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Use this page to discuss design and content changes to the main page, as well as general wiki business. Other wiki discussion can be found at Community Portal.

Note that some conversations here have been archived (1), archive (2).


External Links[edit]

So, I'm liking the complete lack of spam pages right now. Blocking every link is working, but it's not a good plan going forward. So here are a few of the options we have, and I'd like to discuss them with people because that's what I do I guess:

  1. Back to the way things were. We leave it locked down for another week or 4, and then open it back up and hope spammers have given up on us. It works for email to go dark for a couple months (at least, it used to), but we're not entirely dark and and not an email, so who knows.
  2. Keep it locked down, start using the whitelist. Yes, we have a whitelist.... that I and everyone else seems to have completely forgotten about. This is an admin (regular, non-bureaucrat admin as far as I know) editable list of sites that will override the blacklist. So we just add sites to it as needed or requested, and the external linking party continues without spam... probably. I have already added GitP to the list, which also allows through things like GitP's Homebrew Forum.
  3. Keep it locked down, don't use the whitelist, use interwikis for external linking instead. Interwiki links work differently than normal external links, and permanently fix the initial text of a link. You can just declare in the interwiki table that when someone puts gitpthread:<thing> in a wiki link, that it gets replace with http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?<thing> as an external link. Example: [[gitpthread:193515-Orc-Goblinoid-Resources]] --> gitpthread:193515-Orc-Goblinoid-Resources. This option would be better locked down than the whitelist and also forces bots to use internal wiki style links (which I've never even seen), but it's also less flexible for users and I'm not even sure if non-bureacrats can edit in new ones (I'm the only person who even tries as far as I know).

I think that the whitelist is probably the best bet, as it allows the most flexibility in use and for the most people and is backwards compatible with existing external links. Any opinions on the matter? - Tarkisflux Talk 01:25, 24 December 2014 (UTC)

Eiji has been unable to reply to this post, because blacklist issues. If you're not eiji and reading this, please try to reply to this post even if you have nothing to add at all. If you can't let me know on my talk page. Thanks - Tarkisflux Talk 09:24, 24 December 2014 (UTC)
Should option 3. already work? I have just tried to add a new interwiki link (with forgottenrealms), but cannot save it. Hmm, and how would I get to the whitelist? Thanks for letting me know. Daranios (talk) 17:49, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
Option 3 does already work, we would just need to add new interwiki abbreviations for anything else we wanted to link to. I tested it after you did the FR interwiki link on a publication a week or so back (which was after everything was blacklisted). Nothing has changed since then, so you being unable to add a new interwiki link is weird. There may be existing http urls on the page that would throw an error though. Were you seeing a blacklist error when you tried to save?
As to the whitelist, you can find it at Mediawiki:Spam-whitelist. Add each url you need for linkage to the next open line. Please make them as complete as possible. - Tarkisflux Talk 23:17, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
Yes, it is really quite weird. Adding a link at Canon:Phlogiston now worked fine. I do get a blacklist error ("The text you wanted to save was blocked by the spam filter. This is probably caused by a link to a blacklisted external site. The following text is what triggered our spam filter: / "), however, when I try to add the same interwiki link phlogiston at my user page. Daranios (talk) 11:03, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
You have existing links your use page that can no longer be saved under current black/white list conditions, and those would trigger no matter what changes you tried to make. Should add some of those to the white list. - Tarkisflux Talk 18:07, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
So that was the problem. Thanks, now it works, and I know how to expand the whitelist as needed! Daranios (talk) 21:51, 28 December 2014 (UTC)

Blacklisted links[edit]

Did we make you tube a black listed site for out going links? Ive used you tube videos as link for examples of what I was referring to and I went in to update some broken links to videos that had been taken down and I got an error about it not being able to post due to a black listed website in my changes. When was this change made, and why? The-Marksman (talk) 21:29, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

We moved to an "approved link" rather than a "not blocked link" setup a few months back when I blacklisted everything to deal with spambots. We've since been adding things to the whitelist as needed / requested. Youtube seems like one I should have already done and just forgot about, so I have done it. Sorry for the invoncenience. - Tarkisflux Talk 21:14, 27 January 2015 (UTC)
Thank you! :) The-Marksman (talk) 21:29, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Posting for Leziad about Search Issues[edit]

