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Adding a language

Add a Language. How can I get ooRexx (I created a stub) into the list of languages. I want to add its solution to Abstract Data Type to the Algorithms.

User: Walterpachl

Check out Rosetta Code:Add a Language. Also, you can use --~~~~ for a convenient, automatic, timestamped signature when you leave notes on talk pages. --Michael Mol 16:13, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

I did but couldn't finish -- I created the page but kow is it added to the list- And right now I am stuck when I try to add the code to the task list :-( --~~~~

Now I added the code but apparently it did not like the syntax Is there some noformat option? and the --~~~~ doesn't do what you promised. Sorry for the difficulties of a real newbie here!

Don't use the <nowiki> / <nowiki> tags when you use --~~~~. The <nowiki> / <nowiki> tags tell the wiki software not to interpret --~~~~. --Michael Mol 17:38, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

It's now reasonably formatted and it looks good!!!!

Could you pls insert ooRexx to thje list of languages? (or give me instructions for the dummy (me) )? --Walterpachl 18:17, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

The page you created at ooRexx isn't in the right place. Take a close look at Rosetta Code:Add a Language#Category_Page. Anywhere you see "Ayrch" on that page, think "ooRexx" instead. --Michael Mol 18:22, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I managed. My PC in the country home seems to have this defect of crazily formatting :-( ( I noticed also stramge formatting when answering mails:-( )

Anyway. Here in Vienna it works. Pls point me at instrucions how to color my code. --Walterpachl 16:10, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Help:Syntax Highlighting --Michael Mol 17:35, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Hm. I see what's been done for mnay other languages. However, pretty much to do in a strange language for getting Rexx highlighted. Or am I too scared? Could I also use HTML tagging for a start? --Walterpachl 11:41, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Do not use HTML. That would make it very, very cumbersome to correct later on. Just use <lang oorex>(your code here)</lang> for now, and when proper support is added, things will just work. Chances are, Rexx's syntax highlighting support will work decently well for you, too. I should be able to make a tweak on the server to have 'oorex' apply Rexx's syntax highlighting support. It'd be a start. Getting out of the gate on a new language isn't usually easy. --Michael Mol 13:03, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks BUT unfortunately none of the Rexxes is in GeSHi :-( as far as I can see... no highlighting there either --Walterpachl 14:11, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Start with a basic language template that handles comments and strings (there should be those around; it appears to be C-like to me) and then add in the keywords (or at least the things that are normally used like keywords; I don't know whether the rexx-like languages are keyword-based in the first place). That'll give you enough to be going on with, and it's only a little effort if you know the language. (Alas, some other languages are considerably trickier.) –Donal Fellows 14:38, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

Attack page?

Template:Unimpl Page/Not implemented and Category:Programming Tasks were both recently, uh, 'vandalized' by User:Umobytuz who linked them to http://osobageqys.co.cc and http://evicijum.co.cc which seem to be attack/exploit pages. You may wish to check on the IP address of this contributor and/or check for other similar recent additions.

I removed both links.

CRGreathouse 06:38, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the clear-up and notice. I took a look then blocked the user immediately. If I was too harsh, then I'd rather SC unblock than leave the guy easy access. --Paddy3118 07:09, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

No, blocking isn't too harsh. That means it's probably past time to apply active protections on templates and transcluded pages, too. --Michael Mol 14:43, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

User:ShariPantoja‎ appears to be another spammer (using their talk page). –Donal Fellows 11:43, 25 November 2010 (UTC)

Did some WP financial research

I just spent a little time digging through the Wikimedia Foundation's site, trying to find some info on how to get money from them. What results I got I put here --> Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Income#Dear Wikimedia Foundation <-- in case you missed it on the "recent activity" thing.

Not much helpful info, but I tried. Possibly you've already seen everything I found anyway. Shrug. -- Erik Siers 07:23, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

...and now something else you might ponder: Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Income#Paid Memberships. -- Erik Siers 16:00, 3 March 2011 (UTC)

RC used in a talk by Larry Wall (of Perl)

... And reviewed+blogged by me --> User_talk:TimToady#On "That Goes Without Saying (or Does It)".

