internet archives and the google cache. Maybe real names should just be used, if the name is already widely known, for the user spread it itself. But that problem wasn't really what i meant. I told more about consistency, and for the example i used, these names can be read on the mentioned book.--Cybdmn 00:50, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

DOOM 1 @ 2 ARMY MEN mod n or WAD ideas
This is a request for any doom wad n mod makers to help me make a old school ARMY MEN conversion using the DOOM engine. I have the idea written down n all the game information is also written n ready to go. I need help wit this for 2 reasons. 1 is that i don't have a computer n nor do i have that ability to do it my self, I would also like if someone can teach me how to make wads n mods for DOOM. Any one in IL. or IN would b preferable. This game will b the 1st game in my future company called Neo3DO. This is a attempt to bring back the former glory of the earlier 3DO games. NOTE this will be a promotional game only. We r using IDs software n thus we cant sell it for personal profit. If u r interested please contact me by email at Tomek507@Yahoo.com.
 * This isn't an appropriate place to advertise your project. I suggest you join the Doomworld forums and look for help there. To be honest though, unless you already have something to show it's unlikely that anyone will be interested in contributing to such a project. Fraggle 12:25, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

2008 traffic report
Now that we are well rooted in the year 2009, it's time to take a look at our first annual past year traffic report. These statistics are based on traffic counted by Google Analytics from January 1, 2008 all the way up to December 31 of the same year.

All in all the site had 813 372 visits by 548 224 visitors. The clearly highest peak in traffic occured from January 23 to January 28. During this time segment the wiki had more than 6 000 visits a day, the absolute highest peak occuring on January 26 when the site had 9 136 visits (more than 4 times than on an average day). Otherwise the traffic was pretty steady all year round, with on average around 2228 visits a day.

The top 20 pages with the most pageviews were Entryway (with 298 702 pageviews), Monster and the Monsters redirect page (with a combined total of 261 331 pageviews), Doom 3 (120 979), Doom II (82 274), Doom (77 478), Doom 4 (75 339), Cyberdemon (58 046), Heretic (48 073), Hell Knight (Doom 3) (44 988), Cacodemon (42 407), Knee-Deep in the Dead (40 036), Cyberdemon (Doom 3) (38 013), Sabaoth (34 107), Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (33 833), Demon (Doom 3) (33 237), Doom RPG (31 698), Mancubus (Doom 3) (31 405), Arch-Vile (Doom 3) (30 834) and Thy Flesh Consumed (30 809).

On average users spent 6 minutes 48 seconds on the site, visiting 8.90 pages on average.

Top 10 countries by the amount of visits were United States with 373 385 hits (45.91% of all visits), United Kingdom with 71 775 hits (8.82%), Canada with 46 434 hits (5.71%), Australia with 31 152 hits (3,83%), Germany with 24 969 hits (3.07%), Finland with 19,967 hits (2.45%), Brazil with 14 988 hits (1.84%), Poland with 14 500 hits (1.78%), France with 14 099 hits (1.73%) and Netherlands with 13 747 hits (1.69%). Of these countries, Finland clearly stood out in the average usage statistics, with most pages/visit (11.41), the highest avg. time spent on site (8 minutes 38 seconds) and with the most loyal visitors. Finland also strongly dominates in amount of visits adjusted per population. Among the few countries that gathered zero hits were Turkmenistan, North Korea and around 10 African countries.

62.41% of the traffic came through search engines, 18.99% via referring sites and 16.87% was direct traffic. Top traffic sources were Google (55.01% of traffic), direct site access (16.87%), the English Wikipedia (8.02%), Yahoo (5.38%), and Doomworld (1.85%).

In addition to these Google Analytics provides a shitload of all sorts of detailed stats, so if you have any further statistics questions, feel free to ask. -- Janizdreg 00:04, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki welcomebot
This account has recently begun making postings to IP talk pages, and signing them with our admins' names. I don't know what the other admins think, but I took the liberty of turning it off for now, partly because I already post quite enough repetitive things with my own keyboard, but mostly because the message seems more confusing than helpful: it contains no links to our existing help resources (as in the first paragraph of Entryway), congratulates people for vandalism or vanity postings, and of course inherits all the usual issues with dynamic IPs.

What do other admins think? Will anyone volunteer to be the "contact person" for this bot (as it says in the documentation)? If so, what do you think should be linked from the welcome post? Even if no one responds here, I'll try to draft a more robust welcome post within the next few days. Ryan W 20:33, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Hi! I saw this discussion, and I'm dropping by to see if I can help... I'm the staff person who's working on the welcome tool. There's a lot of customization that you can do with this, so hopefully I can help you make it work the way you want it to.


