Talk:Main Page

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Current revision as of 12:11, 19 February 2026

It has been suggested that the Main Page be redesigned. Feel free to use its project page for proposed redesigns.

[edit] sbemail templates

See Talk:Strong Bad Email → sbemail templates

[edit] Trogday decor

Does the Featured content of the day (or whenever) template automatically switch to different links on certain days? Such as linking to dragon, Trogday '08 and other things when the time comes? Or is that done manually? Because tomorrow is Trogday. - HoveringSombrero (talk)

It's not automatic, but as you can see (at the time of this writing), the decorations were indeed put up to coincide with Trogday. — It's dot com 01:43, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

[edit] How many references do you need?

How many references to a thing need to be on a page for the thing the page is about to become a real page? Just curious because my mock-up seinfeld page includes eight references to the titular show. The page on The Big Lebowski has the same amount of references... so do I just make a Seinfeld page now? ----J∃ffJMan 20:13, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

done and done ----J∃ffJMan 20:14, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

See our inclusion guidelines. — It's dot com 21:02, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Songs archive

Would it be OK if I created a subpage to my user page with a complete archive of every existing song in the Homestar universe? I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 22:28, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure we have that covered. — It's dot com 23:18, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

Well, I was gonna add MP3 files with them, so people could download them and stuff. Is that still OK? I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 00:26, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

No, that's not what the user space is for. — It's dot com 00:43, 23 February 2023 (UTC)

[edit] dot dot dot

Why come whenever I try to link to lady…ing and Cheat Commandos…O's, the link is broken? Is it because of those ellipses? — HoveringSombrero (talk)

Sort of! "…" is different from "...", it's a single character rather than three periods. Try highlighting it and you can see. This is kind of like the difference between “curly quotes” and "straight quotes" - in both cases, the former is typically made via autocorrect in word processors or mobile keyboards, while the latter is preferred by the wiki. So while lady…ing and lady...ing may look the same, they are actually two different typed entries. -- Bleu Ninja 22:17, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

I've added redirects to fix the issue. Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 23:06, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Thanks! — HoveringSombrero (talk)

[edit] Navigation sidebar - adding @StrongBadActual?

Strong Bad Email has been in the sidebar for as long as I can remember, presumably because it was the most popular and most actively updated portion of the website. With the Twitter account handily outpacing both sbemails and "H*R.com updates" (not to mention the CGI Paper directing viewers to tweet rather than email), might it be worth adding it over there? I know I regularly find myself navigating to the @StrongBadActual page(s) to fill out "Fast Forward" sections of pages or to find dates when an item or project was mentioned. -- Bleu Ninja 20:16, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I agree (and I'm not going to do the whole "Don't you think I agree" part, this isn't E-mail Birds, but it is bird season.), and I fully support putting it there. It's a handy page and we've put a lot of work into cataloging every post made by strong bad on twitter, with fun facts to boot! So consider this my SUPPORT. ----J∃ffJMan 22:52, 31 March 2023 (UTC)

I also SUPPORT. — HoveringSombrero (talk)

, So I SUPPORT this too, but I like having easy access to the Strong Bad Email page, considering I usually watch the sbemails by clicking on the external links. So, maybe we keep both? I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 22:28, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Maybe we link to it as [[@StrongBadActual Tweets 2023|Twitter]] and put it above Strong Bad Email and underneath Recent changes? — HoveringSombrero (talk)

GREAT IDEA! I like it! I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 18:00, 10 April 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Editing user pages

Alright, so, I've been thinking. The block log has a lot of "user banned for editing userpages of other users". So, the main page, for example, has a system so only sysops can edit it. What if we add a system to all user pages that basically makes it impossible for anybody but the user to edit it? I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 22:52, 18 July 2023 (UTC)

The thing is, I feel sysops / admins / wiki bots should probably still be able to edit user pages. For example, an admin fixing a bug on the page or a bot auto-replacing a link. But I agree that no one else should edit other user pages. Or somehow make a system where users can choose who can edit the page. — HoveringSombrero (talk) 18:10, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

