User talk:Gboyers


Latest comment: 19 November 2012 by Gboyers in topic Poll



Gameids Template

Hi Gerard, just pointing out that your recent edits to Template:Gameids (which you actually moved to Template:id), have actually broken a number of templates. The purpose of that template used to be to convert the Game ID (such as IV) to the full game name with a link (such as Grand Theft Auto IV). After the recent edits, the functionality has now been reversed to convert any input to the game ID, and a lot of templates, such as infoboxes, relied on the old functionality. For example, see the Yakuza article - {{infobox gang}} used to convert game IDs to game names, but now it's the actual IDs that are listed on the page. Seeing as the template being utilised by these infoboxes is actually now just a redirect to the new template, should we simply recreate the old template at the old title? Or is the plan to update all of the infoboxes to stop using it and use something else instead (such as {{long}}, and the infobox itself would have to produce the link)? JFletcherTalk (formerly User:Biggest gta fan ever) 04:30, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Yep, that's all clear - The semantic stuff is really starting to shape together! I'll start to help out with updating all of the pages in the near future. JFletcherTalk (formerly User:Biggest gta fan ever) 11:30, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Common typo

Hey Gboyers, I've seen many errors in the use of the word "it's".

This site shows the way it should be used: http://garyes.stormloader.com/its.html

It's is a contraction for it is or it has.

Its is a possessive pronoun meaning, more or less, of it or belonging to it.

I've been correcting pages, but it's very common. Users that may not know the use of it may think I'm vandalising the wiki.

The mistake is so common; do you think it's best to just leave them, or correct it? I don't want to start any trouble, or have others reverting my edits.

Please tell me what you think is best.

Thanks, --Original Light (talk) 18:00, 6 August 2012 (UTC)


Thank you for clearing that up. Time to go searching! --Original Light (talk) 23:12, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

I just want to mention that not every article uses specific perimeters required for {{gameselect}} in {{Infobox vehicle}}. As a result an unknown number of articles will have the "Appearance(s)" field blanked if exact strings of text are not entered. Could the #ifexist syntax be reinstated or a notification on articles with this error be included? I'm not sure if I can work out the code at this time. - ZS (talk|edits) 19:37, 6 August 2012 (UTC)

Re:Activity

Hey, thanks for checking up on me. Yeah, I've been kinda busy lately what with my preparations for university and the fact that I'm currently on vacation out of the country. Since I devote a lot of my free time to my social life, writing, music, and a few other stuff, I guess I haven't been particularly active. Also the fact that I'm an administrator on a fanon wiki means I have to divide my online time well, and it happens that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot I can find to contribute here, whereas I always have something new to write there. Of course, if I'm needed for administrative reasons here at any time, I always check in provided I receive an email notification. Still, I think this wiki has enough admins to deal with any issues that may come up, and even then, the community here is in a lot better condition than the other one I'm administrating (non-canon respecting fanfiction writers with the spelling ability of first graders, ugh), so if you think I'm not needed, you can remove me from the administrators group. I just come over here occasionally when I think of something to add to an article, and that's not very frequent anymore as I don't really play GTA now, and most of my association with it now is ideas for future GTA stories. Anyway, thanks again for checking in and let me know what your decision is. Silver Infernus talk 05:00, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: Mandatory image use for {{Infobox vehicle}}

I'm not particularly fond of having this infobox require an image link, as there are special cases where a vehicle article encompass vastly different iterations of vehicles that use the same name; the original infobox code was tailored to make available the option of not having a lead image, leaving galleries and thumbnails outside the infobox to provide illustrations instead.