(This is Eiji, the following is posted for Leziad. Are we running into whitelist issues? He kept running into them with this, but I wasn't able to locate why. And I'm able to post just fine, sooo....) -- Eiji-kun (talk) 05:51, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

(I fixed it. There were some unwhitelisted things. Since I was meaning to archive stuff anyway, I manually parsed through it for links.)-- Eiji-kun (talk) 06:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

Maybe im missing something but the search function is pretty useless when you want to find particular material. By example I was trying to search for feats that affect critical hits, so I type 'critical hit', I am redirected to the SRD Critical Hit. So I try again just writing 'critical' and I am brought AGAIN to the SRD critical hit. This happen constantly, sometime redirecting me to some 4e useless reference list. Since the feat page is so bloated actually finding feats good for you is a chore and in the case of high-level feat you need to know how to expand the list.

That 4e index (linking it through one of those handy redirect!, when you reply you will see the absurdity), I went ahead and looked what redirected to it, here some golden examples: arcane, divine, lightning, martial, thunder, stance, charm, zone, ranged and more. Seriously, if you use those terms alone in the search you will end up on this index. This make it very hard to find material that directly affect stances, martial maneuver users, divine feats and a load of other things through the search function. It not an SRD page that explain rules or something, no, it a list.

Again maybe im missing something here, but sometime our search function is borderline unusable. Even when the use of redirect is acceptable it still somewhat annoying, take Sneak Attack by example. It link to rogue, that useful if you need the rules for sneak attacks or if you need to make a link to sneak attack. However it not all that much harder than writing [[SRD:Rogue#Sneak Attack|Sneak Attack]]. With that said, redirect like that I accept because they do become handy, so is critical hit. But critical still linking to critical hit and arcane redirecting a stupid list is perhaps a bit overzealous on the redirect? </rant>--Leziad (talk) 06:59, 16 March 2015 (UTC)

The built in search (as opposed to semantic searching, which is a whole different thing), strongly favors page title matches over page text matches. You can override that by scrolling to the bottom of he suggested list and selecting the contains part, but it's non-obvious most of the time. You can also just not use the whole word and not select a completion suggestion.
But the larger problem there is that single word redirect pages are aggressively selected for in searches, and they link to specific things rather than defaulting to the 'contains' search. Just removing these redirect pages or moving them so that they include an edition tag at the beginning would probably help. Things which are not edition specific should probably not redirect to edition specific pages. 'Dex' as an SRD redirect is pretty poor, but '3.5e Dex' would probably be fine.
If you wanted to search for pages that had a specific property set to Arcane (or whatever), you'd need to use the semantic search. Or the semantic drilldown that we haven't even looked at since early wikia days. It's a whole different problem. - Tarkisflux Talk 16:25, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
Surgo here (at work). If I can catch you all on chat I want to talk about this and what we can do to improve matters. 2620:0:1000:3103:CC50:112E:A810:AE93 16:28, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
I can try to be on later, just ping me when it's convenient and I'll see what I can do.
Short of removing the short redirects to avoid the default search behavior or altering the default search behavior to trigger the 'contains' when you don't specifically select a specific page from the suggested list, I'm not really sure what would work well. Semantic search / drilldown probably wouldn't help in this instance, because we don't track what stuff modifies crits. - Tarkisflux Talk 17:47, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
(Edit Conflict!) I'll mention this here since it's pertinent maybe, Special:Search allows searches that don't go to articles and always just produces results, like that "containing..." selection in the scroll down for the regular search box (I also never noticed that's what that was before, so oh man, thanks for pointing that out, that's awesome). I guess going into the Special pages to locate Special:Search is an extra step or two that's less convenient, but still, it's an option. --Ganteka Future (talk) 17:49, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
Special:Search linked in sidebar as a stopgap. - Tarkisflux Talk 19:11, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
This will do nicely, thank you. I still think a lot of that 4e Index thing is problematic for people searching for SRD stuff but oit not that much of a big deal. --Leziad (talk) 03:04, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
I agree that it's problematic from a search stand point, but I think that applies to all of the edition free SRD redirects as well. When Replace Text is working again, I'll probably go through Special:ListRedirects and migrate a bunch to other stuff. If you want to go through the list already to find the 4e redirects and unlink them manually / delete them, feel free. - Tarkisflux Talk 03:30, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
Well, turns out I wasn't able to make it tonight :-/ So, ReplaceText is broken? I'll see what I can do about that. I'll also survey the current search landscape and see what we can dig up. Short of digging up anything, perhaps putting together a brief guide with examples for Semantic Search would get us most of the way there (though that's not perfect). Surgo (talk) 07:02, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