Squid configuration

It looks like Squid's maximum request size is causing problems for AutoGeSHi. —Underscore (Talk)

Spammer

User:Debonairlazines6974 is a spammer (check their contributions). Alas. –Donal Fellows 12:08, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Got it covered now. Thanks Donal. --Mwn3d 13:06, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I've made a right mess

Mike. I made a mistake with a rename, and I tried to fix it, but the fixes keep digging me deeper and deeper into a hole. Can you back out my changes from 19:29 to 19:48 today (11th July). Cheers. Markhobley 19:53, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Not automagically, it looks like. The 'undo' and 'rollback' features look a little more complicated for page moves that page-local edits. At work right now, and will be busy this evening. I'd suggest popping into (and hanging out in) the IRC channel and enlist some assistance and coordination there. --Michael Mol 19:56, 11 July 2011 (UTC)

Book Mention

In "A Byte of Python". --Paddy3118 12:21, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

Cool. :) --Michael Mol 12:25, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

More financial suggestions

...this time not from me, but posting here in case you missed it:

-- Erik Siers 12:46, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Saw it then. Just been generally busy, and coping with a hardware failure. Slowly resolving these things...--Michael Mol 23:25, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Spam users

I happened to look at the user creation log, and holy crap look at all the apparently-created-to-spam usernames -- things like "4Hjyo29LKb", "Gzs6na7KyZ", "4LwiEd2p", etc. Looks to be on the order of 5-10 spam accounts to 1 legit account.

I was thinking, there has to be a way to catch those, before they start posting their links. The only method that comes to mind is blocking their entire subnet, at least temporarily, say 30 days. That way, they can't just come back and create a new username and continue spamming, or just spam without logging in.

Might be harsh, especially if they're spamming from a normal ISP account, but maybe a short-term solution. Would likely reduce the amount of admin work, methinks. -- Erik Siers 20:20, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

They do get their source IPs blocked, and the IPs are disallowed from creating new users. I don't have a mechanism that allows me to block entire subnets, but that will become necessary when the site moves over to dual-stack IPv4/IPv6. --Michael Mol 20:32, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

And before anyone suggests it, I'm not interested in applying pattern-matching or bayesian tests on usernames. I've been caught by surprise before when an account that looked like a spam username started making beneficial edits. --Michael Mol 20:32, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

What about one of those tests that simply sends an alert to an admin? Make it a one-time thing, something like: "SpamWatchBot has noted an edit from suspicious user name apparent-spammer-name on page So-and-so. This is the only alert that will be generated for this user."

Then the bot (or whatever) could add apparent-spammer-name to an internal ignore list, and let the admins worry about it.

Eh... Looking at it now, maybe not worth the time to write. Shrug. Or maybe there's already a MW bot available to do something similar and could be modified appropriately; I haven't looked. Shrug again. -- Erik Siers 07:15, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Right now, I see almost every edit on the wiki, as I've got the Recent Changes feed pulled in via Google Reader. Anyone who does that can see when accounts are created or blocked, and when pages are edited or moved. Frequently, someone else gets in and repairs things before I have a chance to respond. I wind up blocking the offending account, possibly deleting any 'created' pages if the person who caught the edits first didn't have delete privileges. --Michael Mol 12:52, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

It might be worth considering doing more automated banning. I've been watching the war you've been fighting over the past month or so (and flagging problem pages as I see them) and I'm wondering if it's sustainable in its current form. Is it possible to change the rules to make things harder for the scum? The logs I can see don't let me find out whether there's some common feature of the hosts submitting spam, but I bet it'll prove to be a relatively small group that's targeting RC… –Donal Fellows 17:45, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the flaggings. I've been thinking of taking a page from Panopticlick and [mod_security http://modsecurity.org/] and use request fingerprinting to block automated attackers. The risk of false positives is very low compared to IP-banning, and automated attack scripts are highly likely--at least for the short term--to not change their fingerprints much between attacks. --Michael Mol 17:53, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Heads up: User:Healthytact23164, User:Gmalestripperx look very suspicious, but haven't spammed yet. –Donal Fellows

