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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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

See Also / External Links

In terms of standard style I have been putting "See Also" as a heading and "External Links" as a subheading of that, unless there is no "See Also" heading, in which case it is simply a heading on its own. This makes sense to me in terms of how it relates to a Table of Contents. Does this seem reasonable to adopt as a standard style? Conrad Leviston 12:53, 31 July 2011 (EST)

Laurel Sovereign of Arms

I was looking at the page that redirects for Laurel and noticed that the Laurel Sovereign of Arms is in a page bound with the College of Arms. Might it be more beneficial to do a dedicated page for Laurel instead of being tied in with the College? Donngal 16:37, 22 July 2010 (EST)

• Sure, since the Principal Herald page is now more substantive. I would make sure that Laurel redirects to Order of the Laurel with a disambiguation at the top for Laurel Sovereign of Arms. The page for LSofA should mention the SCA College of Arms. One of the pages should mention any historical links to similar ranks/titles in the RL Colleges, e.g. Garter King of Arms, Lyons King of Arms

- Cian Gillebhrath 10:35, 23 July 2010 (EST)

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 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)

Personas and households

This year has been a quiet one for Cunnan but an old issue has had to enforced by me as a moderator a few times - that Cunnan is not an archive of pages describing SCA personas (see Village Pump 2007), but we do allow pages on SCA groups like households. Unfortunately, sometimes the household pages contain a lot of details on their members and things that are more specific to the individual than the household.

Sorry to those whose pages I mention here but I need examples. Firstly, House Fettered Fleur. I have editted this page a few times to makes its format match those of other pages. It had a paragraph on one of the leading members which mainly discussed and promoted her SCA-related business interests. Since I could not see how this related to the household, I treated it as advertising and deleted the text. A page had also been created for another of the household's leaders Menken but I changed that to [[User:Menken]] since he was the one had just edited it.

More recently, a page was created for the Natt Sang household. This includes a descriptive paragraph for each member that mentions their general character, how they like to participate in the SCA and their musical skills, but no more. I have reformatted that but not deleted any content.

My question to the community (and especially the mods) is whether Natt Sang is saying too much. Small households sometimes say a little about the roles and habits of their members, but generally as appendages to a list, e.g. House Reverie, like a standard SCA regnum. Sometimes little is said about memebers at all e.g. House Awesome. Bigger households have simply too many members to list them all.

So should Natt Sang's member details be abbreviated to something like the following?

Lady Rhyslyn of Soundstream:

• Instruments: celtic flute, Irish whistle, celtic harp, guitar, bass, singing.
• Roles: Husmor, Emmisarian, seamstress.

If not, then should it be editted in any other way?

- Cian Gillebhrath 18:25, 1 November 2009 (EST)

• Recent editting has brought to light two more persona pages that do not seem to qualify for inclusion: Randal Sinclair Hawkins and Kari Kyst. While they seem to have been great people and have been duly recognised in awards for their contribution to the SCA, nothing in their description indicates that they have played a extremely significant role in the development or history of the SCA or their kingdom. All edits so far have been done by Rohesia and Donngal and I don't know whether these editors are also Randal and Kari. If so, then these descriptions should be moved to their User pages.

If there are no objections in the coming weeks, I will delete those two pages.

I have since also noted Logan Ebonwoulfe. He certainly seems moreso a person of great note if he is included in an outside publication, but I know nothing about this Warlords card game. What do others think about keeping a page active on him?

