Talk:Main Page

General Wiki Comments

Spam problem

I don't know how to deal with spam on this wiki. Perhaps I could protect the main page, so spam is not the first thing you see. But then any change has to be proposed here or by mail to me. Any comments?

--pg 16:03, 4 May 2005 (CEST)

perhaps it's contrary to someone's ideal of what a wiki should be, but what about requiring a user to register in order to make changes? --Adam 01:49, 5 May 2005 (CEST)

that does not help: bots are clever enough to create an account (that happened last time) --pg

I would be happy for the front page to be restricted - shouldn't change so often anyway. Otherwise is there a possibility of having one of those human-only registration forms which requires typing the contents of a graphic, to stop the bots? I don't know how that might be implemented though. --Duncan 12:23, 5 May 2005 (CEST)

Right, I noticed that was a bot the last time, just after posting. Yeah, locking the main page would be another good step. Once I have my RSS client set up again, I can keep a closer watch on changes (again) so it's not just Patrick quashing the Spam. --Adam

OK, I have protected the main page. If you want to edit anything, please mail me, or put it here and I will paste it to the main page. pg

GIFs

Is it forbidden to upload GIFs? I wanted to upload one for the Animation page (I'm not sure if that's a good idea anyway; it would be used to get a feeling of what approximately Adobe Reader is capable to do/limited to). I get a warning ".gif" is not a recommended image file format., but then nothing happened any further. --Thanks, Mojca

Comments on Main Page

Mojca recently asked (in the changelog) for comments on the reorganization of the Main Page. It looks quite good to me, overall. The "how to edit a Wiki page" should probably link to the existing Help:Editing page, or perhaps directly to MediaWiki's Help:Editing page.

I do think a couple of the section headings should be changed. "Tips, Tricks, and Hacks" is becoming a storehouse of actual documentation as well as just small "tricks", and the name should reflect that: something like "ConTeXt Documentation and How-To", maybe. "Help & Guidelines" should be "Wiki Help & Guidelines", so as to distinguish it from "ConTeXt help".

It may also be useful to put "short explanations" next to the links, much as I've been doing in the From LaTeX to ConTeXt page.

--Brooks 02:49, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Brooks, you wrote too much today ;) ! You cannot expect people to read all your comments!!! (I didn't even notice your posting here until I wanted to add something).
Yes, "How to edit a Wiki page" should certainly be merged with Help:Editing. I forgot that this page ever existed as it somehow disappeared from my view. Help:Contents should ugently be changed as well. (Feel free to do it.)

I thought that "Help & Guidelines" could be used for guidelines about writing to the mailing list as well, but it's true that it should be distinguished from ConTeXt help. I agree to add comments next to links (but what comments?).
Also, quite some stuff is still missing on the main page, the "Main ConTeXt Documentation and HowTo-s" needs to be reorganized and Categories should be defined, so that we can start categorizing the majority of pages (I had no idea what Categories to define for pages under "Visuals", "Structurals", "Inside ConTeXt" (which should probably better be defined as "Programming" or something similar), ...). Quite some "secondary pages" are missing (connecting the first page and actual articles, just like your From LaTeX to ConTeXt, one page with Links is certainly missing).

Despite the generally accepted decision to lock the first page, I hope that I'm not violating the rules too much if I unlock it for two days (sorry, Patrick), so that you can improve it by yourself if you want. If anyone spams the first page in the meantime, I take the responsibility to remove the spam from it (as soon as I come online).

--Mojca 19:37, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)

No problem at all, go ahead and feel free to unlock it. BTW: I really like the look of the new page, but I still need some time to make real comments --pg 10:55, 5 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Thanks! I think I'll make a copy of the Main Page, and put it in Main Page Sandbox, so I can muck about with some organizational ideas without affecting the "live" version until they're finished. I was going to say that we could delete Main Page Sandbox after we're done, but it might be useful to leave it up for future things like this. --Brooks 23:09, 4 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Another idea for handling the main page, as far as editing goes -- see Page on the Sandbox. There's no actual content on the page; it's all in a pair of templates. That page could then be locked, but people could still edit the templates and change the content, so long as they knew which templates to edit. I don't know how smart the spammers are, but it ought to at least block the lazy and/or automatic ones. --Brooks 00:08, 5 Sep 2005 (UTC)

This seems hidden enough for me (until I knew what Templates are about and where they are stored, I had to search really long until I was able to see the content) --Mojca 00:21, 5 Sep 2005 (UTC)

Let's try it. Good Idea. If it turns out wrong, we can still decide later. --pg 10:55, 5 Sep 2005 (UTC)

General ConTeXt Questions

This is not the place to ask general questions about ConTeXt. If you have a longer question, the best thing to do with it is create a new page (see Help:Editing for how to do that) with a description of the problem, and put the special text {{Howto}} in it, which will cause it to be listed on the page. If you have a short question that is appropriate for the FAQ, you can add it there, and leave the answer blank. If you have a question that you wish to discuss, the best place for that is the ConTeXt mailing list or the "Discussion" page associated with a particularly relevant Wiki page, though you can also use the FAQ's "Talk" page if there's not an obvious choice.