When I see new users in the recent changes feed, I add them to my watchlist. That way, I get an email when their page is created, so I can catch spam users in under five minutes, if I'm awake. --Michael Mol 17:00, 10 February 2012 (UTC)

Uploading problem

I've been trying to upload a file and the interface won't let me. It's a png file which I've cunningly disguised with a .png extension, but when I attempt to upload it I just get

Permitted file types: png, gif, jpeg, svg.

Any ideas?

I had written an elegant solution to a task but I daren't post it without its output since I get harassed whenever I have the temerity to post a solution without giving its results.

CRGreathouse 07:15, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

This is a known problem. See Image Upload problem? ~~and Problems with uploading new versions of existing images~~ on this page. -- Erik Siers 07:31, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

Ah. No solution known, then? I didn't see one at either of those links. CRGreathouse 08:22, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

The one I crossed off is probably unrelated. No response from Short Circuit so I assume no solution yet. He had a combination server move/upgrade planned; I don't know what happened with that but I guess that maybe he was hoping that the problem would disappear when he did that. If he did that. -- Erik Siers 08:27, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

There's some related discussion on my talk page, see if it's of any help. --Ledrug 08:51, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

There is a workaround linked to in the above discussion: [1]. --Mwn3d 11:57, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I believe it to be related to "AJAX" uploads. That's what I found when I tried walking through the JS code. What I don't get is why people are still seeing that message even after I disabled AJAX uploads. Sorry for not replying directly in the other places it's cropped up; I'm beginning to think we need a real bugtracker for this stuff. --Michael Mol 14:03, 23 November 2011 (UTC)

I managed to make it work by disabling JavaScript on my browser. CRGreathouse 03:12, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

The MediaWiki software has been updated, serverside. Is this still going on? --Michael Mol 23:24, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

<math> not working?

Equations in the tasks are not being rendered for some reason. Could you check this? Thanks. --Paddy3118 07:00, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Also broken on all other pages; for example, “<math>1</math>” here renders as

1

(which used to render as “1” because the code used to spot that it was simple enough to convert to HTML; its definitely not getting as far as trying to send the info into TeX and failing). I guess it was the weekend's server changes, and could be as simple as a missing handler for the <math> tag. –Donal Fellows 09:18, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Should be fixed. --Michael Mol 23:23, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

Thanks Michael! --Paddy3118 04:18, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Related Pages -- group them?

Greyscale_bars/Display, Colour_pinstripe/Display, Pinstripe/Display, and to a lesser extent Colour_bars/Display, plus their printer related tasks are all very similar. In fact, many of them center around 4 horizontal bars composed of a pattern of vertical bars, and the code is very similar between each task as a result. (Compare the AHK solutions for Colour pinstripe and Pinstripe; they differ by only a tiny bit: the few lines which distinguish between repeating colored vs repeating greyscale bars.) IMHO, they should all should be grouped together somehow, or even merged. — Crazyfirex 21:43, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Have at it! See Template:Collection...Though that kind of thing really should be accomplished using semantic tags and inline-queries, now. Take a look at Template:Mp community. --Michael Mol 23:30, 15 December 2011 (UTC)

Hmm... how about "Graphical bars", "Graphics bars", or "Graphics patterns"? — Crazyfirex 22:07, 16 December 2011 (UTC)

More likely, something like [[task aspect::line drawing]]. At some point, we can have a box which lists the known aspects of a task, and then drill down to other tasks with the same aspect[s]. --Michael Mol 01:35, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Most tasks actually involve filled rectangles (looking at the sources there is usually a "FillRect" and very few "DrawLine" — one uses a brush, the other a pen), so how about "rectangle drawing"?

