Guild Wars 2 Wiki talk:Requests for technical administration/archive 2

Improved ingame wiki search

Hello Guys, i have an idea:

When you type "/wiki name" ingame, you get to the wiki page named "name"...

When you type "/wiki [chat-link]" it gets the Item code like [&AgH1WQAA] and it searches the wiki for it and gives you the search page for [&AgH1WQAA] with the message:

"The following chat links were included in your search query:

   [&AgEAWgAA] Basic Salvage Kit (item #23040)"

Would it be possible to directly output the page for Basic Salvage Kit instead? (84.63.98.174 21:45, 29 December 2014 (UTC))

I have been discussing this with Stephane before, and I now think too that we should auto-direct people when they just search for a single chat link. The problem is that since the wiki search is literally the only way to get the original chat link out of the game, I still want to provide a way for people to access it. I haven’t really decided on how to do that though. One idea was to show a small hint at the top of the target page that says something like “Redirected from chat link [&…]” – What do you think about that? poke | talk 00:00, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, like it says if you go for example to the page chat link. Dont know if it is possible to automatically create a redirecting page for every page that has chat link in it or if theres an other way for this -84.63.98.174 10:37, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

I found this after writing MediaWiki talk:ChatLinkSearch.js#Auto redirect to search result.3F... oh well. Here's a suggestion: pass ?originalsearch=[&link] to the redirected page, and whenever a page loads on the wiki, if there's an originalsearch parameter set, insert its value into the search box. Alternately, you could keep the URL clean by stashing the value in the browser's session storage, but that's marginally more likely to be disabled than URLs are. -- Dagger (talk) 23:40, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

Just for documentation's sake, we ultimately did implement the redirect for one link solution. -Chieftain Alex 14:15, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

Upload warning for similar file name

A file with a similar name exists:
Shadow Pistol Skin.png

    Name of the uploading file: File:Shadow Pistol Skin.jpg
    Name of the existing file: File:Shadow Pistol Skin.png

Please choose a different name. 

This is pretty annoying, can the file name check be disabled?--Relyk ~ talk < 00:54, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Dear god, please. It makes uploading images with identical names so tedious. —Ventriloquist 10:21, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

So the offending line can be found within UploadBase.php line 1815. I guess it's real purpose was to try and highlight to users letter-case differences between jpg, JPG, jpeg and JPEG for example. I'd still be happier with those lines disabled entirely - i think that commenting the lines out between 1815 and 1824 should be adequate. -Chieftain Alex 14:10, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

So is the wiki "officially" asking for us to do this change? We need to find a proper way for these requests to be communicated, or at least a cleaner way than reading through discussions on this talk page. Something else to keep in mind: modifying code is not something we're keen on doing (because this is not sustainable; everytime we update the software we'd have to check these little things), but that may not be a problem if there's an option for that in the configuration file. Let us know what you think! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 16:42, 28 March 2016 (UTC)

I don’t think this is an official request yet. The talk page is (should?) to discuss ideas inside the community. Of course, your feedback is always welcome, but I personally wouldn’t want any actual changes happen just from an aside discussion. That just makes it super hard to track what is going on.

Especially in cases where we actually modify the software (extensions or code changes), we should follow the process we have written on this very project page. If that’s too much bureaucracy, then we should probably change it, so it gets easier. But even so, I would still have the actual “approved” decisions on the project page, not the talk page.

So, I’d say, unless there is an actual request on the project page, or unless we explicitly contact you about a change (like we also often did in the past), don’t act just based on random discussions :)

That being said, on this actual topic, I’ll try to find out if we can get the behavior changed without having to modify the software (i.e. by hooking cleverly into it using an extension). poke | talk 18:48, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

