D minus seven days and counting...

So I said I would try to get something done on the Wongery every day for the last ten days until the hard launch. Well, I admit I didn't get much done today, but I think it's not too hard to guess the reason for that, given what day it is. Not everyone celebrates Christmas, of course; worldwide, there are more people who don't celebrate than do. Nevertheless, it is widely though not universally celebrated where I grew up, and my family in particular does celebrate Christmas, as well as having a get-together on Christmas Eve. While personally I'm not religious and don't care all that much for Christmas, it would be gauche to skip the family festivities, so... yes. That's the main reason I didn't get much done today. Christmas.

Merry Christmas, to those who celebrate, I guess, and a joyous Takanakuy to those who don't. Or, you know, let's just call it a general Happy Holidays.

Nevertheless, I never said I'd get some major project done on the Wongery every day, only that I'd get something done. And I did do that.

There are a grand total of two (2) posts on the Wongery forum not created by me. The post by "Libre" I mentioned in the previous blog post, and a post by a Ukrainian named "гадюка" ("viper") looking for work in Poland. I have no idea why the latter person posted on the Wongery, but there were no spam links or anything in their post or profile, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt that the post was genuine, if... confusing.

But anyway, if the hard launch is successful, that may change. Now, granted, at this point, I don't have extremely high hopes for the launch's success, given that my lack of money and time means there's going to be a lot less to the hard launch than I'd originally planned. Still, even if it brings only a handful of people to the Wongery, and even if only one or two of them become regular posters on the forums, that's still at least doubling the number of regular posters we have now. (Which is one (1). Me.)

And the forums need a lot of work. I don't think the arrangement of the forums has changed since they were first created in, uh, let's see, December 2012. (Or, well, it hadn't changed until today, but I'll get to that.) There's a "Wongery General" forum with two subfora: "Tech Support" and "Blog Posts". (Or there was, until today, but again let's just take it as assumed here that although this paragraph is written in the present tense some of this description as of today no longer applies. So why didn't I just write it in the past tense? I do not offhand have a good answer to that question.) There's a "Worlds of the Wongery" forum with four subfora: "Central Wongery", "Public Wongery", "Master Wongeries", and "Other Worlds". There's an "Other features" forum with a single subforum: "Suggestions". There's a "Real-World Topics" forum with five subfora: "Mathematics", "Physics", "Biology", "Linguistics", and "Other". And there's an "Off Topic" forum that has no subfora.

(Technically there's also a "Hidden Forum" only visible to administrators, but that's there only because I am an irrational digital hoarder who can't stand deleting anything so I wanted a place I could move the "Welcome to phpBB3" post that was automatically generated when the forum was set up. (Which was, incidentally, how I verified when I'd first set up the forum; I checked the date of that post.))

The "Other Features" forum has the following description:

This is a place to discuss other features of the site apart from the wikis. Except that right now there are no other features of the site apart from the wikis (and the forum, I guess). There'll be subforums here for other features once they're implemented.

Except that that description never actually shows up on the forum, because the "Other Features" forum is set as a category and, as the forum administration page clearly says, "If the selected forum type is a category the description is not used." But anyway, if there are no other features, then what is the purpose of this forum? I guess the "Suggestions" subforum may not be entirely useless (description: "Do you have an idea for a new site feature you'd like to see in the Wongery? Suggest it here! We probably won't do anything about it because we already have way more features planned than we have time to implement any time soon, but hey, you can try suggesting it anyway."), but I'm not sure it justifies this otherwise useless forum. So, yeah, the "Other Features" forum is now gone. (Or more specifically it's now set to be visible only to administrators. Like I said, I'm a digital hoarder who can't stand to delete anything. Okay, I guess I did delete all those spam forum posts, but, well, I guess even I have limits.) Likewise the "Master Wongeries" forum. Description: "A place to discuss the Master Wongeries. Once there are Master Wongeries. Which there aren't yet, so never mind." So, yeah, when and if there are Master Wongeries, I'll bring this forum back, but until then, gone. (Or, again, visible only to adminstrators.)

(Wait... "Master Wongeries"? I think I've been calling those "Private Wongeries" lately, but "Master Wongeries" is a much better name. Why did I stop using that name? I'm going to go back to that.)

Furthermore, though, there were some things that aren't in the forum that... probably should be? If the Wongery is a site devoted largely to worldbuilding, shouldn't there be a worldbuilding forum? (There is now.) And for that matter, what about the topics covered in the various new namespaces and subspaces? RPGs, CCGs LEGOs, origami... if those are a significant enough part of the Wongery's purpose to warrant entire namespaces being created for them, shouldn't they be represented in the forum too? Yes, yes they should. I'm adding them too. (Well, I haven't added them yet, but I will after I get those namespaces implemented.)

However, there's another thing I also got done with the forums that was perhaps more important than this rearrangement. As it was, nowhere were there posted any sort of forum rules. While (almost) nobody but me was posting here, there really wasn't a need for forum rules anyway, but if I'm hoping that the hard launch will bring people to the site and perhaps to the forums (which I am, however vain and unfounded that hope may end up being), then, well, I'm probably going to need to establish some sort of guidelines. I did in fact have some prospective forum rules mostly written; I just hadn't actually posted them in the fora. Well, now I have; there's now a new "Rules and Guidelines" subforum in the "Wongery General" forum, and within that subforum is a single post, "Forum Rules", which is set as the forum rules so it is linked to as such from every forum. (I would have madeit a sticky post, but I, uh, can't figure out how to do that. I'll look into it.)

