Suggestions

This page is for suggestions for the wiki. If you have anything you would like to see implemented say so here, and also voice your opinions on other suggestions in the discussion page.

Ideas

• CheckUser

Extension that adds more user information to be found without digging through server logs. See discussion.

• <post> Tags

This is working but needs to be made better (see the discussion)

• Often used links box.

This would a box such as the 'toolbox' on the left hand part of the page that would have links to commonly used pages such as the 'classes' page.

• Articles on the main page.

This would show a article on the Main Page simmilar to wikipedia, we could do it by a vote (like wikipedia) or have it randomly change every so often, or everytime the user goes to the main page.

• Ability to upload fixed format / size limited images

This would provide the ability to illustrate concepts described in articles without relying on possibly broken external links. By limiting the size of the image we could avoid filling up server diskspace / wasting bandwidth. -JustinLynn

How would you want this to work? Would you like it to be an 'attachment' type thing? or just a seperate page where you upload a image and it gives you a link to it? -Andy

It would be great if we could do it like wikipedia using Special:upload and the tag [[image:NameOfImage.png|Alternate Text]]. Perhaps we could make a page for "Images up for Deletion" as well. See Wikipedia Editing FAQ for an example. -JustinLynn

I disagree with this. There are many free, no-ad image servers out there, and there's no reason to tax the moacad.com bandwidth in this way. Images, while useful at times, are often both superfluous and ugly. If you want to display an image, fine, but link to it from elsewhere. -Chrax

Yeah, but theres not a convienient way to make a thumbnail image with a caption like the wikipedia. If we could use the image functionality of the wikipedia, but be able to host them somewhere else, it would be great. But depending on how much server space and bandwidth the host gives, it might be easier just to host them locally. Anyway, the deal where it replaces image links with the image prevents you from making clickable thumbnails, or images that are inline with the text, as far as I can tell. It would be cool if you could make a "thumb" tag that would embed the image in a table, let you specify a caption, and provide a link to the full image on someplace like imageshack.us. -Squishypickle

While the posting of images to third-party servers might seem to be good for the wiki in terms of bandwidth usage there is no way to guarantee the permanancy of such links. As well as the caption limitations of the wiki software we have no control over the images other than to remove the hyperlink from the wiki page, this doesn't prevent the user from relinking the file or prevent the site in question from blocking moacad from accessing its images through deep links, this would make third-party image links useless. In reponse to bandwidth concerns we might limit the size of file uploaded or display thumbnails in the main article with the image linked to a larger version. By localizing the files on moacad we prevent broken links and maintain control over displayed images.-JustinLynn

As well as the caption limitations of the wiki software we have no control over the images other than to remove the hyperlink from the wiki page - What does that mean? Look, if you can create a tag that allows you to fiddle with images hosted locally, it should be trivial to do that with a third party site. Furthermore, there's nothing stopping you from using the <code> tag and inserting an <img> tag. Yes an inelegant solution, but don't say that we have no control over images currently.
we prevent broken links and maintain control over displayed images. - To prevent broken links, I have a suggestion: in the event that moacad.com cannot host the images to bandwidth worries, find a reliable image/web server and host the images there. We don't have to depend on some unreliable server, there are many good free ones out there.
prevent the user from relinking the file - Why is this a concern? That's trolling and we have not had a problem with that beyond Matt Marshes foray into the area of content. It's not like a sufficiently determined troll couldn't put a goatsex picture in the Wikipedia and have it look almost exactly like a Wikipedia image display.
prevent the site in question from blocking moacad from accessing its images through deep links - Two things. First, when you set up servers yourself, or use a dedicated image server, which was specifically designed to be linked from outside, you don't need to worry about being denied access. Second, it doesn't seem to me that we'll be using up so much bandwidth that anybody will change their policy on account of our use of their service. -Chrax

Happy to see that suggestion was implemented, will use internal upload for vital images only. -JustinLynn

I know this thread is probably really old, but now a-chan is up, which is an imageboard, and uploading/discussing pictures is kind of the point. andy

• TikiWiki

So Brian's trying out TikiWiki, and wow. This thing has everything. I'm a bit curious as to what kind of bandwidth moacad.com can handle. If it's anywhere near decent, TikiWiki includes forum, blog, and image gallery templates. Take a look at it and respond with what you think about potentially moving this to a tikiwiki, rather than mediawiki. -Chrax

We should have enough bandwidth, how fast does the code execute though? The reason that media-wiki is so slow is because the scripts that change the wiki-code to html are really slow, (infact someone's re-writing them in cgi somethin I believe) Do you know if there's a database import feature for tiki-wiki, or would we have to re-write all the articles? --Andy 19:16, 1 Apr 2005 (EST)

I don't see an import function from their site, but they're both MySQL, so it may be possible to write one. I don't know. -Chrax

It would be posible, but the problem would be parsing all he stored information (links, history, etc) in the correct ways and then incerting it back into the new database...

• Study Guide

I was thinking we could posibly start a wiki-sih study guide for different classes. (e.g. post notes, problems, and just colaborate to help each other out in classes). What do you all think of this idea? I dont think that mediawiki would be a good solution to this. If we did it I think we would want something that would easily let us divide things up into departments, classes, and teachers. Does anyone know of a wiki software package that would do this? Im thinking even a simple tree type file system would work. --Andy 13:53, 20 Apr 2005 (EDT)

• Spam

Spam seems to have become really bad the past few weeks so I think we should implement some of the anti-spam features. This could/will make it harder to edit pages (disabling anonymous edits, etc) but I think it would be worth it. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Anti_Spam for more details. --Andy 13:12, 27 Nov 2005 (EST)

• Math

The math used to verfiy anonymous posting is hard at times. I vote we tone it down a little. Love, anonymous

• 2E/2W

I would be ecstatic if we could switch the 2E and 2W information to be updated. I see no reason why we can't just copy all the information on the current pages and switch them--Would anyone be terribly offended if I did so? (I don't have a wing list for 2E for last year, either, but I'll certainly update it with fresh information for this year as soon as school starts)