This makes sense to me but I wanted to mention something I perceive, and correct me if my perception is mistaken: I see a few discussions here that are not progressing toward some kind of resolution. And while I know that it's a normal part of any wiki, I'm wondering if it's impact some projects, or even the feelings of some editors (who may think that things they ask or talk about don't have an impact). It's not a huge deal as I think (again anybody should feel free to give me their direct feedback, here or on my talkpage) things are going fairly well for this wiki but I also value the work of people trying to create new things or evolve existing ones (rather than keep the status quo) on our wikis. Thanks! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:09, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Waiting a year for any response on the talk page does make it hard to form a active proposal.--Relyk ~ talk < 19:43, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Unless poke can find a solution that doesn't involve editing the php files directly, i would like to push the spirit of this change, i'll leave the precise "how" to you though. (image upload warnings are so annoying) -Chieftain Alex 19:57, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Sooo… I might have found a possible way to hook into this in a nice and good way (making it likely robust for future changes). Aaaaaand I might have already written all the code necessary for this to work… At least in theory it should be all that’s necessary. I just need to test this somehow, so I’ll have to set myself up a new VM for this (my old one was on MW 1.23 I think) to test this. And it seems that MW also has a new extension format since 1.25, so I’ll have to read into this new fancyness first before I can pack this up in a usable way. So, it’s going to take me a bit now to work this all out and properly test this. poke | talk 22:22, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I also need a name for the extension (that might be the most critical remaining issue about this). So I’m in dire need for suggestions. poke | talk 22:24, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

*pops head up out of nowhere* how about Poke-xtension? *goes back to Recent Changes page* -Darqam (talk) 22:29, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

That's great news poke. UploadSimilarFilenames / AllowSimilarFilenames? -Chieftain Alex 22:35, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Want us to test it on the Stage wikis? If so, email Justin :) --Stephane Lo Presti talk 22:37, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

It’s not yet “solid” enough to test it on stage; that would just end up being a disaster for both of us. I can’t even tell if I have no syntax errors at the moment :P poke | talk 06:20, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

@Darqam: If we went by that pattern, it would be “Poke-xtension 5” already. :P poke | talk 06:22, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Extension

So, I have been building something, and while testing, I actually didn’t really end up knowing what warning you want to suppress. How is the process where this warning appears? Is this only about the informational warning that gets added via JavaScript on the initial upload dialog after selecting a file? Or is there another step after pressing upload that actually prevents the upload? Because from what I gather (after disabling my extension again…), that JavaScript message does not prevent the upload. Can you give me some more information on this? poke | talk 21:44, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I can't quite recall when the "other" (B) message pops up (where it gets you to confirm a checkbox that you want to submit it anyway), but this warning (A) (which shows up after you type in a name similar to an existing filename, in this case with a different extension) is annoying. I'd be happy with the death of (B). -Chieftain Alex 22:07, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Why is that annoying? It’s just a note that doesn’t seem to actually prevent you from uploading a file… :/ poke | talk 22:15, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Because it pops up on every single weapon page when you upload the icon + screenshot, which is such a common combination of .jpg and .png.

I'm not entirely sure if the (A) message still exists ["Please choose a different name."] is the one that was a complete bugger. -Chieftain Alex 22:20, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Maybe I’ll wait for Relyk to respond then, since he originally created this topic. I’d like to know what I should get rid of before trying to do that. But if it’s really just that JavaScript thingy, we could have probably hidden it easily on the client side (assuming that it really does not prevent the upload). poke | talk 22:28, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I’ve also just checked: I cannot hook into the JavaScript output. poke | talk 22:32, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Waiting for someone who recalls the cause sounds like a decent idea. I don't recall the sequence leading upto it, but basically it was "click Special:Upload, <do something>, press "Upload file", find yourself on a new webpage which is the same upload form with the "Please choose a different name" warning + an ignore warning box. -Chieftain Alex 22:34, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

Okay, I figured it out: If you select a target name, that JavaScript runs which checks via the API whether a file with the same name but different extension exists. If that’s the case, it will show that warning immediately. In that case, it will also take note that it showed that warning, so when the warning is later generated during the upload, there is already an implicit confirmation by the user. So the upload succeeds without a further interruption.

If the JavaScript does not run, for whatever reason, then that warning was not implicitly noted so when the user clicks the upload button, the warning will be displayed instead, interrupting the upload process.

So ideally, you shouldn’t run into the latter situation at all, and there should only be that small warning but no further interruption.

I can’t properly get rid of the JavaScript check (maybe using some client-side script), but I could get rid of the additional server interruption if that’s really an issue.