It is not impossible that these rules may change in the future, but for posterity here is the initial version:

Here on the Wongery forum, we want to welcome discussion on broad ranges of topics, but there are a few things we don't want to see. The following types of content are not welcome on the Wongery forum:

• Insults or hostility directed toward other posters. Please be civil.
  • If another poster is being hostile or abusive, please report them rather than returning their uncivility.
• Displays of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, ableism, and like forms of bigotry.
  • This explicitly includes arguments that these things don't exist or aren't a problem.
• Condonation or romanticization of pedophilia, incest, or bestiality.
• Posts wishing violence or sexual assault on people. Even if the people in question are deeply unpleasant, and even if it's a "joke".
• Solicitations of artists, programmers, or other creative or technical personnel for your projects while offering no pay or pay significantly below accepted industry standards.
  • This explicitly includes offering payment in exposure or only in a share of future revenue.
• Promotion of pseudoscience and pseudohistory.
  • Yes, it has happened that a brilliant new theory has overturned the academic consensus, and it's not altogether impossible that some of our current beliefs will turn out to be mistaken. But the place to hash out these ideas is in peer-reviewed technical settings, not in some internet forum. If you want to promote some theory that goes against the academic mainstream, this is not the place for it.
• Links to pirated software or books, or sites to acquire copyrighted material without the copyright holder's permission.
  • We recognize that there may be some issues with current copyright law and that there are arguments to be made about the ethics of piracy or abandonware, but we would rather not get sued.
• Spam posts that exist only to advertise products and services unrelated to the topic of the forum. I mean, obviously. Nobody wants to see spam posts.

Violation of these guidelines may result in warnings for minor first offenses, but for repeated or especially flagrant violations the consequences may escalate to suspension or banning.

At the moment, the only moderators of the forum are the Grandmaster Wongers themselves, who are busy with many other things, so we may not respond to violations immediately. That doesn't mean we don't care about them; please do report any violations that you see.

Anyway, there is more that remains to be done with the fora, of course. I'd like to install a custom theme rather than leave the forums with the default phpBB appearance, but that's something that's a relatively low priority and can wait until after the hard launch. One thing that I do want to get done before the hard launch, though, is creating a phpBB extension to implement a new tag ("[wiki][/wiki]") that would allow me to use wikitext in forum posts. The main reason I want to have this extension is for the blog posts; that way I can just embed them directly in forum posts. Not only will that make it a lot simpler to make forum posts for the blog posts—no hassling with copying the HTML for the blog posts, converting it to BBcode, cleaning it up, and pasting it in—but it also will mean that if I update the blog posts, they'll automatically be updated on the forum as well. I do plan to go through and do some light copy-editing of the old blog posts, and without that extension in place changes to the blog posts won't be reflected in the posts on the forum unless I go through and also change them manually.

I don't actually think this should be a difficult extension to create; I think most of the hard part of figuring out how to integrate phpBB and MediaWiki I've already done when I figured out how to check that a user with administrative permissions was logged in for the blog post admin page. (Speaking of which, uh, I just discovered on looking through some permissions settings on trying (and failing) to resolve the sticky post issue that the other Grandmaster Wongers are currently set as global moderators of the forum but not as adminstrators; if I want them to be able to make blog posts (which I do, though I don't know if they ever will), I'll have to either promote them to forum administrators or change the admin page to check for moderator permissions instead of adminstrator. Well, again, this isn't something I urgently need to do right now.) It's always possible I'll run into some roadblock I haven't anticipated, but I think once I get a chance to figure out how to make phpBB extensions, this particular extension shouldn't be hard to make. I just haven't had time today because, again, Christmas.

Oh, and speaking of extensions, I just recognized a potential problem with my MediaWiki RandomRules extension. When it changes the query for the API, I forgot to make it check whether the query was for a random article. As it is, the extension will kick in to modify any query that triggers the ApiQueryBaseBeforeQuery hook, not just a random article query. Again, the Wongery, at least as it currently stands, this isn't important, because the only API call I'm using is the random article API call. Still, if I want the extension to be usable by others, which eventually I do, that's something I'm going to have to fix at some point. Again, though, it can wait until after the hard launch.

Oh, yes... one more thing I do want to fix with the forums. The forum technically lies at https://www.wongery.com/f, but can be reached through https://www.wongery.com/forum. I wanted the latter URL to redirect elegantly to the former through an .htaccess condition, but I couldn't get that to work, so as it stands it does the redirect through meta refresh, which is undesirable both because it shows the /f URL in the address bar and because it isn't instantaneous. ("(I'm trying to get this to work more elegantly using the .htaccess file, but... no luck yet...)", says the page that's briefly visible before the refresh occurs.) I should make another stab at getting this working correctly; I don't think I've really looked at it in years, and it may be that if I look into it now I'll see the problem immediately and it'll be an easy fix. Or it may be that I still won't have any idea how to get it working. We'll see.

So, anyway. The forum is improved, though there's still lots of room for improvement. And there are now forum rules in place for when and if the forum actually starts getting (more than a couple of) posters.

D minus seven days and counting...