Talk:Main Page

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This page is for discussing the Valve Developer Community's Main Page. For discussion on VDC in general, see the Main discussion page. For questions about developing, please visit the New Help Desk! This page is not for support questions!

Thank you Valve!

For the first time in years, Valve came back! We can now edit the Main Page again. Thanks Valve. Now, please update the wiki so that it doesnt run on a horribly outdated mediawiki pls Equalizer5118 (talk) 4:04, 7 Jun 2023 (UTC)

I think the new design looks good.

Maybe make the VDC Navbox template make it look like the main page, or maybe make a new one and keep the old one? Because i think the navbox maybe should be here Mr. SystemError (talk) 8:45, 30 Apr 2024 (UTC)

Wow guys, the new front page looks great!, If you can make sure its been changed properly to your native languag Seal Enthusiast (talk) 19:31, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Took me 10 minutes to figure out how to make the rest of the main page fit with the Valve-Tech template, since i found the right colors, I went with it. I also made the colored boxes buttons.
Also i ported other lang to /strings subpage and transcluded from English page, except on Hebrew which uses its own page (flipped the grid design and made the text to be read right to left) N0one (talk) 20:53, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Going about tidying up the Main Page

So I composed a version of the main page in my sandbox, here.

I've changed certain element proportions, I moved the article count underneath the title (and got rid of other stats - the text on the page explains why). There's room for expansion underneath Source 2 section, for future games. I've replaced string lookups with simple text right in the page (with the exception of the navbox, as it's a template and I'd rather include it as template than replicate it).

Basically, it is tidier, more economical, easier to maintain.

The question is, how to go about using it?

I can replace the Main Page's code with it. The biggest con is it'll lose all the languages, as there don't exist translated versions of the Main Page, per se (the translations that currently exist aren't done that way, so they wouldn't show up as flags). They'll be lost until translated versions are reestablished. Which used to be the old way of doing it.

I can replace the Multipage's /en version with it. It'll be less intrusive, but some elements are declared on Multipage's base page, like copyright and legal section, they'll remain as string lookups, which I ideally didn't want. It'll also not change appearance to anyone using non-eng version.

I won't pretend I have the best solution, but I thought if anything I should start discussing this, here, now.

Cvoxalury (talk) 11:39, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

This one's a bit of a weird one, because with the main page being a bit of a mess of inline CSS it's a tad harder to pick things out. Perhaps more common things could be put as classes in common.css to reduce overall noise for styled pages, but that has the downside of needing staff action each time something should be tweaked, as well as being yet another page to edit (which we're trying to avoid, but I think it's more justifiable than the other stuff in this case). --DarkOK (talk) 17:37, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Right, but I think in the meantime, the main page can still be edited to be less, well, messy, as it currently houses more elements than it needs. I don't want to impose my version without asking (and listening), however. Cvoxalury (talk) 10:02, 20 June 2024 (PDT)

I took the leap of faith and tidied up the page. I did a soft version of what I proposed, not replacing strings with text and such (so it should be as adaptable as it was, just shorter now). If I really did wrong by users by doing that, revert it. Cvoxalury (talk)

Autoconfirmed protection

I can't check for myself; can autoconfirmed people here still edit the Main Page? I'm not sure if autoconfirmed protection functions properly here. PabloS (talk) 16:57, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

I was able to edit the main page Darnias (talk) 17:22, 19 June 2024 (PDT)

Yes, i'm autoconfirmed and i can edit the Main Page and semi-protected pages. --N0one (talk) 01:11, 20 June 2024 (PDT)

Yep, works for me! --Seal Enthusiast 07:43, 24 June 2024 (PDT)

Why shouldn't it be protected so only moderators (and above) can edit it? It and its individual elements (templates it's composed of) could use more elevated protection. Cvoxalury (talk) 13:06, 24 June 2024 (PDT)

Avoiding clutter on the main page

I implore my fellow editors to not clutter the main page anymore. Sprinkling icon confetti, coloured text (not that someone did; this is saying preemptively) and things like that is purely cosmetic, style that doesn't improve the substance.

