Topics

1

Kirby / 1Ups best DS games

« on: February 15, 2011, 06:06:35 PM »

http://www.1up.com/news/departing-salute-10-kirby-canvas
I figured to check it out and look what came in at #10!

2

NIWA Discussion / New Hub Pages. Check it out by clicking "Network Hub" and review

« on: February 15, 2011, 05:45:45 PM »

Well NIWA reached the ripe old age of 1 yesterday (Feb 14th), and the new Hub design by Tappy has been released. It's a step towards what we want NIWA to be and many other projects are in the works. And because this thing is new, be sure to report any bugs with it (if any). The layout is meant to be cleaner and display our Affiliates more prominently.

But a bonus feature that Tappy gave us is the Random Article! This will randomly take you to articles among member wikis!

3

NIWA Discussion / WiKirby History Hole

« on: December 24, 2010, 04:37:46 PM »

On 12-22-10, WiKirby experienced a server glitch. The glitch erased all of our changes over the course of 1 month. You can read the report I sent our hosting provider:

Customer Service-We're Uberpissed
When Mr. Moody informed me that we needed to upgrade our hosting plan from shared hosting to a node 4 VPS plan; the WiKirby staff and I interpreted it as an accomplishment. We were thrilled to have reached that point in our first year. The plan for our hosting budget had always been to upgrade incrementally to ensure we weren't under-served nor overpaying.

Our first month on VPS seemed to be off to a rocky start, as pages were loading extremely slowly or not at all. We convinced ourselves that the caching we enabled should ease this issue in time. Our focus became less on whimsical cosmetic improvements to the site and more on a goal to reach 600 articles before New Year's Day. As of 12-22-10, we were at 595. Then the glitch that took the website down occurred and during my review of the submitted technical tickets and responses; I noticed the issue still hasn't been clearly explained. All we know is that we didn't make the site crippling change in the cpanel.

Once the site came back online, all of the editor's work done since the move to the VPS plan has disappeared. The database seems to have been wiped to just before the move took place. So basically, I paid $47 for a month of work that we didn't even get to keep. Insulting to say the least. All previous times this was worked around by using our the database backup restore from our cron job. Immediately we attempted this and discovered that our cron job schedule was deleted from the cpanel, leaving us with absolutely no up-to-date backup. The technician handling the tickets I submitted seemed to either avoid admitting data was lost or was unable to grasp that my site has a permanent hole blown in it's history from 11-25-10 to 12-22-10, which is exactly our time on VPS.

One such edit lost in the time on TMD's VPS was done by a frequent WiKirby visitor. A young girl made a list of her favorite things in life. Much to our surprise, at #3 she listed WiKirby and this was the only website on her list. In my view, it isn't the customer (me), nor WiKirby staff that TMD failed, but the undemanding regular visitors that hold WiKirby in such a high regard. She clearly would not understand what is and isn't in our control and may believe we callously deleted her expressed feelings towards the site.

While I'm paying for the next month of service, out of inconvenience with the amount of time between the bill and time needed to move; I'm sure the WiKirby staff, editors, and visitors could agree while the latest server glitch wasn't the largest, it was the most devastating. We and our affiliated network of MediaWiki sites (http://niwanetwork.org/) may not see a future with TMD

Given that they've yet to explain how this happened, and seem to avoid acknowledging that data was lost, I'm forced to draw my own conclusions. I'm guessing this was the result of extreme ineptitude on their end, and not a deliberate design to sabotage our work. But it still hurts us as WiKirby's history is now missing a huge chunk!

We can turn this around, mind you, we can make it so that the missing piece is not the heart and spirit of the editors, but just some number of views, dates and times in the creation logs. The 70ish articles can be rebuilt. Many of them are temporarily existing in Google's cache. If anyone has any free time to find even one thing lost, and resubmit it to WiKirby, you have my appreciation. The casual reader or occasional wiki editor may not fully understand what a server glitch is and how that's out of our control. I fear they may believe we made the deletions or something. It's up to the NIWA elite to show WiKirby will still be vibrant.

Also, NWiki, Strategy Wiki, and Smash Wiki offer great potential for strong cross-wiki ties. We haven't been able to fully work as we were trying to get Kirby's Epic Yarn content covered. If any one of you can document one Kirby Game on NWiki and link to WiKirby, or even document one console and link to NWiki-You can help both of these wikis. Create a Strategy guide for your favorite Kirby level and link to WiKirby, or offer the link to levels covered on SW in WK articles. Implement SmashWiki links to indepth Smash Bros content in relevant pages on WiKirby. All of those things can help other Kirby fans find WiKirby and the associated wikis. Our staff team has primarily been me and Vellidragon so we haven't been able to do those things ourselves as much as we'd like.

4

Kirby / Epic Yarn SPOILER Thread

« on: November 24, 2010, 03:32:55 AM »

Alrighty, we'll discuss the spoilers here.

MAAAAN  I wasn't expecting to actually play in Dream Land much less fight Kracko, Whispy Woods, and all that!

