Talk:Main Page

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This page is for discussing the Main Page itself. For discussion about the wiki in general, Forum:Codex Discussion is probably more suitable.

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Main Page design

Hullo! I'm Kirkburn, a Wikia Gaming Helper, and I have a suggestion to make regarding the Main Page. You may be interested in stealing some elements from the w:c:starter|Wikia Starter wiki which is the current new wiki base design. It makes content a quite easy to add and is easily expanded. w:User:Kirkburn|Kirkburn (w:User_talk:Kirkburn|talk) 21:32, 5 February 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the tip. I've now shamelessly ripped of the starter content =) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 12:47, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Hi, why is there Geography twice in the main navigation?

That is... an excellent question! Let's get rid of that. Does anyone know how to edit the navbar? Dungy 15:26, 31 January 2012 (PST)

Monaco skin

Hullo! I am User:Kirkburn|Kirkburn, your friendly local Wikia Gaming Helper!

I've just set your site to default to a Monaco skin (slate in this case) - this is the new Wikia default skin, and is now the main actively developed Wikia platform. As a sucessor to Quartz, it comes with even more customizability - you can find out more on w:c:inside:Monaco Skin Customization, where you can also find out info about the w:c:inside:Widgets|widgets available.

An admin can set the default site skin via the skin section on [[Special:Preferences, or by editing MediaWiki:AdminSkin. If users wish to see another skin than the default, they can untick "See custom wiki skins (recommended)" on the same page. w:User:Kirkburn|Kirkburn (w:User_talk:Kirkburn|talk) 19:21, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Nice skin, though it could use some, um, Web2.0 roundedcorneredness that was present in Quartz. If anyone here wants to give a swing at customising the skin, it'd be great. --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 12:47, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

New Look

No offense, but the new look looks like shit and it the only thing you achived is to make nevigation more difficult by moving everything on the right side. Your wish to make it more like other main pages in honor, but there are things where someone shouldn't run after the mass of others. The main page was simple, because it made it easy to find things.

Now the main page look like a cluttered mess.--Tribun 13:22, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Which part of "shamelessly ripped of the starter content" did you miss? =) I'm well aware the layout is awful. I'm still working on it. Right now, I'd terribly appreciate constructive criticism instead of "the old layout just worked"; yeah, it worked, but suppose we had the features that are also in other wikis (featured content, news, etc) - in that case, the old layout didn't exactly work. Do you have any helpful suggestions? Please? --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 13:42, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

I don't exactly know if this is helpful but we aren't exactly a highly frequented wikia and I actually doubt that Featured Article and media will be ever used at all (but I could be wrong if it is only a code-thing). As for the layout, try not to squeeze everything on the right side (too much scolling down and you lose the overview of everything). --Tribun 13:48, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Ah, but we could use featured stuff, just to show that we've accomplished something here; remember that many other Wikia wikis have rather lax requirements for featured articles (if I remember correctly, Final Fantasy wiki has had stubs for featured articles, for crying out loud). The page will need some tweaking, yes; the sidebar width needs to be carefully guessed. =) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 13:57, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

I did change the position of the pic. The column looks better now, but still too much scrolling (Maybe the "ultima-related websites" shouldn't show on the main page and only should be accessable from the links-page?) --Tribun 14:02, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

The reason I like this layout is that it allows for more subdivisions than the previous two. I'm thinking of maybe splitting the real-world part further: "Real world stuff related to the games", "Fandom stuff". And maybe reduce the size of the game column; we might not need the complete names of the games here! Yes, moving stuff to subpages would be a great idea - the page is pretty daunting as it is =) --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 14:11, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

I've cleaned up most o the mess concerning the ultima-related pages and the games. I hope this looks good now. --Tribun 15:05, 22 March 2008 (UTC)

Stupid advertisement windows

I had to switch back to standard wikipedia skin, because these STUPID advertisement windows that pop up in the upper right completely destroy the page layout of a lot of articles!

I really wonder who caused this shit.

You really should take the complaint to Wikia; I'm sure they'll listen to coherent arguments, because no one likes obnoxious advertising. While they're working on that, I suggest you try Adblock; I use Monaco skin and I don't see any ads at all, because I've developed a reflex to block all this stupid stuff without a second thought. =)
However, I don't think the main page is the proper place to warn people about that - it's not really anyone else's business what MediaWiki skin other people use, is it? And since we're all guests here, I don't think the front page is a place for overt statements to the effect of "cut our corporate overlord's source revenue", or is it? --wwwwolf (barks/growls) 17:19, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia Ultima taskforce/wikiproject created. Don't let them forget our history

Please check out WikiProject Ultima if you are interested in helping with the Ultima articles on Wikipedia. Content from one wiki can always be used on another, many people editing both anyway. There are some younger people who have never even heard of the Avatar, and thus are trying to delete his article even. Wikipedia:wiki/Avatar_(Ultima) I think its important for people to remember how important Ultima was to the game making industry and hundreds of thousands/millions of fans(anyone know the sales figures?). If you wish to help, please check it out. Dream Focus 16:59, 18 August 2009 (UTC)

Featured Media

"No featured articles or media has been chosen yet; suggestions?"