By making images mandatory in the infobox, people are being forced to choose only one rendition; but it's come to the point when a recurring vehicle may have a relatively rich history in the series that it's not satisfactory enough to sum up its existence in just one image. I'm sure you're heard me mentioned about this before, but bias favoring specific games or generations isn't acceptable. - ZS (talk|edits) 12:43, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

You got me at a gallery template that supports all images in the lead (i.e. in a photo album-like UI). This is the best compromise available. Sure, there are issues with inconsistent image dimensions, but it can work. - ZS (talk|edits) 02:23, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Naming conventions

Hi. I'm a bit confused right now. You have renamed a few images recently, (Example), stating "naming conventions" as the reason. However, our naming convention has, for as long as I've been here, been [subject]-[game]-[additional info] ("Infernus-GTAV-prerelease-front"), the ones you moved were changed to [game]-[subject] ("GTAV-Infernus"). It was a number of images too, so I'm just wondering if this is a change you are planning to make or if it was simply a mistake. :P

All the best Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 16:23, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi

Hi gboyers i am new to this wiki as before i was contributing to the gta.wikia.com i am a PC Gamer and i visit the gtaforums.com daily, i wanted ask if i can upload badges for each Car/Bike (if it contains in the game files)like the one above. im expecting a kind reply Thanks in advance --02:10, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Your reply is very much appreciated and i got the point plus i found another company in GTA V's Trailer but it's a garbage company so i was wondering if i could make a seperate page for this. the official (fan made logo) can be found here. --Faizanali (talk|edits)

RE:

Sorry for continuous reply's but i had to ask : 1. Do you still visit gta.wikia? 2. Are there limitations on this wiki? (Like page limitations) 3. Are you looking forward to GTA V? These were the questions now for requests. Please can you add the "See Also" option at the bottom of the page like every wikia has. Kindly reply to all the statements above Thanks. --Faizanali (talk|edits) 03:17, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

RE:

You sir deserve a medal Thanks it was nice talking to you i always wanted to talk to you since i heard the staff moved to grandtheftwiki one last question when i searched for the AA-12 gun there was no page not even the redirect page to Automatic Shotgun and when i tried to create one i saw that the page was deleted by the User:A-Dust this is why i asked you the question of if there were any limitations and i think you are doing your job well because ive seen unwanted pages all over the gta.wikia Thanks you are amazing. --Faizanali (talk|edits) 03:30, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Trusted User Status

Hi Gboyers, what happened to the trusted users group? I was filtering the search returned 0 results. Have I missed some rearrangements? Thanks--Montario (talk|edits) 17:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Mission location

Hello, I have a question What should I put as the location of a mission? Some mission articles have as location the place where you trigger the mission, but other articles have the place where the mission takes place instead, this confused me TheReaperHoldsOurHearts (talk|edits) 22:53, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea. I'm going to replay TLAD and TBOGT soon, so maybe I can help with this. TheReaperHoldsOurHearts (talk|edits) 23:43, 10 September 2012 (UTC)
So, are we going forward with this? :D TheReaperHoldsOurHearts (talk|edits) 20:58, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Admin rights

Hello, I just noticed that all of my administrator rights seem to have vanished although the visuals such as the badge remain. I can't tell for how it has been like this but I can only imagine something went wrong when you restored our usergroups?

Thank you Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 19:18, 17 September 2012 (UTC)

"Group Change" Email

Hello, Gboyers.

I don't check my mail often, but, as I checked it today, I received this notification Email twelve days ago. It says:

"Hello Originalusername.

This is to inform you that your group memberships on Grand Theft Wiki were changed by Gboyers at 18:20, 8 September 2012.

Added: trusted Removed:

With regards,

Grand Theft Wiki"

I checked my groups in the preferences page. Not there. I also checked the group's user list. Not there either. Was a mistake been made, or a glitch in the system, etc.? Originalusername (talk|edits) 20:46, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for clearing that up! Regards. Originalusername (talk|edits) 21:42, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Community Event

Hello Gboyers I know I have not been active lately but I had an idea about GTW hosting some kind of Community Event or in other words just invite the community to multiplayer matches for GTA IV. Let me know what you think.Gtajesus (talk|edits) 18:50, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Community Page has been created. Also what would be the deadlines for signups? Gtajesus (talk|edits) 23:22, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Category bar

What is it with the category bar unnecessarily inflated by "xx > yy > zz" links that occasionally repeat itself? These things occasionally overshadow the articles themselves and have become a bit of a distraction for both the readers and editors. - ZS (talk|edits) 19:12, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Wiki is running slow?