 * You can customize the default message to match your existing welcome template, with links to the help pages and everything. Pretty soon, you'll be able to turn off different pieces of it -- you can set it to just leave messages for logged-in users and not anons, if you want. As an alternative, you could also change the anon message so that it doesn't thank people -- just encourages folks to log in. So far, we've seen a lot of people logging in as a result of getting the welcome message -- having the message left so quickly catches them before their IP changes.


 * So -- we're trying to build in all the customization folks need, so that it works the way the community needs to work. Let me know if I can help! -- Danny (talk ) 20:47, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * My action was not meant to contradict any of these statements (I've misplaced the link to your original announcement, but I did read it). Customization is an extremely slow procedure with this wiki's level of activity, however, and the tool could easily have made 2,000 edits before we updated any of the messages.  Given that scale, I thought it was best to err, temporarily, on the side of human-vetted welcoming.    Ryan W 21:19, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Yeah, absolutely! I agree, that was the best thing while you're figuring it out. I'm just going around and making sure folks on the active wikis know how to do the customization, since we're adding more parts, and it's getting kind of complicated. :)


 * So we actually just released the new changes -- now wikis are able to enable the user page, the anon welcome and the log-in message separately. (You use MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled for that.) You can also set the bot flag, if you want the edits flagged as bot edits, to take them out of Recent changes. We'll post info on the new settings on User:Wikia later today. So that's all available now, and you can use 'em whenever you like. -- Danny (talk ) 21:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Policy discussion link
A proposed PWAD notability guideline is currently being debated here. Ryan W 23:09, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

questions
why do you have to give information (such as email adresses) to create a new wiki?


 * Probably you should ask this at the Central Wikia, which is where new wikis are created. I would guess that, if nothing else, they want at least one person to contact if a wiki looks abandoned (as the vast majority eventually are).    Ryan W 12:21, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

Best place to upload new WADs
I really like this site, but the few I've come across that deal in wads seem a little sketchy. Is there a repository of Doom wads that has some dignity and history? Thanks -- Chris.


 * Your best bet is the idgames archive, which is essentially the biggest, oldest and most popular WAD archive today. -- Janizdreg 23:59, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Doom 3 level statistics
Do we want a list of the items and weapons found in each level? If so, would anybody care to make a mock-up so that I have a format to follow? —Shidou 09:39, 23 June 2009 (UTC) I just remembered that the developers created a set of items for users who use the  command, so that they don't start with just a pistol. Should I exclude those? —Shidou 11:54, 23 June 2009 (UTC)


 * That type of information is definitely accepted and useful according to our policy (as you can see if you take a look at the classic Doom level articles), so feel free to add it to the Doom 3 articles if you wish. The gear you get at the start of a map when cheat-warping would also be a useful addition if you ask me.


 * Most likely you'll have to build the framework for such information yourself, as it seems there aren't enough active users interested about Doom 3 to find someone to do it for you. Although maybe you could use the classic Doom tables as a basis to make your job a tad easier? -- Janizdreg 00:57, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

Blog posts policy
Now that we have received our first blog posts, it would probably be wise to write up a new policy for blog posting. Of course it is also possible to disable the blog system, but personally I'd like to see whether this new feature will add some refreshing informal interaction to this wiki.

My suggestion for the basics of the blog policy would be the following:
 * The blog posts should be somehow related to the topics this wiki covers, the wiki itself or its users.
 * The posts don't have to be written in a neutral point of view and can include varying types of comments written from almost any type of perspective.
 * We could choose one general written netiquette used by some other (gaming) community and use that as the basis of our own. If we can find something suitable we can agree on, of course. The netiquette for blog posts could possibly include stuff such as "no personal attacks or racism", "respect other people's privacy" and so on.

What do you think? -- Janizdreg 01:43, 30 July 2009 (UTC)

MediaWiki welcomebot, revisited
As per the above thread I have made some changes to the system messages. See User:Wikia for a general explanation of what each entry does.

What I did:


 * Added "@sysop" to MediaWiki:Welcome-user. Staff members who edit here are usually in the middle of a huge cross-wiki project, or just reverting vandalism.  They probably don't want dozens of questions like this.
 * Added "bot:" to MediaWiki:Welcome-message-log.
 * Removed "page-user" from MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled. The vast majority of new users are gamers, so posting about themselves is already as natural as breathing.
 * Expanded MediaWiki:Welcome-message-user and MediaWiki:Welcome-message-anon to explain what a wiki is, and where useful informational pages can be found.