- Cian Gillebhrath 10:37, 20 November 2009 (EST)

• A new one to consider - Michael of Bedford. 10 times a king, first King of Atlantia, Laurel, Pelican, Knight. But is that enough to qualify him for inclusion? Did he introduce something that is widely used in the SCA? Is he known to all in the Society? Is he known outside of the society? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:18, 23 November 2009 (EST)

• • I've been thinking on this subject a bit and trying to figure out a good rule of thumb. As a first pass: if the page consists of a simple list of awards, or even a few simple lists, that's probably not enough. An explanation should be needed. For example, the page for Cariadoc of the Bow doesn't list his awards, rather it gives his accomplishments with appropriate explanation and links. (Full disclosure - I created the page so I like the format, but I don't actually know His Grace.) With respect to Michael of Bedford's page, it's just a list of awards, which I'd suggest is inadequate. There may be other information which could be added to the page to make it clear that the page should remain, but as written I don't think the page works. AlexandreDavigne 00:14, 24 November 2009 (EST)
    • That sounds fair enough. Then it would just be down to us to decide whether the accomplishments are sufficient. Anyone else have a view? - Cian Gillebhrath 10:13, 30 November 2009 (EST)
      • Sorry about that, I did not realize till reading here today that general persons were not eligeable for inclusion in Cunnan, feel free to delete the page I created on Duke Valharic, just trying to add content Donngal mac Ronain

Wine

I want to make my own home made wine ,, were do I start ??? this will be my first time and I want to know how to start from being to end with fruits - gilpaulrod@yahoo.com, 12 Nov 2005

• Try C.J. Berry's books available from any good wine making shop or online. - Bcholley, 14 June 2010

Herbs

Would it be possible to merge the herb pages (e.g. borage) with their page of historical quotes (e.g. borage (Maplet))? I think having all those extra pages is superfluous especially seeing as most of the quote pages are only a few lines long. Could they be added to the end of the original herb page with a new heading instead?

• The idea with these entries is that they can be accessed either via the herb, or through the book title, so that one can browse the entries as one would a book. If you look at A Greene Forest and Askham's Herbal you will realise that merging these pages involves an awful lot of work for dubious benefit.

Problems Uploading images - Fixed

I'm trying to upload a .png image and keep getting an error message: The upload directory (public) is not writable by the webserver. Is anyone aware of this issue and able to fix it? -- Paul Matisz 16:00EDT 29May11

I also have the issue. After a 5 year absence in image uploads, I can't correct my Calontir one, lol. Thorgrimr of Dragonsspine 11:17, 7 June 2011 (EST)

Is this problem going to be fixed by any chance? -- Kirstyn 7:04, 19 Sept, 2011 (CST)

Most of us administrators don't have access to the software side of Cunnan, just extra interface pages - Cian Gillebhrath 14:32, 10 November 2011 (EST)

This has now been fixed, by the Lochac Masony team! - Yves de Lyle 21:46, 24 November 2011 (EST)

Spam spam lovely spam

I know we have all been busier at removing spam than we have been adding proper content. If Tobin or anyone who can access the software could do anything, could you? One thing that might help is if you can prevent the creation of any pages that end in digits (and possibly new member names ending in digits). That is where all the spam is ending up. A simple regular expression filter should do it, but I don't know whether the software has that capability. - Cian Gillebhrath 14:32, 10 November 2011 (EST)

• Okay, 27 spam accounts removed and their pages plus their images. That is not how I really want to spend my night. Time for a message to the Masonry team. We really need some way of getting around this. Rolling back would be much easier so perhaps stopping people making new pages until they have editted three other pages. - Cian Gillebhrath 00:02, 5 December 2011 (EST)

• Requiring approval to create an account would/should solve the problem, or a decent captcha check might do it. I agree, it's gotten out of hand - AlexandreDavigne 23:50, 7 December 2011 (EST)

• Sent another email to the Lochac masonry and webmaster, having received no response to the first one. - Cian Gillebhrath 10:56, 3 January 2012 (EST)

Enable CAPTCHA?

It looks like MediaWiki ships with a captcha extension, enabling it for account creation would solve a lot of the spam problems. Is there some reason not to do this? AlexandreDavigne 00:13, 21 December 2011 (EST)

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Combating_spam#CAPTCHA

Yeah, I am happy to try anything. The problem is that none of us have access to the system, so we can't change the settings. I am still yet to hear from the Lochac webmaster or Lochac Masonry officers. - Cian Gillebhrath 10:29, 21 December 2011 (EST)