Hi Danny, some user has been surfacing here since 2010 under various aliases (Flunky04012003, Ashketchum09071998, SesameStreet11101969, the list goes on and on...). He's been blocked a few times for adding nonsense to the Sesame season pages, like incorrect predictions for future premiere dates. I blocked as many sockpuppets as I could find, but there may be more. When you're able to, would you set a block on his IP address(es), so we don't have to deal with him anymore. Thanks!
Hi again Danny! One of our newer users created pages and categories for various characters/songs from Billy Bunny's Animal Songs. He didn't do a bad job, but I felt I should bring this to your attention because I saw through some page history that a few years ago you had merged the character pages/bios, including for the Termite, to the main page.
I wanted to hear your thoughts before I did anything, but the character pages should probably be merged again (since all of them repeat their respective character bios stated on the main page). The song pages I can see keeping, although they're all written by Dave Kinnoin, most of them have been released on his website (Those would count as official releases, right?). Anyway, I'd be happy to do all the reorganizing. What do you think?
My general rule is that every click should offer a reader more information than they had on the page they were on. So if the page about Kermit's Christmas Show lists John Smith's credit for sound editing, and clicking on John Smith only tells you that he did the sound editing for Kermit's Christmas Show -- then we've just wasted a reader's time, and that reader is a little less interested in clicking on our links.
Along the same lines: We should never use 10 pages to say things that you could say on one page. The page about Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet is a recent example. That was fifteen pages and two categories before I merged it all together, making one good page instead of sixteen crappy pages.
I think one-shot subjects -- one special, one book, one comic that isn't connected to any other character family -- can probably be covered thoroughly on one rich page.
Thanks Danny! I'll keep that in mind the next time that happens. As you can see, I restructured the page, using your character table from Tales of a Sixth-Grade Muppet as a model. I did keep the song pages though, after seeing that we have pages for songs from Muppet Treasure Island (Muppet Sing Alongs). The only weak one really is I Have A Secret; with it's repetitious lyrics, it seemed difficult to flesh out and have it merit it's own page.
Hi Danny! I wanted to address a technical issue on the Jimmy Dean Show page -- the Recent Activity bar (with Chat and New Photos) is shoved all the way to the bottom, probably due to how large the page is. On the plus side, User:Boppity Frackle filled a lot of the gaps in adding missing screenshots for show sketches, including Rowlf's appearance at Carnegie Hall.
Ouch, that was broken for a while! But an easy fix. We're using some "div tags" in the wikitext to anchor links to places in that sketch table, and a couple of the tags weren't done quite right. I fixed em up, and the page looks awesome now, thanks to all those new screenshots!
At this point, I'm not sure what else I could add to it. On a related note, I don't know if you've read about it, but Frank Oz's comments on The Muppets on this page of that recent Entertainment Weekly article have me both intrigued and confused; http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/05/15/frank-oz-little-shop-of-horrors/3/
Yay, I really like the page. I added some more to it, moved it out of Sandbox-world and made it a real grown-up page. :) I'm sure other people will add to it also. It's a really interesting part of Muppet history; I'm glad you came up with the idea!
Yeah, its great that other people continue to add to it. For a few days now, I had been thinking of moving it out of the sandbox, but I was worried that I would be over-stepping my boundaries.
Aw, you don't have to worry too much about that. The nice thing about the wiki is that everybody gets to update and fix things. The best way to get a page going is just to post your version and inspire other people to fix all the mistakes. :)
Hey, do you know what this is from? I ripped it from one of the tapes you sent me. It's not from the 25th anniversary special hosted by Caroline Rhea I just found on YouTube. I kept in the small amount of material that bookends Kermit & Gonzo which looks like a parade, but I don't know which one.
No, I'm not sure... What else was on the tape? If it's a lot of random segments, then it might be a compilation that someone sent me. I know Ryan D gave me a couple; other people did too.
This was for the Disney Channel. I recognized the male host as J. D. Roth, so I googled him and Walt Disney World, and he and Brianne Leary (the one who speaks in the clip) co-hosted Walt Disney World Inside-Out, beginning in 1995, and according to online trading sources (so not sure how accurate they would be on the date), this would have been a 1996 special to promote the 25th anniversary (thus, about the time of Muppets Tonight).
We do now! I made one: Sing with Elmo's Greatest Hits. That's an incredibly silly video -- they actually have the lyrics printed right there, and they insist that Elmo is saying something wrong.
I'm sure you've seen this, because it's probably where you got it -- a 2007 blog post about the story. Do you want to add this stuff to the toy's page? I think it's funny.
Hey, I reported this to you already, but I can't find it now (might have been in email). The bug where you look at an image description page (like this one) and it tells you what pages are using it, is still broken for threads. When I click on the link, it doesn't take me to where that image is embedded.
It's also causing me to be unable to find where someone linked to Category:Delete. It's probably because whoever did so, didn't know to put a colon in front so that the page wouldn't get categorized. Either way, I can't get that thread out of that category now.
Oh! Okay. I think I lost track of that bug; thanks for telling me about it. I'll see what I can do... we're working on Forums now and M.Wall fixes can be a part of that.
Hey Scott -- I think the problem finding the message in the deletion category it was that it was a thread you had removed from your wall. I found it in Mr. Grille's user contribs and removed the template and then deleted the thread. Oddly it isn't clearing out of the category yet... which may be a caching thing I guess.