What I didn't do:


 * IIRC some admins believe that 99.8% of vandalism and spam comes from anon editors. If that's true, then "message-anon" should be removed from MediaWiki:Welcome-enabled as it creates more problems than it solves.
 * The account probably does not need a bot flag (2 new users in one day is a busy day by our standards).

IMHO the total edit rate on this wiki is nowhere near high enough to justify leaving welcome messages without bothering to check whether the newcomers are making good edits. If someone else wants to add their name to MediaWiki:Welcome-user and turn the thing back on, however, so be it. (The "most recent active" option should absolutely not be used because most admins, myself included, either are inactive or edit only intermittently.)

Opinions? Ideas? Flames?

Ryan W 02:39, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * I about share this anon's opinion on wikia welcomebots. I've often refrained from editing a page to fix some problem (deleting spam, correcting grammar or spelling, etc.) on various wikias I've browsed so as to avoid them. --Gez 11:53, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * In general I doubt it's worth it. The moment I looked at Monaco I just registered right there. (:P) Also, it seems generally known that it is usually best to register if you intend to do multiple edits, since you have a consistant name to be identified by. InsanityBringer 14:33, September 7, 2009 (UTC)


 * The moment I looked at Monaco I just registered right there. (:P) so as to have a profile in order to set the skin to monobook? If so, I understand. I can't stand the agonizingly slow AJAX mess that is Monaco, or the ways it tries to prevent you from seeing the actual wiki code on a page. --Gez 10:33, September 8, 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah just for that reason. It was slow, it barely worked for me (menus wouldn't always show up), it took forever just to shut off. Heck when trying to browse from school one time it had a habit of crashing my browser (A old version of safari on a old mac computer) InsanityBringer 01:57, September 14, 2009 (UTC)

Doom 3 and Strife minor character pages
This is something that has been bothering me for some time, and I hope this is the right place to discuss this. Anyways, recently there have been a lot of new pages covering all the various minor NPCs in Doom 3 and Strife. Wouldn't it be better if all of these were merged into one page for each game? Seeing as most of these character pages probably won't have anything more than a paragraph on them when they're finished, this would seem like the most logical way of doing things. Also, many of the pages don't even describe what game the character is from, leading to some confusion. Thoughts? EarthQuake 10:33, October 31, 2009 (UTC)


 * US$0.02: I would support this.  It was discussed years ago with regard to the Strife characters (example) but no consensus was reached.  IMHO the same logic could be applied to the many short pages about the Doom movie.    Ryan W 05:24, November 1, 2009 (UTC)


 * While I'm okay with characters being listed, throwaway characters generally don't need their own page. If they're major enough to appear in more than once level (whether by an in-game appearance, PDA, e-mail or order from a commanding officer to meet a given person two maps away), then they can have their own page.  Otherwise, the character's description should be contained within the level's description. --Sigma 7 23:56, November 3, 2009 (UTC)


 * On one hand, some of the articles are very short. But on the other hand, and for Strife in particular, there are only a fixed number of these characters. The usual overriding concern when merging articles like these together on wikis is when the number of articles would eventually become unmanageable. Some of Doom 3's characters are only mentioned in text, but Strife's characters all appear in the flesh, and virtually all of them have some purpose in the game. As far as Strife goes, I would personally prefer those articles to remain separate. Failing that, at least make sure that they can be independently linked to via having their own properly labeled sections in any combined article. --Quasar 15:44, November 18, 2009 (UTC)


 * The latter idea is straightforward to implement, as MediaWiki now allows redirects to point to sections, or even to anchors within an article. I personally favor combined articles because permastubs just look sloppy &mdash; there is no way that this would ever be a whole page in a commercial game guide or a Dungeons & Dragons book.  Also, for people reading on phones or PDAs, it halves the number of character articles they need to load (IME the ads cause a noticeable delay even on a T3 line).    Ryan W 22:03, November 18, 2009 (UTC)

Doom Fan Wiki Companion?
Just tossin out an Idea.... A Fan Doom Wiki for Fan fiction stories, like the Star Wars Fan Wiki, or the Indiana Jones Fan Wiki, or the Jurassic Park Fan wiki, So on and on... I would like to create it mysef, but I got the JP Fan wiki and the Ice Age wiki already created by my hands. So if someone else thinks this would be a good idea, I would greatly contribute. 65.30.143.155 17:00, March 13, 2010 (UTC) (Clonehunter, not signed in)


