SPCodex:Pumpkin Patch

Welcome to the Pumpkin Patch!
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Migration to new server

Welcome to our shiny new server! For those who don't know me, I'm MusikAnimal and I founded this site.

What happened?

Long story short, our old wiki provider was verging on collapsing, so we had to move somewhere. When I started SPCodex, I chose to use a wiki provider to avoid having to do maintenance and upgrades, but as time has proven, that decision was a mistake. We've had a lot of issues left and right, and our provider was slow to address them. I work for Wikipedia and happen to be an "expert" per-se in MediaWiki – the software that powers the site. So why don't I just host the dang thing myself, eh? As it turns out, it was pretty simple, and I'm confident we're in a better place now.

Should we be worried?

No! This is mostly good news. Hopefully you'll find things to be running more smoothly than before. Our old provider hosted thousands of wikis, which is why it had a hard time tending to my support requests, not to mention the general unreliability. Now that I full control over our server, it should mean more stability as I'm able to adjust things to fit our needs and tend to problems more quickly. Nonetheless, if you see any issues, please let me know!

The bad part is that it's no longer free. I will be billed monthly. For the time being, I will cover all costs, which is only around 30 USD a month. However depending on if we have to increase our resources, I may face higher costs in the future, and be forced to occasionally ask for donations. I will avoid this as much as possible. Additionally, while I'll accept them, I do not feel our editors should have to pay anything, as you're already donating your time by contributing. Anyway, we'll worry about that if and when the time comes, which is hopefully never!

Notable changes

Some things are different now, hopefully for the better:

• Communication uses the DiscussionTools extension instead of Structured Discussions. The latter is poorly maintained and I don't see a true need for it. Hopefully the new discussion system is intuitive enough. However as a result of this change, all previous discussions have been lost. I can try to convert them to the new system if anyone wants.

  EDIT: The reply tool feature is strangely not working. I'm trying to figure it out. Sorry!

• Our URLs no longer contain the /wiki portion. I.e. a link to "Today" will be simply https://spcodex.wiki/Today. Much nicer, but it's possible there are bugs somewhere and I just haven't found them yet.
• We can host our own bot now, which I plan to power our social media posts. This was something that has been in the works for some time now. See SPCodex:Social media for more information.
• Tour history pages now show maps on the mobile version of the site.
• We are hosted in New York City instead of England, so most users should now see faster speeds.

I lost my account!

It's still here! Please contact me so I can assist you in getting your account back. Let me know what your username is in the message. Our old provider would not share user data with us, so while your account is still here, your old password, email, and preferences have been reset. You do have the option of creating a new account, after which I may be able to merge your old account into the new one.

Thanks!

That's all for now. As always, thanks to our editors, readers and supporters for making SPCodex possible. I look forward to watching SPCodex continue to grow for many years to come.

Cheers, — MusikAnimal ^talk 04:06, 14 June 2023 (UTC)

archive.org links are broken

Not sure what's happened, but apparently using the archive.org link from a tour date is not working anymore - it will redirect to the main SP landing page with no date filter active.

Can we please update the template's archive.org link with the following format: https://archive.org/details/SmashingPumpkins?query=date%3A1996-05-03&tab=collection East79 (talk) 10:06, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

P.S. Also, not sure if there's a specific discussion space related to bugs, so feel free to move this to a more appropriate place.

 Done This is indeed the best place to report any issues with the site. Thank you for noticing this problem and reporting it! Fixed :) — MusikAnimal ^talk 15:12, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Discography page now fully automated, and other news

After many hours of work, I'm pleased to report that The Smashing Pumpkins discography should – aside from minute copy edits here and there – will require no further updates. One of the frustrations of running your own wiki with such a small team of editors is that data duplicated across different articles can become out of sync. The SP discography page was especially frustrating because of all the chart positions, etc. From now on, all of this data is pulled from the respective article pages, so you do not need to update The Smashing Pumpkins discography anymore. For example, if you see a chart position is wrong for the song "Rocket", you would fix this at Rocket in the Charts section.

In addition, I'd like to announce that chart history data is now more or less completely comprehensive. We have more data on SP charts and positions than any site, including Wikipedia. We can now run cool queries like "how many top 10 hits did SP have in 1996?" (though most of us could answer that off the top of our heads, lol). In addition, we also have the dates that a song or album peaked on the chart. This is now surfaced in the Today in history section of the Main Page.

I hope you enjoy these new features! As always. thanks for reading and participating in this wiki, and if you have questions/concerns please don't hesitate to ask. Warm regards, — MusikAnimal ^talk 18:47, 1 August 2023 (UTC)

Acoustic songs sorting

Proposed this a while ago but want to bump it. Would it be possible to add more columns to the tables on each tour page (e.g. by band, specific tour, year, musician, etc.) for whether or not the song was performed acoustic (or piano)? It would be great to have a handy place where we can see all the songs that have been performed acoustically, and how often. 192.200.148.88 21:36, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

Apologies for taking so long to reply! Back when you first proposed this, I built but never quite finished the Tour search form. It mostly works… let me know what you think :) For example this query lists all the shows "Disarm" was performed acoustic on the Infinite Sadness tour. If you wanted a list of all songs that were performed acoustic, based on whatever criteria, that's what the "Group by song" option is supposed to do. However as you'll see that doesn't quite work yet. I'll try to revisit it soon.

Hope this helps, and thanks for caring, — MusikAnimal ^talk 23:26, 22 October 2024 (UTC)