Heroes Wiki talk:Community Portal

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Google Chrome

Anyone try out Google's new Chrome browser, yet? It looks pretty cool. You can read about it here. I haven't tried it yet; was wondering what other people thought.--MiamiVolts (talk) 02:50, 3 September 2008 (EDT)

• It's pretty fast, but it doesn't have any plugins that can block ads. So I'll be using Firefox until Google can fix that problem. Chrisyu357 06:52, 3 September 2008 (EDT)
  • According to Chrome's help, it automatically stops pop-ups from creating their own window. However, there may be an ad blocker as a Gears extension (I'm not sure cause I can't find the list of Gears extensions; probably cause I haven't installed Gears). I can't use Chrome/Gears as it doesn't run on Windows2000.--MiamiVolts (talk) 09:22, 3 September 2008 (EDT)
• I have no interest in it. It's unlikely to gain much traction and is likely just to end up being a fad. Google doesn't have a lot of focus and they put out a lot of projects that ultimately just end up failing, I think this will be another example. Despite the candy they put in there I don't think they have the focus to develop a full-featured, secure, reliable web browser when Firefox is already out there and meets all of these demands already. Google wants to try to leverage their services to provide you the experience they want you to have and I don't think it's going to succeed. Sure some people may use it and some people may think it's neat, but I think the novelty will wear off quickly and people will just return to their stable and reliable prior browser. ...and what are the odds Google's browser is going to let you block Google ads, eh? It would be stupid for them to block their own ads, but it would also be stupid of them to not let people block ads. The only reason Chrome even got any attention was because it was Google putting it out there. It's not really impressive in its own right and as I said I think the novelty (as well as the project) will fade quickly. (Admin 09:52, 3 September 2008 (EDT))
  • It can probably block pop-ups but it cannot hide the ads that are on the page itself (of which most are ads by Google). I've got a plugin in Firefox to do this, so yes, I like Firefox better. Chrisyu357 10:17, 3 September 2008 (EDT)
    • It has some pretty neat features and ideas, but it is missing some useful features and one almost necessity for me (a spell checker). -Lөvөl 17:28, 3 September 2008 (EDT)
      • Since it's open source and has extension capability like Firefox, such features will probably be added eventually. Their idea was to make it simple and secure. The problem for me, though, is that my Win2K machine can't run it and it doesn't look like they've any plans to add a Win2K version.--MiamiVolts (talk) 17:41, 3 September 2008 (EDT)

Soccer Aid

Anyone heard about the UNICEF project Soccer Aid? It's a football (soccer) game with loads of famous celebrities to raise money for charity, and the match is actually being played right now! Only reason I bring it up is because Santiago Cabrera is playing for the Rest of the World team! Though I do of course encourage anyone to donate if they can :) -- Friskymuffin - (talk) 15:04, 7 September 2008 (EDT)

Graphic novel pages

Is there any way we could hide the summery untill say a week after it has come out, with say a Template:Characterbar kind of thing? Just I have to scrole down to read the novel. --Skywalkerrbf 13:29, 9 September 2008 (EDT)

• I would not be in favor of hiding it. What link are you trying to get to in particular? The PDF or the interactive one by any chance? (Admin 13:57, 9 September 2008 (EDT))
  • Yer,the arobat reader one, its the best quality. Its not normaly a problem as the summery isn't put up for a few days, but it has spoiled me a few times. I would only have it hidden for say a week.--Skywalkerrbf 14:05, 9 September 2008 (EDT)
    • What about episodes when they air? I understand that you're going for the link, so don't look at the bottom of the page. I've been in the same situation, except I look at recent edits when I come to this site. So when I saw things like Evs Dropper clone, it should have spoiled me, but I had no context. I think consistency is important. It's not a spoiler once it's released, so there shouldn't be any hiding of any sort. --Bob (talk) 14:48, 9 September 2008 (EDT)
      • Exactly. It actually bugs me that a lot of sites still consider something a spoiler after it's been released. However, I understand not wanting to see the summary before reading the novel. A good solution is to click on the Adobe link that's in the GN section on the main page (it's above the little tiny infobox)--there's no GN summary on the main page. Otherwise, if you want the Adobe link, it's actually at the top of the GN page itself. It's in the light blue part of the infobox on the right. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 15:15, 9 September 2008 (EDT)

UK Season 3 release?

