User talk:The Rooster

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Use the '+' tab at the top to create a new section at the bottom. If I've come to you, let's keep the conversation there; if you're coming to me, I'll be replying here. The archive can be found here. CONTRIB WATCHING You probably already know this, but you've been added onto the contribution monitoring service. --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 14:49, 24 August 2009 (BST) Image:Example.jpg If you're not wanting it overwritten by teh newbs you can get it protected. I've just tested it out and you can't overwrite a protected image as a regular user. -- Cheese 21:58, 25 August 2009 (BST) Most excellent! To A/PT! --  RoosterDragon  22:03, 25 August 2009 (BST) Crazy EMRP idea I'm sure you've been asked something along these lines before, but what are the odds you could create a bot that could analyze external military reports and update danger reports accordingly? So if say, Johnny posts a EMRP to be filed for Yagoton, and the bot sees the words "The Whatmore Building", it could use that section of the report (bounded by the ellipsis's on both sides) to update the building's Danger Report?--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 23:21, 28 August 2009 (BST) I had been working on just such functionality a good while back, but then a bunch of users started recording manually (and they still are) so I focused on some other stuff instead. Guess I should probably think about finishing that off. --  RoosterDragon  23:46, 28 August 2009 (BST) That "bunch of users" is, for the most part, Kittithaj and myself =P all considered, a bot would be a real time saver, and would be less mistake prone. Also, a bit more complicated, would it be possible to program a bot that can use the "serious collateral damage", "infrastructure intact", "only one building with power". etc. blurbs to infer status reports (on the multitude of 'unknown' buildings)?--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 23:54, 28 August 2009 (BST) Is there enough information for that? I don't think you'd have enough to nail down a specific status for these buildings with any degree of certainty. Unlike named buildings which get a general status indicator and a horde (or lack thereof) report. --  RoosterDragon  00:22, 29 August 2009 (BST) My idea was for something that could just ball-park guess unknown staus reports off of the military.It would use the extreme infrastructure and power reports (and zombie counts) to make a logical guess at what the unknown, really-out-of-date reports were (i.e. EMRP states the suburb is "wrecked" and without power; therefore St. Phony Hospital, which has an unknown status and hasn't been updated in well over a month, is likely ruined). If this were to work, it would just replace reports marked 'unknown', since such a system would be a little too inaccurate to replace real reports. The way I see it, inferred reports, while far from ideal, would be better than a wall of unknowns. Am I making any sense?--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 01:10, 29 August 2009 (BST) I guess you could get away with it for extremes. You'd need blanket ruined/intact though, otherwise you wouldn't have enough information about individual buildings. --  RoosterDragon  01:23, 29 August 2009 (BST) Yeah, I'll admit the idea's a bit of a stretch. All the same, the more extreme reports aren't particularily uncommon.--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 01:30, 29 August 2009 (BST) Well, I'll see what I can come up with. Gotta get it working before we can consider having it guess at stuff, after all :P. --  RoosterDragon  01:36, 29 August 2009 (BST) Ok, just ran the thing on the backlog of reports. A good thing too, it seems the manual updating suddenly became much more patchy. Talk about timing. Anyway, I noticed a few minor errors I was able to patch on the fly. If you notice anything odd over the next few days and updates please shout. See the bot's log for a comprehensive list of changes. One thing I spotted was that when logging reports, the bot posts a timestamp sans the timezone. It's actually always done this. Should I add the timestamp back in? I'd probably have to fix a lot of logs retroactively but guessing the timezone won't be a problem at least. On the bot's log I've already noticed the red links. The bot would update the disambiguated page but didn't record that name properly. I've fixed it so that fix should show up in the next record. Also, I'm still working on the "horde building" functionality. That's when you get a report "maybe 20 zombies outside the Specific Building" which happens so rarely I didn't worry much about it. That and it requires a lot of extra code because it can be any building whereas the general building reports are limited to strategic buildings. I did make it so that if this building is also reported on again in general status, the reports would be combined, but this failed :P All that said, things look pretty good. --  RoosterDragon  22:35, 3 September 2009 (BST) Well, so far, so good. From my experience the "horde building" reports are for the most part limited to hospitals and police departments, and generally say "a dozen" or "twenty". Considering that a lot of these buldings share the same name, I could see how it could become a problem. Not sure if you noticed this or if it would even help, but I noticed specific buildings appear to have specific messages (A is reported "being held" when safe, B "power's on"). I might be wrong, but if this is the case it could come in handy.