However, considering that this topic is from last year, it might actually be the case that this JavaScript way only was introduced recently, making the request/complaint only refer to the server-side warning (which you shouldn’t see anymore?). So maybe we don’t need to do anything here? poke | talk 22:43, 1 April 2016 (UTC)

I don't remember the exact circumstances, only posted after encountering a few times. Alex's comments covered anything I could say.--Relyk ~ talk < 01:40, 2 April 2016 (UTC)

Fixing Case sensitivity

→ moved from Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Admin noticeboard

As it stands the wiki requires search queries to be case sensitive leading to some pages not correctly appearing when searched. This can be remedied as shown here and the patch is here, it's not a major issue but it can still screw up results so I figured that I'd submit a request (Mainly on the behalf of Binary_Llama on irc).

Thanks, Karou 19:06, 25 August 2014‎

"This extension is not necessary if you are using CirrusSearch." I'd say we just upgrade to Extension:CirrusSearch rather than using this stopgap measure. —Dr Ishmael 14:53, 3 November 2015 (UTC)

I agree with Dr ishmael- Zesbeer 23:23, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

This is an old topic, but I'm trying to come up with some examples of pages that don't come up properly when you search with the wrong case. (maybe I'm going nuts here, but anything I'm entering into Special:Search with the wrong case seems to be pointing to the right page in one of the top results). -Chieftain Alex 19:23, 4 January 2016 (UTC)

Huh. I tried "/wiki molten boss fractal" and indeed it loaded Molten Boss Fractal directly (which there's no redirect for). Is this fixed, or does it only fail on specific pages, or what? -- Dagger (talk) 23:24, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Yep, I also verified with "SS Prospect" and both seem to work, in-game and on the wiki. Let me know if the issue still happens? Otherwise we'll consider this "fixed" --Stephane Lo Presti talk 18:55, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

If every word in the title is title-cased, there's no problem (obviously also applies to all-lower-case titles). The issue is with mixed-case titles, like Wreck of the Argent Warrior. If you search for the all-lower-case "wreck of the argent warrior," you get the search results page instead of going straight to the article.

Also, the on-wiki search box has an auto-complete feature, but it's case-sensitive. If you type "wreck of the a" into the search box, it drops the auto-complete suggestion because it doesn't match the case.

You can compare both of these with Wikipedia, where they have CirrusSearch installed. —Dr Ishmael 19:14, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

I see, interesting discrepancy. At least we know what exactly to investigate! Thanks for the info :)

Justin also discovered that Cirrus would solve some issues and align our wiki on WikiPedia (so probably a good practice), but it's not something we're ready to do for a little while as it's a significant backend change. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:12, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

The reason it works like that is because the search is case-sensitive, with one exception: if you supplied an all-lower-case search term and the wiki can't find an exact match, then it converts the term to full title-case and tries again. It doesn't have any exceptions for "little words" (of, and, the, etc.), though, which is why these mixed-case titles cause an issue. —Dr Ishmael 19:18, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

The OP mentioned an article where the extension Extension:TitleKey is suggested. We'll test in our dev environment whether it helps but if you or anyone else have any other suggestion, let us know! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:20, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Good news! We tested the extension Extension:TitleKey and it seems to fix the issue! We'll add that extension for the upcoming upgrade we're about to test soon. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:52, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Hey Stephane. Any particular reason that Extension:TitleKey didn't ultimately get implemented? -Chieftain Alex 14:11, 26 March 2016 (UTC)

It slipped through the cracks. I'm going to implement it tomorrow morning. Justin Lloyd (talk) 20:26, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

The extension is now live on all wikis. Justin Lloyd (talk) 13:49, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

Allow semantic mediawiki in the API namespace

Per the title, currently the API namespace (list of pages) isn't in the list of namespaces that are allowed to be annotated with SMW data. The list can be altered per the instructions on smw:Help:$smwgNamespacesWithSemanticLinks. (presumably using NS_API = true,) -Chieftain Alex 17:43, 19 November 2015 (UTC)

Resurrecting this thread: is there potential here for a better organization of the API namespace? Pinging Dr Ishmael :) --Stephane Lo Presti talk 18:57, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Personally, I'd rather that SMW were turned on for *all* namespaces. Since the default configuration turns it on for the User: namespace, we're already used to including a mainspace filter in semantic queries (i.e. because people use templates on their userpage that spit out semantic annotations). Thus, enabling it on more namespaces - even on the Template: namespace (i.e. properties leaking out from templates that aren't wrapped in <includeonly>) - shouldn't cause hardly any problems. —Dr Ishmael 19:06, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Why wouldn't include it on all namespaces? And what should we do to allow this? --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:09, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