Hi, it's possible that this is a problem on my end as no one else seems to have reacted on it, but for the last week or 10 days, the Wiki has been running extremely slowly for me. Pages will hardly ever finish loading and if they do, the visuals will fail somehow in 90% of the cases, mostly looking like this but a few times it has been a bit worse than that and looked like this. It's been making it almost impossible for me to even look at the list of Recent changes. This evening though it seems to have improved a bit but maybe there is less stress on the server at this time of the week or something? Or do you think it's a problem on my end? Thanks Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 00:10, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Of course, I understand. Thank you for your response. :) Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 20:43, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Heh, no I won't. I tend to doubt myself and think I'm wrong, especially so in this case as no one else seemed to be having any problems. I won't do that from now on. Everything is back to working just as well as it did before. Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 21:08, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

"Junk" user registrations

I've been noticing a instances of user registrations with completely nonsensical usernames occurring every once in a while (i.e. October 29). What do you make of it? - ZS (talk|edits) 15:19, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Good to know that you're keeping a eye on that. Thanks for the response. - ZS (talk|edits) 16:25, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Sunqueen/Sunqueer

I created the page Sunqueen a few days ago. And I saw a similar page named Sunqueer. I watched the Introduction video for GTA SA on Youtube and found out that the correct spelling is Sunqueen. Watch the video and tell me what you think is the correct one. Delete the page with incorrect spelling. Thanks. Angelobrylle24 17:56, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

GI images

I'm not sure if it's a good time to post those picture so soon after the preview's release, especially with those watermarks in view. If GTAForums is so concerned about preventing people from posting any GI material, we may want to do the same for now if we want to stay out of trouble. - ZS (talk|edits) 22:54, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

Fine. But if the relevant parties do request to remove them, we'll need to comply. Otherwise, we can assume they either don't mind or didn't notice. - ZS (talk|edits) 23:09, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

2D/3D/HD universes

What do you think about recategorising games into 2D, 3D, and HD universes? Like in Wikipedia, because GTA V is in the same universe as GTA IV. Angelobrylle24 16:16, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Grand Theft Auto (GBA) Release Date

Is Grand Theft Auto Advance released on the same day as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, or is it released one day before the North American PS2 version of San Andreas? :-) Angelobrylle24 (talk|edits) 17:53, 11 November 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Okay. Another one not about the release date but still related to Advance. I noticed there aren't any pages for cheats in GTA Advance, are there any cheats in that game? Angelobrylle24 (talk|edits) 18:10, 11 November 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]
I would, it's now on my To-Do List. Angelobrylle24 (talk|edits) 18:19, 11 November 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]

How to check the contributions numerically?

Is there any way i can get to know my Contributions in Numbers? --Faizanali (talk|edits) 15:51, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

RE:How to check the contributions numerically?

Thanks for the informative post, Naw i was just wondering how much Contributions I've done since my account was created. --Faizanali (talk|edits) 21:09, 17 November 2012 (UTC) One more thing, Am i doing the right thing to post the websites as images? Because at the time when GTA IV was released on Consoles and not on PC BOY i couldn't resist, How much of a clusterf*ck could R* do? I also wanted to see and experience that feel of searching those websites INGAME, But at that time no one had posted images of websites :( To me i think im doing a good thing. --Faizanali (talk|edits) 21:14, 17 November 2012 (UTC)

RE:Websites

Thank You Sir i will surely complete it sooner or later, From what i have known the Internet files aren't actually that kind of spoilers and are completely non-intractable, I show you an example with craplist.net

In-Game: http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20090131015304/gtawiki/images/d/d2/Craplist1.jpg

From the Game's Internet Files/Textures: http://i.imgur.com/fgNx3.png?1

See what i mean? Every mission/story related website is non accessible through Internet Files, Thats how intelligent R* is. --Faizanali (talk|edits)

Poll

That poll, 'When will GTA V be released?', is kinda redundant now isn't it? Unless we refine it to March, April and May (or behind-schedule). JFletcherTalk (formerly User:Biggest gta fan ever) 23:30, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

It is, I've just been having a little trouble replacing it. Will look into it later this week. gboyers talk 00:47, 19 November 2012 (UTC)Reply[reply]