--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 02:18, 5 September 2009 (BST) The reason I edit more recently is because Rat of Steel keeps editing a lot of bot-doable edits. And he make mistakes more than once, including a deletion of important suburb data. Despite the fact that I warned him twice about leaving those tiresome edits to our EMR bot and focusing on quality mistake-free edits, he ignores me and continues to add more of them, making mistakes along the way. I even suspect he is another bot himself, because his edit pattern is very repetitive, and he never replies back any comments and criticisms. So, to prevent more damage, I take the matter in my own hands and edit those things before he does. Anyway, the new bot feature is good. So it lessen my and Red Hawk One's works updating those buildings manually. Things that can be automated furthermore are blanket reports like "infrastructure looks intact" and "the whole suburb is wrecked." Even "only Specific Building with power" can still be automated (for the said building, but not anywhere else.) The same thing can be done for "being held", "lights are on." Even just the word "definitely..." can be added as ruined (because it always follows by "...fallen.") Still, many fuzzy details need human ingenuity to deal with. For the horde building, as far as I can remember, all of them are important strategic buildings. So, no need to worry about unimportant buildings that have no danger reports (you've removed them all, right?) And even if such a case comes up, can't you just order the bot to skip it? And the duplicate names aren't going to be a problem. Because the name of the suburb is always right there at the beginning of the report. It won't be too hard to add it to make a specific report on said suburb's building. And, this is a very minor detail, but malls don't use "ruined" in their danger reports, but the bot reports fallen mall that way. I do understand that "in zombie hands" needs visual confirmation of the zombie number inside. And people sometimes add wrong tags as well. So, if it's too much of a bother, you don't need to fix it. -- Kittithaj 11:20, 5 September 2009 (BST) P.S. About the missing timezone stamps, I think of the same way. It's nice to have them fixed. But only the most fuzzy people (like us) will care. If it's too much hard work for you, then leave it alone. -- Kittithaj 12:17, 5 September 2009 (BST) All good feedback chaps. I'll look into adding smarter treatment of certain strings later, for now I just want to ensure it's doing the basic idea correctly. So: Malls using "ruined", I'll adjust that to ransacked, that was just an oversight on my part. As far as using ruined v in zombie hands. It's a debatable choice. I prefer ruined since that's all the military can be sure of. Though I'm willing to change it. Also, to be clear on the terminology I'm using on the fly here, here's an example report: 25.96 MHz: "... reporting from Suburb, I've got about forty active ... a horde of twenty or so outside the Horde Building ... lights are on across the suburb ... infrastructure looks intact too ... some survivor activity in Strategic Building One ... Strategic Building Two has definitely fallen ..." (10 hours and 55 minutes ago) Strategic Buildings are Forts, Malls and NTs (just something I made up with when I created the map) but I later realized the military only report on these locations, as far as I can tell, for the last two sections of the report. The "Horde" building is just the building the military notices has a lot of zombies outside. There's rarely enough for them to say anything other than "a few small groups" or whatever. Strategic buildings are limited to forts, malls and NTs which are easy to deal with. The horde building can be literally any building in the suburb however. Including "blah, horde, blah - outside a factory" which is of limited use :P. This is more difficult to deal with as I need to alter the in-game name to the wiki version, and possibly disambiguate by suburb and then maybe even co-ords for a few rare buildings. That and the horde building might also appear later in the same report as a strategic building. If it's a generic building (like a factory), but that building is the only one of its type in the suburb, a report could still be sought out. So getting comprehensive and correct reports for horde buildings could take a little while, and since they're so rare I didn't make it a priority. I'm still trying to think of a good method of identifying the cut-off transmissions and filling in the blanks. The bot just ignores them if it can't match an entire statement, so you guys can do those reports using your superior human ability to extrapolate if you like. Not sure about the extreme conditions yet though. Might wait until the extraneous reports are purged. Otherwise it could entail like 50 read/write requests which is added server load, but mostly damned boring to sit through when I'm processing them. Finally, the timestamps, I'll fix the bot so it logs new reports with timezones. It would be a bit much to fix all the old ones for me though. (But not for another bot, of course :P) --  RoosterDragon  18:36, 5 September 2009 (BST) Funny, I could have sworn the "Horde Building" was only either a hospital or police department. A bit off topic here, but any chance you could have a bot check Category:Confirmed Groups against the stats page? I tried doing it by hand but it was even too tedious for me.