We already have explicit guidelines on who can and should edit user pages. If a user page is edited for anything other than a legitimate reason, the edit typically gets quickly reverted. No harm done. Anyone that might be banned in relation to user page edits is most likely doing it in a disruptive manner. In any case, the block logs mostly include bans for spamming. There really is no compelling reason to add user page security settings or tools for this. --Stux 21:10, 19 July 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Wiki availability

For about the past week, I haven't been able to access the HRWiki, and downforeveryoneorjustme.com consistently confirmed (and still does) that hrwiki.org is down. However, I see that plenty of edits have been made to the wiki in that time, so obviously it wasn't entirely down. Basically, I've been presented with a white screen that occasionally loaded the hills in the background and sometimes the Homestar logo in the top-left corner, and if I moved the mouse around the screen, it would recognize where links and drop-down menus were, but it wouldn't show me any text for the links and all. Any idea what may have happened/be happening? The Knights Who Say Ni 20:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Hey Knights. Usually, when a big update is released, wiki activity jumps exponentially and typically the wiki reaction times can slow down to a crawl. Pages still load but they take forever and one must be patient. Eventually that goes away as edits taper down. However, for a site like "downforeveryoneorjustme", their timeout is likely far shorter than regular browsers when reporting if a site is down. In your particular case it seems that not all website elements are loading and some may be timing out and not loading at all. I'd typically expect that behavior during peak edit times. Hope this helps a tiny bit! --Stux 06:05, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

At some point I did see pages seemingly load but remain blank unless I interacted with the tab in some way, though that could have been a browser issue, it never really prevented me from accessing the wiki, and I haven't been experiencing it for a while. I've also had some "unable to connect" errors because sometimes when loading the wiki, it attempts to load an https URL. Most of the time, though, especially after a new release, it's been just slowdowns. DEI DAT VM^┌_{datvm center}\^{super contra}_┘ 21:09, 4 September 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Still Slow

It seems that the wiki hasn't fully recovered from its slowdowns back in August. In the last couple of months I've come across the Job Queue and this mediawiki page detailing what it is and how it's supposed to function. I get the impression that currently, all jobs on the wiki are running when a page is being requested. The page outlines a means by which the jobs can be run in the background (either via cron job or background process; I'd recommend the background process) and then the job run rate could be set to zero (so that pages aren't spending time running jobs while loading). Is this something that is already in place or could this perhaps be implemented in order to improve overall performance even during busy periods? --Stux 11:41, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

[edit] glitch on the main pages

Noticed a glitch on the main pages, done by holding the cursor on one of the buttons, and then moving away, and then moving your finger off the mouse. to see what this does and what I mean, refer to this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgM-NA0Rja4 I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 21:08, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

There's a whole page about this. Main Page Glitches Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 21:21, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Why does the website still have the Halloween theme?

Halloween ended 18 days ago, and so did October in general, so why does the website still have the Hallow's Eve theme? --Cy4nIsN0tB1u3 04:33, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Because we're still waiting for the annual Fan Costumes toon to close out the season, even if we have to wait days after Thanksgiving. Also, because the sysops in charge of changing the wiki settings are busy people with lives and tend to wait a while to get around to it. -- 68.37.43.131 23:56, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

[edit] New Fan Stumes’!

The 2023 Fan Stumes has been released! And not only that, but my costume from last year is the very first Strong Bad costume! That counts as a fun fact, right? We should probably note that like how we note when a wikian sent a email. I wanna be the TMBGLOVER too! 17:12, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

[edit] Permafrosted logo?

