discussion RP Wiki Woes

[Delilah Scythewood]

SO! After mooonths and mooooonths of procrastinating, I'm finally getting my characters settled with their RPC wikis. Including redoing formating, coloring, information, etc.

 

I'm tweaking one of the templates and using colors more character specific to make it more unique and expressive. As lovely as some of it has been turning out, it's also a goddamn nightmare!

 

What are some issues you've had with creating RPC wikis? Too much info, not enough space? Fudged on a little tidbit of coding and now the whole thing messed up? Unsure which template to choose from? The struggle can be real at times. Talk about it here!

[Kellach Woods]

actually giving a shit about if it's understandable by other people, knowing fully well that if there's a number in the double digits of readers on a wiki it's a super rare thing.

[GhostlyMaiden]

Making a mistake and nit being able to find said mistake that's screwing up the entire format of the template.

[Kilieit]

I can't make myself care about using fancy templates for my pages. >_>

 

I did that for my tumblr pages. It took me weeks. I know I could repeat it for the RPC ones, but...

 

Eeeh. EEEEHHHHHHH.

 

CSS is designed for this kind of fancy stuff. Wiki markup... is not. I already knew HTML, so tumblr's CSS was really easy for me to learn; but knowing another wiki markup (I used to admin a WoW RP server wikia) has actually impacted my ability to work with the RPC negatively. There are a thousand tiny differences, and being "so close but so far away" so many times when trying to do something as basic as "add an infobox to my page" (yeah...) is a singularly frustrating experience.

 

Enjoy my flat text pages. Visit my tumblr for anything else.

[D'ly]

Making a mistake and nit being able to find said mistake that's screwing up the entire format of the template.

 

This, right here, 100%.

 

I keep a doc open and copy the wiki to there each time I make a change that hasn't messed anything up. It's saved my ass time on more than once occasion.

[Unnamed Mercenary]

Snip

 

Most of the fancy wiki pages use a lot of HTML and CSS, actually. But you are kinda limited in what can be done. And the use of HTML isn't supposed to be something normally allowed on a wiki. For the most part, if it can be snuck into a

, , or

, you can use it on RPC wiki.

 

There are some pretty cool things that can be done with wikicode though, like the fancy templates we make use of for the info boxes.

[Delilah Scythewood]

*eyes CSS as something she needs to fiddle with eventually but mrrgl*

 

I always end up fudging on coding some where. Nothing major but it's always one missing > or ' or ] that is so easily overlooked that it takes me nearly half an hour to find it.

[Gegenji]

I went with a pretty basic look and implemented a couple things I've seen in other pages decently enough...

 

However, my biggest issue has always been a matter of trying to think of what to include and what not to. Judge's wiki in particular I waffled over for the longest time about putting what I ultimately listed under a warning-tagged spoiler section. Chachan's, alternatively, has been more a matter of what to cut out due to the things he's done. I want to give a decent tale of what he's done thus far without it getting horribly lengthy. And it's still kinda becoming that, and I still have his latest exploits to add... :blush:

[Parth Makeo]

Most of my issue comes from having multiple characters. I don't mean 2 or 4 but 9!

And 4 are NPC characters! 

 

Trying to maintain and update them all is a hassle. Especially when characters who don't have a wiki have to he added.

More problems is debating who makes it on the relationship list. I sort of solved it by only adding most influential people.

[Sunwins]

I often wonder if it's even worth it, and I wish there was a way to gauge if people actually give my pages a look over when I do walk-up rp.

 

Formatting can be a nightmare (when ur image doesn't show up despite all the formatting being right like what u doin code, wat u doin), but I'm the worst at updating them. I put it off, and put it off, and then I have to re-write everything because so much has changed since I first wrote them.

[Nodem]

I often wonder if it's even worth it, and I wish there was a way to gauge if people actually give my pages a look over when I do walk-up rp.

 

I get tells about my wikia all the time. So people do look at them if you have them listed in your search comment.

 

 

My Woes: (The ongoing problem)

Spacing of sections

Formatting all around

Infobox issues (Had a few)

What to list

Information

 

AND THE BEST FOR LAST!

Keeping up with information! Which is why journal stuff is now on Tumblr... Relationship stuff however... Still have issues keeping up with.

[Valence]

Generally I had troubles initially by using preformated templates designed by somebody else.

 

1) Since I always want to do my own thing I eventually end up frustrated that I have to change too many things to suit my idea.

 

2) A lot of those have external wiki templates stored in template forms on the wiki. They are extremely hard to find (still no clue how you can look for them without twisting the search engine like hell), and of course you can't change them. They also puzzle me a great deal on how they work. So... I end up coding my own layout like dirty without external template styles and stuff. Which is a (organized) mess, but well. So yeah, now I do my own thing really. And I'm happier that way.