--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 02:12, 6 September 2009 (BST) Okay, perhaps I misuse the term "important strategic buildings." The correct term I should use is "important resource buildings." So, sorry for the confusion. And I can somewhat confirm Red Hawk One's observation. Those horde buildings are resource buildings. I'm not sure if they're restricted to just hospitals and PDs like he said. But I believe unimportant building (one that doesn't need and shouldn't have a Danger Report) is never reported with zombies outside on External Military Radio. And, yes, "ruined" and "ransacked" are correct statuses for the automated bot update. Without a real scout looking at the number of zombies inside a building, "in zombie hands" can't be use. Don't worry too much about strange cases and minor exceptions. You don't have to spend time writing your bot to cover them. Those things are better be handled with human intelligence. After all, robots are designed to do tedious, boring, and easy stuffs, leaving humans free to do creative things. By the way, about Red Hawk One's project, the Confirmed Groups category is overused. But what are you going to do about it? You'll piss a lot of people if you try to remove that tag from their group pages. Also, an umbrella group like Dulston Alliance is big and very alive, but nobody is using that name to mark his/her group. Instead they use names of subgroups inside it. Removing such groups because they don't show up is strange and counter-intuitive. Just a thought. -- Kittithaj 17:55, 6 September 2009 (BST) While organizations like the DA obviously exist, the category is for confirmed stats-page groups; technically they shouldn't even be on there in the first place. Of course, it wouldn't be to hard to manually go back and re-add organizations to the list.--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 22:16, 6 September 2009 (BST) It's a dumb category all things considered. For horde buildings, I swear I've seen reports for some insignificant buildings and even a report for "a factory" like I mentioned. Guess I'll have to look though some records and see if I'm remembering right. --  RoosterDragon  14:43, 7 September 2009 (BST) Well, Red Hawk One, you are correct. I won't argue with you on that. After all, you're just trying to enforce the rule laid down by the category creator. But as I said, some won't understand why that their 9-man group is tossed out. So be careful! You should put in the reason for category removal on edit summary of their group page (copy and paste works best here) so they understand and won't add it back/flame you. Perhaps the category should be renamed somewhat? The word "Confirmed Group" actually means a group that really exists and not made up by one guy. So that's why it is so misunderstood and overused. How about "Group Bigger Than Ten Members"? I know it's a bit too direct. But no one can mistook that. And, The Rooster, if you say so, then I believe you. After all, I'm just posting them. You're the one who goes through all those EMRs. And if it's the case, can't you just order the bot to skip generic buildings without Danger Reports? -- Kittithaj 20:15, 7 September 2009 (BST) a/sd category usage I was watching you tag some templates with template:speedydelete, I was wondering, any way to template that category category:Speedy Deletion Candidates onto the Speedy Deletion Queue permanently so pages with speedydelete template can be reviewed through a/sd? --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 16:50, 29 August 2009 (BST) Transplant A/SD onto the category page. Then the listing appears at the end. I know of no method to directly transclude category members. See what the other wiki has to say on the matter. --  RoosterDragon  16:56, 29 August 2009 (BST) A/DM table Don't get it... Vista, Firefox, coding is fine. --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 09:11, 31 August 2009 (BST) Looks fine to me (IE and FF). --  RoosterDragon  22:16, 31 August 2009 (BST) ;_; --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 23:11, 31 August 2009 (BST) Ha! Look at it now! It just won't stop! --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 23:25, 31 August 2009 (BST) Still fine here. --  RoosterDragon  21:56, 1 September 2009 (BST) Try hitting Ctrl-0 (zero, not oh) on that page. --Bob Boberton TF / DW 23:08, 1 September 2009 (BST) Thanks. --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 00:08, 2 September 2009 (BST) *walks away mumbling quietly about how much he hates Vista*... --DANCEDANCEREVOLUTION-- 15:06, 3 September 2009 (BST) minimaps There are a few pages created by your bulkupdatesbot that are on the orphans page. Brooke Hills/Minimap, Brooksville/Minimap, and Buttonville/Minimap. Were these supposed to be integrated into the suburb page? Are they the images being used, just still showing up as orphans somehow? --– Nubis NWO 06:16, 6 September 2009 (BST) They're being transcluded onto those suburb pages, but appear as orphans as they have no other incoming links. --  RoosterDragon  15:05, 6 September 2009 (BST) Is there a way we could make a page to dump them on for proper links? That way the orphan listing is more accurate and saves time when going through it.--– Nubis NWO 19:24, 6 September 2009 (BST) I altered Template:Suburb which trancludes these templates so it also provides a normal link to them. That should fix your orphan problem without the need for an ark. --  RoosterDragon  20:03, 6 September 2009 (BST) Protect Those signature pages. It'll make things easier. --  AHLGTG THE END IS NIGH! 01:45, 8 September 2009 (BST) And to think I was just popping in before I logged off for the night... --  RoosterDragon  01:49, 8 September 2009 (BST) But then the vandals win! Nil gold 01:52, 8 September 2009 (BST) Ugh. Can't we just block registration for an hour or so until this guy calms down?--~ Red Hawk One Talk | space for lease 01:55, 8 September 2009 (BST) May just have a bunch of old accounts sitting around for just this purpose. --Bob Boberton TF / DW 01:58, 8 September 2009 (BST)