Cunnan:Village pump

In Medieval villages people would gather at the Village Pump to discuss those items that were important to their lives. On Cunnan the Village Pump serves a similar purpose: Giving users a place to meet and discuss current events, policy and content.

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You can add a new topic/question by clicking here.

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Announcements

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

Topics

sca.org.au documentation

Just wondering whether cunnan might be a useful place to store the documentation that I have started to put together for the databases and stuff on sca.org.au? This includes the new registry & groups database, and the events database (currently mentioned on the Arrowsreach wiki, but plan to start coding on it soon).

Specifically, neither the FAQ nor the policy document says what sort of articles are OK to put on Cunnan. The front page says it's a medieval & renaissance wiki with an SCA slant but that doesn't really cover it in my opinion. The SCA covers lots of areas, and there probably could be a lot of stuff added here about SCA administration, etc, but it isn't really related to the middle ages or renaissance.

Also, a side note, sca.org.au is going to get an OS upgrade sometime during October. That will mean things like a new PHP version, a new version of Apache (from 1.3 to 2.0) etc. Keep an eye on the site mailing list for annoucements.

Del

My view is that this is a beginner's encyclopaedia to the Middle Ages. It is being written with the knowledge that recreationists are the main users. A decision had obviously been made in the past that the pages were allowed to relate the historical data specifically to how the SCA is played. This has been expanded by writers (like me) into pages that are specifically on how the SCA runs (cf. Board of Directors etc). I helped here to reduce the ambiguity of SCA jargon between branches and help define the roles of officers etc for those outside the offices. However, I still feel that the main purpose of Cunnan should be basic historical information. While it could be used as an SCA database, that should not swamp the rest of the system. This is especially important if the SCA stuff was just relating to one Kingdom, not the SCA as a whole. - Cian Gillebhrath 14:53, 2 Aug 2004 (EST)

I think general SCA information would be no problem but Kingdom specific info would only clutter things up, IMO. There are enough people asking why we do SCA and general medieval info as it is. Maybe we should consider forking into two wikis eventually (I think it'll be a long time before this is actually needed though) - Tobin 16:01, 8 Aug 2004 (EST)

I wouldn't mind sca lochac info, if it was kept very seperate with the intention of forking off the info in the long term. Say we don't add many links to that information? and all pages keep a certain phrase in the title or category, so they can be easily seen as a bunch and moved. I'd rather see more information on the web than lack of information for lack of venue. Specific things I'd want to see with such info would be a cut and paste top of page explaination suitable for a beginner - by the way of "if you are new to medieval reenactment, or from outside [Lochac] you probably didn't mean to come here, this contains a lot of boring detailed information about...." Of course this is one opinion amoungst many, and I think I've already been outvoted.

And one way to avoid swamping with sca pages could be to ask anyone who wants to bring in a lot of sca data if they could help bring in more medeival data through recruiting writers of writing material themselves? Also to remember that the wiki is not suitable for material that must remain unaltered. Tiff

What if articles specific to the SCA all started with "SCA:"? So Lady would be about the title, role, life, and reenactment of a Lady in period. And SCA:Lady would be about our use of it for a woman who has received an SCA:Award of Arms. JakeVortex 04:35, 7 Dec 2004 (EST)

As for articles specific to the sca starting with sca:

• would this create sorting problems in the index?
• Would people remember to link between the sca and medeival articles? That's a lot more links to create, and much more difficult for the beginner to navigate.
• In the short term I think you can see the solution we've applied to a number of articles is to have subheadings "ladies in medeival times" and "ladies in the sca". I think this is working at least moderatedly well, and enables us to have other headings to cover practises of other groups "ladies in the adrian empire" "ladies in medieval middle east".
• perhaps we should be finding articles which only cover sca topics and adding a "in the sca" subheading to them, even though they are words used only in the sca?
• starting articles with sca would make it easier to fork later. Do we want to, or is it the information about how to relate with ing the sca that makes us valuable? Could we just expand and become and encyclopedia that offers information in the general as well as specific for differnt groups?

just food for thought... Tiff

It wouldn't create technical problems with the index but things that look like name-spaces (cunnan:, help:, etc) but which aren't, should be avoided. A better idea would be to use some article (SCA) as this gets some special handling from the software and matches other wikis using the same software (this is the method the Wikipedia uses for disambiguation.) Personally I think that separate sections within the one article are fine as long as the article is fairly short. - Tobin 07:45, 8 Dec 2004 (EST)

