User:StarGeek/Test

NewData

March 5, 2006

New Hero Wiki Skin Implemented

Changes are afoot! There is a new skin called "Heroic," and it has been set to the default skin of the wiki. All existing accounts have also been switched over to the new skin. If you prefer the old skin, simply go to your Preferences under the Skin settings, and set your skin back to MonoBook.

The changes are purely cosmetic and do not affect the look or feel of the actual wiki content, merely the outer navigational, header, and footer appearance. If you experience any difficulties with this skin or you have any comments or questions, please post a message on the wiki forums and let me know. Otherwise, enjoy!

February 27, 2006

Software Upgrade

The Paragon Wiki has been upgraded! This weekend, after extensive testing and and development of software installations and automation scripts, the MediaWiki software that runs the Paragon Wiki was upgraded from verstion 1.4.9 to version 1.5.6. (If interested in the technical details, please see the MediaWiki release notes.)

When all was said and done, the upgrade went very quickly and smoothly. The wiki was down from 3:20 am EST until 3:23 am EST. For a pretty major upgrade, that's not bad at all. Still, if you notice any glitches or problems, please e-mail tonyv@pcfreepress.com or post a message on our forums.

If you happened to try to access the wiki between 3:20 am EST and 3:23 am EST early Monday morning, I apologize for the inconvenience.

February 20, 2006

City of Villains Exploration Badges Complete

Hey all, a rather intensive effort over the past couple of days to document and audit all of the City of Villains Exploration Badge articles is complete. In addition to the normal wiki information fare, each article has got the badge description, a detailed explanation of how to get to the badge, and an in-game picture showing you exactly where the badge is. Also, each has been formatted according to a rational standard and categorized correctly.

Valentine's Day Event 2006 Wrapping Up

If you have not participated in the Valentine's Day Event 2006 activities, you should be sure to log on now. The event wraps up the morning of Wednesday, February 22, 2006, so you only have a little time left!

February 8, 2006

Valentine's Day Event 2006

Wow, a brand new unpublished event was sprung on us today! At midnight Eastern (for the east coast servers) and 9 pm Pacific (for the west coast servers), heroes and villains who logged in received a new costume part and an accolade! Read more about the event in the Valentine's Day Event 2006 article!

February 7, 2006

Paragon Wiki Forums Test

Test forums have been installed for the site to discuss anything you have on your mind, such as mistakes in articles, requests for articles, asking for help, and so on. Currently, the forums and the wiki use two different user databases, but before the forums are considered live, the databases will be integrated. We apologize for the inconvenience, but hey, that's what makes them test forums! If you'd like to participate in the test, register for an account and post away.

Also please note that as test forums, you should consider them purely beta, and though we'll be making periodic backups of the database for them (as part of my own administrative testing), you should keep copies of anything that you consider too important to be lost if the forum database eats itself on a whim. The default phpBB logos, colors, and icons have not been changed, but before the forums are considered live, there will definitely be some "aestheticization" of the site.

A New Domain Name

The domain name paragonwiki.com and its variants have been registered and redirected to this site. Since the Paragon City Free Press and the Paragon Wiki serve two conceptually different functions, serious consideration is being given to splitting them up. Before you panic, All current pointers will be retained, so all existing bookmarks, links, and such will still work fine. Mainly, the look of http://paragonwiki.com is better than http://www.pcfreepress.com/wiki, as it's much more readily apparent what it points to and it's much easier to remember. More information will be posted on this later.

January 31, 2006

Issue 7 Preview Released

The Issue 7 Preview has been released on the City of Heroes and City of Villains official sites. With a new zone, new mission types, an increase in the villain level cap, new power sets, and much, more, this looks like it will be an exciting new chapter in the CoH universe!

January 22, 2006

New Administrator

I've added another person as an administrator of the site, StarGeek. If you've seen the Recent Changes log lately, you'll know that his additions to the wiki have been invaluable, and spread across several areas such as enemy articles, powersets, error corrections, and more. With administrator privileges, he will now have even more access to change protected pages and perform user administration as well.

Thanks for your contributions, StarGeek, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's next!

Server Outage

Well, not exactly. The DNS servers for this site went kaput sometime yesterday (Saturday) afternoon Eastern time, which had the same effect: For hours, the site was inaccessible. It was, unfortunately, completely beyond my control other than logging a couple of tickets with my web hosting provider to try to have the matter resolved. Sometime between around 11:00pm EST Saturday night and 5:30am EST this morning, the problem was resolved and normal service restored. I apologize for any inconvenience this caused, and hope that the service provider takes steps to keep from having such a long outage again.

January 15, 2006

Spam Filter

Well, if you've been checking the Recent Changes page, you may have noticed that the Paragon Wiki has lately been the victim of some vandals who are, no doubt, trying to increase their sites' link counts by posting hidden links to sites of, shall we say, questionable repute, in articles.

If you're thinking about doing this (or have done this), I'd like to remind you of three things. First, this site is a purely volunteer effort, which basically means that you're going to hell, have a nice day! Second, this wiki is configured with rel=nofollow links that do not get followed by search engines, so your site is not getting credit for links from this site and you're wasting your time. Third, I do check this site for changes at least once a day (usually more), and your links are taken down before any search engines really have a chance to see them.

Nevertheless, I resigned myself a long time ago to the old Internet adage that if you build it, they will attack. I guess that I should take it as a kind of backhanded compliment that my site is important enough now to be spammed! Anyway, to alleviate the issue, I've implemented the wiki spam filter that the Wikipedia uses. Thanks, Taxibot Yellow for pointing me to it!

If you have trouble editing or posting a legitimate article, please let me know by e-mailing me at tonyv@pcfreepress.com, and I apologize in advance.