SMW's configuration is set up as an "opt-in" feature - by default, semantics are disabled everywhere, and you have to tell it which namespaces should have semantics enabled. I'm just saying that we could go ahead and turn them on for all namespaces without any worries. —Dr Ishmael 19:20, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I'd still like this change implemented - but solely adding the "API:" namespace would be sufficient, i really don't want to go around cleaning up all the templates too. -Chieftain Alex 21:54, 18 August 2017 (UTC)

The NS_API namespace was added to the SMW settings in the GW2 English stage wiki last year (its config contains $smwgNamespacesWithSemanticLinks[NS_API] = true). Can anyone confirm that it works as needed? If so, I can make the addition to this live wiki. Justin Lloyd (talk) 13:05, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

It's been a while since I've visited the stage site and it's been erased from my browser history. If I've got the web address correct (wiki-en.stage.guildwars2.com), I'm getting a certificate error ("The hostname in the website’s security certificate differs from the website you are trying to visit.") when trying to access it. -Chieftain Alex 17:43, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, meant to provide a link: https://wiki-en-stage.guildwars2.com. Justin Lloyd (talk) 17:44, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Yep looks like the API namespace is enabled and working for semantic mediawiki on stage. Those settings will do fine for us! Cheers. -Chieftain Alex 17:52, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I've enabled it on this wiki. Let me know if everything is working as expected. Justin Lloyd (talk) 18:01, 25 August 2017 (UTC)

2-Factor authentication on the wikis?

I've just brought up this idea in a tweet https://twitter.com/codemasher/status/674736252411879426 and wonder if it was any useful and appreciated by the users. Discuss! ;) --Smiley™ de: user | talk 00:17, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

I don't think there's really a need for it. I haven't heard of anyone's wiki account getting hacked/stolen, since it's much easier for spammers to just create a nearly-infinite number of their own accounts. —Dr Ishmael 02:01, 10 December 2015 (UTC)

TextExtracts Extension

→ moved from Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Admin noticeboard

I'm building an app for Guild Wars 2 and part of the functionality will include in-app access to the GW2 Wiki. I've built a search tool utilizing the standard MediaWiki API, but I'm unable to retrieve/display any content in JSON format because we don't have the TextExtracts extension installed on the GW2 MediaWiki, which is required in order to retrieve content in JSON format via the MediaWiki API. --Mflayhart (talk) 19:12, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

I checked and the parse API and json format on the wiki works fine. The extension doesn't seem to provide any important features, so I'm not sure why you need it. --Relyk ~ talk < 21:59, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Correct, API Parse and JSON format do work on many areas of the wiki, and I have my tool built up to the point of retrieving raw or limited HTML page contents via the "props=extracts" action for individual page contents. I can retrieve almost anything and everything that I could possibly want to know about the wiki, a specific page, users, etc. but according to the MediaWiki API, props=extracts is the "official" action-specific parameter to pass to the URL for retrieving standalone page content. It's beyond me why they would utilize this action-specific parameter without bundling the extension by default with every MediaWiki installation, but for some reason this seems to be the case. --Mflayhart (talk) 22:15, 31 January 2016 (UTC)

Ok so it looks like we're all good? Once your app is live, let me know about it (on my talkpage) and I'll take a look at it if I can, and then promote to all players :) Thanks ~Stéphane

The extension still needs to be installed on this MediaWiki before prop=extracts can work. I've tried to look for an alternate way to retrieve the wiki page contents but haven't had any luck so far, everyone seems to just use prop=extracts. And thanks for the offer to help promote it, I'll definitely let you know when it's finished! Already been several months in the making and probably has another month or two to go... it's incorporating user's GW2 accounts, inventories statistics, guides for crafting, professions, events, an interactive map, and a boss timer 0_0 I'm having fun working on it though, it's a nice challenge :) --Mflayhart (talk) 17:42, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Ok we're looking into it and determining on whether we'll be all to integrate it on our next update --Stephane Lo Presti talk 17:57, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