Displeasure

You must excuse my sporadic response in talk pages. Expressing my problems with this wiki in words and replying to complicated discussions is not my strong suit; in fact I'm increasingly displeased that my participation in community talk discussions has had little effect in changing things while distracting me from actually improving articles. I have to be blunt; while this wiki is still a great platform with lots of articles in dire need of TLC, the bullshit policy-making here is a waste of manpower when it could be used to promote the wiki for more traffic and new editors, because in case you haven't noticed, the GTA Wikia is still as popular as ever. - ZS (talk|edits) 08:17, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

What I'm arguing against is the how the policies set out are regarded as the definitive "rule" and thus should be applied to every article, when they clearly do not apply well in every case and wouldn't mean anything if there is barely anyone editing in this wiki; working in an environment where there is very little breathing room, especially with regards to new games, is reduced to a tedious chore because of how much time is wasted working across multiple articles (no thanks to needless article fragmentation), as well as having to correct every damned piped link (no thanks to needless capitalization), terminology (no thanks to needlessly officiated fan terms), spelling and grammatical errors, layout problems, and image placement (no thanks to a lack of proofreading) in every affected article.
I love to take your incredibly long reply as a friendly gesture, but after finding out what happened to the Benson article, I don't even know if I want to carry on, especially when whatever I do or say don't mean jack shit as all that hard work is being torn apart by needless formatting, splits, crap fan terms. And I thought something as simple as articles about a video game series would be easy for people to manage. - ZS (talk|edits) 08:22, 22 November 2012 (UTC)
As for the tedious chores with no breathing room, I dispute that. Yes, as the wiki becomes more 'complete' (at least before GTA V), there will be less blue-sky broad-scale article creation to do, and as a result there is more cleaning up to do. I do not think big reorganisations are necessary, except when we change something like, but we do have Gtabot to do a lot of that stuff.
The "cleanup" is the tedious bit. While there are articles on nearly every topic, the contents of a lot of the articles suffer from anything from poor composition, in-universe writing, convoluted proses and the lack of organization, to missing information, missing pictures and missing formatting, problems that a bot cannot easily fix. All this requires research, screencapping, constant proofreading, and most importantly, repeated amendments and improvements, which is often tedious as it involve a lot of time spent modifying the wiki text. Even though I've long editing without the aid of a bot and would prefer to operate one on my own, I do not have the knowhow to operate one nor do I trust others to do the bot work as there has been cases when they botched editing.
I know you go around changing all redirect-links to piped-links, but I do not think that is necessary. I've certainly never asked anyone to do it and there is no policy saying that's what we should do.
Then what about efficiency in editing articles to save time? Is that not necessary? Wouldn't that help cover more articles on a daily basis, rather than having to spend longer hours working around what is effectively a broken system?
Yes, we should fix broken links, and some links do need to be piped, but there is no real benefit to going around piping every link on the wiki to a different page when a redirect serves that purpose. If this is the tedious work that you don't want to do, dont do it!
You seem not to understand that by making people use inaccurate titles created both from the unnecessary need to completely capitalize titles, they are made to believe that these are all official terms. SWAT Tank, Involuntary Ejection, GTA III Era, or Vehicle License Plates, for example, are not official terms, but when people use that link in another article, they won't go to SWAT Tank, for instance, to check the accurate name or take the initiative to pipe it, but simply use the "SWAT Tank" link, disregarding the accurate name. Not only does it make the article's writing look lazy, but the crappy writing also has the potential of affecting this wiki's credibility, something a low-traffic wiki like this cannot afford.
Redirects are there to help editors as well as users who are searching, and they solve the problems with capitalisation etc.
Redirects are not a completely useful workaround; forcing people to link through redirects adds to the server load due as the server is forced to retrieve both the redirect page and the actual article; redirects may also suffer from double redirects as a result of article moves, and not every unnecessarily capitalized term has a lower-case redirect, which also wrongly paints the picture that lower-case terms are not acceptable because a lot of them are redlinked.
With regards to Benson, I don't understand the problem. They are two completely unrelated articles - with nothing in common except sharing a name. Don't think of it as "reasons to split" - it's not as if we have all articles on 1 page and split them when it gets big. We have one page about each distinct thing. The Benson sports car is one thing, the Benson truck is another thing. So they should be on separate pages.

