The Kingdom of Ealdormere Wiki:Community portal

This is the community Wiki page for the glorious Kingdom of Ealdormere, which is a part of the Society for Creative Anachronism, a not for profit organization that encourages the study and joys of the medieval ages.

Suggestions for the new wiki

I was involved for several years with the ill-fated SCA wiki known as [Cunnan] [(Live Link to Cunnan)]. While it was a great resource and a lot of fun to work on, it died a horrible lingering death beneath a horde of spambots. I'd like to avoid that fate for the Ealdormere wiki. I think the best way to avoid that is to require all new user accounts be vetted by an actual human before they're given their approval email. It'll slow down the process of adding new users, but in the long run it'll definitely make things a lot easier for all of us. Fulk Beauxarmes (talk) 08:40, 25 October 2012 (CDT)

This sounds like a very good idea. Catherine Townson (talk) 09:35, 31 October 2012 (EDT)

A New Category

I've created a new Category called Category:Device with sub-categories of Personal Device, Device of Office, Canton Device and Baronial Device. If you add the proper category to your uploaded images, we can have a nice page of all our devices that we can see! We can add sub-categories for awards and so forth but I thought that was a little too much division as I'm aiming for 10-20 images per page except for the Category:Personal Device page which will be huge for now.

Just add the appropriate tag to the text associated with your file: [[Category:Device]] or [[Category:Personal Device]] --Cennédig (talk) 13:17, 28 October 2012 (CDT)

Spambots & New Accounts

Well, we've been noticed by the spambots -- we've averaged half a dozen spambot accounts created per night for the last couple of nights. Fortunately, the email-reply registration system is preventing them from flooding us with vandalism. Admins are being diligent about blocking accounts with certain giveaways -- one type of spambot registers accounts with a strange name/number combination such as FabrizioWinegar422. Other spambots use a name/capital letter combo such as MarkoIB.

In order to prevent new users from being accidentally blocked, please do not set up new user accounts with similar naming features: Don't call yourself Cadfael123 or anything. I suggest using your SCA name without titles -- User:Lucia, User:Dafydd and User:Cennèdig are excellent examples of this -- which makes it easy for us to figure out who's who and keep this wiki alive and useful.

Also, do you want to make the admin's jobs really easy? When you get confirmation of your new Ealdormere wiki user account you can immediately contribute some content -- setting up your own persona page for example -- and we'll know for sure that you're an actual human being with something to contribute.

-- Fulk Beauxarmes (talk) 06:49, 1 November 2012 (CDT)

Blocked in Error?

We've had a flood of spambot accounts opened lately, although thankfully our policy of requiring email confirmation before allowing posting has kept them from vandalizing the wiki to death, the fate which befell Cunnan. That being said, I've been working hard to block these spambot accounts anyway before somebody tweaks their programming to try and work around that policy. Basically, I get up in the morning and bulk-block all suspected spambot accounts while I have my coffee... which means that some legitimate accounts may get lost in the shuffle. If you think your account was accidentally blocked, email me and I'll undo the block. -- Fulk Beauxarmes (talk) 07:46, 27 November 2012 (CST)