 * My personal opinion is that this wiki's blogs section combined with Doomworld's fan fics forum is plentiful for the fan fiction output needs of this relatively small community. -- Janizdreg 19:31, March 13, 2010 (UTC)

Problem with Thing Type / Monster "ID #"
I have noticed an inconsistency between articles which has become a dire mess - some articles are listing the doomednum, or Editor Number, and others, such as D'Sparil, are listing the DeHackEd number, or internal ordinal. It's going to be nearly impossible to clean this up. If an attempt is made, I would suggest transitioning the articles to call this the Editor # explicitly, so as to avoid confusion with DeHackEd numbers. --Quasar 21:54, March 30, 2010 (UTC)
 * It's even more complicated when you take into account Hexen actors (which have a spawn number as well, and the accompanying ACS constant such as T_ETTIN_MASH; and for some a puzzle item ID) and Strife actors (which have a conversation ID too -- three if you count the different values from the two teasers). I think something like the Actor template I made on the ZDoom wiki could be useful. --Gez 22:24, March 30, 2010 (UTC)

Question about the trivia in Doom 3
I asked the same question in the talk page some time ago but I didn't get any reply, so I'll ask here.

From the "Trivia" section:


 * A terminal after returning to Mars from Hell displays a red screen. An email can be downloaded from this terminal, containing a rather tongue-in-cheek message written by the Hell demons on proper human sacrifice techniques.

I couldn't find that. Can someone give me more detailed instructions or/and screenshots? Thank you --Kyano 21:53, April 1, 2010 (UTC)


 * If it's not in Grawl's walkthrough, then it probably doesn't exist.   Ryan W 23:54, April 1, 2010 (UTC)


 * Yep, it's there. Seems that I didn't do a very deep research ;-) For those who are interested, it's the 21st easter egg in this list, and here there are 1, 2, 3 and 4 screenshots. Thank you very much for that valuable link, Ryan W. --Kyano 00:40, April 2, 2010 (UTC)

Maggot doom 3
Something has to be done with Maggot doom 3. I think that it should be deleted since it does not add any relevant information to Maggot. --Kyano 13:06, April 15, 2010 (UTC)

Reorganize policy page?
I would like to propose splitting Doom Wiki:Policies and guidelines into three pages: a list of policies, a list of guidelines, and a FAQ. Trying to cut a long story short, I believe that:
 * it is confusing to have inflexible policies and infrequently heeded recommendations listed together;
 * we should have a FAQ (for the same reason any project does);
 * the FAQ would be read more often if it could be linked to without mentioning "policies".

Drafts are here, here, and here. The last time I made major revisions to that page, it was controversial, so if I get little or no feedback then I won't do anything. Please record questions/criticism here, not on the talk pages, so the discussion remains visible, thanks. Ryan W 08:05, May 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * I definitely support your proposed threeway structure and in my opinion it definitely adds to the clarity of our policies. -- Janizdreg 19:23, May 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Forgot to mention that I also approve the tweaks and additions you made to the content itself. -- Janizdreg 19:31, May 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Ugh, I hope I did not make tweaks unless a statement was very obviously out of date (like the one about notability of unreleased mods).   Ryan W 05:13, May 9, 2010 (UTC)


 * It all looks sound from here, and I agree with Janizdreg that our policies are now much clearer than before. (It does make me feel bad for creating my own article, though. ;) ) &mdash; The Green Herring (talk) 02:59, May 9, 2010 (UTC)

Attempted to upload map in SVG
I tried to upload a map for Hexen's Winnowing Hall as File:MAP01-winnowing-hall.svg. It is in the SVG format. Unfortunately, it doesn't render. The NetHack wiki can render SVGs server-side;. I conclude, then, that the Doom wiki is capable of rendering SVGs, and that either:


 * I've uploaded a broken SVG file, and it needs to be deleted;
 * the Doom wiki does not have SVG enabled, and an administrator needs to enable it; or
 * the Doom wiki does not have SVG enabled, the adminstrators don't want to enable it, and my map file needs to be deleted.

