Talk:Main Page/Archive 1

request for categories to be added to the "About this Wiki" box

Would it be possible to have the Articles in need of updating and Category:Articles in need of expansion categories added to the About this Wiki box so as to direct people towards articles in need of some wiki-love ?

SignpostMarv Martin 23:14, 8 January 2007 (PST)

Headline

I would very strongly suggest that (a) directly under the page name ('Main Page' - which could do with being changed anyway) is a statement along the lines of "This wiki relates to the Open Source client and protocols for Second Life only. If you are looking for assistance regarding Second Life please refer to (whatever page is felt best)" as it is clear from the comments on the announcement thread on the SL Blog that there are an awful lot of people who do not understand what this is all about and it will probably scare some of them! If I had sysop status I'd add it myself ... --Alison Wheels 07:31, 9 January 2007 (PST)

The wiki isn't just for the client though.

SignpostMarv Martin 09:19, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Indeed, however I do believe something is needed there to make it clear to the neophyte SL-standard-user who has no interest at all in these 'behind the scenes' activities but clicks on the link here because it is there that there is nothing for them to get worried about. --Alison Wheels 13:26, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Heh, yeah, it is really in need of a title and some introductory text.

SignpostMarv Martin 14:14, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Could someone mock up what they think the homepage should look like? Sorry that the homepage has to be protected, but I figured it's such a vandalism target that I couldn't avoid that. -- Rob Linden 14:20, 9 January 2007 (PST)

Done

SignpostMarv Martin 03:25, 10 January 2007 (PST)

Removed Main Page title

Since the title "Main Page" doesn't add anything, it's just deadwood. So, I made a change to the stylesheet to make the Main Page title invisible. This will not affect any other pages. If anyone has an issue with this, please discuss or ping me directly.

Thanks, Rand

--Rand Linden 18:20, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

What is this wiki for ?

What is this wiki for? Is it a general purpose wiki, where information like the old support wiki had? Would it be appropriate for someone to start a page on Groups, and Land, and Animations, etc.? A page similar to the LSL wiki for the main page would be logical, providing a list of topics, categories, etc. to guide people in the right path. A search box doesn't help if you don't know the right term to search for. Was this wiki's creation announced? If this is a general help wiki, might it make sense to put the F1 help in here to be used and worked on? If this is supposed to be a general help reference shouldn't it be listed on the support page: http://secondlife.com/community/support.php and have a separate item in the dropdown box to make it a simple as humanly possible for people to find this?
SuezanneC Baskerville 08:26, 11 January 2007

The wiki currently seems to be being used for the OSSL (Open-Source Second Life) project, and for Volunteers.

However, with some of the work being done in Category:Linden Lab Employees, it's slowly expanding into other areas.

With regards to improving the main page, I invite you to take a look at the wiki-code I've used on my demo, copy it over to your user-space, and showing off your ideas.

SignpostMarv Martin 09:57, 11 January 2007 (PST)

I agree with SuzanneC that this wiki needs to be much more accessible to the average user/newbie, and that the link to this wiki needs to be MUCH MORE visible on www.secondlife.com. People want to find information, and that's what a wiki is for. Do I have permission to create a "General Knowledge" Portal? Any "general knowledge" for the average user does not seem to fit into any current portals. Please advise! Oryx Tempel 21:51 08 August 2007

The Volunteer wiki was announced on the 8th, and Pathfinder is due to make another announcement soon, in case anyone missed the first one. Below is a copy of the original announcement (modified for wikification purposes):

Greetings!

I'd like to announce that our Volunteer Wiki is now open and ready to go. It primarily contains information collected from inworld notecards, but this is *your* resource to contribute to and organize however you feel works best. Feel free to experiment, edit existing content, or add some completely new pages!

Just log into the wiki with your SL username and password, and feel free to start adding or reorganizing. Amber and I will also continue to watch it and add whatever resources we find.

I noticed that a few of you have already started editing and contributing to it, having discovered it via the new Open Source wiki (both wikis are on the same server). Outstanding initiative, and thank you.

Also, please be sure to visit the new Volunteers mailing list page and subscribe yourself to it. I will be using this list as a key way to communicate directly with Volunteers. I also think it will be a great way for all of you to communicate with each other and share ideas without being interrupted by Group IM's inworld.

Volunteer Wiki

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Volunteer_Portal

Volunteer Mailing List

https://lists.secondlife.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/slvolunteers

Onward and upward!