hello i am a noob at d&d[edit]

can someone tell me where to begin with this gaem. im lookin for sum books and stuff liek that u no.


so if anyone can suggest me some good resource's id appreciate it

thanks d&d noob

GOOD D&D RESOURCE'S??[edit]

If anyone here can provied some good D&D resource's Id be thankful, D&D Noob (talk) 16:49, 22 December 2015 (UTC)

Recent downtime[edit]

Thanks to whoever it was that texted me the wiki was down (I changed my phone so I'm not sure whose number that was). It was really badly timed since this is one of the few weeks I'm not WFH and wasn't able to get to it immediately. The reason is a bit embarrassing: there was a badly-behaved bot that was scraping the wiki but not rate limiting itself so it was overloading us with expensive requests. I blackholed their IP to solve the immediate problem, but perhaps more importantly I just switched us from Lighttpd to Nginx. Nginx has a rate-limiter module that can limit these sorts of requests, and I'm turning it on so we shouldn't have this sort of problem again. This should also result in a small performance boost because lighttpd is ancient and hasn't been updated to make use of the new PHP cgi methods like nginx has. Surgo (talk) 05:37, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

I un-blackholed the IP and the rate limiting is letting us operate through this just fine. Hurray! Surgo (talk) 05:52, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
I want to use this occasion to thanks you for the constant support Surgo. Hurray to you! --Leziad (talk) 06:10, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
Surgo proves once again why he is the Hero of the Internet. Seriously, if we ever meet I'm buying you dinner. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 07:10, 2 March 2016 (UTC)
Sorry about the 502s -- just a couple of teething issues with the new PHP installation. Unfortunately it happened in the middle of the night (for my time zone) while I was asleep and I wasn't able to get to it until after I came to work. - Surgo (not logged in)
The text was probably from me. I sent one early this morning after a reminder from Leziad that the wiki was gronked at the time. I got a reply on the text, so yeah, there's that to confirm. I knew I should have put my name on it. Oh well. Didn't feel like sending a second text with just that on it. --Ganteka Future (talk) 00:30, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
Looks like I haven't quite solved those teething problems yet. Sorry for the trouble. Surgo (talk) 16:44, 3 March 2016 (UTC)
Seems like the immediate trouble is over but I'm having some issues with Recaptcha that is probably preventing IP edits. Surgo (talk) 08:26, 7 March 2016 (UTC)

Creating Account[edit]

The sign up page appears to be borked, with people unable to input the captcha. Anyone know how to fix this? --Ghostwheel (talk) 06:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

I've pinged Surgo about this. - Tarkisflux Talk 19:02, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Fixed. The people behind ConfirmEdit extension CHANGED A SETTING VARIABLE'S NAME, thus breaking everyone who used ConfirmEdit. WTF. Surgo (talk) 01:06, 6 July 2016 (UTC)

help needed[edit]

So I am working on a project called project fire emblem D&D it is meant to be a mix of Fire emblem and D&D but currently nobody is helping so if you would like to join —Preceding unsigned comment added by XX the memenist Xx (talkcontribs) at

You should probably make it a sourcebook instead of haphazardly creating random pages in the main wikispace. --Ghostwheel (talk) 22:37, 25 July 2016 (UTC)

Captcha Problems[edit]

Someone in the IRC channel is having problems signing up due to the captcha. Here's what he's saying: reCAPTCHA shows a check mark, but the website says "Incorrect or missing CAPTCHA."

