Thought on the community portal

Hello, William One Sac and others,

Obviously, communication is important as a feature for a community, but perhaps some additional features could be useful and beneficial to add (next to the forum). If this sounds interesting then perhaps it could be worth considering making a tinWiki page from the Community portal link, and then have a link on *that* page to bring people to the forum here.

Of course the point would be to also have a couple of other features on that page, in addition to a forum (link), for example a link to the Chores page and a link to Help, and so on. (The chores page could also be deleted and its content put instead on such a new Community portal page, like it is at least my impression they do in Wikipedia...)

The specific things I mentioned now are however basically me thinking out loud. The general thought is only to create a page from the Community portal link, to be able to add some more features next to the forum. I mention this idea only in case it might sound interesting.

Optimist

OM gosh what is the community portal? Do you mean the front ATS page? Sorry to sound so uninformed but I am just getting to navigate ATS can't help that I am a slow learner... that said I see far too little of the TinWiki forum and sometimes wish that were not so. More exposure to tinWiki would be a good thing !

antar,

Hello. No, the community portal isn't the ATS front page but a kind of internal part of tinWiki. Right now, however, the tinWiki Community portal is mostly an idea, one might say. In the navigation panel in tinWiki there is a link called "Community portal". That link goes straight to the tinWiki forum in ATS, and what I am suggesting in this thread is to create more of an actual portal page.

So, to answer your question, right now the (tinWiki) community portal is in fact this very forum, since clicking the link leads here.

Anyway, yes, I definitely agree that more exposure to tinWiki would be a good thing. By the way, if you should want to link to tinWiki from your signature, feel free to use the "button" I made. (Or both, of course.)



Optimist

So Optimist, just to be clear, you want to make a page on tinWiki that the community portal link will redirect to instead of this forum? And you are saying that we can just make links on that page, one of which would be to this page? That is an interesting idea. I am not certain how to do that though, off the top of my head. I have some ideas though, from when that spammer created a new page for the community portal that actually had a different url than the actual link in the sidebar. I am sorry if I am misconstruing your idea.

William One Sac,

You got it exactly right, and I was happy to see you found this thought interesting. As I described it, I initially talked about putting only links on the page I guess, but there might also be actual content (like what I also mentioned about for example putting a list of chores on the page). Whatever might be of use to those who work on improving tinWiki could be on the page, of course not just piling it on but in some way which is simple and user friendly and so on. I assume the page could be changed according to what is seen as best. The specific content ideas I suggested for the page were just some initial thoughts, mostly to have something to mention like a sketch or such.

As far as how the Community portal link itself is made, I went to the manual for MediaWiki wikis and was at least able to find out the name of the standard page where the settings are made. But it seems tinWiki uses another page than the standard one for writing the content of what is appearantly called the Sidebar. I wasn't able to locate the actual page which tinWiki uses for its Sidebar, at least not right now.

But you may not have been talking about the Community portal link and how to change it.

Since it's very limited what I know about how MediaWiki wikis function and so on, I haven't even been able to actually find the page which that Community portal link links to -- the case is it seems it doesn't actually link directly here to the forum but instead goes via a page called TinWiki.org:Community_portal.

So, one would think that one way of creating a new page which would be a Community portal page would be to make a new page and change the link to point to the new page (if the Sidebar page could be found). Or, then, another way could be to work directly on TinWiki.org:Community_portal which is the page the link points to now (and which I btw. assume is an automatic redirect page as it is now).

However, it seems I wasn't able to find either page for the moment. If one of them are found, though, it could be possible to make a page that would be a new step between tinWiki and this forum, but that would also allow adding some extra, handy functions, next to the forum, to present in one page to those who want to work to improve tinWiki. At least that is what I am picturing a community portal would most likely be about.

Optimist


edit:

P.S. I remember that spammer who created the page that I first thought was the target page of the Community portal link, but when I think about it now I am thinking that the spammer uses a "trick" of creating pages with almost the same title as legitimate pages so people won't think there may be something suspicious about the page.

[edit on 29-8-2007 by Optimist]

I was able to find the TinWiki.orgCommunity_Portal page by looking at editing another page and then simply just insering the name of the community portal into the url. However I do not think this is going to work, as I noticed there is no redirect on the page. Also it lists one deleted page, which when viewed is the page the spammer created. I spoke to you about this on your talk page, but I thought I would repeat it here to see if anybody else has any ideas on a solution to this.

William One Sac,

Thank you for the replies (I reply here to perhaps make it easier for others to follow the topic). I, too, tried that thing about editing another page and inserting the page name for the (non-existent..) Community portal page in the browser address bar and going to that location, but I thought it hadn't worked since I didn't see any redirect code or such.

Now when I think about it again after reading about your attempt, too, maybe it's that simple, that in fact the link does not lead to where it appears to lead, even though that sounds really strange... Then again, I'm no HTML expert or such.

I guess the way it would have to be done, changing what is at the target of the Community portal link, is to change the link itself, since the page where it seems to lead to is not actually its real target (so it won't help, probably, doing anything on the supposed target page).

Finding the Sidebar page is the next thing to try, then. I would guess it says somewhere what page is the actual tinWiki Sidebar page, but as I understood you from what you said on my talk page, the easiest way might be if SkepticOverlord knows the page name.

Anyway, there has been a little progress, which I would say is good. At least a little "mystery" has been revealed about that link.

Optimist



P.S.

Just in case the standard Sidebar page should happen to actually be the real Sidebar page, I tried editing and saving it just for a short while (I added the word "test" at the bottom), but my edit didn't show up in the tinWiki pages' Sidebar navigation panel. Why I wanted to try is I took a look in Wikipedia, and saw that the standard Sidebar page there seems consistent with what is actually in the Wikipedia pages' Sidebar (navigation panel and interaction panel), so I thought perhaps the standard Sidebar page could in fact be the page that controls the Sidebar panels but that it looked like only placeholder text to me because I don't have the power to edit it.

It seems the standard Sidebar page in tinWiki is also consistent with what actually appears in the pages' Sidebar, that is the navigation panel, but there are no URLs or anything specific, it just looks like placeholder text where one would fill in customized links. I imagine it *may* be that my user account doesn't have the privileges necessary to actually see the real content of the page, but if that's the case then of course it is a little strange that I was able to actually edit the page (?). So right now I still imagine that the real tinWiki Sidebar page is some other than the standard one. (Then again, it's a little strange that both the Wikipedia and tinWiki standard Sidebar pages seem to have the exact same structure as what is shown in each site's actual Sidebar. If it's no coincidence then I would say there is probably something more to how the Sidebar page works than what I have managed to understand right now.)

I have created an experimentation page for trying out ideas and such for the possibly coming new tinWiki Community portal. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to edit the page, as well as expressing thoughts and ideas in the page's discussion and of course here in the forum. Here is a link to the page.

Should a real Community portal page be created, then of course it would be very easy to copy and paste the content of this experimentation page over in the real page, or even to simply move this page to a new title and so make it into the actual Community portal that way.

Right now I have tried to equip the page with a short presentation or introduction text, plus I listed some links that I felt could be good to have in a community portal page.

Any and all feedback from anyone and everyone is welcome.

Optimist