I live in the UK and have heard that season 3 will be simulcast over here. However all the sources i've gone through all say the season will start on different days. Could somebody please clear this up for me?LilRebel616 03:39, 13 September 2008 (EDT)

• BBC hasn't officially released a date on their website, but the popular assessment is that it will air Thursday, September 25th at 9pm British time on BBC2.--MiamiVolts (talk) 03:59, 13 September 2008 (EDT)
  • Thank you very much appreciated LilRebel616 07:10, 14 September 2008 (EDT)

autosig malfunctioning

They appear to have gone goofy, linking to the template and not pulling up the formating. what's going on? look here --SacValleyDweller (talk) 10:29, 15 September 2008 (EDT)

• Don't know why they're linking funny, and don't know why it's only happening on the main page's talk page. I'll let Admin know. Thx. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 10:47, 15 September 2008 (EDT)
  • The additional ArchiveLinks template at the top of the page is exceeding a transclusion limit on the article I believe. I recommend ditching the ArchiveLinks templates entirely and just creating the archive listings manually. (Admin 11:28, 15 September 2008 (EDT))
    • Nice work doing the top of talk page templates, Ryan.--MiamiVolts (talk) 16:10, 15 September 2008 (EDT)
      • Yes! Great solution! :) Pierre 16:22, 15 September 2008 (EDT)
        • Thx. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 20:14, 15 September 2008 (EDT)

Episode transcripts

I just received permission from the episode transcriber (kilohoku) to post all of her scripts (with proper credit, of course). This is good news. I've already posted the first season on a blog. After I post the second season (probably tomorrow), I'll make the blog public and we'll go from there.

What this means is that if we want to continue posting transcripts, we'll have to do them ourselves from here on out. I am willing to post them, and to do some grammatical clean up, formatting, and proofreading, but I can't very well spend all my time actually transcribing them. I'll need others to do that. If you're willing, let me know. ryangibsonstewart at heroeswiki dot com. If we get enough people who are willing to help transcribe the episodes, we can organize it really nicely, and divvy up scenes for different transcribers. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 02:18, 17 September 2008 (EDT)

Season 2 just premiered in Germany

• Season 2 just finished premiering in Germany this hour. The people maintaining the German Heroes Wiki do such an excellent job in translating the articles and making the site informative that I'm seeing a huge spike in activity right now thanks to it. Very nice! (Admin 15:30, 17 September 2008 (EDT))
  • Cool, do we go by the American air date? To me thats a bit biased, i think we should go off the country that airs it first.--Skywalkerrbf 15:34, 17 September 2008 (EDT)
    • First off, I'm referring to Season 2, not 3. :) They're one season behind us. Secondly anytime there is a conflict of information between the US airing and another country, heroeswiki.com takes the US information. This is why all our episodes show their US air dates even though some aired in Canada the day before. On the localized wikis they're free to and encouraged to use whichever source would be most relevent for them. (Admin 15:36, 17 September 2008 (EDT))
      • Oops ok ,sorry!. --Skywalkerrbf 15:40, 17 September 2008 (EDT)
  • I'm very happy for the contributors of the German wiki. They really do a nice job, from what I can tell. (It'd be cool to see some updated statistics from them.) You know, the localized wikis play such a vital role in Heroes Wiki's development, growth, and expansion. As somebody who concentrates on the English wiki, I often forget about our sister sites in other languages. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 15:46, 17 September 2008 (EDT)

Here we go again!

• With season three less than 24 hours away we all have a lot to look forward to. This hiatus has been long, but fortunately the writers and artists have managed to keep breathing life into Heroes week after week with the graphic novels. I don't know of any other television series that puts so much commitment and time into its alternate reality (read: Evolutions) components. Because of their hard work this site has even continued to grow (albeit more slowly) during this long hiatus. With Season Three right around the corner we have a lot of work to do and things are going to start getting a lot busier around here. I've noticed in the past week the site activity has already started to climb again in anticipation of the new season. I'm very excited to see what this season has in store for this site. It's time to get back to business! :) (Admin 22:14, 21 September 2008 (EDT))
  • I bet you're ready to see how much that new server can handle. I doubt it'll get anywhere near its capacity, but all the same.--Bob (talk) 23:32, 21 September 2008 (EDT)
    • I know the server can handle quite a bit more than we've ever thrown at it (I made sure it was plenty powerful enough for future increases in traffic when I purchased it). Things around here are always a lot of fun when there is a lot of interest in the show. Each season we've grown quite a bit and I'm looking forward to seeing what's in store for us this season. (Admin 00:14, 22 September 2008 (EDT))