 

3) Damn tabs. Want to put tabs inside tabs but that doesn't seem possible with the tab wiki template I'm using, sadly.

 

Making a mistake and nit being able to find said mistake that's screwing up the entire format of the template.

 

Oh yeah, that too. I have one like that in mine and it's driving me crazy. Fortunately it doesn't screw up the whole ordeal, but still seems to apply a weird font formatting by default, forcing me to reset it for every

layer.

 

I can't make myself care about using fancy templates for my pages. >_>

 

I did that for my tumblr pages. It took me weeks. I know I could repeat it for the RPC ones, but...

 

Eeeh. EEEEHHHHHHH.

 

CSS is designed for this kind of fancy stuff. Wiki markup... is not. I already knew HTML, so tumblr's CSS was really easy for me to learn; but knowing another wiki markup (I used to admin a WoW RP server wikia) has actually impacted my ability to work with the RPC negatively. There are a thousand tiny differences, and being "so close but so far away" so many times when trying to do something as basic as "add an infobox to my page" (yeah...) is a singularly frustrating experience.

 

Enjoy my flat text pages. Visit my tumblr for anything else.

 

I honestly can't stand wiki and HTML formatting. Most of the stuff I use is blatant CSS 1 or 3.

[Knislinge]

As usual, an overarching problem for me when I do anything is my tendency to get completely lost in making something look pretty to the point where I forget about doing anything actually important.

 

Predictably, I have a fairly lovely looking page with not a whole lot of actual text.

 

As for specific problems, I'm lousy at coding. I've only ever done some light bbcode before, and this was quite a pain in the rear, even with the help of a savy friend.

[Valence]

You didn't exactly choose the easiest in terms of code though 

[Knislinge]

You didn't exactly choose the easiest in terms of code though 

 

Looks nicer this way!

[Delilah Scythewood]

For the wikis, I love the variety of ways one can customize their profile. I myself took one of the templates and just altered the coloring for each character. Took a bit to figure out what went where but it wasn't so bad!

[SapphireSkylines]

... What are some issues I've come across when creating my RPC wiki? Everything... I suck at html so I'm just not very good at making Wikis. I did manage to create a half baked one for my character Y'zhara, but it's not even done yet because working on it just makes me want to tear my eyeballs out of my eye sockets.

[Dis]

My wikis are all pieced together from other peoples formatting, though I have done some things myself, some of them pulled from other formats, some pulled from formatting I've seen used off-wiki in other places. 

 

I love my wikis, but recently I started trimming them down drastically, after realizing I'd basically overloaded the information on there. That said, I mostly make Wikis because they're pretty, not for any other real reason.

 

I do have a tumblr, but I'm lazy when it comes to tumblr coding (which is weird, I know), so that's a thing.

[ExAtomos]

Is there something up with the wiki categories, or am I just missing something? If I click on Elezen or Wildwood Elezen category links, for example, my character Alberic isn't listed. Yet these categories are listed and linked at the bottom of his wiki. (Though I do see a note about "these categories will be updated after 2.0 is released" on some pages like Regions. >.> ) Is it just that these wiki pages are not being updated any longer or is there something wrong with my (admittedly copy and pasted) coding?

[Ari Kagon]

I'm no coding expert so it takes me a looong time to fill mine out since I have to hunt through line after line of coding to find the space I want to fill in. 

But the biggest problem I have is when I am finished for the day, I look at it and get self conscious about whether people looking at it will think it's bland and boring. I really want people to get a sense of who my character is and read through the whole thing but I worry that they take one look, see that it's very 'meh' and move along. (Living with anxiety over the most trivial things like this is a struggle ><)

[Neems]

I tried messing with a template that had multiple tabs once.

 

Never again.

[John Spiegel]

My wikis are barebones as giving godmodders/metagamers insight on super awesome stuff about my character is my primary reason not to do more wiki stuff. My secondary reason is I am lazy!

 

Give only enough information as you want others (including godmodders/metagamers) to see!

[Delilah Scythewood]

My wikis are barebones as giving godmodders/metagamers insight on super awesome stuff about my character is my primary reason not to do more wiki stuff. My secondary reason is I am lazy!

 

Give only enough information as you want others (including godmodders/metagamers) to see!

I'm mostly lazy I'm not too worried about GM/MG's though since I just shut that kind of nonsense down very quickly and am not afraid to OOCly stop the whole RP and either correct someone or call them out.

[Kilieit]

Yeah, I'm actually kinda glad when someone decides to meta-game with OOC information I've given them. The way they react when I ask them not to do it is a very good method of gauging how good an RP partner and friend they're going to be going forward.

 

If they're gracious, admit their mistake, and promise to retcon their statement / not mention it again without proper IC knowledge, then that's a green flag.

 

If they throw a tantrum, well... I consider it a gift that they made it so obvious they aren't to be trusted; usually early on, before I got too invested.