Talk: Toughpigs

Welcome

Toughpigs, welcome!

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My bad

Hey, Danny. I had misinterpreted exactly what your categorization was doing. A few helpful admins explained what you were doing. Entirely my fault. Sorry about that. If you haven't re-reverted all of that, certainly don't hesitate to do so. :) Toprawa and Ralltiir 01:40, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Okay -- thanks for your message! I'm glad to know that I wasn't doing anything wrong. -- Danny (talk) 01:57, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Re: Pagetitle

Hey, Danny. Thanks for taking the time to point it out to me. I was following the conversation in the Skype channel until a few minutes ago, but some other things demanded my attention :) I'll read up on the back log when I get a chance. And, I've been doing well—busy, but well. Thanks for asking, Greyman Jan.png (Talk) 18:01, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, it looks like something's weird somewhere. It's not just here -- it's every wiki that's customized MediaWiki:Pagetitle. I filed a trac ticket. :) -- Danny (talk) 18:36, 23 April 2008 (UTC)
Please don't change the title without checking with the community, though. We've been talking about it on the administrators' mailing list, and a lot of us either don't like the idea or think it needs public discussion. Thanks. —Silly Dan (talk) 11:46, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
Hey, no worries, Danny. I'm glad to see the forum started :) Greyman(Talk) 20:04, 2 June 2008 (UTC)
  • Hi Danny! Based on the results of Forum:Main page pagetitle, you have the community's approval to go ahead with the 2-week test. —Xwing328(Talk) 01:56, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
    • Hehe, so I realized that although the vote had been inactive for over a week, it hadn't technically reached the required two-week time frame when I archived it. If you catch any heat for this, direct it towards me ;) —Xwing328(Talk) 02:12, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, man. Actually, when I brought up the pagetitle thing with Green tentacle a while back, I didn't realize that the New Monaco plan would be brought out so quickly. I'm in charge of communicating with the users about New Monaco, so I'm kind of taking the heat right now with everybody who's unhappy about the changes.
So I don't think it's a good time for me personally to start playing with the Pagetitle right now. :) You guys did vote to try it, and I know that it'll be helpful -- so I'll show you how to do it, and then if somebody wants to make the change, they can do it. Here's the code:
{{ #ifeq:{{FULLPAGENAME}} | {{MediaWiki:Mainpage}} | Star Wars Wiki - Wookieepedia | $1 - Wookieepedia, the Star Wars Wiki }}
Once you guys make the change, I'll track what happens on Google. I can get stats on where visitors are coming from, and I expect that as the Google ranking rises, we'll see more people coming in from Google. I'll be happy to report on the results once we've collected some data. -- Danny (talk) 03:14, 12 June 2008 (UTC)
  • The main page test has been completed for nearly two weeks. Please come up with the data and stats from this test as you said you would, or we'll treat this as another failed experiment from Wikia and disregard the test. Thank you. Atarumaster88 Jedi Order (Talk page) 16:58, 10 July 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, sorry about that... I've been tied up with the skin & ad changes for the last few weeks. Y'know how ads got turned off for logged-in users yesterday? That was me. :) I'll post about the pagetitle soon, though -- thanks for the reminder. -- Danny (talk) 17:47, 10 July 2008 (UTC)

Google rankings

Hi Danny. I'm an admin over at Wookieepedia. I'd like to hear about the other avenues you're looking at to raise Google rankings if you've got the time to explain them. Oh and I just saw above that ads got turned off for loggin in users! Sweet! --Eyrezer 00:47, 5 August 2008 (UTC)

Sure! We're testing a bunch of different things to help with Google rank right now... The one that I'm most excited about is a new way for our software to handle redirects.
The way that MediaWiki usually works is that redirects take you to the page, but with the redirect in the URL. So Google sees two separate pages -- starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Darth_Vader and starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Anakin_Skywalker -- with the same content. This splits the potential page rank between the two URLs, and Google also penalizes pages that have duplicate content.
So if you do a Google search for Darth Vader, you'll see the wiki/Darth_Vader page come up at #7; search for Anakin Skywalker, and the wiki/Anakin_Skywalker page comes up at #4. There's also duplicate pages for wiki/Princess_Leia, wiki/Leia_Organa and wiki/Leia_Organa_Solo -- which may be why a search for Princess Leia comes up at #10. (Google has a bunch of servers and databases, so the results you see may be slightly different.)
Meanwhile, pages that don't have major redirects rank higher -- Han Solo and Boba Fett are at #3.
So we figured out a way to solve this -- an extension that forces a "hard redirect" instead of the usual "soft redirect". We're testing it out right now on Muppet Wiki. If you put "kermit" in the search box, you get sent to wiki/Kermit_the_Frog, instead of wiki/Kermit. The "(Redirected from Kermit)" message pops up as a javascript message, so that Google doesn't see it. That way, all the links point to the same URL, and it doesn't split the Google ranking.
You can see this working now on Muppet -- search for "kermit", or "muppet movie".
We've been running the test on Muppet for a little over two weeks now, and the results are promising... It'll be another couple weeks before I can say anything definitive about its impact. Let me know if I can tell you anything more... As you can probably see, I like talking about this stuff. -- Danny (talk) 20:10, 5 August 2008 (UTC)