However, the actual naming of the pages is open - in fact if we adopted the LCD system, that would suggest we name them "Benson in GTA 2" rather than "Benson (car)". The idea of forcing the two articles to share the page is harmful to the content, confusing to the users, and there's no good reason for it. I can not see one single benefit of them sharing a page, except the fact that both cars would be on the same page. This has nothing to do with page size at all.

All this time, I've yet to read about how the table of contents could be used to overcome these problems. They provide directions on where a reader can skip to without having to scroll down and pass the GTA 2 section to reach the post-GTA 2 section. If the split was simply motivated by the mere presence of a different vehicle from an antiqued game seemingly disrupting the flow of a page, then what's the point of these TOCs floating on the top of so many articles? I'm sure readers are not that stupid to not make use of the TOC and distinguish which part of it covers one type of vehicle and which part covers another.
Even assuming a split is "justified", what was done at the Benson article has bias towards newer renditions of the vehicle because the "Benson" namespace is not used by a disambiguation page as logic dictates, but the truck, when the car and truck should be moved to "Benson (car)" and "Benson (truck)" respectively.
If there are things you really hate doing, things that make you want to leave, then I'd rather you spent your time on things you did enjoy and someone else could pick that up.
I have invested way too much time on this wiki to quit, even though the amount of time I can spend here has dwindled recently because of real-life.
You talk about people carrying on my torch, but I doubt that. For starters, this wiki barely has anyone editing. There hasn't been an output of good screenshots covering the entire series as of late, and worthwhile amendments and improvements made on articles are far under expectations in comparison to the Wikia.
You also imply that people "could" pick up where I left of with regards to obscure GTA games, but that's just bullshit. The problem with gaming wikis is that the general demographics of editors will usually gravitate towards games which they grew up with, and since the GTA series is now 15 years old, generation gaps within the fan community are apparent and the vast majority of fans to the series are too young to care about older games. These days you will see little to no love on GTA games that are nearly or over a decade old (GTA 1 to GTASA), or are obscure due to their platform (Advance and Chinatown Wars. Pages like the Counthash (Wikia page) or London (Wikia page) or I'd Like A Tank Please, Bob! (Wikia page) will never ever be updated with crucial information because barely anyone care. And when those who have specialized on these games are no longer active, those pages will not only be neglected, but will be forgotten. - ZS (talk|edits) 18:57, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Character Quotes

Hello Gboyers how are you? I have spent many hours on this Wiki and on the internet lately finding good quotes to use for characters throughout the series. I believe quotes are a strong, interesting way to introduce a reader to the characters page. However, all of my hours will be going to waste now, one of the favourites here, A-Dust, is going around and deleteing quotes with absolutley no explanation. Perhaps if he didn't like the specific quote I could understand, but the fact that this user feels he can do anything and delete everything he wants without even a slight explanation, is more then ridiculous. Unless I'm just fixing spelling, I always put a summary. The summary is meant to explain the change so that other Wiki users don't waste their time checking to see if it's a reasonable change or not. Now that I have explained myself, I will explain my side to A-Dust, and will be reverting any quote deletions I think should have stayed. However I can agree that some quotes can be changed. I hope you can see reason, thank you for your time. Grand Theft AJ (talk|edits) 22:12, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Patrolling broken?

Hi, I've been having a strange problem as of recently when trying to patrol edits. Most of the time when I go via the diff link on Recent Edits I get a little pop up error saying "Marking as patrolled failed." when I click the link to mark it patrolled. Although you can't get every edit with Special:Patrol, it still seems to be working fine if that is any help. Andreaz1 (talk|edits) 18:22, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Hey

Hello there Gerard! It's been a while :D. Just thought I'd stop by and see how everything's going and let you know that If I get myself a copy of GTA 5 I'll certainly start editing here again. GTA just hasn't been the thing I've been wanting to play for a long time. So.. yeah, I'm not dead, I've just lost interest. Hopefully GTA 5 will mitigate that, nice to see everything's looking well :). Chimpso (Talk) 12:36, 27 November 2012 (UTC)