I suggest stones.mid (or perhaps a mp3 version), as it is the most often heard song in Ultima Soundtracks ("Oh' Britannia" aside) and seems to express the spirit of Ultima best. Ultima games had many unforgettable soundtracks, but stones is IMO most memorable of them all.

(Second Favorite, the Heavy metal version of the Warriors of Destiny theme, lol. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xx-10sI33lk)

Or perhaps a rare but interesting media file (say a video interview with Richard Garriott, or pictures of his space mission, etc)

Carcerian 22:19, October 20, 2009 (UTC)

Featured Article

Any chance of getting a new featured article? Like, weekly, maybe?

--Polygoncount 04:16, March 10, 2010 (UTC)

New Home New Name

So here we are in out brand new home. Hey everyone! What this means is we also need to decide if we should choose a new name to separate ourselves from our likely now inactive fork The Editable Codex. I would personally prefer the name "The Ultima Codex", but that seems to already be taken by a site that has been inactive for nearly 4 years. Maybe we could try "The Ultima Wiki". Dungy 11:42, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I fully support a name change. Both of the above suggestions sound good to me. Fenyx4 11:45, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

P.S. When talking about it I usually refer to it as "The Ultima Wiki" and not as "Editable Codex". Fenyx4 11:46, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I've always liked the "Codex of Editable Wisdom" to be honest. I do like "Ultima Codex" more than "Ultima Wiki"... perhaps something a tad similar, I don't know: "The Codex of Ultima Wisdom" perhaps ?

On a side I was thinking it might be nice down the road to have our very own Ultima skin/look rather that the default white wiki skin, which is nice but rather blanc. --Sergorn 11:49, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I think we should avoid the name part "wiki", after all we try to get away from them. I hoestly don't see the problem with our current name, as it is well known (and thanks to Fenyx's notices on the old site, it will hopefully fast surpass the old site). But a new background would be really nice, something to make it look more Ultima-like.--Tribun 11:53, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

My only worry is someone who has no knowledge of the Ultima series might not understand what we are about if they just see our name. I feel if we have Ultima in our actual title, the confusion would be lessened. "The Codex of Ultima Wisdom" which Sergorn mentioned would also be an excellent choice. Dungy 12:02, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Ya, the lack of Ultima in the title is what bothers me the most. "The Codex of Ultima Wisdom" rolls off my tongue nicely. It has Codex (I'd feel bad changing that since I like this subdomain) and it has Ultima.

Also wiki != Wikia. Wikia and this site use MediaWiki which is wiki software. Fenyx4 12:24, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

"The Codex of Ultima Wisdom" is good, it also preserves the pun on the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom.--Tribun 12:29, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

In order to keep that this is a wiki or such around the title we might consider a subtitle/slogan like you know "The Codex of Ultima Wisdom" with a small line below like "The one and only Ultima wiki of the world wide web" or some such --Sergorn 12:45, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

We'll also need a new title image to represent our new name. Our current subtitle is "a Wikia wiki for Ultima and Ultima Online". We first need to get rid of the "Wikia" part, but after that, I'm fairly happy with our current one. Open to suggestions, though. Dungy 12:57, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Wow, I'm gone a couple of hours and we already have a new name. Anyway, I do like the proposed name. Btw, we weren't the first ones to came up with that name, it is the way the codex is refered to in the fan game Ultima IV Part 2, but I guess that is no problem.--Sega381 17:12, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Activity Feed

I have to say: one of the things I liked at wikia was the activity feed and how it showed all the latest edits. We have the recent changes pages here, but it's a bit more confusing so I wonder if we could somehow implement a loot more similar --Sergorn 11:50, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Just want to throw a "me too" in here. I loved the Wikia recent changes page. Dungy 12:04, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I've added upgrading Recent Changes to The List. Fenyx4 12:24, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Sending out the word

I plan to write all important Ultima sites to inform them of the change. What I want to ask: should I also add that we plan to change our name to "The Codex of Ultima Wisdom"?--Tribun 13:37, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I'd say the new name since everyone seems happy with it. Dungy 14:56, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

New Logo

It doesn't look bad. It's hard to be certain with both images present at once, since it means the content is pushed quite far down the main page. Still, maybe it's possible to slightly reduce the vertical dimension. Also, the edges of the yellow text slightly blur into the yellow of the surrounding images. Maybe you can slightly increase the blacked out area behind the text so it's more readable. Dungy 15:00, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

How is this?--Tribun 15:11, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

The left side looks better, but the right side, not so much. I was mostly unhappy with the left side, anyway. Maybe you were a little overzealous darkening the area behind the text on the right. Sorry for being picky. :P Dungy 15:13, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Also, a little more blending of the right side of the Ultima IV image with the black area between the two photos, so it's not as obvious that there is a blank area there. Dungy 15:16, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I recreated it, should be better now.--Tribun 15:32, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Looks better. WTF made an interesting suggestion over on the Aiera forum about the logo that we might want to think about. Dungy 16:20, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