5

NIWA Discussion / Just so everyone knows

« on: October 20, 2010, 10:01:34 PM »

WiKirby's database nosedived itself stupid earlier today. TMD finally fixed it and restored the back up to last monday (their latest copy). Adam has a more recent one and will be restoring to that asap.

6

The Lounge / Adam's Birthday!

« on: October 11, 2010, 04:05:01 AM »

HAPPY BIRTHDAY ADAM!!!

We got you this cake, you see, but some mice took it...

7

NIWA Discussion / Wars Wiki's newest Awesome feature

« on: October 05, 2010, 12:10:22 AM »

Wars Wiki's Language dilemma
Many of our friends at Wars Wiki live in Europe and use spellings like "colour" where as we Americans use "color". A small debate arose on which spelling for terms should be used in the article body. When Moydow and I began working on WiKirby's personalization (your name in the article instead of "the player") I had in mind that we should figure out a way to get that level of personalization (or personalisation) to Wars Wiki. I love finding solutions in debates where everyone actually wins and this as well as the gender pronouns debate on WiKirby seem to do exactly that, give everyone what they want, instead of making a choice and forcing the other to accept.

And it was successful! Although this may seem to be a very minor and trivial feat at first glance, I assure you, Moydow's efforts should be respected. The MediaWiki software itself didn't bother to display regionally specific spellings even for words not linked to in the article body. My own role in this was only having the idea on how it would get the region from the editor and getting the code to JoJo. This is Moydow's creation. Now I'm hoping KC will textreplace the words to implement it fully.

But what would be totally awesome is if you guys could go add a few new regional difference spellings or even implement a few here and there! Afterall, you'd get to brag about your role in (quite possibly) a revolutionary feature so new it isn't used anywhere else yet!

Wouldn't you think that personalization is the future of wikis?

8

NIWA Discussion / Your name in an article

« on: September 30, 2010, 05:00:48 AM »

Meta Knight has your WiKirby account name somewhere in the article! Moydow and I innovated some wiki code for a feature to personalize WiKirby instead of using "the player", we put your name.

Tell us what you think. Personally, I think it's an incredibly great tool unique to MediaWiki and we'd be sillier to not take advantage of it.

9

Kirby / New Kirby DS game revealed today!

« on: September 30, 2010, 12:10:59 AM »

Yes I'm linking you to WiKirby for the news!
Kirby DS

Thanks to Static for saving me the trouble of looking for news from Nintendo's conference today, and Moydow for the most epic Future Game template ever! And lastly and leastly to me for putting the article together and informing you all 

10

Kirby / Nintendo's Epic Yarn promotional email

« on: September 25, 2010, 06:31:19 PM »

Odd that they sent out an email to visit the official site and WiKirby has more trailers, images, and info than the official site does :S But I suppose we need to keep an eye on it for the updates.

11

NIWA Discussion / Main Pages (Pimp 'em!)

« on: September 24, 2010, 01:37:24 AM »

Malake and I were talking about pending members' main pages and the lack of development on them. So who's ever been interested in a main page design? At the very least posting ideas for things to have on each wiki's main page would help.

I'm torn on where to work first so I'll just post the state of the main pages at each wiki.

WikiBound- possibly the least developed main page, but a structure seems to have been set. I started a MainPageProject there but had to wait for the colors to be decided on.

Lylat Wiki. has a main page, but imo it's just basic and unappealing. It has improved since I last looked at it, but I actually have no ideas on what to do for that one.

Fire Emblem Wiki, looks like the style is set and would merely be a matter of generating content.

Animal Crossing Wiki, possibly needs even less. What they have is basic, yeah, but it flows nicely. I suppose a few apps on the page to give it a wiki feel would be good.

SSB Wiki, seems the news is out as there are messages on WiKirby from one of the editors.

12

Kirby / free copy of Epic Yarn

« on: August 30, 2010, 04:42:38 AM »

As you can see here, Wikirby will be having a contest with a free copy of Epic Yarn delivered to your door!

Eligibility is simple, have a parents permission if under 18. Create 5 articles (1.5kb contribution minimum) and alert us! We want articles and you want a game, so it works out perfectly!

(offer void on Neptune)

13

NIWA Discussion / An independent Animal Crossing wiki has launched

« on: August 18, 2010, 02:41:07 PM »

Animal Crossing Wiki

Jake of Animal Crossing Forums.net has informed me that his staff is ready to be a publicly released wiki! It's a new wiki, so be sure to report any issues, as you poke around. I'm certain they would appreciate any articles, images, reviews of the site, links to resources from Nintendo, templates, or more importantly advertising. It's a good wiki! It don't chew up the furniture!

Note: I haven't heard from Yoshario about a united AC wiki, so I have no idea where that stands.

14

The Lounge / Another Wiki with Wikia problems

« on: August 12, 2010, 06:31:31 AM »

Telarpedia vs Wikia

During some searches, I found this and figured to tell them a bit about NIWA. Although it's not a Nintendo franchise, I'm looking to make friends everywhere possible!

15

NIWA Discussion / Since we don't have a news page....

« on: August 07, 2010, 07:36:07 AM »

Wars Wiki's new main page!

