Countdown talk:Recap checking project

Welcome

Good idea having this page. I've started to add links to recaps concerning octochamps, as all other linked recaps are now for series 50 and earlier, and my dictionary covers series 51 and beyond (if I've read it right). Just done Ross Allatt's first, to see how it looks. Presumably Viscounts should be included too. Drawoh 08:02, 20 September 2007 (BST)

Great stuff. Good to keep setting ourselves attainable targets. Soo 12:42, 20 September 2007 (BST)

Edit conflicts

Does the Wiki editor prevent two people editing a page or a page section simultaneously? If not, we have the possibility of two of us fixing the same recap. Drawoh 11:22, 20 September 2007 (BST)

It doesn't (in fact it's not possible to.) so that is indeed a worry. Perhaps we should set aside a series each? I'd be happy to take on Series 51. Soo 12:42, 20 September 2007 (BST)

I'll go for series 55 then. Would've offered series 56, but I haven't watched it all yet. Drawoh 12:53, 20 September 2007 (BST)

Dumper bug

Thanks for the info about the bug after recap dumper. I've found a few where that's happened, and sure enough, the stuff is all there. Recap dumper is still required on two of the series 55 octochamp programmes, however; the bug doesn't apply to these. Drawoh 18:05, 22 September 2007 (BST)

Misdeclarations in letters rounds

A convention which I've seen done by one other person once, and which I've also followed once, seems ok to me - have the usual cross, followed by a superscripted suffix indicating the incorrect count declared. e.g. BOLLOCKS ☓⁷ Drawoh 18:12, 22 September 2007 (BST)

Suggestion for handling tie-breaks

I suggest that these handled slightly differently in two ways. First, a slight difference in the wording in the preamble, see Episode 4319 for an example. Second, when giving details of the tie-break conundrum, this can use the standard R-conundrum format, but the round number could be shown as TB, rather than 16, and no entries are made in scores, either for the contestants or for the maximum. Drawoh 16:05, 23 September 2007 (BST)

I agree with all of that except for showing the contestants' scores - they are shown on the programme and I suspect omitting them is likely to cause more confusion than it avoids. I will compile a list of episodes with tie breaks at some point soon and update the pages accordingly. Soo 16:19, 23 September 2007 (BST)

OK. I go along with that. Once the 4319 recap has been posted, can you run dumper on it, and then I'll tidy that one up while it's still fresh in my mind. Drawoh 16:24, 23 September 2007 (BST)

Round dump added, as you probably saw already. Soo 11:56, 27 September 2007 (BST)

Stile Guide. I'm thinking about a stile guide. I did say thinking, which does not necessarily mean writing :)

One thing that would help in such a guide is to be able to write something like: R-letters| 6|LTBIEIDNR|BINDER |BLINDER |TRILBIED* |14|30|44 preceded and followed by two curly brackets, and get it displayed as written, rather than have it converted. Is there a simple way of switching conversion on and off within a page? Drawoh 10:12, 24 September 2007 (BST)

Anything between <nowiki> and </nowiki> won't get formatted. Soo 18:02, 24 September 2007 (BST)

Thanks. Just the sort of control instruction I was wanting. Drawoh 18:32, 24 September 2007 (BST)

Specials dictionary

All special games were recorded end of 2002/mid-2003, so NODE would have been the authority used at the time.

Spam question for Soo, or anyone else

I've been trying a dummy edit on a few pages, one of which is episode 3978, in order to get the output of the recap dumper displayed. Show preview works well, but Save page displays what is said to be a Spam Guard, inviting me to type a couple of words. Is this genuine? Or is it itself spam? Am I concerned, needlessly? Drawoh 20:31, 28 September 2007 (BST)

There is a spam guard system in place, because we were getting quite a volume of spam. It only kicks in when external links are added (I think) so it shouldn't be popping up for any normal edits. I tried the episode you suggested and it saved fine. If the problem happens again, you can respond to the spam query safely but let me know - if it starts happening too often then I'll look into replacing it with a different one. Soo 00:07, 29 September 2007 (BST)

Thanks for response. It happened with me twice yesterday when running a dummy edit in order to display a page correctly after a dumper run has resulted in a blank page. Presumably, the external link which the spam guard is referring to is the link to the recap. Just tried another, 4023, and again got the Spam guard warning. Accepted it this time, and all worked ok. I was probably being a little over cautious, as the warning was reminiscent of a trojan I had a few months ago (and which I've successfully cleared). Drawoh 09:07, 29 September 2007 (BST)

I know the poker article on the Wiktionary gets spammed a lot, people (or bots) keep linking to onlin play sites. Mglovesfun 21:50, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Important notice

I've read the notice, and will stop work on the programmes of the series 54 octochamps. I'm happy to assist with series 50 and earlier, but don't have the appropriate dictionary. For the later series, the only time that the dictionary had been really necessary has been the ones for which dumper made a cock-up, and didn't give all the letters for the letter rounds. So maybe it's not so important to have it. Do you want me to attempt any of the series 50 and earlier progs? Or is it better to wait and see what happens? Drawoh 17:17, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

Feel free to work on the Series 50 ones and just skip over any where the dumper has completely cocked up. Hopefully it won't take me too long to integrate Jim's data, which is in a very nice format. Soo 19:54, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

The Series 51 data should go in tomorrow unless something disasterous happens. Series 52 onwards will follow as soon as I get Jim's data. I'll list the limitations of his data at the time but they are minor -- this will save us a huge amount of work. Soo 01:38, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

I look forward to seeing what's reported after I return from weekend away on Monday. Drawoh 09:04, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Just to see how it worked, it tried one of the non-octochamp games in Series 51. Worked well, even though recap had errors in two numbers rounds solutions. However, see comment regarding TTT1 and R14 (both comments would've applied even using the system pre Jim's data). Drawoh 23:44, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

TTT problems

There are many episode pages with missing, incomplete or duplicated teatime teaser information. Some of these are Dumper's fault, and others are the fault of the recap writers for not including the information.

Worse still, Dumper has been adding broken TTT data after the original posting of the episode data, and not re-adding to Category:Unchecked recaps or anything of that nature. And so it might take a bit of work to find them all. I think what we need to do is:

• Start Category:Recaps with missing or incomplete Teatime Teasers
• Give Dumper the task of looking through the recaps starting from when TTTs were introduced and assigning this category as appropriate
• Program Dumper to add episodes to this category when processing recaps if it couldn't completely make out the information on them

-- Smjg 21:24, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

Humm, it shouldn't have edited any articles that were marked checked - that must be a bug. I must admit TTTs are low on my list of priorities, I will put my mind to the problem more thoroughly at some point in the future. It's likely we can recover all of the missing TTTs but it might take a while. Soo 11:21, 27 December 2007 (UTC)

The category now exists, I will eventually get round to putting articles in it. Charlie 17:45, 24 April 2008 (BST)

"Eventually" Charlie 03:00, 1 May 2009 (BST)