-Pathfinder

• --If the Volunteer Portal is supposed to be the answer to SuezanneC Baskerville & Oryx Tempel posts about thinking we need more general help available in this wiki, then I'd have to say that the the Volunteer portal is not good as a resource for newbies, and not really even for vets either (because it's too hard to find and too sparse). I know about the newbie side, because I'm a newbie, I never thought to look in the Volunteer Portal, I doubt anyone else does either. I've spoken to other newbies in-world, they've visited this wiki too, and also thought there was absolutely nothing here of any value to newbies. Because they couldn't find it.

--And we need more stuff for newbies. After talking with Jeremy & Jon Linden Friday during office hours, it's clear LL offers next to nothing in the way of documentation for newbies. There is nothing good for newbies on secondlife.com or in-world. The 1 thing LL offers, is when you first login to the Second Life Support Center there's a link titled "New to Second Life? Find out how to get started." But the info offered there is WAY too brief!!!

--LL doesn't give a dictionary. LL doesn't give a browse-able overview of the client, so you could just poke through a table of contents and read-up about the features in the viewer. LL gives no intro for newbies (though there are some pretty good, outdated, & disorganized notecards kicking-around that do this...but how many newbies ever find/read those?).

--If LL, or this wiki, offered better docs for new users, Mentors might be less overwhelmed handling basic problems, Help Island would probably be less crowded, and other citizens might spend less time hand-holding newbies and more time doing more advanced, satisfying activities. I bet SL loses confused newbies in droves over the lack of docs.

--Since newbies don't know what questions to ask, the stuff at secondlife.com/support isn't too useful...because they don't know what search terms to type in. Lots of people don't even like to search. Why not a table of contents? What this wiki could offer is ONE point for ALL newbies to click..."Help with Second Life". From that ONE click, it should be possible to browse to EVERY article of interest to newbies. Just by browsing from ONE point they should get an overview of SL, FAQs, dictionary, info on the viewer, more in-depth info, etc. Perhaps something like this:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Jaszon_Maynard/Proposed_Second_Life_Help_Portal

--Jeremy said I should look again in the wiki for docs that are good for new users. And there are some...but they're only linked to the Volunteer portal. If the Volunteer portal is supposed to be helpful to newbies, well, first of all, it's called the "Volunteer" portal (!!!). I wasn't looking to be a volunteer, or to find one...I was looking for help text. The description on the main wiki page says "Learn more about our Resident Volunteer program and access shared Volunteer resources. Resident Volunteers are participants in our Official Volunteer Program, providing guidance and assistance to Residents blah blah blah....". By the time any newbie reads 2 lines in, it seems pretty clear that the volunteer portal does not offer what they're looking for. It doesn't say "general help in here!".

--And the Volunteer portal is, for newbies, not organized well at all for them, and is missing all kinds of things it would have to have. I'll post about that in the Volunteer portal talk page.

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Talk:Volunteer_Portal

--And what if I don't want to join any organization (I don't, yet), but I do want to add/edit articles in the Volunteer portal? Am I allowed to? The descriptions & posts I've read implies I should not. There needs to be a freely-editable help wiki or people aren't going to edit it.

--Also, as a computer veteran, programmer, gamer, & user of many products...it is WAY weird to have to login to a support system before being allowed to read basic help info (which is what you have to do at secondlife.com). I am accustomed to only logging into anything if I want to make posts (forums) or submit tickets. But not just read help!!! Probably 2 kinds of people come to SL Support...those, like me, who aren't used to logging-in just to read basic help...and those who aren't used to logging into anything at all ever. Either kind of person will be confused by SL Support. They're just looking for basic help. They're asked to login to something?!? I wonder how many of them are annoyed & confused.

--LL is offering nothing for newbies, and I'm pretty shocked. It's probably losing them lots of potential customers. But the community could take up that slack. We can do their work for them, and maybe even do it better. We can be pretty responsive to comments from actual newbies. And we're the ones doing the most socializing, buying/selling, role-playing, setting-up businesses, etc. So we'll have a different perspective than LL. It's a user-created world, there probably should be a user-created guide to it. And hey, it's the internet, users SHOULD have a robust wiki, and LL should take advantage of that interest. I've already got some great notecards to start with and some great ideas to add in. But this wiki needs some changes first. I would start putting some of my ideas in, but there's no point unless we either make changes to the Volunteer portal, or make a new portal. Otherwise newbies will have a hard time finding what I add-in, even if they're given the URL to this wiki. I'm willing to WRITE the 1st draft of the intro for newbies, I'm willing to setup the structure for the dictionary and make the first entry in it, I'm willing to setup the structure so others can fill in the details about the client (menus, dialogs, etc), and I'm willing to setup the structure so others can write about everything else in SL (socializing, avatar customization, sight-seeing, classes, Events, money, land, building, scripting, role-playing, businesses, etc) and it'll be find-able easily in a browse-able format to newbies.