Anything we can do to help him? --Ghostwheel (talk) 16:48, 13 August 2016 (UTC)

Ugh I saw this a bit after I went away from the weekend. Taking a look now... Surgo (talk) 18:33, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
You've gotta be kidding me, those jokers at MediaWiki changed variable names again. Alright it should work now. Let me know immediately if it does not. Surgo (talk) 20:34, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
Now a user is having trouble with e-mails. First he got a message that his e-mail contained an invalid character, and after that he received the following message: "Unknown error in PHP's mail() function." --Ghostwheel (talk) 05:25, 16 August 2016 (UTC)
Email should work now. A system upgrade moved the location of the program that sends the emails. Surgo (talk) 04:43, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

Publicity[edit]

If someone wants to put a word in for us here, I think it would be a good idea. I plan on doing it myself when I get home, but that will be in a number of hours. --Ghostwheel (talk) 14:02, 25 August 2016 (UTC)

Our image--we really need to work on it :-/ —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ghostwheel (talkcontribs) at
Radical ideas: what if we change our domain name? And we could move all the homebrew content to the new domain name, but leave the SRD and OGL material on this domain name. It would solve most of the complaints, I think. Then when people say "D&D wiki suckz", we can reply: "Yup, it does. Take a look at our wiki: we actually curate it and have the concept of authorship". --Aarnott (talk) 00:21, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
To what, something like... dnd-homebrew.com or somesuch?
I'm not sure it would make much of a difference, since people are leery about homebrew in general unless we do a massive public campaign, like a weekly AMA, each time by one of our more prolific homebrewers to get ourselves out there and have people understand that we have actual quality control on this wiki. Once we do that, I think we can turn people's perception, and get our name out there at the same time to allow others to speak up and suggest homebrew from us when people ask for something, and also perhaps get more new blood writing content for the wiki. --Ghostwheel (talk) 00:31, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
I was thinking something more clever if possible. Similar to how Memory Alpha is a wiki but the name doesn't outright say "Star Trek". The advantage is that it can be referred to as its own "thing" so people can start forming new opinions instead of carrying preconceptions. Lots of people like the GitP forums and their form of quality control is basically that threads will die with no comments. I really do think that a wiki is an ideal way to distribute homebrew and I think a bit of effort differentiating and maybe a brief walkthrough set of pages on why we think a wiki is a good idea might go a long way. --Aarnott (talk) 00:49, 19 October 2016 (UTC)
This may be a radical suggestion, but what if this wiki shifted primary focus from the homebrew section to the encyclopedia section? Dungeons & Dragons could really use a major encyclopedia wiki, like Memory Alpha is for Star Trek. My suggestion is moving the homebrew content to a "Homebrew:" namespace, and moving the "Canon:" namespace content to the main namespace. In this way, the wiki could fill a need while differentiating itself from Dandwiki. It would also help prevent people mistaking homebrew for official content, and avoid name clashes between homebrew and official content. --Dungeon Master Mimic (talk) 11:30, 24 April 2017 (MDT)
That would be a huge shift, most of the existing userbase are homebrewers so we would need a lot of new blood willing to do all this shit. I am pretty sure each official campaign setting have their own wiki as well. --Leziad (talk) 13:35, 24 April 2017 (MDT)
I naturally like the idea, having been active a lot in the Canon section, and totally agree that something like Memory Alpha would be great to have for D&D! But as Leziad said, that would need a lot of contributors, as there would be lots and lots of work. Most campaign settings have their own wiki, but some are quite small and stagnant or have a different outlook. An overview can be found here. - It may be outdated, but The Great Library of Greyhawk and Planescape Encyclopedia have been down for some time now, so what we could do here might be more rather than less. In any case, the basic framework would already be here as the Canon section. Daranios (talk) 11:35, 25 April 2017 (MDT)
I'm leaning against this idea. This is probably THE best site for homebrew I know and it's got some great creators, and most of the current users enjoy the homebrew. Plus encyclopedias of All Things D&D are out there. I'm not sure if I should link or mention any since our sister site is likely competing with them, but is restricted to just the SRD (d20Srd) but they're out there. I think being the go to homebrew site is a much better goal. - Aeturo (talk) 12:59, 25 April 2017 (MDT)
Now you got me personally interested: I guess you can find SRD at a number of places, but is there a D&D encyclopedia (like Memory Alpha for Star Trek) anywhere aside from what was left behind at Wikia when this site was formed? Thanks for sharing! Daranios (talk) 13:24, 25 April 2017 (MDT)
To be fair it does not need to be one or ther other, it could be an equal focus. --Leziad (talk) 14:21, 25 April 2017 (MDT)
Much of 3.5 isn't fair use to publish yet, which is another reason I lean against it. With the exception of short descriptions of things like we have in our Canon section, Canon:Ronin for example, much of what's outside the SRD we can't publish at all. - Aeturo (talk) 17:03, 25 April 2017 (MDT)
I don't think that's completely accurate. It is true that non-free material must not be directly quoted. But it is possible to paraphrase + summarize source material, as well as recombining information from different sources. Big sites like Wookieepedia, the Forgotten Realms Wiki, and, in the end, Wikipedia work on that basis and I have not heard that they got into legal trouble. So while this issue has to be considered, it would not be a major hindrance. Daranios (talk) 10:31, 26 April 2017 (MDT)
Well we already do that in our Canon section, and to give more information (class features, racial stat adjustments, and the like) is prohibited outside of the SRD. Sites like dndtools have been shut down multiple times for offences like that. - Aeturo (talk) 11:32, 26 April 2017 (MDT)
I have strongly supported an effort to grow our Canon section. While we don't want rules or anything outside the SRD that is explicitly related to gameplay, a robust canon section will help establish the wiki as a usefull resource for a broader section of the community. Things such as cataloguing all the modules, and books, along with general encyclopedia entries on places, characters and such would be more than welcome. I see lots of that stuff scattered across sites all over the internet from wikipedia to places such as The Acaeum (which I hope never just dies before its invaluable information can be archived). Long story short - anyone who wants to become loremasters and work on building up the canon section has the site's full throated support and enthusiasm. Regarding copyrights the task for the canon section is to catalog the various publications themselves, rather then copy and pasting the contents of those publications. Again, take a look at the incredible publication information on The Acaeum as an example of what I'm talking about. For the encyclopedia section the goal is to describe the various topics is if they are real and you live in the D&D universe, not to cut and paste the rules for using them. Bigred (talk) 23:07, 27 April 2017 (MDT)