Thanks for looking for it, Wendy. I'll keep an eye on the delete category and update here if it doesn't go away in a day or two. Or however long it takes the squirrels to crank the wheels on our 1992 servers.
To be honest, css cache is broken at the moment (not a good time to try to update the skin at all) and image cache is updating really really slowly.... (also not the best time to reupload images). So it's possible this is just another aspect of the general cache problems.
Possibly, but it still hasn't gone away. Is it possible that there are still bits of the software referring to the old message wall naming convention? If a thread were to be categorized, it should show up with the current naming convention, which is Thread:xxxxxx whereas the thread showing up in the Delete category is doing so using the username/@comment-blah1234 style.
yup. What she did was to edit and remove the category; I thought I had tried that but must not have.... Just noting it for reference in case it happens again though :)
Yeah, I tried too. If it had worked, I wouldn't have been nagging about it. She either worked some staff kung fu or she did the same thing we did and it took this time because something changed in one of the upgrades. Either way, it's fixed, so that's a happy :)
Yeah, I don't know what the exact plan is right now. They asked me to write up some fun facts, and then... they'll do some stuff. Probably Joe comes by and makes some edits or something.
Yes! That's one of The Muppet Show Fun Figures made by Palitoy in the UK in 1979. I recently got a Rowlf from that set on Ebay just because he's wearing a bowler hat and it's such an unlikely object. You know how that is sometimes.
Okay, cool. I wasn't sure, and didn't know how to find it. It looked similar to the stick puppets, but I knew it wasn't one of them. Anyway, it's a nice, big picture if we want one out of the box.
Oh, you don't like them? I wouldn't mind having a piece of Muppet film, especially since most theaters are digital now! I had been wondering how many prints they actually struck for The Muppets, and it's nice that at least they ended up here!
Yeah, I don't really have anything against them; I just think they're silly. It makes sense to buy a hand-painted animation cel, because they're unique little pieces of art. These feel like you could crank out a bunch of them, chop them up and stick them to a frame. But maybe I'm missing something?
Well, now that everything's moving toward digital, there are only so many actual film copies left, so I'm pretty sure that the copies that end up in those frames had been struck by the studio for exhibition, which is why I was surprised to see one for The Muppets so soon! I'll have to look around and see how valuable this kind of stuff can get.
I hope you don't mind me changing some of the images you uploaded for the guide you're doing for inserts already documented. Also, what's going on with the search? If I search "Season 22", it doesn't redirect to the "Season 22 (1990-1991)" page, it takes me to the search results page.
Of course not, I was hoping you'd see them and help me out with the eka's. :) Obviously, I know how to find all the Muppet segments, but I don't know a lot of the cartoon & film segments. I uploaded my screencaps basically to help somebody (probably you) to identify the segments. Thanks! It's taking me a while to get through this episode -- I haven't done one in a while, and I forgot how long it takes! Fun, though.
And, yeah -- Wikia just made a change this week to search, turning off the "go" behavior. Entering a search term always gives you search results now. The search suggestions still work as links, so if you start to type a page and then click on the search suggestion, you'll go straight to the page.
It's a pain for me and you and whoever else likes using the search box for navigation -- but they're doing a bunch of work now on improving the search results and the search suggestions, so we should see some new search goodness coming soon.
The cartoon and films are usually hard. I basically remember where they are through association (finding the insert by recalling what other inserts it appeared with in the guides). That's why I don't really want to guide the season 5 eps. from iTunes; they've probably chock full of obscure cartoons and films that will be harder to search for.
The video team is working on updating the way we handle videos -- you might have noticed the new video lightbox player, which means you don't play videos in little thumbnails anymore, hooray. As part of the project, I think they used WikiaBot to replace all the old video uploads with a new version. The new system had a problem with videos with a colon in the title, so in those cases the bot uploaded a new version without the colon, and updated the pages to point to the new (non-colon) version.
So -- why don't the new video pages tell you what page they're linked on? I don't know that part. :) I'll ask the PM who's working on video...
What I can't believe is that it's slipped by us until now. They should really figure out how to use Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ more effectively for their appearances!
Hey, Danny! Check this out! I found scans from a Rechov Sumsum/Shara'a Simsim book on this link. It was published in 2000 and the text is mostly in Arabic while some of it is in Hebrew. -- Max 21:54, April 9, 2012 (UTC)
Wow -- that's awesome, thanks for showing me! I'm actually thinking about buying that... That's super nice, and I don't know if it would come up again. I'll think about it... :)
Okay, I bought the book! :) It's coming from Israel, so the guy says it might take a couple weeks to get here. I'll be able to get better scans and more info once it's here. Max, thanks for letting me know about it!
I love your page about the PAAS Easter kit! I still have some of mine intact, because I didn't want to lose all of the pieces! Since you made the page, I had a fast question. You wrote that it came out in 1980, but the ad says 1981. Did you see a different kit, or did they sell it more than once?
Here's a pic that shows the 1980 copyright date. It's not surprising that they were still selling the kit in 1981 -- wouldn't you? It's too good to just sell for one season. :)
Yeah -- it's definitely happening, as a Forums project that will connect up to article talk as we go along. You'll probably see the first demo version in late May or June -- and Muppet Wiki is definitely going to be the first wiki to try it out. :)
