UESPWiki:Archive/CP Missing Pages

This is an archive of past UESPWiki:Community Portal discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page, except for maintenance such as updating links.

Missing Pages

Some pages are missing/empty, e.g. http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Scrolls

This page is not empty. It's rather large and slow-loading, so it may not be loading properly on your computer, but it's definitely there. It's possible that all the Daedric text on the screen may be bogging the page down. I've been considering other ways of displaying that which don't have this problem. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 12:17, 13 November 2007 (EST)

I can see it now. And it loads fast. But the last week this page (and some others) was always empty. Strange. 212.114.251.97 03:53, 14 November 2007 (EST)

Please let us know if you notice pages that appear to be empty. There is some quirk that occasionally causes pages to not load in IE, and that's what was happening in this case. We don't know what triggers this problem, although it's easy to fix once we know about the problem page. So we really just rely upon readers who use IE to let us know when it happens (unfortunately, many of the editors use firefox, so we don't experience any problems). --Nephele^Talk 12:39, 14 November 2007 (EST)

Well, it was definitely the over-abundance of Daedric characters that did it. When GuildKnight and I replaced the separate-letter inscriptions with single-images for each inscription yesterday, it reduced the page size by almost 60K, and made it load MUCH faster. Something about the way the wiki handles large numbers of images (even if it's the same 26 images used over and over) makes it a bit of a problem for IE users. (Though there's now 39 different images, more than the 26 or less that were there before, the total image count, including duplicates, is much less, which appears to be what matters most.) Unfortunately, this method won't be quite as practical for the other pages making heavy use of Daedric, e.g.: Message from Master Aryon, Response from Divayth Fyr and Bible of the Deep Ones, since they contain large blocks of text, rather than simple inscriptions. I'd considered two possibilities for this.

One would be to let the users download and install the Daedric font, and then just display Daedric as regular text using the font. Those who choose not to download the font would just see the same text in standard Arial or whatever the default is. But we'd place a note at the top of any page using the font directing people to where they can download the font. This method has the advantage of quickest load-time, since it's just text, not images. Unfortunately, it also requires the user to download and install a font in order to see the Daedric text, and some people might not want to do that.

The other possibility would be to screen-shot these books in the game, and just have a single image per page instead of each letter being a separate image. This has the advantage of being universally viewable by all visitors, and also authenticity of appearance to what's in the books. It does have a few drawbacks, however, in that it still means loading a full-screen sized image, and the text can then not be copy/pasted. It will also be missing the X and Y since the in-game font does not have these letters. Finally, it is more labor-intensive to produce.

A third possibility would be to combine these two methods. Have a page with the Daedric font text displayed, and put a note on the top saying that if this text appears in English, you can either download the font, or click here to see an in-game image version of the book. This is sort of a best-of-both-worlds approach, in that you get the nice, fast-loading text-only page by default, and then have the option of either downloading the font to make it display properly, or you can click on the image version if you don't want to bother with fonts but don't mind a slow-loading page. --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 15:05, 14 November 2007 (EST)

Or we could go with option 3, but link to an image like the one I have ready to upload, a screenshot of the daedric text from the current page, but it's 160KB. --GuildKnight (Talk) ^contribs 15:33, 14 November 2007 (EST)

I like option 3; it sounds like a good compromise. I'd vote for an in-game screenshot over a screenshot of the wiki page, just because it has a bit more significance. --Nephele^Talk 15:40, 14 November 2007 (EST)