--I really think we need either a NEW portal called "Second Life Help", or the Volunteer portal needs a new name, new description, and new layout.

--If what people want is a new portal, I'd try making one myself. It would need a lot of helpful edits from others though.

--Jaszon Maynard 21:56, 25 February 2008 (PST)

To point this out: the Volunteer Portal is not the help resource for newbies. It is supposed to provide information for Second Life Mentors. But yes, I would like to see an official Help Category for newbies on the wiki. As far as I know, there are just articles in the users namespace such as the very helpful newbies guide by on Tid Kidds Userspage or the growing subpages on Lum Pfohls site. If newbies are searching for in-world help they can have a look at the official public orientation and help islands or the well made private ones like the Orientation Station in Scholar or the NMC Orientation Island (to just name two of them). We could name and link them there as well. The problem might also be that there are not many people aware of the wiki. So i would like to see a Tip of the week and/or Video Tutorial (like requested by Marv here) on it to make it public. But it would be nice to see this help category put up first so newbies can actually find help. By now, it might only be interesting for scripters or volunteers. Greetings, --Zai Lynch 15:17, 26 February 2008 (PST)

• --Ok, thanks for the reply. So I gather I can create my own portal, that's allowable? Will it automatically end up on the Main Page or would I have to request someone to put it there?

--Jaszon Maynard 16:14, 26 February 2008 (PST)

I think you can create your own one but it won't be added automatically nor can you add it since the main page can only be edited by wiki moderators (Lindens only?) at the moment. So I would recommend to check back with Rob on this. --Zai Lynch 20:01, 26 February 2008 (PST)

upload directory needs chmod

DOWNTIME NOTICE: we'll be performing maintenance on wiki.secondlife.com on Thursday, May 31 at 10pm for up to two hours. The site may be unavailable during this time. Upload file From Second Life Wiki Jump to: navigation, search

The upload directory (/shared/mediawiki_prod/wiki.secondlife.com/w/images) is not writable by the webserver.

will someone please chmod 777 the directory??? (Ina Centaur 05:11, 1 June 2007 (PDT))

Translation

I plan on translating this page to Dutch (Main_Page/nl) objections anyone? --Aidamina Hunt 00:03, 30 August 2007 (PDT)

Plan on finishing the Main_Page/nl soon --Aidamina Hunt 07:06, 11 April 2008 (PDT)

secondlife.com/support no longer links to the wiki?

• --secondlife.com/support used to have a link to the wiki...not anymore?

--Jaszon Maynard 16:56, 26 March 2008 (PDT)

There is a link in the footer but I know what you mean. :/ -- Strife Onizuka 08:54, 28 March 2008 (PDT)

Queries

• Where can I ask technical queries about Second Life? The email address support@ secondlife.com has disappeared. I was directed to http://secondlife.com/support/ , which does not seem to have anywhere to send messages and queries. There is a Yahoo email group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Second_Life , but it is moderated and its moderator seems to be on holiday or AWOL.

I was given two USA phone numbers, but I am in England.

I was told to go to https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/security.asp , which displayed only "Insufficient Account Information deptID is empty!".

CaptainJack Grauman 05:40, 1 April 2008 (PDT)

I would say it depends on what your question is related to. If it is a support question for your SL, then https://support.secondlife.com/ is the page to look at. The portal got a revision lately so that might be the reason why the link mentioned above is out-of-date. In case your problem isn't listed there, you might file a support ticket (service varies for account type basic/premium). If it is a bug report or the request of a new feature, have a look at Second Lifes public issue tracker at http://jira.secondlife.com. If it is a question about SL in general, you might want to visit an in-world office hour with a Linden who is responsible for that specific technical field where your question is related to. Greetings, --Zai Lynch 06:25, 1 April 2008 (PDT)

Where is the Teen Grid Section?