You rock, very much appreciated! --Mflayhart (talk) 17:58, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

So which feature in particular of the extension do you require? (Some kind of search thing where you return a limited number of characters? Conversion of wikitext to plaintext?) -Chieftain Alex 18:19, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Oh hey Alex! Per my last email, I went ahead and chose the API route. The extension is just one feature as a whole, being the prop=extracts action that allows me (and anyone else who might want to build GW2 tools that integrate the wiki) to retrieve wiki page's contents in either a stripped down HTML format or as plain text. So it isn't anything that would create any more server load than the rest of the API actions. --Mflayhart (talk) 23:00, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

Sorry to ask again, since we're already setting up to test this new extension, but is this still needed? I wasn't sure if this was an official request or a discussion about whether it should become one, so maybe we jumped the gun? --Stephane Lo Presti talk 23:02, 1 February 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure who gives the go ahead for this type of thing, but I'll try to provide some clarification. As of right now, the API can retrieve page contents, just not in limited HTML or plain text format. If this doesn't seem like the right solution (and I'm totally open to going in a different direction in order to best serve the community's needs, not just my own), perhaps something like MobileFrontend [1] would be useful? Ultimately, I'm just trying to find the best way to provide a more streamlined experience of the Wiki on mobile devices since the default GW2 wiki theme is not very responsive (due to the fact that the wiki theme itself was not built in the mobile-first design movement and it would be a massive project for them to redo everything). If anyone has any ideas I'm 100% open to it :) --Mflayhart (talk) 00:40, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Hey Mflayhart, I built a wiki Android app a few years ago that uses the MediaWiki API to grab page content without any special extensions- take a look at my source code to see how I did it. I apologize for the kind of crummy code, I did this right out of college. - Felix Omni 00:41, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

PS. And the reason I built the app in the first place was because there was no community support for the Mobile Frontend extension at the time. :P - Felix Omni 00:44, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

So would the Mobile Frontend extension remove the need for your application? Trying to better understand what's needed and for what, before a decision can be made. Most wiki editors would probably focus more on features that are directly relevant to editing, but I think that your work is potentially important too, by providing a better way to access the wiki for some players. Tell us more about what you're trying to do and maybe we can make a public call to everyone here to make sure that no one has any reason for a particular extension to be installed. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 01:41, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

It would be interesting to see how badly our pages display using mobile frontend (particularly tables and infoboxes).

I think we're just discussing what might be suitable Stephane, no need to go into action over any extension briefly mentioned ^^. -Chieftain Alex 01:47, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Sounds good Alex. The reason why I jumped into that discussion is that we're right at the tail end of our testing for upgrading the MediaWiki software, so integrating a new extension would be easier now rather than later --Stephane Lo Presti talk 01:50, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

These indents are about to get cray. Felix, thanks for the input and link to your project! Your comment about building the app due to lack of MobileFrontend support at the time relates to the idea I was conveying to Alex in an email last month. I do think there are community supported, viable options to achieve a mobile friendly wiki without us needing to build our own tools for that purpose. I started with that approach for the sake of my app, but a universal solution for the wiki would be the best option in the long run. It'd be nice to see how the Wiki looks with MobileFrontend, perhaps the tables and info boxes would just need a bit of CSS clean up? And Stephane, it wouldn't remove the need for my app, the integration of the GW2 Wiki is actually just one piece out of many different tools. I want to include it because it's natural for me to look things up on my phone while playing fullscreen, and I noticed that nearly every app for GW2 is either outdated or only serves one purpose, hence my decision to make an app where almost everything related to Guild Wars 2 is accessible in a single location. If the Wiki had a mobile-friendly frontend, I could simply embed it in the app for ease of access and continue building out the app's other main features. --Mflayhart (talk) 02:51, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

The parse API gives the HTML parsed text in json format (Example). That's why I was wondering what additional features you would need from the extension.--Relyk ~ talk < 03:04, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Yeah I didn't explain things very well haha my apologies. TextExtracts was the initial idea for keeping things as slimmed down as possible, and I was considering using action=parse and adding a step to strip out any extra script and html, or strip the script and rewrite any essential pieces to make them more mobile friendly while just restyling the html, but all the extra steps began to seem like overkill if there are more universal options out there for making the Wiki more mobile friendly. --Mflayhart (talk) 03:17, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

CORS API

→ moved from Guild Wars 2 Wiki:Reporting wiki bugs

In order to use the MediaWiki APIs from other websites, CORS must be enabled (yes, there's the JSONP option, but that's just really an unnecessary workaround): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API:Cross-site_requests#CORS_usage

I don't know if it's possible to enable this option, and who should be in charge of such a change in case.

