Rosetta Code:Village Pump/Old main talk

Syntax highlighting

It took a month, but we now have Syntax Highlighting! It would be very helpful if people crawled through all the programming examples on Rosetta Code and instituted the formatting changes. --Short Circuit 16:50, 20 February 2007 (EST)

And...Syntax highlighting support has been removed. It worked poorly for each tested language, and didn't support many languages already in place on Rosetta code. --Short Circuit 10:28, 22 February 2007 (EST)

Damn... That sucks... Well, I guess I'll see what I can do, unfortunately, I changed to a new computer, and lost everything I've done 'till now. But well... --CrashandDie 02:44, 6 March 2007 (EST)

Hey, it's good to hear from you. Might I recommend you try building a MediaWiki extension, rather than a bot? The highlighting extension we tried last month worked by adding <syntaxHighlighting language="blah"> tags around the code block, leaving the code easily editable. I don't think it would be easy to do that using a bot that dropped in <font> tags. --Short Circuit 02:52, 6 March 2007 (EST)

Ok, I'll look into that, I'll probably just mod the actual syntaxhighlighting, I'll get the sources from mediawiki and start working on it as soon as I have some time to spare... Cheers --CrashandDie 10:33, 12 March 2007 (EDT)

Copying from Wikipedia

As you may already know, wikipedia supplies samples of code in 'pseudocode'. Would it make sense to copy these across from wiki to here (placed in its own 'pseudocode language section). Maybe then others may use these as a base for translating them into one of the 'usable' codes. There shouldn't be any legal issues in doing this, should there? --Oatzy 18:47, 25 January (GMT)

As a blanket rule, if you copy from Wikipedia, include a citation with a link to the specific version of the page copied from. I don't know that the GFDL requires it, but I will. :-) I'll mention this in the Copyrights page. --Short Circuit 13:57, 25 January 2007 (EST)

Things needed

1) A village pump type page (like wikipedia has) where this kind of stuff can be put

2) Better segregation of language types. For instance, is LaTeX really a programming language? As a markup language, it's as much a programming language as HTML is IMO. (Of course, HTML could be added instead), should completely different codes be on their own page?

3) Better guidelines as to what code should be placed. Is something that will run on it's own required, or just enough lines to complete the task (for instance, the part of a C++ program which will print "goodbye world" is: std::cout "goodbye world\n"; but that wouldn't compile on its own. On the other hand a BASIC compiler (or interpreter) will complete the task with: print "goodbye world", but it wouldn't really be a complete program (missing a line number and 'end' or 'system' at the end). So should people place: Only the code that completes the requirements? or; Enough code to get it to compile, dependent on how lax the compiler in question is? or; A program that is completed to specifications and accomplishes the task?

4) A copy of (or a link to) the GFDL1.2 that is easily visible.

62.252.32.16 17:57, 22 January 2007 (EST)

1) Click on Feedback on the left.

2) Once I get time to work on categorization, that'll happen. I need more people to step up and work on keeping style standards high.

3) I'll work on clarifying the tasks to that end. Something like Control Structures clearly doesn't require a full program, while something like File I/O does.

4) Click on the GNU FDL icon in the bottom-left corner of any page. --Short Circuit 12:39, 23 January 2007 (EST)

ParserFunctions

Can we get ParserFunctions installed? It would really help with making more flexible templates. --Bob9000 00:00, 1 February 2007 (EST)

Done. Enjoy. --Short Circuit 09:47, 1 February 2007 (EST)

Solution to linkspam?

At last, there has been a lot of linkspam vandalism. Those linkspams should be easy to automatically identify because they insert many links at once. Since valid external links are rare on this site, and many external links in one edit are virtually never done, maybe a simple rule to fight linkspam would be to automatically reject any change which introduces more than, say, three external links at once. This shouldn't be too strict for normal usage (if at some rare occurence you really need to insert more than three links, you can simply do two edits in a row). You also can except admins from that rule (nobody gets admin through an automatic procedure, thus spammers will never get admin rights).

A simpler change would be to only allow logged-in users to make changes. I'm working out how to do this. It's not, unfortunately, a built-in option in Mediawiki. --Short Circuit 09:32, 10 May 2007 (EDT)

Spam wave prediction

There has been disturbing activity lately ("+" killers appeared as logged-in users with apparently randomly generated names). Given that similar activity from IPs happened before the spam wave which led to disallowing anonymous editing, and given that some spamming was indeed combined with removing "+" signs, I fear that's a testing of spambots for a new spam wave. Maybe creating a new account should be protected by Captchas.

I've been working on some new kaptcha's (ideas), drop me an email or edit my talk page if you're interested... --CrashandDie 07:34, 2 July 2007 (EDT)