I agree. Award of Arms (SCA) seems the more wiki way to do it. I am fine with subsections. I was mostly talking about pages which are primarily about the SCA. --JakeVortex 15:38, 28 Dec 2004 (CST)

Another upgrade

Those of you who contribute to the Wikipedia will have noticed that over the past few days it has undergone a major facelift as well as having a major feature upgrade. Once the software settles down and the new version is released to the public I will install it here. - Tobin 10:43, 1 Jun 2004 (EST)

The upgrade is now complete. I apologize for the abruptness of the upgrade but there was a problem with the old software (I would have had to reinstall it or install this newer version). The new interface can be customized and we will have category support again.

As always you should report any problems here. - Tobin 18:14, 8 Jun 2004 (EST)

Uploading has been disabled. Was this deliberate, or is it as a result of the upgrade? Conrad Leviston 00:11, 10 Jun 2004 (EST)

It was deliberate (and done on account of the upgrade). I've re-enabled uploads now. - Tobin 01:14, 10 Jun 2004 (EST)

Information taken from Wikipedia

I've noticed that Cunnan is listed on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copies_of_Wikipedia_content_%28low_degree_of_compliance%29 (under SCA wiki). I think that we are listed on the wrong page since we meet the criteria for moderate compliance but that is beside the point. We really should do something about this when we come across articles of our that are copied from the Wikipedia. Just adding "Some of this articles content were taken from the Wikipedia article at http://whateverurl" would be sufficient. - Tobin 10:43, 1 Jun 2004 (EST)

They have moved the page to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_forks and Cunnan doesn't appear to be on the list any longer. I hope I wasn't part of the problem. I have brought over some stuff from there. I typically put in a back link to the page where I got it. I guess I should be adding the boilerplate. Do we have a message {{Wikipedia:content}} or something I can add? JakeVortex 04:57, 7 Dec 2004 (EST)

We're still there (under S). There is one of my comments up there, no response, and the link they cite has since been fixed. Obviously nobody has seen fit to remove us yet. Conrad Leviston 17:26, 8 Dec 2004 (EST)

Copying from Wikipedia?

Is it OK to copy articles from Wikipedia to add here? I would of course put the Wikipedia legal stuff on the copied content. I am not sure if this fits this community so I thought I would ask. Sir Michael 22:22, 30 Jul 2004 (EST)

Copying from the Wikipedia is fine if you add something like "Some of this article's content were taken from the Wikipedia article at http://whateverurl". - Tobin 23:11, 30 Jul 2004 (EST)

re/moving misspelt page titles

Hi, I have noticed that there is a page for Pavillions. This is a misspelling of Pavilions and while I have corrected all the words inside the page, I don't know how to move the filename. The only way I know is to make a new Pavilions page and redirect Pavillions to it but I am not happy to do this.

Please advise,

Cian, the spelling pedant.

If you are logged in (which you seem to be). You can move a page by clicking the "move" link. It should be along the top of the article (if you are using the new design) or in the left hand set of menus (if you are using the old design). You'll be asked where to move the page to and the old version will be turned into a redirect. - Tobin (PS writing ~~~ will automatically sign your name on talk pages)

Yet another upgrade

There will be a minor version upgrade tonight (sorry about the short notice). There will be no (big) cosmetic changes this time just a few bug-fixes. - Tobin 19:15, 8 Jul 2004 (EST)

Done. If anything explodes mention it here. - Tobin 20:13, 8 Jul 2004 (EST)

Grrr, I broke special characters again. Fixed again. I'll update the database to UTF-8 soon so that this doesn't keep happening. - Tobin 20:36, 8 Jul 2004 (EST)

Not sure if it is related to these changes, but I had something break, I was looking at my watchlist and clikced of "7 days" and it gave me this error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: floatval() in /home/sca/public_html/cunnan/includes/SpecialWatchlist.php on line 74

Should be fixed now. - Tobin 19:59, 13 Jul 2004 (EST)

I get this message in April 2005. I guess that my php is not new enough. Tim.

it was the same when I tried clicking on the other day or hour fields for this page. Cheers, taryn

I'm getting the following whenever I use the search box and click [Search]

Warning: Wrong datatype for second argument in call to in_array in /home/sca/public_html/cunnan/includes/FulltextStoplist.php on line 588

Warning: Wrong datatype for second argument in call to in_array in /home/sca/public_html/cunnan/includes/FulltextStoplist.php on line 588

- Cian Gillebhrath 15:08, 13 Jul 2004 (EST)

New Article

I am planning on writing an article on libraries in Europe during the middle ages. I will probably take some info from Wikipedia and add stuff from my own knowledge of library history. Where should I add the internal links? I don't want to orphan this article. I think education and university are good starts. Are there others? Thanks. Sir Michael 11:34, 8 Aug 2004 (EST)

There are probably others but you can always add links from them after you have written your new article. Its also perfectly acceptable to add "See also" type links to the end of related articles.

