Oolite Bulletins

I've searched the forums for a thread that specifically covers this topic, but failed to find one. If anyone can suggest an alternative home for it, we can move this post (or delete it, if the rest of you think this is a waste of time). For myself, I thought it might be useful for those of us with little/no experience of wiki editing to have hints & tips in one place. Maybe it will encourage folk to dip their toe in the water, before stepping into the shallow end and slowly wading ever deeper. That's what I'm hoping to do, anyway.

My own personal 'toe in the water' was adding a ship, the Scimitar, to the fastest ships list -- http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Fastest_Ships_(Oolite). Having appended the lines...

|-valign="top"
|[[Scimitar]]
|0.41 LM
|5 TC
|500k CR
|OXP
|Yes
|100 x 17.5 x 73

... I 'Previewed' then 'Saved' the page. Everything was looking good, though I was surprised to see the cursor change to the little 'link' hand when I moved it over the word 'Scimitar'. I clicked it, and was astonished (in a happy way) to find myself redirected to the Scimitar wiki page -- http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Scimitar.

My question is, how is this happening? I certainly didn't set the link myself, and can't see how it's done. Is it something to do with the brackets around the ship's name -- |[[Scimitar]]?

That was yesterday. Looking at it again today, though the link still baffles me, I've suddenly twigged that the attribute bgcolor="#e7e7ff", appended to alternate |-valign="top" lines, is setting the background colour of the line to pale blue, presumably to help the eye track across the chart. I notice that it's out of synch in some places, presumably as people have added new ships. (I'm as guilty as the rest, having failed to change the entry for the Terrapin, immediately below the Scimitar). I know it's a purely cosmetic issue, but I'm happy to go through the lists and tidy them up in this regard. If I remember, I'll check from time to time to make sure they stay tidy.

I suppose the ideal solution would be to have bgcolor set automatically for alternating lines. Assuming it's even possible to do that, it's way beyond my present abilities -- at least knee-deep, I would have thought, to continue the swimming pool analogy.

If nothing else, hopefully this post has at least helped you Elite guys enjoy a wry smile as you think, "Jeez... was I ever that naive?"

Albee wrote:

My question is, how is this happening? I certainly didn't set the link myself, and can't see how it's done. Is it something to do with the brackets around the ship's name -- |[[Scimitar]]?

Yes - the square brackets indicate a link to the page with that name.

I use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting if I'm unsure about any syntax.

cim wrote:

I use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Formatting if I'm unsure about any syntax.

Thanks, Cim. Most useful.

Reading the wiki entry for Docking Computers (under Equipment) I found the following:-
This is wrong, surely? Holding shift and pressing c ("C") activates the sleep inducer. Holding shift and pressing d ("D") appears to do nothing at all on my MacBook.

I tried docking with a Black Monk Monastery and BuoyRepair facility -- the only option that worked was a straight "c", which put me into the autodock sequence (upside down at the BuoyRepair facility, which I found a bit disconcerting). Then again, I wasn't expecting shift-c to work, as I believe one only gets this fast-dock functionality at main stations.

Can someone please give me the lowdown on all this so I can correct the wiki?

Albee wrote:

Reading the wiki entry for Docking Computers (under Equipment) I found the following:-

Your thoughts are correct - "c" to activate and deactivate docking computers, "C" to fast-dock if the station supports it.

It looks like the documentation there hasn't been updated for a while.

Thanks, Cim. I'll change it.

Albee wrote:

Can someone please give me the lowdown on all this so I can correct the wiki?

The functionality of SHIFT-D was moved to SHIFT-C in Oolite 1.75, I think.

For the exact current behaviour it's probably best to look into the readMe that comes with the game.

On another thread I just tried to use the BBcode wiki= command to link to this page on the wiki: http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Sector2/Usqurave

What I tried to do was this: IE: [wiki=Sector2/Usqurave]Usqurave[/wiki]
but this doesn't work. I think its due to the forward slash in the wiki page name.

I then tried this: IE:  Usqurave
but that goes to a non-existing page called Usqurave.

The only way to get it to work I found was this: IE: [wiki] [/wiki]Usqurave
but thats not ideal because of the space between the wiki commands.

^ Also, the wiki sigil is then a link to the root of the wiki, which is not what you want.

Hmm, wh ohas access to the plugin code?

Talisker wrote:

^ Also, the wiki sigil is then a link to the root of the wiki, which is not what you want.

No that's expected behaviour, and wanted.

Yes, that's how things work. The <wiki> tag cannot take anything but normal letters and (perhaps)numbers. If you have an URL with anything else with it (a Wiki page of the type "SomeShip_(Oolite)" for instance) you cannot use it and have to resort to the normal <url> tag. Same goes for category pages, or for any link to a position within a page.

It sucks, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it.

PhpBB’s upport for custom BBcode gives us the choice between too restrictive (“Unicode letter characters, numbers, spaces, commas, dots, minus, plus, hyphen, underscore and whitespaces”) or way too lax (“Any text”). On these here intertubes, paranoia is the only real option, and we’re not fiddling around with mods for such a minor feature.

Of course, you could use:

I noticed you can't point a link to user pages either. ie

[wiki=User:Tricky]Tricky[/wiki]

Ahruman wrote:

On these here intertubes, paranoia is the only real option

What this man said.