DPL deprecation

• The load on the server has been pretty high since the premiere. I did some testing and found that the DPL extension is at fault. When I disable DPL the system load decreases so dramatically it's not even funny. It just adds way much overhead and is going to prevent growth. I'd like anyone who's used DPL to re-evaluate the benefit of it in each place it's used (especially on any templates that might be widely transcluded). I want to remove it entirely, but if it will cause a massive amount of work to maintain a particular section of the site then I am slightly open to the possibility of using it in a very select number of places (like 1 or 2) if it still results in the load returning to an acceptable level. (Admin 15:52, 23 September 2008 (EDT))
  • Have you tested as to whether caching the DPL would reduce the server load? Maybe you could alter the DPL code to turn caching on by default? I think I can set up a few examples on the test server if that would help you. Also, it looks like DPL is on roads to become mainstay in the next wikimedia release so if we can work out any way to keep it, I think that would be good. DPL makes maintaining a lot of the portals much easier, and most production staff articles are using it for auto-updating. --MiamiVolts (talk) 00:37, 24 September 2008 (EDT)
    • When the load is higher later on I will see if turning on cached results improves performance significantly. I believe I can set the default globally rather than modifying all the DPL templates. It's promising... I didn't know DPL was bypassing the page cache each time by default. Good idea. (Admin 00:48, 24 September 2008 (EDT))
      • Load crept up again tonight, so I enabled the caching and it's back down to a much nicer level. That seems to have done the trick at the moment. Good catch, Miami. (Admin 21:30, 29 September 2008 (EDT))

5000+ users!

That sounds like great news! Can you check the stats and let us know how many of those users joined before the finale of Season One and haven't logged in since? That might give us some perspective.--MiamiVolts (talk) 14:35, 24 September 2008 (EDT)

• If I'm correct, about 1300. (Admin 14:41, 24 September 2008 (EDT))

BBC

Note when referring to the BBC as an entity in itself, it should always be preceded by the definite article. There's a lot of content on here which doesn't do this and it just looks and reads odd to someone from the UK. On the other hand, individual BBC channels (BBC Two (BBC2) and BBC Three (BBC3), or indeed people, departments or other features of the BBC do not require the definite article. Mintz 20:24, 9 October 2008 (EDT)

• Thanks, Mintz, that's terrific information. In America, we refer to NBC without a definite article ("Heroes is shown on NBC," not "Heroes is shown on the NBC.") so it sounds like a language usage thing. If I come across any misuses, I'll certainly correct them. You might want to copy your note to Talk:BBC. Thanks so much for the fixes and the enlightenment! :) -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 20:39, 9 October 2008 (EDT)

Anyone want to help raise some money for my scout group with no cost to them?

All you have to do is use [[1]] as your search engine and for every search you complete the group gets 0.5p which might not sound like much but it adds up! I know this isn't really aloud as it is advertising but it is a easy way for you all to help some kids out.--Skywalkerrbf 07:06, 11 October 2008 (EDT)

About characters?

Can someone explain exactly how the groups of Main, Supporting, and Recurring characters are decided? I mean Arthur Petrelli's just appeared in this one episode and he's already a recurring. Both Maury and Zimmerman have appeared in two Season 3 episodes, yet they don't even make the Characters list.Radicell 07:09, 16 October 2008 (EDT)

