Valve Developer Community talk:Release Notes

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Be aware that the latest upgrade is only a first step, and other changes and improvements to the site are in development.

Steam links

No need for a template! (Incidentally, what's up with the design of the Steam icon? It's different...) --TomEdwards 23:43, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Either way works, but a template is a little more flexible. The template offers the chance to easily change, replace, or extend the syntax of the tags down the road. --JeffLane 02:28, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, and the icon is different because the standard icon was a little too large and heavy to be included inside blocks of text. --JeffLane 02:30, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Site icon

There's a nice Source favicon on its official site. It'd be great to have it added to VDC. --TomEdwards 00:24, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

We like how that icon turned out, too. :) The first part of the upgrade is focused purely on functionality. There are a number of visual changes planned down the road, of which this is one. --JeffLane 02:32, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Allow SVG upload

SVG's primary use here would probably be for logos (Valve's, Source's, HL2's, etc). It certainly wouldn't do any harm... --TomEdwards 13:52, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

SVG should have already been enabled. We'll investigate. --JeffLane 20:18, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Simple merge error in the upgrade script. Should work now. --JeffLane 20:40, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Getting an error after committing the upload: "The upload directory (public) is not writable by the webserver." --TomEdwards 22:22, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

Work on this issue is in progress. --JeffLane 03:54, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

I re-disabled SVG. There are some rendering problems. It should be able to be re-added after some other things get worked on. --JeffLane 06:23, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Images

Thumbnail rendering

I didn't see this in the release notes, but I noticed the image scaler code was updated and PNGs can now be thumbnailed without the horrible artifacts, very nice. But, it seems it was a two edged sword as detailed GIF's are now even more mangled after thumbnailing. For example, Old VS New. --brandished 22:48, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

PNG is a generally more useful format than GIF, but we'll look into it. --JeffLane 04:29, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Ah, your correct, I looked into it, and PNG matches GIF at the 8 bit scale. I'd assumed it was the compression format that was making the image larger, but it was the 24 bit colorspace the image editor I was using had set by default when saving into PNG. --brandished 03:28, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Horizontal tiling of thumbnailed images

Another possible issue is the arrangement of multiple thumbnailed images, they are now forced to lie vertically were they used to be horizontal. For an example, the Navigation_Meshes article in the new WiKi format VS the old format. The issue does not show up when the caption frame is removed, but then the text summaries don't work. They can still be forced to lie horizontally with table formatting, but this may break page formatting on smaller screen resolutions. --brandished 22:48, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

We'll look into the issue. It's possible that the thumbnailed images will have to be done differently going forward. Gallery tags are a possibility, but they are not as flexible. --JeffLane 04:29, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Short answer: fixed. Longer answer: This is actually a bug that existed in the old version because floating left images should not stack horizontally. The bug was "reintroduced" until a better and more permanent solution can be found. So no more action is needed at the current time. --JeffLane 01:31, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

That makes sense, I haven't had much experience with the caption and frame options MediaWiki uses. I have noticed a lot of wasted horizontal space inside the official Wikimedia Foundation's projects. I've looked around several WiKi sites, but haven't found any good solutions to this that allow for wrapping (other then the "bug" here at the VDC). --brandished 14:02, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

"Getting help"

The "Getting help" link on the left-hand menu navigates to help on using the Wiki itself. Its name doesn't do a great job of reflecting that. --TomEdwards 19:12, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

Brush entity

I noticed Brush entity redirects to "Category: Brush entities" which seems to be broken and cannot be created. I'm not sure what's causing the problem, the only thing I can think of might be a possible word filter? I was able to create Category: Brush entity without any trouble, so if it's unfixable, the articles in the category could be moved there. --brandished 04:11, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

This was a capitalization error on the Brush entity page. The category already existed as Category: Brush Entities (capital "E"). --JeffLane 05:12, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I don't think I ever would have thought of that. I saw the note on the release notes about links being case sensitive, but not article creation. If I ever finish my section on templates, I'll add a note about the case sensitivity to the Help:Editing as well (if someone else doesn't 1st). --brandished 23:36, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