Wikis grow chaotically but in the long run they sort themselves out. - Tobin 16:12, 8 Aug 2004 (EST)

I see nothing wrong with searching Cunnan for instances of "library" or "libraries". If even slightly relevant, then make it library. That and the random page button is how I find most pages I read. - Cian Gillebhrath 10:35, 9 Aug 2004 (EST)

Admin Nominations

I'd like to nomiate Cian for adminship and Tiff and Conrad Leviston for promotion to bureaucrats (admins that can create other admins). If no one objects I'll do this sometime next week.

Its probably also time we looked at a better system of nominating admins (it seems like a bad idea to keep leaving these things to a single person). - Tobin 10:33, 17 Aug 2004 (EST)

I think having a nomination and a seconder from those with at least admin levels is probably ideal. Give a week's lead time in case there are objections (unlikely in the near future), and if there are objections have a vote.

Oh, yeah, and I second Cian. Conrad Leviston 18:49, 18 Aug 2004 (EST)

Subcategories

I have created a new category category:armour and I have also created category:SCA armour. I would like to make the second a subcategory of the first. How do I do that? - Cian Gillebhrath Subcategories are added to to parent categories in the same way that articles are. Edit category:SCA armour and add [[Category:Armour]] to the text. - Tobin

Spammers

I've been seeing this happen a lot recently. Has the chinese spammer always been a problem, or just recently? Can we ban them for more than a month, somewhere around indefinitely?- WanderingSpy

• The bans only work if they keep the same IP address. Admins can ban them for 100 years if we want to, but if the IP address changes every time they get online, then we might be preventing someone who is quite decent making any modifications. That's right isn't it Tobin? - Cian Gillebhrath

That's right, banning them for even 1 month is pointless (but it usually stops them from coming back more than once a day). It is also possible for us to block a range of IP addresses in one go but that would make us even more likely to stop a legitimate user from contributing.

You can see all the bans we currently have using Special:Ipblocklist.

I'm looking into setting things up so that any external link in China (ending in .cn) will be treated as spam and not saved. I don't think we're likely to link to Chinese sites.- Tobin

I've activated the wiki's antispam checker. Edits will now be checked for known spam links. If new spam makes it through bring it to my attention and I'll update the list. - Tobin 10:41, 10 Sep 2004 (EST)

I've also unblocked the 131,081 (this number is correct) IP addresses I had banned. - Tobin 17:03, 10 Sep 2004 (EST)

I, as an administrator, seem to have no trouble blocking spammers who haven't logged in. However, the recent spammer yoga didn't present me with the blocker option. I notice from the list of blocked addresses and names that Tobin has been able to block a name before. Is that because you are the Cunnan god and I am just a humble admin? - Cian Gillebhrath 22:52, 1 May 2005 (CDT)

Did you try blocking him using Special:Blockip or were you looking for a "block" link? Anyone who can block people by IP address should be able to block usernames (but I haven't tested this). - Tobin 23:58, 2 May 2005 (CDT)

I was looking for a "block" link on the Special:Recentchanges page. But I couldn't see one. How do you use the Blockip page as distinct from the button?

My latest problem was the two IPs having edit wars over Siege weapons. I could revert the most recent edits to their "original" form for that IP, but I don't know how to take it any further than that, meaning that the rest of their edits were still unchanged. In the end, I had to call up the version before they started, edit that and save it as the current form. Is there a better way to do things? - Cian Gillebhrath 00:20, 5 May 2005 (CDT)

• Help!! -- Current Events has been spammed *again* !! --Simoncursitor 03:30, 26 May 2005 (CDT)

• • I've cleaned up the mess and added the URL to the anti-spam filter. Sadly the spammers have wised up a bit and seem to have looked at how the spam filter works. In a couple of weeks I'll look into turning on mediawiki's open proxy checker (may require an upgrade/hacks). - Tobin 23:00, 26 May 2005 (CDT)
    • B*gg*r!! It takes a major case of stupid to start spamming -- why do they have to be just smart enough to get round the watchdogs ?? Template:Persons of unmarried parents!! --Simoncursitor 02:06, 27 May 2005 (CDT)

Server move

You have probably noticed that Cunnan has changed to a different server. This was done because the wiki was placing to great a strain upon Del's primary work machine (Cunnan only exists because of Del's generosity). Most features have been re-enabled and things should work as expected.