It is starting to look gooood.--Sega381 16:43, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

last suggestion (for now). How about a picture of the Codex in the blank area in the bottom centre. If you could make the three images merge together, I think that'd look nice. Dungy 17:07, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

That also sounds goood.--Sega381 17:12, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Already done, and I think it adds nicely to the picture.--Tribun 17:20, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

I'm much happier with that addition. Dungy 17:23, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Great job Tribun!--Sega381 17:25, 26 October 2010 (PDT)

Fantastic! Fenyx4 00:28, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

New favicon

Whilst I figure out how to add it I thought I'd start up a discussion on whether we should make a new one. The old one is nice and familiar but it is the icon for UO. Not entirely appropriate for what we focus on. -- Fenyx4 00:39, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

That is something I've been questioning for a long time. I think we should have something different. Maybe just a little ankh. Dungy 05:39, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

Yes, an ankh sounds good. Other images, such as a codex or the Avatar, will not be very clear in such a small icon.--Sega381 05:51, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

With WTF's permission I've used the Ultima Aiera favicon as it is an ankh and I like the consistency. I'm open to changing it though. -- Fenyx4 07:56, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

Looks great :).--Sega381 10:36, 27 October 2010 (PDT)

Abbreviations

I may be wrong, but I'm not sure this is necessarily a strict grammar rule. I know it is poor form to use lower case letters in an abbreviation or acronym, so that should be fixed. However, while the USA example is certainly true, I've seen plenty that include articles and prepositions (e.g. COO (Country of origin), FOV (Field of view), ANH (A New Hope), TESB (The Empire Strikes Back), ROTJ (Return of the Jedi)). I'm also reasonably confident the Ultima community would be accustomed to seeing the titles abbreviated the way we had them, which might count for something (i.e. google "T2A" and the top two results relate to The Second Age). --Terilem 08:53, 8 May 2012 (PDT)

Youtube Link Broken

The Youtube link under Featured Media is currently broken. I could fix it, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to edit the "Featured Media" section. Dungy (talk) 11:04, 24 March 2013 (PDT)

You can open the Main_Page/featuredmedia page and edit it. I'm not sure what the code needs to be changed to, however. --Browncoat Jayson (talk) 12:48, 24 March 2013 (PDT)

Fixed. Thanks! Dungy (talk) 15:48, 24 March 2013 (PDT)

"What is Ultima?" and other ideas to increase our profile

It seems as though this is the second most popular page in the wiki, which tells me that for a lot of people, this page will be the very first impression people get of Ultima. Further to that, we should probably make sure that this page has the maximum impact. From what I can tell, it's already pretty close, but getting into the head of an Ultima noob, I'm wondering if we have considered the know-nothing mentality of our visitors. Sometimes I have to smh when I go to these nerdy fanboy pages and don't see a very basic explanation of the site and theme I'm looking at. But that might be a bit hypocritical, since we don't seem to have it either. What do you think of a "what is Ultima?" link front and centre? The Ultra-Mind (talk) 20:42, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

Seems fair enough an idea. I also think perhaps we could do with some search engine optimization. I notice if you type "Ultima wiki" into Google, it's a direct hit for the Wikia version and we're several results further down. We don't even have that string anywhere on our main page. --Terilem (talk) 07:00, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

It wouldn't need to be, if we could get ahold of the <meta /> tags, but I don't know how to do that. 'Probably requires an admin.

I'm all for poaching readers from Wikia, but don't set yourselves up for a disappointment. They are a big, popular site and we're just a bunch of grassroot punks. That's probably the first metric that decides ranking in Google.

But it's worth a shot. This might be a good place to start. The Ultra-Mind (talk) 13:47, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

For future reference doing this search in incognito places at us #5 (for me anyhoo). That has improved from where it was before. We'll have to track and see if it improves further. -- Fenyx4 02:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)

Also for future reference, doing that same search ("Ultima wiki") on Chrome in incognito mode, in my case, places us at #2, right after Wikia and before Wikipedia. Doing that same search while logged in to my Google profile in Firefox lowers us to #3, still before Wikipedia, but after 2 Wikia pages. Maybe geolocation differences? I doubt we have improved so much in a week. In any case, the only way to improve the results I get is to beat Wikia. But hey, from where I am standing, #2 seems great! --Sega381 (talk) 20:06, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Same here. Of course, if it was to improve, we'd have to beat Wikipedia and then the big boss: Wikia.

There are still some things we can do, not just to this page, but to the whole site. Summing up the advice given in that link I posted, and w/IMO:

• Publish relevant content: I think we're already doing our best here.
• Update your content regularly: brute force application of what we're already doing.
• Metadata: (there are several sub-suggestions to this, BTW). This, I don't think we mortals, have the power to do. Do admins? Does Wikimedia afford that power? I'm not very good at finding WM reference material, but Googlng for it gives no joy.
• Have a link-worthy site: We probably can't improve on that either.
• Use alt tags: This is something we can (and I think don't) do. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, since it'll likely attract the attention of search engines. And WM allows for that, too. Just put "alt=" after another "|" in the file tag and then your text.

The Ultra-Mind (talk) 19:15, 1 September 2015 (UTC)