There's icons for the main branches of the wiki - Goldsrc, Source and Source 2 - its main three 'kingdoms' if you will - that's really enough.

We're climbing out of the dark times when it looked this bad, and we're currently at the point where it's pretty optimal. Reasons like 'looks nicer' is what led to looking like that pic in the first place.

Cvoxalury (talk) 08:14, 24 June 2024 (PDT)

Yeah it's looks pretty clean and good enough, another thing about the icon, the CS2 workshop icon is unofficial anyway (Valve didn't made one like other Source 2 games, so I made them based off HL Alyx Workshop Tools), the only problem that it doesn't seem to look good sometime on smaller resolution (16px), and probably looks bit too similar to HLA, but it works. --leonidakarlach (talk) 04:38, 25 June 2024 (PDT)

To the user User:Seal Enthusiast adding icons to the Source 2 games: they're useless clutter. It's not about bandwidth, it's about what's needed. Icons aren't needed, three of them are almost the same, everyone can read the text right next to them. Don't revert undos, as that becomes edit warring. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:35, 3 July 2024 (PDT)

Why don't you discuss it with others before you undo the change yourself? You are the one starting the war of edits now. At this point, there is nothing stopping you from changing the minds of the majority (and there are at least 2 people who disagree with you, not counting me and others who just don't care), but you just undo even a minor change instead of waiting for a response to your complaint 😒

--THE OWL (talk) 03:55, 3 July 2024 (PDT)

Apologies for any issues adding the icons may cause. I was not aware there was a "unspoken rule" of not updating the wiki to a more modern style. Once again sorry for any trouble I may have caused. --Seal Enthusiast 05:34, 3 July 2024 (PDT)

This passive aggression isn't solving anything. I see that User:PabloS reverted the removal of the icons, as a final decision in my eyes. Alright. Whatever. Three of them are the same blue square, I still think they're without use, but it's not that essential. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:26, 12 July 2024 (PDT)

Text on the main page

What exactly is the practical reason right now behind keeping text (like the welcome text, or text on the buttons) as string lookups instead of just having it like normal text? It only appears once per every version of the page, and every version has its own text. Cvoxalury (talk) 14:12, 13 July 2024 (PDT)

Added strings as parameters of Template:MainPage which should be less hassle free with ability for quick preview. Nescius (talk) 04:02, 15 July 2024 (PDT)

Address to editors about paragraphs

When you create templates, pay attention to the paragraph problem. Seriously, a bunch of new templates break the formatting again, and the place to fix it people just put all the damn text on one line, making everything unreadable.

Let's look at the problem

I'll use part of the {{Infobox game}} code for an example. This template is fixed now.

Template
<includeonly><onlyinclude>
{{sidebar
| header = {{{title|}}}
}}
</onlyinclude></includeonly>

Consider the example above. We can see that after <includeonly><onlyinclude> the editor has created a paragraph by moving the template code one line below, and also created a paragraph before the closing HTML tags. What is the consequence of this? When the editor writes code like this:

Source code of the article
{{LanguageBar}}

{{Infobox game
| title = Dota 2
}}

{{Stub}}

The wiki engine will create this:

Article
{{LanguageBar}}
<p></p>
<p></p>
Final view of the info box
<p></p>
<p></p>
{{Stub}}

A user with no knowledge of template editing would try to fix it this way:

Source code of the article
{{LanguageBar}}{{Infobox game
| title = Dota 2
}}{{Stub}}

Or this way, but this too can cause formatting errors:

Source code of the article
{{LanguageBar}}
{{Infobox game
| title = Dota 2
}}
{{Stub}}

Let's fix this

Variant 1:

Template
<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{sidebar
| header = {{{title|}}}
}}</onlyinclude></includeonly>

Variant 2:

Template
<includeonly>

Tip: You can write anything you want here, it won't be included in any page as <includeonly> hides everything.