RedGlow (talk) 12:07, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

This isn't really a bug per-se. Where are you thinking of using the MW API on? -Chieftain Alex 15:18, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

Indeed, but AFAIK there's no section for feature requests, or there is? Anyway, I intended to use them in a (browser, pure javascript) calculator to automatically extract the frequencies of the research tables, like the ones of Cracked Fractal Encryption/research, in order to provide estimated gold gains for various containers. -RedGlow (talk) 16:57, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

We could enable $wgCrossSiteAJAXdomains to enable CORS for the API. poke | talk 20:33, 4 March 2016 (UTC)

Allow uploading audio files using Special:Upload

Currently the only permitted file types are png, gif, jpg, jpeg, svg. Having audio files, as well as an appropriate sound player, would allow the wiki to be documented with official ArenaNet game assets. This would make each article more complete, and skill infoboxes could have a button to play what the skill sounds like. This would allow players to learn all kinds of audio cues featured in the game:

• The sound of receiving boons. Receiving Swiftness makes the sound of wind and receiving Might makes an electric spark sound. This would help since I don't even remember if Fury makes a sound.

• What skills sound like, so I can distinguish between the sound of all the Mesmer skills which sound strikingly similar. When I first played I noticed that some Necromancer skills sound like a camera clicking sound and I wasn't sure what was killing me. People on Reddit ask, "What is this sound I'm hearing?" all the time, because of subtle sound effects made by the interface (at every 50 Endurance intervals, you hear a small blip, for example), Engineer turrets that sound too much like other things, sounds that bosses make when charging up for a massive strike.

• Gem Store profits. Through the wiki, players can learn what sounds Gem Store gathering tools make, such as a mining flute or those insufferable golem tools / back pieces. Glider skins, one of ArenaNet's current focuses, also have custom sounds, such as the Super Adventure Glider or the Phoenix Glider featured on Guild Chat with Sound Designer Drew Cady. In fact, most of them have unique sound effects. I even noticed that legendary back item gliders have subtle and more powerful sound effects, compared to the default glider. Black Lion weapons, Super Warhorns, and legendary weapons are also known for having unique sound effects on certain weapons. Even since this request was made, new warhorn sound effects have been added for a new set of Super weapons!

In terms of a sound player for use in articles, I recommend SoundManager 2, you can see it in action for voice responses on a wiki here, for game sound effects here and for music here. The play buttons are what it may look like on the Guild Wars 2 Wiki, but it is highly customizable.

--Cronos (talk) 21:34, 30 July 2016 (UTC)

I would love for this to be available! --Xiphia (talk) 23:41, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Since this was brought back up on reddit I'll continue here. An option could always be that only admins/anet staff could upload files, and that be only the soundtracks. This could always be just a first step and go further if things work out nicely. -Darqam 18:59, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

After talking a bit more with Justin about this, here are our thoughts:

* In theory we're open to this idea, but we'd need to know more about the space requirements, e.g. how much storage this could take on a monthly basis (including versions which we hope can be kept to a minimum); I would encourage anybody interested in this project to try to do it outside of the wiki and report back to us on their findings.

While we may be able to support this in the short-term (depending on the space requirements), this could be something easier for us to manage in the mid- to -long-term since we could take that additional space requirement into account.

* This is a cool idea but we encourage everyone interested in this to look into what MediaWiki extension would be required and how this would be integrated into the article; the OP does mention that and link to the Dota2 wiki as an example, but I'd like to see more opinions; I know that the wiki philosophy is "be bold" and encourage editors to try things, but I think significant new pieces of content should be discussed a bit more.

* Think also about the production pipeline for creating all these sounds; this is potentially a lot of work for a few editors, so any way to make this an easily shareable process would improve the project.