Whichever one of these is true, I need administrator assistance.--Ray Chason 03:21, June 8, 2010 (UTC)


 * Your new version renders for me (WinXP, Firefox 3.6). But that does not establish that your first hypothesis was correct: we don't have any admins who devote a lot of time to site customization, so our config files may be wonky.    Ryan W 15:56, June 8, 2010 (UTC)

Source port template?
I'm thinking that source ports could have a template that creates a nice little information box that would show at a glance, in a standardized way (maybe with icons for a more efficient use of space) important data like whether it's still active or abandoned, which systems are supported, which games are supported, and other relevant data. (This template could do the categorizing automatically by the way.) Any idea about what there should be? Opinions? --Gez 15:56, June 12, 2010 (UTC)


 * I like this idea a lot, and if you have the motivation to create such a template, definitely go for it. Though before we start adding it into actual port articles, it should be thoroughly planned and tested first.


 * My initial vision of what the template could look like is basically a table at the top right of the port article, structure-wise similar to the Wikipedia's general info table seen at the top of game articles (as seen here), with content based on what is presented here, perhaps with the addition of the source port's rough year of origin (usually best measured by the release date of the first public version of the port). -- Janizdreg 05:38, September 26, 2010 (UTC)

Classic Doom hi-res logo
Does anybody know where can I get a hi-res classic Doom logo? Everything I found is this but I think it's not enough for making a T-shirt (that's what I want). And yes, it's not legal, but it's for my personal use, I won't sell it, I promise :-) --Kyano 11:58, July 18, 2010 (UTC)


 * The biggest image with the logo only that I've ran into is this. But if that's not big enough, you'll probably need to crop it off the big cover art scans yourself (or ask someone to do it for you). If you crop the logo off (for instance), you'll get the logo in a resolution around 3200x2000. -- Janizdreg 21:52, July 21, 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you very much, Janizdreg. I cropped the logo from that poster, the result is 3330x2100, which is perfect for a T-shirt print. --Kyano 11:03, September 26, 2010 (UTC)

New Wikia skin
I hate it and probably you do, too. You can select Monaco again at your preferences panel, but it will be deleted on November 3, according to some users at the IRC #wikia channel. Thoughts? --Kyano 16:25, October 6, 2010 (UTC)
 * I hate the Monaco skin, so I use MonoBook and have set it to override everything else. Granted, Wikia loves making your preferences "forget" that you want MonoBook instead of Monaco or now Oasis, but they always end up repairing it after enough people bitch about it on the wikia central forums. I have not yet actually seen Oasis, but nothing I've read about makes me feel like I'll be missing out by sticking to MonoBook. --Gez 19:56, October 6, 2010 (UTC)
 * As far as I know, both Monaco and Monobook (which I prefer over Monaco) will be deleted on Nov 3. That's the point of my complaint: I don't have anything against freedom of choice, but this is not freedom of choice. They are imposing the new skin. There had been lots of complaints, so I hope that the Wikia team will allow any wiki to use Monobook or Monaco, if they want to... I guess it depends on the number of wiki admins bitching about that :-) --Kyano 23:37, October 6, 2010 (UTC)
 * No, Monobook is staying. Just Monaco is going. (See (1), (2)). So long as Uncyclopedia stays on Wikia, is it likely that Monobook will stay. Considering how little Wikia cares about their userbase though, nothing is certain. Nuxius 04:07, October 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Oh, then I misunderstood it. And: "However, many of the new features we will be creating for the new design will not work in Monobook", so we'll be able to avoid all the new useless features by using Monobook. Great. --Kyano 09:40, October 8, 2010 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion on which skin is the best and IMHO all of them have pretty balanced sets of pros & cons. However, it seems that the Wikia staff have made their choice and the new skin is here to stay, which warrants a few changes to our wiki as well.

Required changes on this wiki that I can think of off the top of my head include a new logo and a customized theme for the new skin, cleaning up the new skin's navbar and making sure wide pages fit the new, solid-sized content area. Currently too wide pages include at least Comparison of Doom source ports and List of WADs. The source ports comparison should be easy to modify accordingly (perhaps by splitting the features table after the Games supported column into another features table), but the WADs list seems like a trickier one. Any ideas, especially on the former?

I can take care of building the new navbar and optimizing the source ports comparison myself. I also designed a new custom theme for the new skin using the new theme designer tool. You can view a screenshot of the theme here, and remember to give feedback on it while you're at it. If it's received well and no other designs are proposed, we can use my theme as Doom Wiki's temporary new look. Once the new skin & theme designer go live for everyone, I was thinking about posting a news item at Doomworld, calling for help of web and graphic designers who can hopefully help us get a new well-designed theme and logo. -- Janizdreg 02:36, October 9, 2010 (UTC)