<onlyinclude>{{sidebar

| header = {{{title|}}}

}}</onlyinclude>

</includeonly>

Result:

Article
{{LanguageBar}}

Final view of the info box

{{Stub}}

To fix the problem, I just removed the extra paragraph after <onlyinclude> and before the HTML tag that closes it. As a result, the wiki engine simply doesn't create unnecessary <p></p>, which only makes life better for ordinary users and editors.

-THE OWL (talk) 23:26, 13 July 2024 (PDT)

Can you take a screenshot of what the 'broken' and the 'fixed' Infobox game looked like, side by side? Not its code, but side-by-side comparison of how the end result looked on pages. When I switch between versions before and after your edit, I literally can't see a difference, trying it in Firefox, Chrome or Brave. Cvoxalury (talk) 01:08, 14 July 2024 (PDT)

I've attached the image below. You can check it yourself. To do this, save the old code {{Infobox game}} and after that purge Dota 2.

- THE OWL (talk) 01:44, 14 July 2024 (PDT)

Yes, I see it happen on the Dota 2 page, but I don't see the same happening on Half-Life's page. Well, the Dota 2 page also has the stub template. And it has not just newlines, but empty lines between its tags. Does that have anything to do with it? Cvoxalury (talk) 01:48, 14 July 2024 (PDT)

On the Half-Life page, this problem was not visible because the article elements were spaced too tightly together. As soon as I updated the article code, the extra paragraphs appeared.

Here's an example of old code that avoided unnecessary paragraphs:

{{LanguageBar}}
{{hl topicon}} {{gldsrc topicon}}

<span style="color:white; font-weight: bold;">{{For|about=the 1998 game|the documentation on GoldSrc and Half-Life SDK|[[Half-Life SDK]]|}}</span>
{{Game Infobox
| title = Half-Life
}}
[[File:C1a0 testmachine.jpg|thumb|''"They're waiting for you [[Dr. Gordon Freeman|Gordon]]... in the [[Anti-Mass Spectrometer|test chamberrr....]]"'']]

Here's an example of new code that would create extra paragraphs without updating in the template:

{{LanguageBar}} {{hl topicon}} {{gldsrc topicon}}

<span style="color:white; font-weight: bold;">{{For|about=the 1998 game|the documentation on GoldSrc and Half-Life SDK|[[Half-Life SDK]]|}}</span>

{{Game Infobox
| title = Half-Life
}}

[[File:C1a0 testmachine.jpg|thumb|''"They're waiting for you [[Dr. Gordon Freeman|Gordon]]... in the [[Anti-Mass Spectrometer|test chamberrr....]]"'']]

- THE OWL (talk) 01:59, 14 July 2024 (PDT)

I'm still not seeing any difference between the tab I had open since yesterday and didn't update, a tab I opened while temporarily undoing the Infobox edit, and a tab with that edit and purged.

Or opening the three revisions of the page (yesterday by Nescius and two today by you), they appear to be the exact same height *except* one line at the very bottom that says 'This page was last edited on <timestamp>' but that's not part of it all.

Mediawiki treats single line breaks (text like this)

first half of sentence
second half of sentence

as a single line, it ignores the break and it just becomes one line.