Let us know what you think about that. Thanks! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 20:07, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

@Darqam: If by "only the soundtracks" you mean the game's music, I think that would be one of the less useful applications of audio playback on the wiki. Although I'm not opposed to having music on the wiki, a track would take up storage space that could instead be used for many sound effects (profession skills and audio cues/jingles) and voice lines. For the sake of promptness and completeness, any registered user should be able to add audio files, even though the game's sound files aren't easy to extract. --— Cronos 21:44, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi Cronos, I noticed that you already ask for the file limitation to be lifted. FYI, it's not something we can consider until more thoughts are given to the points I raised above (file size, frequency, etc.). Let me know if you have questions about that. Thanks --Stephane Lo Presti talk 21:49, 18 November 2016 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I thought Darqam was talking about in the long run. Yeah, a limited usergroup test makes sense. --— Cronos 22:14, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

Cronos, although I agree with you, it seems that we will first need some sort of test run, if not simply a test scenario. I was simply suggesting a simple case to start with (since it's easy to know how many soundtracks we have and the total size). That said, I'll try to see if I can come up with some numbers for basic things such as shout lines, effect lines, etc. I would however highly encourage others to help since I will probably be rather slow in figuring what I want out.—The preceding unsigned comment was added by Darqam (talk • contribs) at 22:32, 18 November 2016 (UTC).

Ok, so small update on some numbers. I've managed to find where most of the skill sound effect (pre-HoT) were stored in the dat file, and have observed that in their default mp3 format, most of the are in the 20-30kb file size. Of course some skills have longer drawn out sounds and are thus longer (such as Necro down state 1 with a sound file of 86kb).

I've also found a few emote sound effects, usually between 10-50kb in size.

Finally I have also found where all of the spoken dialogue per race/gender is stored (such as "Adrenaline rising", "Agony, Torment, Pain", "For Great Justice!", etc...) are stored and those seem to very rarely be over 25kb in size.

I have NOT managed to find the buff sound effects (such as might and fury), but I really can't imagine those being big in file size since they are sometimes not even a second long.

I seem to not be able to dig up many things post HoT for the soundbank, but I still might be able to find sound effects for the new skills/gem store items. Is this the kind of information you are looking for Stephane? -Darqam 18:59, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

So how are you recognizing which sound is for which skill, doing it from memory? -Chieftain Alex 19:17, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

(Reset indent) Pretty much. I've got a small list of sound file numbers with what I associated them with, then there are usually related sounds nearby. There are definitely lots of sounds that I recognize but can't place. If/when this project does go through, I will definitely be uploading files saying "I know this is important, but can't remember from where". -Darqam 19:56, 19 November 2016 (UTC)

What's the total size of all audio in the .dat file? That's an obvious upper bound on how much space audio from the game can possibly take. If I remember rightly changing your audio language downloads about 2 GB of new files, so that's a max of ~8 GB for a full multi-lingual set of speech and a I-have-no-idea-and-completely-guessed 2 GB for everything else? -- Dagger (talk) 02:17, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

If I assume that all I've extracted is the total audio (minus the spoken dialogue in HoT and onward due to different encryption type(?)) the dat sound files sum up to 4.44GB. That being said, this doesn't catch any cinematic audio, doesn't catch some misc event dialogue (at least it seems like that to me). This is, I think just for English (as I've never swapped audio language on this dat file). To be very safe, I could image all the audio we care for fitting in maybe... 10GB, without counting possible re-uploads of better quality. Note that this size also includes maaaaaany sound files that are no longer in use/were never in use, and multiple (virtually) identical duplicates of some music pieces.

That said, this is the size of the files in the dat. Players recording the sounds might get files waaaaay bigger due to how some software record and encode the audio. -Darqam 05:17, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Hey everyone, So there's something that I only realized after discussing with members of our audio team (and I'm sorry that I couldn't flag this before): these sounds are game assets and we'd never support their public release because they're part of the product we're creating. While the sounds are not everything (the Audio Team also pointed to the fact that assets get combined in a complicated way so a given sound may be used differently depending on the context), it's clearly off limits for the wiki unfortunately.

Another point I'd like to raise is that accessing game assets from our game files is against our Terms of Use. It's important that the official wiki abide by these rules.