January 6, 2006

E-Mail Snafu

First of all, I apologize for a mistake I made when I moved the site over to a different server. In the process, I forgot to set up the email forwarder which forwards e-mail to tonyv@pcfreepress.com to the web mail client I use. The end result is that any e-mail that has been sent to me in the past couple of weeks was sent out to the Shadow Shard somewhere, never to be seen again. I apologize profusely if you sent me something and I did not respond. Please send it again, and I assure you that it will be read by me now.

Happy New Year!

That said, I hope that everyone is having a wonderful 2006 so far. The Winter Event 2005 was a raving success in Paragon City, and most heroes (and villains!) seem to still be thoroughly enjoying their rocket packs. Don't forget, they only last for thirty days from the time you got them, not from the end of the event!

Game of the Year

How did NCsoft start off the new year? How about by winning Game of the Year from MMORPG.com! Congratulations and kudos to the developers, and it's a great way to start what I am certain will be another fantastic year of fighting crime—or causing it—in Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. I promise that Paragon Wiki will continue to follow all changes and updates and become even bigger and better with tons of new information during the year!

December 15, 2005

Winter Events Continue!

Last week, we got a new toy and a badge. Today begins Lord Recluse's Operation Scrooge and Miss Liberty's Operation Holiday Cheer to counter his nefarious plans. Along with the festivities comes another accolade and a special new look for the heroes and villains of Paragon City and the Rogue Isles! See all of the updates in the Winter Event 2005 article.

December 8, 2005

Winter Event 2005

Naughty or Nice?

The Winter Events of 2005 have begun! Beginning today, all characters logging in will receive the Longbow Reservist Badge (if the character is a hero) or the Jet-Setter Badge (if the character is a villain). In addition, all heroes and villains will receive the Holiday Rocket Pack as a whopping 30-day temporary power! See Miss Liberty's Radio Address and Black Scorpion's Memo for the announcement.

November 25, 2005

New Admin: Arkenor

First of all, I'd like to welcome Arkenor aboard as the first site co-admin. He's been an invaluable member of the wiki, having contributed and edited several articles, and even catching a couple of vandalism attempts.

Maintenance Monday: 2:00am EST

This Monday, November 28, I am going to run some routine maintenance on the Paragon City Free Press site, including the wiki, beginning at 2:00am EST (7:00am GMT). During this time I will be backing everything up, shuffling a bunch of stuff around, and optimizing the databases. I hope to be done by 6:00am EST (11:00am GMT). Hopefully, it won't take that long, but I can't swear that it won't take a little longer.

During the outage, the site will be redirected to an "Under Maintenance" page.

November 22, 2005

City of Villains Survey

Today, I received an e-mail from a psychology researcher for the University of Queensland, Australia conducting a study on social aspects of online game play such as how people adjust to playing a new game and how they come to identify with their new character.

He is seeking respondants to a short survey (approximately ten minutes). To encourage players to take part, they are offering 12 free months of gameplay to one randomly selected participant. If you are interested in taking the survey and entering the drawing, visit the survey site. I've also added a site link on the left in the "links" list.

November 2, 2005

New version of Map Patch

Map Patch v0.4 Released

I've updated the downloadable in-game maps to version 0.4. There were a few minor additions and an icon added to aid in getting the Sweet Tooth Badge in Cap au Diable. Currently, only the big four maps are included (Breakout, Mercy Island, Port Oakes, and Cap au Diable) plus Bloody Bay, but very soon I plan on releasing version 1.0, which will include all known information about all city zones. Stay tuned!

October 31, 2005

City of Villains Goes Live!

Go-Live!

The City of Villains beta and head start is over, and the game is now officially live for the general public.

A shorter URL

I have added http://wiki.pcfreepress.com to be redirected to this site. This may make it a little easier to give the URL out in-game. The old URL of http://www.pcfreepress.com/wiki will continue to work as well, in case anyone has the site bookmarked.

Please direct people to this site

Speaking of giving out the URL in-game, if you find this wiki useful, please refer people to it in-game. I don't derive any financial profit from raising traffic at the site (in fact, it could eventually end up costing me a little more money if throngs of people flock here), but as a stereotypical geek, it makes me all warm and gooey inside when I see good numbers of visitors each month coming to see what's here.

News Archive Added

The news section was just plain getting too long. I have added a Archived News page to save these items in. I will leave the latest one or two things here.

October 24, 2005

FAQs Added

I have added an article called FAQs to answer questions I constantly see in the chat channels. If you're new to the game, please take a look, as it will be very helpful when you're just starting out. Even if you've been around the block a while, you may still learn a thing or two!

If there are any questions you constantly see, please feel free to add them to the article.

October 18, 2005

Added Content Update

I have added a lot of content over the past week. The main thing I have been working on is getting maps, locations, and descriptions for badges entered.

In addition, I have created in-game maps of the Rogue Islands. Right now, I have maps ready of Breakout, Mercy Island, Port Oakes, Cap au Diable, and Bloody Bay, including marked locations for badges, monuments, Fortunata Fateweavers, and Arachnos HQ's (where villains create Villain Groups and bases). I have a bunch more to do. Today, I spent a lot of time mapping out the locations of the firebases in Bloody Bay and will update the maps very soon.

October 13, 2005

NDA Lifted

The City of Villains Nondisclosure Agreement has officially been lifted, so City of Villains articles can now be added to the wiki! I am eagerly anticipating being able to add lots of stuff over the next few days, so stay tuned!

City of Villains Content Categories Added

I have added a special CoV category about content that is City of Villains-specific to make it easier to find material related to that game. I will eventually re-edit all City of Heores-specific articles to be part of the CoH category.