My draft which I asked reviews on has been superceded by this one! One of the Bulbapedia guys became their newest admin and opted to create the main page as a homage to Bulbapedia's. We all know Bulbapedia has the cleanest Main Page, and I think a friendly site employing a similar one is a great way to foster further innovation on the design. The two sites will naturally evolve their main pages independent of one another, but as NIWA members, likely will share tips and improvements.

But more importantly, now all of the NIWA members have awesome looking Main Pages! In fact if there were Wiki Main Page awards, I'm sure the top 6 candidates would be us!

16

NIWA Discussion / How about this Main Page draft?

« on: July 18, 2010, 03:49:10 AM »

Trying to design a Main Page, Have a look and give me some feedback. If you can "fix" the core format, by all means do so. It's been a nightmare for me, bc I have to cheat the boxes into lining up.

17

NIWA Discussion / Let's have general wiki talking

« on: July 15, 2010, 02:10:38 AM »

Well, we rarely have general wiki editing discussions, favorite userboxes, etc. Soooooo..... Let's start doing that.

My favorite template creations:

• User Proud at WiKirby Meta Knight and "This user is proud to have kicked ass on {{{1-20 article names}}}
• User Proud at Zelda Wiki.org Twilight Princess Zelda and "This user is proud to have shared wisdom on {{{1-20 article names}}}.

Share whatever you want from your own wiki, another, discuss what's presented, or whatever.

18

Membership and Affiliate Requests / New Alliance Requests

« on: July 08, 2010, 12:38:22 AM »

The previous Alliance Request thread has served its purpose, but as a casualty of our hasty setup became unmanageably messy.  Also many of the options we have now didn't exist then. We can now add Affiliates which can be any manner of site that supports NIWA or its member wikis.

Consider all previous requests void! We're starting over with new options. We realize NIWA is still young and may change later, but affiliating can be the absolute first step for a candidate wiki to join as a full NIWA wiki. When suggesting a site consider whether they would fit as:

• Affiliates: Wikis and forums supportive of NIWA and/or its members.
• Membership Requests: If the wiki seems ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest, let us know that the submission is a membership request. The staff will need to host a private discussion, but the first step should be a new thread on the site.
• New Wiki Startups: Be clear if your submission is a new wiki intended for NIWA membership. Although we can't build your wiki for you, we can offer guidance, connections, and a place to discussion its potential.

19

The Lounge / Gaming FML joke thread

« on: June 21, 2010, 06:10:58 AM »

I love these so I want one My friend Yianni and I put a lot of these together. But I figured to share the best of them. Actually I'm reposting these from ZT since no one joined that discussion.

Today, I realized I left something in the Great Palace. FML
Today, wiped his ass with my land deed. FML
Today Vaati split me into four copies . FML
Today, I took a swig of my purple chu jelly and lost hearts. FML
Today, I forgot the Lost Woods directions. FML
Today I found a hidden cave, but the old man took my rupees for door repair. FML
Today Kaepora Gaebora gave me a lecture, Instead of paying attention, I just kept agreeing.
****
MY
LIFE!!!

Today we learned that Ganondorf is the one responsible for this...again. FML
Today Saria said she can't leave the Forest Temple cause she's the Forest Sage. FML
Today Ganondorf played :i left my heart in San Fransisco on his piano

They brought me to the nearest hospital but it was in Raccoon City, FML
Today Umbrella launched a new product, but it spilled and I'm hungry for people. FML
Today the Umbrella Executives were mocking me for my blonde hair and sunglasses. FML
Today I solved a microwave puzzle to unlock the door, the hallway was filled with zombies pretending to be dead by the Green Herb. FML

Today i traveled to Greece, Egypt, and i discovered Atlantis. But i forgot to save. FML.
Today i got into a fight with Sephiroth. I got Poisoned, Cursed, died and had been Revived by a Phoenix Down. And he did it all over again.FML

Today, I got my new Varia suit, and people keep pointing me to the men's restroom. FML
Today, I used a plunger on the pipes, thought it was clear, sat down and a piranha plant snapped my ass. FML
Today Bowser teamed up with Wario,and kidnapped Peach,Daisy, and stole my pasta! FML!
Today i learned my daughter is the soul-half of Alessa Gilespie,and that this town is filled with her dark energy. FML
Today two Groaners and an Air Screamer attacked at the same time,so i was forced to waste Rifle Ammo. FML!!

20

Nintendo Gaming / Heads up!

« on: June 05, 2010, 11:05:54 PM »

You probably already know from Nintendo Emails, but The Club Nintendo "year" is close to its end June30th. But here's an idea for you all: When you fill out the surveys for points, mention NIWA member wikis as much as possible. We did this for Zelda Wiki.org before Spirit Tracks was released, and (it might not be related, but who knows) sometime after the release we got that magazine mention/referral.

Some of the questions are like:

Why did you purchase this game:
and we wrote in stuff like:
 [] Other: To document everything about in on Zelda Wiki.org

What did you least like about this game?
Too many unnamed enemies and characters which makes creating the Zelda Wiki.org encyclopedia much more difficult.

For some of the surveys I just completed, I mentioned WiKirby even though Picross 3D is unrelated :p