Talk:Main Page

From SkepticWiki

Just a little suggested reorg to make the main page clearer. Feel free to revert if you don't think it works - ajrae

This puts "people" under "Critical Thinking" even though much of it is about woo-woos.

I've said why you shouldn't have separated "History" from "Artifacts".

There is little logic in your decisions. I preferred the earlier version: and you might have opened discussion first, rather than rearranging it and awaiting objections.

--- Dr A.

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Let me know what you guys think of the new logo. -Ducky.

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[edit] Site Access irritations / problems

Hi, not sure who is the main maintainer of www.skepticwiki.org but I have a few suggestions.

• What is the point of having a "splashpage" at www.skepticwiki.org? Why not just display the Wiki? If you want an unhijackable front page then just lock the front page. When I saw that splash page I assumed I'd come to the wrong place - it looked like a dead end page not the first page of a site brimming with articles.
• There is no visible link to the Wiki on the front page. Certainly the logo links to the Wiki, but that's non-intuitive. If you must have the splash-page then put a text link on it to the Wiki.
• The only apparent way to access the site is through the Google search at the bottom of the page. Using that means that the real front page of the wiki will be missed. The Google search results also come back with a black background which makes them very hard to read, and unprofessional. I assume this is a setting which you pass to Google. In case this is browser-specific, I am using Firefox.

Rainbow Snake 21:24, 3 April 2007 (CDT)

Rainbow Snake:

Due to technical issues, we were forced to put the wiki into a specific directory below the apache root on the server when it was moved from the old web host to the new one. Also, there used to be a blog associated with the wiki, that has since been terminated. They were both in separate folders in the apache document root to maintain them easily This means that the wiki was forced to be in the folder "wiki" under the apache document root. This facilitated the need for a splash page - originally to provide a link to the blog and the wiki separately. The splash page that is there now was not meant to be permanent, and I haven't had time to design a new one. The page has two links to the main page of the wiki: the logo, and the words "The Skeptic Wiki" underneath the logo. Sorry you missed them. Thanks for the advice in design, I'll take it into consideration when I have the time to redesign the splash page. The wiki is also forced right now to stay at the version of mediawiki 1.67 because any higher upgrade would require our web host, who has generously donated the space and bandwidth for free, to upgrade the PHP version currently running on the server. Since the web host has many other sites that would be affected by this upgrade, it is not a priority. It may be that in the future the wiki can be moved to another host and when that happens we can lose the splash page as I would then start with a db dump of the wiki, and install a fresh copy of mediawiki at the latest version. I've tested this several times on the development server I run here in my studio, and it would work fine. However I am in no position to be able to implement these changes as of yet. There are many technical factors involved in our current home that I cannot fix immediately. When I can fix them, I will. If you would like to design a new splash page, I would happily review and implement it. -Ducky

Hi Ducky, I'll contact you directly with some suggestions for technical fixes. With regards to the splash page. I just checked it again, and though I have quite good resolution, the search box was off my screen. When I recently came back looking for the SkepticWiki after a long absence and found that page I thought it had been closed down until I scrolled down and saw the search box. I had been part-way through an email to my local Skeptics list to tell them this site wasn't around anymore. Maybe you reckon everyone's smart enough to click the picture or the non-underlined heading, but I'd really encourage you to change the link to something like "Enter The SkepticWiki" or "Click Here for the SkepticWiki". We don't want to lose people.

Anyhoo, thanks for running this site. Had a similar one myself but it's hard to run it alone. Rainbow Snake 18:21, 9 April 2007 (CDT)

I have to agree with Rainbow Snake -- it is completely not intuitive to click on the giant icon to get in here. And the link, with "underline link" disabled by the web page author, presumably, doesn't help much. I suggest enabling the underline of the word link, anyway. Or change the text to "Enter The Skeptic Wiki". Something. User:Beerina

There's no reason why you can't have a redirect go to the SkepticWiki main page automatically. But if you really want an unhijackable front page, then I'd suggest one that repeats a lot of the Wiki information: number of articles, search box, links to Main Page, Recent Changes, etc. —Shanek 08:56, 10 April 2007 (CDT)

Well there should be nothing but the wiki now, we've moved to a new server temporarily while the old one is worked on. when we migrate back, there will be no splash page, and we will have solved the needed upgrades. In the meantime weve upgraded to mediawiki 1.93 and php5/mysql5 and I am looking to introduce some new functions with that. User:Fowlsound

[edit] categories

When you talk about uncategorised pages, what are the categories?

I've just been trying to link each page back to any index page that links to it. I don't know how to make categories.

What sort of thing did you have in mind?

--- Dr A.

Dr. A:

Well for now I think as long as they are linked back that's fine. I have to email some wikimedia developers I know and ask about some specific DB issues, and when I do that I'll slip in a question about categorizing the articles. I took down the call for fixes.

-Ducky