Email issues[edit]

While emails should be sending again, we aren't out of the woods there just yet -- Google doesn't like what we're sending and won't send it. Investigating how to fix. It has to do with ipv6 and PTR records, if you care. Surgo (talk) 04:45, 31 August 2016 (UTC)

WOW IT LOOKS DIFFERENT[edit]

The new website look is great. Kudos to whoever made the update. --YouLostMe (talk) 18:50, 2 January 2017 (MST)

Helping the Wiki[edit]

We are well into the marketing and technical aspects of spreading the word about the site and increasing it's online footprint.

I have a simple request for the admins and other fans of the site.

The single most effective thing any individual person can do from a time point of view is to add a link back to the site in your signature on any RPG or other D&D related sites/wikis/forums you visit. Especially ones that you have a longstanding account on with many, many posts over the years. A simple plain link to https://dnd-wiki.org or linked via | D&D Wiki can be done easily and have a dramatic effect when performed by dozens of people across their favorite RPG sites.

Already done for me chief, but next time I spot us being mentioned on r/dnd I'll see if I can promote a bit. I totally agree that multiple people with links is super effective! -- Eiji-kun (talk) 16:54, 3 January 2017 (MST)

Whitelist[edit]

We're starting to get spammed again, how do we turn the whitelist back on? --Ghostwheel (talk) 03:13, 19 May 2017 (MDT)

Undo the most recent change on MediaWiki:Spam-blacklist. That will kill all outgoing links except things on MediaWiki:Spam-whitelist. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Surgo (talkcontribs) at
Thanks! --Ghostwheel (talk) 01:49, 20 May 2017 (MDT)
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