If you see Del at an event you might like to thank him for dealing with the whole situation as kindly and quickly as he did.

I had also turned off the anti-spam filter, it has now been reactivated. - Tobin

There will be a few hours downtime as Cunnan moves to its final home on Wednesday 10th November. - Tobin 16:35, 8 Nov 2004 (EST)

• Umm... how about fixing the machine's time because I sure wasn't working on Cunnan at 5 o'clock this morning. - Cian Gillebhrath

Hi all,

Here's what's happened and why:

• Some time back in August I noted that cunnan was placing somewhat of a strain on sca.org.au (volta). I didn't bother doing anything at the time because I was heading off to Pennsic.
• In early October I had a major project happening on volta due to a big government tender that was due. volta is also my main work server so I needed to move cunnan. I set up a temporary machine at my office and moved cunnan to it, this was what caused the site address to change (to cunnan.sca.org.au) because it was no longer on the same machine as the rest of www.sca.org.au. Unfortunately this was only ever going to be a temporary thing because the machine I moved it to (galliard) is a "project" server used for software development work and testing. Also galliard is on a fairly low speed link -- 512K/512K whereas volta is on a 10Mb link.
• Last week I moved it again, to a server that I lease in the USA. It's a server (cascarda) that I use for US based clients and has a 100Mb link but bandwidth over there is much cheaper. It also has more memory (1GB) and CPU (3GHz) than volta (256/600MHz). There it's going to stay I'm afraid -- cunnan has become a victim of its own success and it's no longer economical for me to provide sufficient grunt for it to run or bandwidth for all of its traffic in Australia.

So the machine is now in a different time zone -- US "Central Standard Time" (CST) which is 6 hours behind GMT, or 16 hours behind Australian Eastern Standard time, or 17 hours behind Sydney/Melbourne summer time. Of course it will also have daylight savings at a different time of the year.

I don't know much about the wikipedia code or why its dates are out, but I assume that if it was set up on the assumption it was running on Australian EST (GMT+10) it now needs to be told it's running at CST or GMT-6 instead.

Yes, all of my servers are named after Renaissance Dances.

Del 22:24, 14 Nov 2004 (EST)

Spam filtering madness

For the past few days all edits were being stopped by the spam filter because of an extra bracket in the spam regex. I've fixed the problem now and would like to apologise for not having tested the wiki more thoroughly after I made the changes.

Things should be back to normal now.

My thanks go out to Tiff for pointing out my error.

Tobin.

Software upgrade

The software behind Cunnan has been upgraded again. If anything is broken you should make a note of it here. - Tobin 10:45, 28 Dec 2004 (EST)

Also, make sure you check out some of the new features such as Special:Newimages and Special:Uncategorizedpages. :) - Tobin

A couple of questions. What do the red exclamation marks on the recent changes page mean? What's the page validation stuff about? Can you change the clock from GMT? Is the page counter broken?

Conrad Leviston 07:33, 30 Dec 2004 (CST)

The red exclamation marks on Special:Recentchanges show edits that haven't been looked at yet. Once a few people have viewed a page a small "mark this page as patrolled" link appears in the article letting someone mark it as havin been looked at. The exclamation mark then goes away.

The clock, or at least the time reported by Cunnan, can be changed from GMT but I'm not sure what we should change it to. The server is in the USA, as are most readers (last time I checked). You can set your difference from GMT in your preferences.