Would it be possible to add the Teen Grid Wiki on the Main Page of the Second Life Wiki? —The preceding unsigned comment was added on 13:54, 7 May 2008 by Daniel Voyager

This might be something to ask a TSL VTeam Linden. I would recommend Lexie since she seems to be the VTeam-Wiki Linden or Blue as allrounder. I got the feeling that the links are missing to not make it to easy for adult Residents to contact TSL Residents (via talk pages etc.) since it's some kind of intergrid communication. But well, TSL Portal and TSL Blog aren't really hidden, just unmentioned. So if you got the O.K. for the legal stuff, you could create a Template:Main Page/TSL Portal that fits the design of the other involved templates and ask Lexie/Blue to add it to the Main Page since they should have SysOp status and would know that they gave you the previous O.K. (so you wouldn't have the same discussion with Rob again). If you got problems by creating the template, please provide the links you'd like to see displayed and poke Marv, me or one of the other Scribes to this.

Greetz, Zai Lynch^{(talk|contribs)} 09:14, 7 May 2008 (PDT)

Making the Main Page portal "boxes" more compact

Most of the portal "boxes" (templates) on the main page have a title (with the light blue background) and then a link to the portal as the first words in the body of the box (white background). In most cases, the text of the two is the same or very similar. I'd like to eliminate the redundancy by making the link be the title. For example, see the "Web Services Portal" box at lower right. I also modified the "Help Portal" box to be along these lines.

In general, screen real estate on the Main Page is a valuable commodity and should be used parsimoniously.

Does anyone have an objection?

--Rand Linden 07:34, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

"Parsimoniously" ? *lolz and heads for Google* -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 19:54, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

LSL Portal "box" should have links to pages that are helpful and often used

• The guidelines shown is for editing the LSL portal and not about LSL script it self. Instead it should link to say LSL Style Guide or just be removed.
• The same thing with the to do link. I would just remove it.
• I most often use Category:LSL Functions. When I first was looking for information on how to script in LSL this is what I wanted. I think it should be the first link. Looking at Special:Statistics it is the 5th most viewed page with 708,956 views.
• Next I think LSL Tutorial should be added as it is a great place for people who have never scripted before and even for those who work in other languages. This is also the 8th most viewed page on the wiki.
• The last link I would add Category:LSL_Library which is a list of scripts that show off how LSL works or does a common task.

• For the the two categories you may want to use Template:LSLGC.

Master Starship 17:34, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I move the conversation back. I am talking about the main page box labeled LSL Portal with the two links. Not the actual LSL Portal page. -- Master Starship 19:07, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

All the links you could ever want are on the LSL Portal Main Page. If anything further is needed at all on the Wiki/KB Main Page (portal box) it could be a few words of explanation of what "LSL" is (EDIT TO SUGGEST: A reference guide to Linden Scripting Language. "LSL" is used to script behavior in SL objects.) so visitors are more enlightened about why they might want to visit the portal. Then the portal itself could be a little more "friendly". The Wiki/KB Main Page shouldn't be over complicated. -- Fred Gandt ^{(talk|contribs)} 19:42, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

I was looking at the Creation Portal box and all the links in there are also on the Creation Portal Main Page. Looking at the other boxes' links it looked like none of there were to information about how to edit that portal which is what the LSL Portal box has. All the others linked to what the summery said. The two pages currently linked are not references for LSL. I can see changing Guidelines so it says Portal Guidelines and then adding the ones I suggested. -- Master Starship 16:45, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

Ohh I see what you mean, considering what's in the other boxes, the links are inappropriate. IMO, they should be the header links. -- Strife ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:37, 25 April 2010 (UTC)

If no one has a problem with that I will make the changes tomorrow. -- Master Starship 12:53, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

Just to be clear I will made it so the box has the same links as the LSL header. -- Master Starship 13:08, 27 April 2010 (UTC)

category poisoning?

there seems to be some kind of error in the sub categorization causing the marketplace to be read as top level to a great majority of pages in the wiki, including all user pages, and even this main page... I thought maybe is was some recursion in the marketplace nav template, but that doesn't seem to be it... the category:marketplace contains itself as a sub category though, and I can't figure out where the problem is (maybe the marketplace page being in and redirecting to the category:marketplace?)... at any rate it's goin to take someone that knows this software better than I to fix it
-- Void ^{(talk|contribs)} 02:00, 16 December 2010 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Breadcrumbs was the culprit, something got confused and the bolded self-links showed it as a subpage of Marketplace. A purge half fixed it, more on Talk:Second Life Wiki Known Issues. --Cerise 07:26, 16 December 2010 (UTC)