Uncyclopedia talk:How Zana Dark ruined the site and why it will never get better

Really? A mainspace article about this? 15:54, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I have moved it to the correct namespace. User:Toaster/sig 19:51, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

I’m kinda tempted to move this to your userspace instead. Putting it in the Uncyclopedia namespace makes it seem like a policy of some sort, which it absolutely isn’t, because this is just an opinion manifested into a wiki page. 19:04, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Well, I agree that it’s very opinion based, but I personally think it’s fine in the Uncyc space (though maybe user space is better, I’m not really sure). I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but it does seem to do a good job of summarizing a problem we have here. In Uncyc space, it’s very unlikely to be found when someone is just typing in the search bar. At the same time it might be stumbled across by a more technologically adept user who might be able to help clean some things up in the future. MrX blow me 20:10, 27 May 2023 (UTC)

Lol

Lol. Yeah upon reading this I generally agree. Looking at Zana's templates, it reminds me a bit (like you mentioned) of those extra-important and indefinitely-layered and transcluded templates on Wikipedia which are pretty much impossible to decipher. However, they have a dedicated team of template editors who are there to fix problems and answer questions. With Zana we have something like the evil version of Lyrithya, both of whom are cryptic, skiled MediaWiki editors, but only one of whom actually dedicates their time to improving the site for its editors. In fact, I should probably retract that comparison because it is probably insulting to compare the two, and Lyrithya herself likely identifies as evil. That said, there might not be a great solution to this, unless someone knows of a way to use bots to edit templates in a way that goes into all of the layers and transclusions, therefore helping us solve problems that way instead of us having to untangle the layers ourselves. I'm interested in hearing @Lyrithya:'s take on this, especially as to a) whether dezanafying the site is necessary, b) whether it's worth the effort, and c) whether it's possible. In the meantime, I'm going to take a yearlong leave of absence so that I can travel to Bolivia in order to undergo a secretive and complex medical procedure. —  (talk) (contributions) 01:59:24 2023/07/29 UTC

The simple solution is to revert any high traffic templates which Zana has "retouched" (virtually all of them) to their pre-Zana version. Relatively simple, although it gets a little complicated in templates where Zana has deleted templates (mostly subpages) which the template had used, you would have to restore those subpages as well. It shouldn't be too hard to do this manually, but it's very tedious. I don't consider Zana to be a "skilled MediaWiki editor", more like someone who picked up more than a few homegrown quirks which she has no problem imposing on a wiki that's (meant to be) edited by many different people. God knows I've done more than my fair share of MediaWiki errors and poor practices, but to force every other editor into your own highly personal mold is just nasty. Also, I would argue that Uncyclopedia's templates are much more difficult to decipher and obscure than Wikipedia's, mostly because Wikipedia has extensive documentation for all their templates and a team of people who (probably) know what they're doing, whereas Uncyclopedia's templates are a sort of hodgepodge of random kludge thrown together, although I prefer random kludge to Zana's nasty ass templates! They're literally evil. User:Toaster/sig 16:59, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

I very much doubt that the templates are "evil" or something like that, but go on, i guess. 18:40, 3 August 2023 (UTC)

Oh, I will. Zana's templates use deprecated CSS practices like using tables for laying out design elements instead of displaying tabular data, and she also had a terrible habit of having giant omnibus parser switch function templates which use many different variable names to display different special characters or hexcodes, like Template:A and Template:X, thereby introducing bloat and lag which weighs the servers down; personal testing with my web browser shows loading times increasing by 100-200ms after reverting Zana's edits. Also, web design wise, Zana's ugly, gaudy, rainbow vomit shitstain templates mesh horribly with basically all wiki skins used by Uncyclopedia users (Vector, Monobook, Timeless), clashing with the site's intended vision as a Wikipedia parody. I call them evil because laziness does not cover the type of malfeasance I see in these templates: her edits were lengthy and deliberate, and her ultimate goal was to be the one-stop shop for all Uncyclopedia templating needs, with a cohort of naive, impressionable editors to further spread her bad practices and incompetency to every corner of the site. Sounds pretty "evil" to me! User:Toaster/sig 04:48, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

That just left me confused. How is any of that evil? 11:35, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

"And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it." User:Toaster/sig 00:29, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

You could have at least tried to explain how it is evil instead of giving me some sort of religious quote. 07:16, 5 August 2023 (UTC)