Cunnan:Village pump

In Medieval villages people would gather at the Village Pump, where they would promptly contract cholera and the black death. On Cunnan the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving people a place to meet and discuss medieval reenactment.

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Announcements

• Some of the old Village pump articles have been moved to save space:
  • Moved during 2003
  • Moved during 2004
  • Moved during 2005
  • Moved during 2006
  • Moved during 2007

Topics

The Illegible Vandals

First it was the Ampersand Bandits. Now we have new class of vandals with a different MO - the Illegible Vandals! We have been getting unknown people adding just one word consisting of 8-10 characters to a range of pages. I believe the choice of characters is random because I don't recognise anything that I would find in any of my dictionaries. So the vandalism is pretty pointless. As far as I can work out, the same "user" has never struck more than once. Wierd. - Cian Gillebhrath 13:39, 27 September 2007 (EST)

Alas, we're now seeing several articles vandalized by a single IP. It's the sheer volume of IPs involved that concerns me -- we've been hit pretty hard over the last week. Kudos on everyone helping to stem the tide! Paul Matisz 19:05EDT 02 Oct 07

Yeah, I have since noticed repeat offenders. The thing that gets me is the fact that there seems to be no reason for these attacks. If they were all concentrated at particular times, then I could believe that it is was just an attempt at "denial of service" but there aren't enough of them at any one time for that. Other than restricting editing to logged in members, I can't see how any system can automatically prevent the Illegible Vandals. - Cian Gillebhrath 09:19, 3 October 2007 (EST)

On 04 Oct between 10:39 and 17:08 some twenty articles were vandalized by these jerks. In some cases, the same article was vandalized numerous times. Given the randomness I suspect this may be some kind of bot or virus... is there any way to defend against them? Paul Matisz 17:15EDT 04 Oct 07

Attacks today from three different IP addresses from 87.101.244.* . I think we might be able to put a filter on that for a few months. Tobin? Unfortunately, there seems no clear pattern to any of the other addresses. - Cian Gillebhrath 13:09, 9 October 2007 (EST)

A Note on Vandals and Newcomers

I despise vandals. Vandalism to Cunnan articles will be quickly corrected and the vandal's IP outright banned for a an appropriate length of time. Be aware that my definition of "an appropriate length of time" is inversely proportional to the amount of caffeine in my bloodstream.

I encourage anyone interested in making legitimate changes to Cunnan articles to make a user profile -- it's always nice to have new people in our community, and it makes it a lot easier to weed out the vandalism. Paul Matisz 09:51EDT 28 Sept 07

Registration is now required for edits

Hello all, I've been away from Cunnan for a long time as I've been busy with uni. I've read everyone's comments regarding the vandals and have looked at the mess they've been making recently.

Anonymous edits are no longer allowed. Hopefully they can be enabled again later after I've looked at other possible solutions.

There will also be a software upgrade in the next few weeks.

Tobin 12:17, 25 November 2007 (EST)

Thanks for that Tobin. It's a shame that this has been needed, but all that rolling back was getting quite tiresome, and I wasn't one of those who was doing most of the work. Conrad Leviston 23:25, 25 November 2007 (EST)

I concur: thank you for taking the (hard) decision -- it hurt me to the heart to see our good work mangled in this way. -- Simoncursitor 19:43, 26 November 2007 (EST)

Putting in my 2 cents/pence, I noticed that on other wiki's that made this tough choice, those inspired enough to contribute didn't mind signing in, and that usually less than 10% of anonymous edits are valid. This may not have been the case here, but this step does greatly reduce the vandalism and, in my opinion at least, makes Cunan a better place. --Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine 09:50, 16 December 2007 (EST)

It's a shame this had to be done. I would think SCA folk would be better than that. CsikosLo 00:59, 10 July 2008 (EST)

Personal details

Pages have been created for SCA Contacts for various areas of Europe. While I prefer the information to be on the country's or kingdom's page, I have concerns about the address and phone details being put anywhere on Cunnan. They are far less likely to be updated regularly and I would much prefer this sort of personal data to be on the group's homepage outside of Cunnan. What do you guys think? - Cian Gillebhrath 13:12, 6 June 2008 (EST)

Good observation. I would think (knowing most of the people involved) that they posted it there themselves. If so, I have no problem with it. If not, that info should be deleted. Not sure how we can find out the truth though. CsikosLo 01:01, 10 July 2008 (EST)

Applicability Question

See these these Caidan Tourney results: http://wiki.caid-commons.org/index.php/Results

Has Cunnan evolved so far away from its St Monica/Lochac roots that setting up a section under Kingdom of Lochac to support something like the above (but for Lochac) would be a no-go these days? I refer to Village pump discussions mid-2007 on culling some SCA-specific stuff that was seen mainly as ego-boo.

Or would it be fair enough? A wiki is a very good way to maintain this sort of thing; the question is whether we need to set up a whole new one, or use the resource that already exists, but which may no longer be appropriate. (Or, indeed, whether Cunnan would be open to any Kingdoms which wished to use it so).

- Bartholomew 15:02, 9 June 2008 (EST)

Templates

Greetings all. I have been working with learning the language of templates in MediaWiki and have copied one over from Wikipedia, Template:Information for image files. However, there seems to be a bit of markup that isn't working correctly, as can be seen in Image:Thomas_Hawley_Clarenceux_King_of_Arms.jpg. If someone can fix this and explain in detail how they went about fixing it, I'd like to be able to fix broken templates myself. Thanks! --Tobias Morgan 13:45, 24 September 2008 (EST)

• I'm sorry but I don't know what error you are talking about. How about you use the Cunnan:sandbox to set up some examples and describe what you were expecting to happen and what has happened. I suspect it might be that Cunnan's MediaWiki version hasn't been updated for 3 or more months. - Cian Gillebhrath 09:14, 25 September 2008 (EST)
  • The problem using the sandbox is that the template is primarily used in the Image namespace. If you clickthrough to the Image page listed above then go down to the information section, you can see that it looks odd and cluttered, with bad markup. Whereas if you go to the original image on Wikipedia and look at the information section, it's much cleaner. --Tobias Morgan 12:10, 25 September 2008 (EST)