I believe the confusion is specific to Category page creation, because unlike standard pages, it still lists the contents of the category at the bottom if the page is incorrectly linked. Incorrectly-linked standard pages just lead to a blank page. --JeffLane 00:00, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

The confusing part for me was clicking Category: Brush entities would go to the "new page creation" page, but when I tried to actually create the new page, the edit wouldn't go through. This might have been as intended, but it was a bit confusing to me as there was no message returned as to why the edit failed. I just tried this again by trying to create Category: Dead mods, and the save was successful (I didn't want to create the page, I just wanted to recreate the problem), was there some changes to the software? I'm not sure if it's possible with MediaWiki, but a message like "This edit is not possible, the page you are trying to create, Category: Brush entities, already exists as Category: Brush Entities" would be helpful for preventing duplicate article names from being created. --brandished 18:05, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Page and link titles are now case-sensitive. This is a change in the MediaWiki software, and there is no simple change to go back to case-insensitive links (if we really even wanted to). This is not really that different from non-category pages. If there's any capitalization or spelling difference in the link title, the link will be red, and if you click the link, you create a new page. I'll try and duplicate the error you mentioned, I have not seen that. --JeffLane 22:08, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Special character limitation

Is the ASCII / English only character requirement (no "ط" or "ﭾ") for page names still in effect with the updates to the VDC? --brandished 23:36, 22 January 2009 (UTC)

Double-byte / non-ASCII characters should work correctly with the new server, but we need to run some more tests first. So for now, the restriction should probably stay in place to make sure we avoid data loss. --JeffLane 00:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Terms of Use

The link for "Terms and Conditions" on the "create account" page directs to a blank page, Valve Developer Community:Terms of use rather then Valve Developer Community:Terms of Use due to the case difference, I made it a redirect for now. Also, on the Valve Developer Community:Terms of Use article, in the "Conduct on the Site" section, there is an invalid link on "You agree to abide by the conduct rules posted here" line. It used to link to this page (according to archive.org), but now users end up redirected to the home page of the Steam Store. The Steam Subscriber Agreement page (5. ONLINE CONDUCT, CHEATING AND ILLEGAL BEHAVIOR: "Specific requirements may also be found in the Steam Online Conduct rules at ...") also links to this seemingly non existent page. --brandished 18:05, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Good catch, we'll fix these up (the conduct rules page is already fixed). --JeffLane 21:24, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Allow Compressed Files?

This is more of a request, but would it be possible to add an allowance for compressed files (Zip, 7zip, Bzip, etc) to the image upload page? Up to now I've been using MediaFire and similar file share sites for example map VMF's and such, but these share sites tend to delete uploaded files on a whim and are often plagued with ads. I don't think bandwidth would be an issue if the maximum file size is 2 MB and I know 7zip and Bzip are non-proprietary (I believe Zip is as well, but I'm not positive). --brandished 03:28, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

Search

Recently I tried searching for .pfm and .lmp here but got no results, in spite of there being pages about them. Has the update made the search worse or has it always been like this? --Tschumann 21:38, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Never mind, turned out the search term was less than 4 characters. --Tschumann 21:40, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

No more overflow?

After the last update or so, the line "overflow: auto;" was no longer included in the VDC's "main.css" file causing the "pre" and "source" text blocks to "run off" the page.

• before:

244 	background-color: #f9f9f9;
245 	line-height: 1.1em;
246 	overflow: auto;
247 }

• now:

244 	background-color: #f9f9f9;
245 	line-height: 1.1em;
246 }

Not sure if this was purposeful, I know it can sometimes cause some odd rendering issues in WebKit based browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc) if pre-formatted text is wrapped inside table formatting. --brandished 21:58, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Nope, not intentional. Some old CSS snuck in during the upgrade. Fixed. Thanks for reporting it. --JeffLane 02:09, 3 July 2009 (UTC)