To my mind, it's the same thing if I use a one stroke of a pen with a square brush to fill in the same set of pixels as I could with filling a rectangle. I don't have a strong feelings to care which way it goes. As the thing becomes done more properly, ambiguous scenarios like this will be wrapped up in a tree of properties and subproperties.

It does bring to mind an interesting way to draw a distinction, however: The same task, except in a rotated frame of, say, 30 degrees counterclockwise. --Michael Mol 02:07, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Demo of IPv6 access from anon user.

SC here. Just demonstrating what an anonymous IPv6 user looks like. --2001:470:C5B9:DEAD:E269:95FF:FEC5:295F 15:24, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

Another edit, from the same user, on the same /48, but a different /64. ('beef' instead of 'dead'. This is my wifi network, as opposed to my wired network.) The final 64 bits are different, because I'm using my wireless NIC instead of my wired NIC, and the two NICs have different MAC addresses. Also, if I were dedicated to it, I could automate coming at the wiki from 2^16 different /64s. The use of IPv6 privacy extensions would allow me to randomize the MAC-derived portion, too. If it were truly necessary to block my network, you would have to do it at a /48. That should be a last resort, though. Generally, you'd block the /128 (the full, specific IP) first, followed by the /64, followed by the /56, and then the /48. The larger the subnet, the more collateral damage, so larger blocks should be last. --2001:470:C5B9:BEEF:4EED:DEFF:FE93:63A0 15:37, 22 January 2012 (UTC)

IP address to nickname change request.

Hi. Recently I discovered that I created the page Canny_edge_detector not being logged in. Is there a way to change my IP address 87.224.129.185 to my nickname `firstfire' in the history? Thanks. --Firstfire 04:28, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Not something I can do, sorry. --Michael Mol 06:29, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Well, not a big deal. Thanks anyway. --Firstfire 19:06, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

"Edit privileges will now require email addresses"

Does this mean that anonymous edits are no longer allowed? -- Erik Siers 00:49, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Never mind; checked for myself. But is this likely to be a permanent policy change? -- Erik Siers 01:21, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd like it to be. I don't expect spammers to adapt quickly, and it's already allowed me to relax restrictions on image uploads (the same restrictions that coincided with the problems with AJAX uploads). I'll probably drop CAPTCHAs for registered users next.--Michael Mol 02:58, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

I noticed what you wrote on User talk:XazuxiRasiha. In light of the new policy (especially the nice big notification banner) I would think that it's safe to assume that anyone who gives a false email address when signing up is probably trying to spam. -- Erik Siers 13:10, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

About one in three bounces I get are typos or other email errors, actually. Only two out of three are spam accounts, and it's worth the trouble (for now) for me to handle it manually. --Michael Mol 14:24, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Popular pages?

Hi, Whatever happened to http://rosettacode.org/mw/index.php?title=Special:PopularPages ? --Paddy3118 22:01, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

I think with the mega-caching that goes on here the pageview counters were pretty much meaningless (you'll notice them missing from the bottoms of pages). It might also save some resources on the server to disable pageview counts. --Mwn3d 01:32, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes and no. The mega-caching was getting partially punched-through to update the counters, but only essentially randomly. That wouldn't defeat relative measurements, as far as stat-keeping goes. However, as those got updated, they tended to purge cache, which hindered performance. They also pushed more work for reads and writes into the MySQL database, which, again, hinders performance. The last update to MediaWiki added more workload to the PHP code, and I found need to go on an optimization binge to improve pageload speed. As the site stands now, it could probably take a slashdotting in stride. --Michael Mol 01:43, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

And sorry for not responding sooner; I've been away on my honeymoon for the past few days. --Michael Mol 01:43, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

No problem about the page - I appreciate that its gone for a reason. --Paddy3118 03:41, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations

... And sorry for not responding sooner; I've been away on my honeymoon for the past few days. --Michael Mol 01:43, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

First things first Michael: CONGRATULATIONS!!! --Paddy3118 03:41, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

(I second that! -- Erik Siers 17:44, 11 May 2012 (UTC))