Does the same not happen with the code? Wouldn't that cause

<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{sidebar
:::::

and

<includeonly><onlyinclude>
{{sidebar

to be equivalent? Cvoxalury (talk) 02:23, 14 July 2024 (PDT)

Variant 1:

Template
<includeonly><onlyinclude>{{sidebar

Source code of the article
first half of sentence
second half of sentence
{{Infobox game}}

Result
first half of sentencesecond half of sentence
{{Infobox game}}

Variant 2:

Template
<includeonly><onlyinclude>
{{Infobox game}}

Source code of the article
first half of sentence
second half of sentence
{{Infobox game}}

Result
first half of sentencesecond half of sentence

{{Infobox game}}

Fixing Variant 2 without editing the template:

Template
<includeonly><onlyinclude>
{{Infobox game}}

Source code of the article
first half of sentence
second half of sentence{{Infobox game}}

Result
first half of sentencesecond half of sentence
{{Infobox game}}

The second variant creates an additional line break in the saved article, because the wiki engine counts a template line break in an article as two line breaks due to the position of the template code under . This is what can create extra paragraphs.

- THE OWL (talk) 00:49, 17 July 2024 (PDT)

Address to editors about tabulation

When you are trying to make your page or template code more readable by creating indents to the left for lines of code, don't use regular spaces, long spaces and other. You make the code very messy and overload the pages with increased character counts. Tabulation has been around for centuries, so please use it in combination with regular spaces, long spaces and other only when necessary.

An example of terrible code (note the space between the parameters and =):

{{Infobox game
| title         = Dota 2
| image         = Software Cover - Dota 2.jpg
| developer     = [[Valve Corporation]]
| publisher     = Valve Corporation
}}

An example of good code (It looks the same in the source code wiki editor, but there are fewer characters):

{{Infobox game
| title		= Dota 2
| image		= Software Cover - Dota 2.jpg
| developer	= [[Valve Corporation]]
| publisher	= Valve Corporation
}}

The source code wiki editor does not support tabulation, but you can simply go to Windows Notepad (or any other text editor), press Tab ⇆, copy the character, and paste it onto the page as many times as you want. Also, you can use third-party browser add-ons like VDCEditor.

-THE OWL (talk) 23:45, 13 July 2024 (PDT)

Changes to "New to the wiki?" section

Recently I've been working on modernizing the Community Portal as part of an effort to centralize aspects of the community. For the final step, I've been hoping to edit the "New to the wiki?" section on the main page to link to the Community Portal. I created a mockup which adds two new buttons which you can see here, in the bottom right corner of the page.

While I've been proactive with my other changes, I'm reluctant to change the Main Page due to the continuing activity and debate surrounding it, as well as the fact my changes would require new translations. I might go ahead and do this if I don't get a response here, but does anyone have any specific input on these changes, or any requests for me to hold off on them? --Blixibon (talk) 11:36, 16 July 2024 (PDT)

I think it looks fine and the portal itself does too (WIP notwithstanding).

It is going to offset things a tiny bit because it's slightly taller, but if Valve releases Deadlock (probably will), it's going to make S2 plaque taller so that'll even that out. (Deadlock links are already in it but hidden).

I kind of fell out of loop with the most recent changes to the {{MainPage}} template that had to do with strings/text parameters, though. I assume it (new to wiki box) needs to be patched through that now.

User:Nescius, User:N0one, User:SirYodaJedi, thoughts? Cvoxalury (talk) 04:14, 17 July 2024 (PDT)

My only objection would be that in the second mockup there are the links twice. First in the text and second in the form of a button and both link to same page but I don’t hold too strong opinion about this so don’t feel too obliged to address this. As for the MainPage template the way the template works now is you can provide the text as parameter and if you don’t it defaults to the strings in strings subpage. Nescius (talk) 05:22, 17 July 2024 (PDT)

For me, the 2 links to the same page isn't ideal, the text could go see Wiki contents and see Community Portal, but not holding any opinions about it. For the MainPage, its identical to what Nescius said. But overall its fine for me. N0one (talk) 09:28, 17 July 2024 (PDT)

Main Page rework?