Thanks for the work you've put into this and again sorry that this project won't be possible. --Stephane Lo Presti talk 01:22, 22 November 2016 (UTC)

rip. here's to hoping I can identify game audio and make my own ringtones for Gw3 --— Cronos 20:07, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

"Another point I'd like to raise is that accessing game assets from our game files is against our Terms of Use". With regards to this, doesn't the wiki already go against this with loading screens, and icons? As much as I understand that this particular thing is not going to happen, I don't quite understand this supposed restriction. -Darqam 20:24, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm not tracking any single piece of content of the wiki but the Terms of Services apply equally to all content here. It's not a "supposed" restriction but one that all editors should be aware of and respect strictly. Let me know if you have questions about it. Thank you --Stephane Lo Presti talk 20:26, 2 December 2016 (UTC)

My prediction is that, were the game files easier to symbolicate and extract, ArenaNet would have little issue with them being available, even on unofficial websites. If I uploaded a video of every skill sound effect in Gw2, provided it wasn't monetized it would probably never get removed. It's pretty easy to steal anything, but just because it's available for free on the internet doesn't mean you can steal it and use it for your own game. Definitely makes this feel decades behind compared to all the other games / MMOs I've played. Really the only reason not to is to make stuff less easy to steal which isn't a very good reason in the first place. --— Cronos 23:37, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Cronos, I'll quote myself from the above message: "these sounds are game assets and we'd never support their public release because they're part of the product we're creating". The Terms of Use would allow us to take actions, even if it's not something we'd like to do. I can understand the willingness to document every aspect of the game, but there are certain limits to what we can allow. Thank you for your understanding --Stephane Lo Presti talk 19:23, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Perhaps I asked too much. Sound effects should still absolutely be documented, whereas it is understandable that entire dialogue should not be. --— Cronos 20:47, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Increase semantic max mediawiki offset from 5000

Hi guys, previously we've identified the problem that if you're searching through the data and specifying an offset, you can never get past result 5000 (except if theres <10000 total results, in which case you can sort the data the opposite way and get the data anyway). I'm looking for the most widely used ingredients and yet again I've hit this issue (there are 12284 recipes to search through). Can we please increase this value to 10000? (there's another setting that needs to be set if we want an offset over 10000) Previously we didn't know how to change the limit, but it is set by smw:Help:$smwgQUpperbound. -Chieftain Alex 15:44, 29 August 2016 (UTC)

Maps and Semantic Maps with tile service

Since the API has a tile service (https://tiles.guildwars2.com/{continent_id}/{floor}/{zoom}/{z}/{x}/{y}.jpg), I wonder if it is as simple as to add the tile service for custom OpenLayers layers per smw:Extension:Maps/mapping_service#Defining_your_own_layers. I don't recall the issues Ishmael ran into with Semantic Maps that pretty much halted progress on getting maps to work. Otherwise, I guess we're stuck with [[Widget:World map]] map widgets as the poor man's map.--Relyk ~ talk < 07:52, 13 December 2016 (UTC)

Technical difficulties "site experiencing technical difficulties"

So I just got this error when trying to save a page. About 1 minute from this posting. -Darqam 21:03, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Are you still getting this error? Can you reproduce it at all? Justin Lloyd (talk) 04:04, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

No I got it once, while everything was being very slow. After a refresh it has yet to come back. I usually wouldn't mention it but I hadn't seen anything like it before, so I thought wise to show it, just in case. -Darqam 04:11, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

We appreciate the feedback of any problems, even infrequent and/or irreproducible ones as they can sometimes point to subtle issues, especially given the recent migration of the wikis to a significantly different platform. I'll take a more in-depth look at the server logs when I'm back in the office tomorrow. Justin Lloyd (talk) 04:24, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I'm not seeing any logged database errors. What page were you trying to edit? Justin Lloyd (talk) 13:59, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I was creating the page [2] Healer's Bastion. That I know of there's nothing particularly special about that. I tried to save it after writing it, got the error. Posted here, then saved it again and it all went normal. -Darqam 15:05, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

I've added information in the title in the hope that we can get more reports. If you do encounter this error, please indicate: the day, time, and the article you were trying to edit. Thanks! --Stephane Lo Presti talk 16:35, 4 December 2017 (UTC)