The Decemberween themed logo is still up, but December ended 11 days ago. The weirdest part in my opinion is that there's no d'ween themed colors despide icicles and Homestar's hat. Is there something we're waiting for, like a new not-Decemberween toon? Yours truly, The guy who confused Dobbs for Daubs. — 206.110.189.60 (Talk | contribs) 11 January 2024 16:34 (UTC) (left unsigned)

I'm not an admin, but I'm assuming the style is simply for the winter season. Even though the Christmas lights have been taken down, it's still a chilly and snowy time of year for at least another month and a half. (P.S. Even if you don't have an account, please sign your posts with four tildes: ~~~~) -- Bleu Ninja 17:34, 11 January 2024 (UTC)

[edit] Load times and potential solutions

The wiki's been crawling along like something funny that crawls along for about a year now. This hasn't been much more than a minor inconvenience on my end, but it comes up pretty frequently on the Homestar subreddit, with a concerning number saying they haven't been able to access it at all. downforeveryoneorjustme.com consistently insists that the system is down. I don't know what the hosting situation is like, nor am I anything close to an expert on such things, so unfortunately I can't diagnose the issue... But, after extensive investigation, I'm ready to release my findings.

• Talk:Main Page#Still Slow — A few months ago, Stux proposed a solution involving MediaWiki's job queue. Seems like something worth looking into.
• Host a Website with High Availability — The wiki's web host Linode features a guide on how to host a website with high availability. I can understand at most seven words of this, and I'm not sure how well it applies to wikis, but it might be helpful to someone. (They also have guides for enabling HTTPS, which improves security... Maybe performance too, but I've heard mixed things about that.)
• Special:Version — The wiki is currently powered by MediaWiki 1.15, which released in 2011. Later versions have added collapsible elements, citation features, slideshow galleries, an optional visual editor interface, the ability to rename categories, and most relevant to this particular discussion, improved performance. The current stable release is 1.41.
• HRWiki:Donations — I just discovered that the wiki moved servers in 2011 to cut back on expenses, which apparently resulted in slower load times (at least initially, while settings were still being optimized). According to Special:Ledger, there haven't been any donations since then (additionally, it still lists FellowSites hosting dues instead of the new host). I've seen multiple people offering to donate if they could, so if the more recent slowness is once again a financial issue, it might help to get the donation links working again.
• Special:ListUsers&group=developer — I have no way of knowing how actively people have been working on maintaining backend stuff, but I can see that of the six developers, only It's dot com and Tom have been editing consistently since 2016. I realize I'm asking quite a lot of two people at most, and I really don't want to be too demanding... so I can't help but wonder if my suggestions might seem more reasonable if there were more people responsible for backend maintenance. I'm not qualified for that sort of thing, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were active users with MediaWiki and/or web development experience. As much as I want this wiki to be accessible to more people, I really don't want anyone losing sleep over it.

Anyway, sorry I can't offer more help than this, but I hope someone finds this stuff useful (and that I didn't get anything terribly wrong)! Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 01:06, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

Out of curiosity, I decided to use Special:Statistics and the WayBack Machine to calculate roughly how many people have been affected by the slow load times. After comparing the last seven months (from around the start of the slowdowns to now) to the seven months prior, I found that the average number of edits per day has decreased from 22 to 14, and the average number of active users has dropped from 27 to 17. That's a 37% decrease in both areas, leading me to believe they are linked by a common cause...

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out if that percentage corresponded to anything specific, like "37% of people use this certain type of Internet connection"... That information would tell me which people are having problems accessing the wiki, and from there I might be able to research a potential solution, assuming any of that works the way I think it does. Maybe I'll do an off-site poll somewhere, but I'd need to know what information would be most pertinent to ask... Would that be helpful at all? Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 05:18, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Wait a minute, it seems fine now. What happened? — 71.195.40.33 (Talk | contribs) 08:25, November 15, 2024 (UTC) (left unsigned)

[edit] Availability of the wiki over https

Are there any plans to upgrade the wiki from http to https? --UN TACO 00:36, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

[edit] Created page with a technical oddity in the edit summary

So far this month, Bleu Ninja has created a few pages that have started with a picture, and in the edit summary, a pair of opening square brackets is included in the link. This is the most recent one. I don't know how it can read it that way. However, there doesn't seem to be any problem in the page itself. A secondary question regarding This one is that "Dangeresque (character)" appears hyperlinked in the edit summary text. However, on the page itself, the link is piped and reads as "Dangeresque". All the rest of the links seem to be properly piped in the edit summaries. Are these just quirks that don't need to be worried about? Or why is it doing it that way? The Knights Who Say Ni 01:22, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