Considering reworking Main Page to use the multi page style format i.e. based on interface language and transcluding translated main pages to the 1 true Main Page. The reason is that only 1 true main page exist where the tab next to the discussion says "Main Page" and the page display title is automatically removed along with that horizontal bar. Also another thing that would be good to do is recreating any templates used on the main page as subpages of Template:MainPage uniquely used on main page so that any missteps in editing templates won't be reflected on the main page and to avoid any extra checks related to how the language is handled. Nescius (talk) 15:16, 20 July 2024 (PDT)

Isn't that what we removed so that it's not such a mess to edit and to revert someone's bad edits...

so that any missteps in editing templates won't be reflected on the main page - wait, how would that not make them reflect on the main page?

I'd also like to address, since we're here, the many languages it has that are, for lack of a better term, "fake". Not as in the languages are fake. But half of them only have just 2-3 pages (Cs/, El/, He/, Ka/, Nl/ Sk/ (0 pages), Sv/). There's no apparent demand for them yet they're included there (some don't even have the main page itself translated) as if there's more content for them, but there isn't. I think Main Page translations should be included if there's anything to show behind them and moderated manually. If someone starts with the main page then does nothing more (or even doesn't finish it, as with some of them), they should consider starting from the meat of the thing instead so one day it makes sense to give that language a Main Page presence. Cvoxalury (talk) 15:44, 20 July 2024 (PDT)

The point is that there is only 1 Main Page. It has title removed along with the horizontal bar below the title and the tab next to discussion says "Main Page". Translated main pages aren't really main pages and no clue if that horizontal bar can even be removed there.

What I mean about the templates is that all templates used on main page would be defined as Template:MainPage subpages and not used anywhere else on the site. For example Template:hl2 would be separated as Template:MainPage/hl2 and used exclusively on the Main Page and so any edits to the Template:hl2 would therefore not in any way affect the Main Page. The editing wouldn't be really much more complicated, pretty much there is just Template:MainPage where design of the main page resides and each translated subpage contains {{MainPage| ... translated strings as parameters ... }}.

Also not seeing the issue with having translations of the main page despite the given language not having many translated pages. The unfinished translations would be probably fine to omit until someone finishes them. Nescius (talk) 18:17, 20 July 2024 (PDT)

I see, I didn't understand the templates subpages part as I read it that changes to those templates (once they become Template:MainPage/[stuff]) would somehow not affect it. I see now what you meant.

But if that's to be done, can it also be alleviated of some of these templates? "Half-Life 2" for example can't look different in any translated versions (names don't get translated) so it can just be text (same with Valve, Source/GoldSrc). Well, this is a minor point.

The only real "issue" with those abandoned translations is they stretch the language bar by even being there. The {{Translate}} even says to nominate such articles for deletion. Cvoxalury (talk) 01:40, 21 July 2024 (PDT)

In case of Half-Life 2 it would still remain a template that automatically makes the link based on language (ex. linking 'Ru/Half-Life 2' when Russian is chosen) but completely stripped of any unnecessary stuff that regular hl2 template has and is not used on the main page. Imo language bar being long on main page looks fine and would look nice if it filled the line completely. If by abandoned you mean non-fully translated main pages then maybe those can be omitted but I am for keeping any fully translated main page even if there are no other articles in that language Nescius (talk) 09:21, 21 July 2024 (PDT)

Ah damn I forgot about linking to languages. Yes, moot point in my post, then.

About the translations - alright, it's your call. Cvoxalury (talk) 02:27, 22 July 2024 (PDT)

Language pages

I feel like it would make more sense for language pages to be how they were previously (e.g. Main Page/fr instead of Fr/Main Page) since it's a bit odd to have every page as a subpage of one—just a thought. PabloS (talk) 01:21, 26 July 2024 (PDT)

There are several issues with suffixes for example let's say we are on page info_target. {{SUBPAGENAME}} gives us info_target but on info_target/ru it will just give us ru on every translated page which is not very useful.

Clicking on backlinks on pages like page1/subpage2/subpage3/ru would always lead us to an english page while as ru/subpage1/subpage2/subpage3 each backlink properly goes to ru/ pages. With prefix we can also cheaply determine the language using {{ROOTPAGENAME}} see Template:Pagelang.