Where are you seeing the page validation stuff? I didn't think that was included in this version of mediawiki. - Tobin 15:55, 30 Dec 2004 (CST)

Categories

I've had a few thoughts regarding category naming and it occured to me that we should have some kind of guidlines written down somewhere: Cunnan:Categorization. I'll put my thoughts at Cunnan talk:Categorization - Tobin 16:10, 28 Dec 2004 (CST)

MySQL error

New one for you Tobin. I get a similar thing if I search for "fir". Is this a new version of the old message about trying to search for three letter words? - Cian Gillebhrath 17:29, 27 Jan 2005 (CST)

Database error

For query "oak"
A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the  software. The last attempted database query was:

   SELECT cur_id, cur_namespace, cur_title, cur_text FROM `cur`,`searchindex` W ERE cur_id=si_page AND AND cur_namespace IN (0,4,9,11) LIMIT 0,100 

from within function "". MySQL returned error "1064: You have an error in your SQL syntax near 'AND cur_namespace IN (0,4,9,11) LIMIT 0,100 ' at line 1".

free idea

Well part of the idea of the wiki, and having all these SCA terms defined is to help newcomers to the SCA (and reenactment in general). So how about a page welcome to historical reneactment, SCA Style. We could then advertise it to sca groups. Basically coverign links to pages on topics the newcome might like to know about - scaisms, fighting, etc, but in a friendlier way than the main page. Maybe a devoted question and answer page. Hopefully with more consistancy than the rest of the wiki too. Yes i know, I should just start it myself, but it's bedtime, my head hurts and I've got to write more thesis tommorow, so I'm hoping to inspire someone else. Tiff 07:51, 8 Feb 2005 (CST)

polite suggestion

Is it time for the mechanism/algorithm that divides the Subject Index up into 6, to be adjusted so that the division is, say, into 10 or 12, as the pages are getting quite long to scroll down ? --Simoncursitor 06:01, 7 Apr 2005 (CDT) ((Please delete after consideration, as this is unworthy of long-term archiving))

Which subject index do you mean? Special:Allpages? I'll look for the bit of code that controls the size of its "chunks" and see what can be done. Things aren't really bad until it looks the Wikipedia's index though. :-)

Don't worry about discussions not being worth archiving; nothing, that is in anyway relevant, is ever removed from the database (it's all in there). - Tobin 06:37, 7 Apr 2005 (CDT)

Request for Guidance

I hope one (or more) of the sys-admins can assist. Working through the Scottish kings, at some stage I will have to deal with the interregnum between Margaret and the English-imposed John Balliol. I do not want to list this as a specific period on the king-list, but it could so to be covered, with inter alia a list of the contenders. I can see that it can be linked to from Margaret and to John B, but what ought I to title it ?

• Scotland - Interregnum
• Scotland 1290-92
• Scotland -- The Contenders

Suggestions, please. --Simoncursitor 02:27, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT)

I assume you are thinking of adding a table to the bottom of the page similar to the one on the pages for English Monarchs. The Scottish Interregnum sounds like a reasonable name for an article to me. Conrad Leviston 07:21, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT)

Thank you -- I have followed your titling suggestion. --Simoncursitor 03:08, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT)

Main Page alteration

I'd like to have a more interesting front page for Cunnan, which adds a bit of variety. To this end I have edited Cunnan:Main Page with an idea for a monthly edit. This does make the front page rather full, but it does have the advantage of directing readers to some of Cunnans better pages. Other categories that might be added are Historical figure of the month (mainly to highlight Simon's Scottish kings) and SCA group of the month. Feedback please. Conrad Leviston 05:41, 27 Jul 2005 (CDT)

Barony Template Added

I so liked the idea of the Kingdom box template that I created a Barony one. See Barony of Dragonsspine for example of use although its pretty straight forward. Let me know if you'd like to see them for the other locality types (i.e. Canton, Shire, College, etc.) Feedback on it appreciated. Tobin & Co., you have a great wiki here, I love it!--Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine 09:04, 2 Aug 2005 (CDT)

Having been partially resopnsible for the Kingdom box (Tobin did most of the work) I quite like your adaptation. The one problem with both the Kingdom and Barony boxes is the way devices are depicted. Ideally the device will have a transparent background, but even then IE 5.5 and earlier won't display them properly. A white background is the usual wy images come to us and this creates a problem (for me at least) when the Knigdom box metal is yellow. I'm not sure that there is a real solution to this, but feel free to try your own ideas.

Good job though, and I don't see why the boxes shouldn't be used for other locality types. They are a useful way of representing vital statistcs, and look pretty too.

On a related note see Barony of Stormhold for the Lochac Barony navigational aid template. Something similar for other kingdoms may also be worth considering. Conrad Leviston 09:21, 2 Aug 2005 (CDT)

I added a Shire box as well for folks to use. The template looks the same, but you only add a Seneschal instead of two people. Also, I added an image to the Device article since it was in Requested Pictures.