Wow! That's an interesting observation I hadn't noticed! I'd lean towards this being a "quirk" that we don't need to worry about. As to the why, I can try to make an educated guess:

• First off, we must keep in mind that since edit summaries are mostly text, they're limited in terms of the wiki code they can render (well mainly, none except links, I think?) Also, both edit summaries are automatically generated when a new page is created with no summary.
• Now, here's the wiki code in question from the first link:

[[File:TwitterJoCoHiddenTrogdor.gif|thumb|[[Trogdor]] [[meeples]] were hidden around the ship for fellow passengers to find and collect.]]

• Since we're processing a simpler subset of wiki code, the parser is likely different, and simpler. It most likely does not expect image links to be embedded with their own wiki links, and so there's no need to process the case where we have a link within an image tag. This means that the code, once it sees an open pair of brackets ([[) it will immediately find the first closing pair and consider that part of the link. And so it sees this:

[[File:TwitterJoCoHiddenTrogdor.gif|thumb|[[Trogdor]]

• If we were to render only the above wikicode we'd see: [[Trogdor (I had to tweak the actual wiki code to render the same as in the edit summary. It also seems to magically ignore the "thumb" parameter. This is likely deliberate.)
• The rest would look like: [[Trogdor meeples were hidden around the ship for fellow passengers to find and collect.]]

Hope this helps form a picture of what's likely going on behind the scenes when it comes to parsing edit summaries. --Stux 12:54, 24 October 2025 (UTC)

For the secondary question, it seemingly has to do with [[Dangeresque (character)|]] automatically hiding the content of the parentheses. According to Help:Editing the pipe is only filled in when the page is saved, which apparently means it doesn't work on edit summaries. (See this revision, where the content of the edit and the summary are the same code, but are interpreted differently) Gfdgsgxgzgdrc 02:00, 25 October 2025 (UTC)

[edit] E-mail

I'm having problems with the e-mail feature. I've tried sending myself an e-mail, but I'm not getting it, nor am I getting the copy of it that you have the option of getting. I've changed my e-mail address, but the new address isn't getting the confirmation e-mail. What is the cause of all this? RickTommy (edits) 08:04, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

I wouldn't be surprised if the cause is more stringent spam prevention protocols such as DMARC, SPF and/or DKIM being implemented virtually everywhere. And if a host sending email isn't using these, most likely their emails get treated as spam. This is likely a seldom used feature these days since account creation is now a manual process. But that's only a guess. It's possible your issue may have a different cause. --Stux 13:12, 29 November 2025 (UTC)

[edit] slow server

it took me an entire minute to load the main page. an entire minute! the wiki is almost unusable in this state. 76.176.69.232 05:41, 11 December 2025 (UTC)

Probably AI bots. CloudFlare et. al. have partial solutions to block them, but they have their own issues. Upgrading PHP and MediaWiki may help, as newer versions are far more efficient than the ones installed.

However, it will be necessary to go to MediaWiki 1.35 and then MediaWiki 1.43 because upgrade support is limited to the last two LTSes as of MW 1.36. Also, just upgrading the hardware helps. Also also, you'll need to upgrade the database server as well, at least for any LTS version beyond MW 1.35. But that'd be almost inherent in moving from something newer than Ubuntu 12.04. In theory this also means two different versions of PHP (from Sury, which also has 5.6, but nothing older, so you'd need MW 1.23 for PHP 5.6 support to swap hardware on a new OS, may as well just do MW 1.35), although you might get away with 8.0 for both 1.35 and 1.43. If you just want the PHP installed with Ubuntu then you could try 20.04 LTS Focal (PHP 7.4.3) for MW 1.35 and then 24.04 Noble (PHP 8.3) for MW 1.43 (though I recommend Sury's PPA on Noble). GreenReaper 12:11, 19 February 2026 (UTC)