Suffixes also cause search suggestions to become quite useless File:Language_suffix_clutter.png --Nescius (talk) 05:25, 26 July 2024 (PDT)

I want to add that the previous way of having language pages as suffixes was a nightmare for editing (and I'm sure others can vouch the same) and looking back on page history, and it also broke searches so I'm very happy its gone --Ficool2 (talk) 06:13, 26 July 2024 (PDT)

To add to this here are optimizations results that were possible or simpler because of prefixes. Using page CBaseAnimating as an example it took ~11s to render that page based on what 'show preview' shows at the bottom of the page. After moving to prefixes and editing Template:uselang and other notices related optimizations it got to around ~6s. Further editing all the templates used on CBaseAnimating page to avoid Template:autolang but use a simple #switch function it got to around ~1.9s and some further minor optimization on the page resulted in current ~1.3s. --Nescius (talk) 09:47, 1 August 2024 (PDT)

CSS suggestions

I'm doing a lot of stylesheet changes (most of which is trying to fix icons). Feel free to recommend stuff you have problems with or that I need to fix. PabloS (talk) 17:11, 4 November 2024 (PST)

Fix the top action buttons

Right now I only have a suggestion for changing the top action buttons. They should be turned into a gradient with a fully transparent top.

Example:

Hello, World!

Code:

<span style="background-image:linear-gradient(0deg, rgb(28 28 28), transparent); border:1px solid; border-top:0; border-image:linear-gradient(transparent, rgb(82 82 82)) 1; padding:.3em .6em;">Hello, World!</span> 

THE OWL (talk) 02:03, 5 November 2024 (PST)

Adding dark pre tag

I was thinking, should pre tag be darker? Since there are lots of the pre tags on articles, tutorial pages, etc., which is just white (See example) and the current one doesn't fit with the VDC theme.

One example is on L4D2 Mission File.

/* Making the <pre> tag style fit with the VDC style */
pre, .mw-code {
    color: #d1d1d1;
    background-color: #1f1f1f;
    border-left: 6px solid #2f2f2f !important;
    border: 6px solid #1c1c1c;
}

/* Some text are darker when its inside the <pre> tag (Also applies to tags that have the pre tag)*/
.mw-highlight .mi, 
.mw-highlight .mf,
.mw-highlight .mh,
.mw-highlight .o {
    color: #b5b5b5;
}

/* Transparency fix when the TOC minimizes the block */
.mw-highlight {
    background-color: #00000000 !important;
}

/* Making the red brighter (e.g 1>px<) */
.mw-highlight .kt {
    color: #ff1f71;
}
/* Making the blue brighter (e.g  #>pagehistory<, li.>selected<, etc...) */
.mw-highlight .nc,
.mw-highlight .nn,
.mw-highlight .nf {
    color: #0082ff;
} 

/* IMPORTANT! this makes the highlighting text readable inside the <pre> block */
.mw-highlight .hll {
    background-color: #41410e !important;
}

/* Made the red color brighter to be readable when theres highlighting */
.mw-highlight .s2 {
    color: #ff3535;
}

Example text
li.selected
.mw-something {
color: #ff1f71;
height:1px
}
test highlight with "red" color

N0one (talk) 14:19, 5 November 2024 (PST)

Talk:Main Page

Contents

Thank you Valve!

I think the new design looks good.

Going about tidying up the Main Page

Autoconfirmed protection

Avoiding clutter on the main page

Text on the main page

Address to editors about paragraphs

Let's look at the problem

Let's fix this

Address to editors about tabulation

Changes to "New to the wiki?" section

Main Page rework?

Language pages

CSS suggestions

Fix the top action buttons

Adding dark pre tag

Navigation menu

Personal tools

Namespaces

Variants

Views

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Workshop

Support

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