• Main characters are designated by NBC--certain actors are principal actors, and the rest are not. I personally think we should do away with the "supporting" characters, and simply make it "main", "recurring", and "minor" (or "guest", if we're talking about actors). Then we could very clearly define each category: Main characters are designated by NBC, minor characters only appear once or twice (or three times, if that's what we decide), and everybody else is recurring. I think it would lead to a lot less confusion and a lot less speculation about who would be considered recurring and who wouldn't. Plus, the term "supporting" is very loaded. I say do away with it altogether, then clearly define each category. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 12:56, 16 October 2008 (EDT)
  • I think the main reason for the supporting category is that it is the more common term used in Hollywood, especially at awards shows. I wouldn't mind merging the categories/portals of supporting and recurring, but only if we could agree to use "supporting" as the merged name.--MiamiVolts (talk) 14:05, 16 October 2008 (EDT)
    • I don't care what we call it, though I'd prefer to call the actors "supporting" and the characters "recurring", sort of the way we call the actors "guest stars" and characters "minor characters"....But yes, I'm itching to simplify and define the designations. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 18:55, 16 October 2008 (EDT)
      • That makes sense. I'll second that suggestion.--MiamiVolts (talk) 19:12, 16 October 2008 (EDT)
  • I have to second this merging of recurring and supporting terms into one term. I would support going from minor to "the other category" after a second appearance. Yet, also we have to define what we mean by appearing, because we have these same categories for graphic novels as well. We already say the first appearance of a charcter is where they first appeared either on a GN or episode. Whatever we decide, I would suggest that we place these "rules/policies" on an article within Help:, I would suggest Help:Characters. I was looking around and saw Help:Layout/Characters (I updated it too, since it was a little old.) Maybe a subpage under Help:Layout might be find too, but it just needs to be somewhere that everyone can easily find the information. --Pinkkeith 14:18, 17 October 2008 (EDT)
    • Making the criteria for being a recurring character (or supporting actor) be only appearing twice is too few times. That means people like Lynette, May, Kin Egami, Mark Spatney, and the CDC crew member (II) would all be considered recurring characters--and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I would make it three appearances to start, and see what we get. If we need to reevaluate, we can always move it to four. I don't think we should include graphic novel appearances--otherwise Bianca and Gael would be considered recurring characters, and they really aren't, are they? When we're talking about the episode minor character portal, let's just stick to episodic appearances...but great questions, and that's exactly the kind of stuff we should be considering and discussing. And yeah, we would add this information to a help page, I totally agree. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 15:14, 17 October 2008 (EDT)
      • My opinion is that 2 appearances would be better to be considered as recurring/supporting to start. If there are too many, we can always trim back. Also, it is important to note that being in a photo/painting or an actor's/character's voice being in a story doesn't count as an appearances. I'm not positive what we decided about being in a video such as the television news pieces, the wrestling and cooking shows, and Hana appearing on computers.--MiamiVolts (talk) 15:30, 17 October 2008 (EDT)

Upcoming ad layout changes

• I wanted to let everyone know about some upcoming changes to the ad placements here and get any feedback ahead of time. There will be two new ad placements: a 728x90 leaderboard at the top of every page and a 300x250 rectangular unit on the main page only (where "Next on Heroes" is currently... the "Next on Heroes" will be moving down one spot on the main page). The skyscaper ad down the left side will be staying and the 3 units at the bottom of every page will likely be going away. If this happens then the number of ads on the main page will remain the same and on every other page it will be reduced from 4 to 2. I can't go into too many details quite yet (so don't bother speculating), however I can say this change will be accompanied by something else very good for us. I know the ad placements will be a little more intrusive than we're used to. I purposely designed the original layout to be as discrete as possible while still maximizing the impressions we'd get per page. If anyone absolutely cannot stand the new placement then ad blockers are always a possibility, however leaving ad blockers turned off really helps benefit the site. Since we don't ask for donations or anything I figure it's a small price to pay in general. Plus when you see what accompanies these new ad placements I don't think you'll be disappointed. :) (Admin 14:04, 17 October 2008 (EDT))
  • I know what this is going to be, someone sent me the wrong email.--Skywalkerrbf 14:05, 17 October 2008 (EDT)
    • If so, do not disclose it. Thanks. (Admin 14:11, 17 October 2008 (EDT))
      • Do not worry I will not. I was thinking of suggesting it myself.--Skywalkerrbf 14:14, 17 October 2008 (EDT)
  • Admin, I think the new layout will be good. The large leaderboard at the top is not my favorite, but it's a small price to pay for a reduction in the amount of ads. You're very right, you have done a lot to maximize ad space without ever compromising the wiki. Ads have never been intrusive here, especially compared with other wikis and their growing amount of ads. I think this will be a very good thing. -- RyanGibsonStewart (talk) 14:17, 17 October 2008 (EDT)
  • I'm not much of a fan of the leaderboard too, but I don't really know what the content will be. I think the ads at the bottom were very nonobstructive, which is what I liked. Do what you have to do.--Bob (talk) 14:40, 17 October 2008 (EDT)