Sinfest has restructred its linking system

And pretty much all outbound links to Sinfest strips are broken as a result. I don't follow the comic so my solution would just be to remove said links (that way the links don't break again the next time this happens) rather than find the new link(s) but either way that's a lot of links to fix.

Considering how they've been changed on the work page, I think translating them doesn't seem impossible. I PMed the troper who made those changes for input.

Plainly removing links generally isn't the best solution.

On trope pages, the examples should probably be moved to the discussion pages until the links can be fixed. The page itself is going to be a much more involved fix.

Actually, examples that don't need the link to work can be left alone, the link removed, changed or referenced in the discussion page. Examples that rely on the links ought to be expanded so that they don't rely on the link, commented out or removed per Weblinks Are Not Examples.

The linking system has changed but there is a 1:1 relationship between the old and new link format where increasing comic I Ds (old format) correspond to chronologically later dates (new format). I wrote up a script that will take in the full edit page with markups and transmogrify any valid comic links it finds into the newer format. The valid set of dates are gathered from sinfest.net.

I applied these changes to every trope page (links and icons) accessible from the main page, though if there's anything I'm missing then feel free to give me a note. Since the narrative presented by Sinfest happens mostly chronologically (requiring the actual data to be stored in a sane and logical order), I don't expect any new linking structure in the future to be difficult to automate.

Wow, Sqrfrk, that's great! Thank you so very much!

Would you mind running it on all the wicks as well at your convenience? I know there are a lot of them, and I have no idea how many of them include links, but any that are links also need to be changed.

edited 17th Jul '14 12:20:44 PM by Madrugada

The wicks need to be cleaned as well, though.

Hum...this looks like an interesting afternoon problem! I'll see what I can whip up (short of slap chopping 1179 pages by hand), but it looks doable if the pmwiki editing API is accessible.

I'm certain that most of the wicks won't have external links. I would also caution you against trying to write any code against pmwiki's default API, since ours is rather torturously mangled from anything that would easily resemble the original.

edited 17th Jul '14 1:21:50 PM by Fighteer

Fighteer, most wicks I did check (in a crudely made random sample) do include links. As for that fixing script, I would suggest to run it through the standard wiki edit interface, but make sure to throttle its editing speed if you do so.

I put together a scraper with automated editing that seems to be working, so it shouldn't be too much work adding the converter into this tool and just running through the list of wicks. I'll go ahead and make a run of it tomorrow morning. I apparently didn't have the foresight to bring my converter code home from the office

...don't mind the sandbox page *cough*

edited 17th Jul '14 7:57:49 PM by Sqrfrk

Ran through the wicks and changed the links. Gunnerkrigg Court had some of its links clobbered due to an oversight on my part (who'd have guessed it uses the same linkage as Sinfest?) but I went ahead and fixed that.

Some minor text changes occurred due to encoding issues when pulling (non-ascii dashes converted to dashes, some non-ascii single quote marks converting to ascii or outright disappearing). I would have liked converting all text to utf-8 and forcing the browser to encode it like that, but I've read some posts stating that the pmwiki fork used came long before Unicode. Seeing as how some linkage would also look quite awkward with the browser encoding in utf-8, I tried to keep the changes as sane as possible.

There are some reports that your script messed up symbols on some articles. You might want to fix that. As noted, the codebase precedes UTF-8 and we've had this exact problem come up before.

Fixed...latin-1 is magic.

Hey, sorry for bumping, but would you be willing to release some form of the script you used, Sqrfrk? I would find it extremely useful, not only to quickly fix any stray outdated links I found, such as one on InTheStyleOf, but in case I have any outdated sinfest links hanging around elsewhere.

I hope you guys don't mind me turning this into an all-purpose "outbound link fixer-upper" mega-thread (I totally didn't think things through when creating the page originally): Brawl in the Family has also restructured its links such that the way it was done originally, it only points to the author's comments about a particular comic and not the comic itself.

edited 15th Aug '16 9:09:35 PM by dotchan

If anything, just holler for a name change once you figured out what kind of cleanup thread it is. Also, this may be a case of having to talk to the authors of the comics. If they don't want their comic pages generally linked, we need to respect that. We can still trope the page, have a basic image of each character in their character pages, but that's not the same thing as literally linking their comics itself.

Who do I holler to for this name change?

It doesn't matter "who", you just simply press the yellow icon on any post in this thread. That lets you holler a post(essentially reporting it). You're basically letting the moderation know that you need the name changed to reflect the changes of this thread.

Also - Youtube links often end up dead because of a variety of reasons. Please police them regularly in the pages you watch.

Another one: Garfield

edited 18th Aug '16 6:04:15 PM by dotchan

• 1 to the to do list: Nip and Tuck

Axe Cop has restructed at least its "Ask Axe Cop" section, if not the entire comic archive.

Haven't explored any functionality to the ¿new? backend being used here. Is there an API available for use to automate link updates?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Meanwhile, more link restructuring reporting: Playing to Win, Sirlin's site about game strategy, has restructured.