Topic on Extension talk:LinkFilter/Flow

I'm translating this extension, but I've never used it. What does "Special:LinksHome" do? There are several ways to translate it. I don't even know on which wikis is it used, otherwise I'd try to check.

Hi Amir, thank you for taking the time to translate LinkFilter, it's much appreciated :) Of course naturally it's preferable to install the extension in question yourself and play around with it, as documentation can only go so far; this can even uncover bugs or at least documentation shortcomings neither I nor other developers (of social tools) have yet found. As per Template:Social tools, LinkFilter should work even without SocialProfile (which a lot of people find scary to install, I dunno why!) but I'll admit it's been years since I've tested that...

Now, to answer the actual question, which is indeed a very good one! LinkFilter provides a reddit-esque workflow for managing (user-submitted) links. In a way, I'd argue it's basically "reddit but for MediaWiki", sorta; honestly, I don't think LinkFilter was ever super popular outside ArmchairGM and AGM in its original form was discontinued well over a decade ago.

So, users can submit new links (for approval) via Special:LinkSubmit; these links then go to a queue where privileged users (those w/ the linkadmin user right) can approve or reject them. Rejected links are discarded; for approved links, a page in the Link: namespace is created; this Link: page is kinda like reddit's discussion view for a link, it uses the Comments extension for providing the commenting view. (Since internally that is done via the Parser, it won't fatal if you don't have the Comments extension installed.)

The Special:LinksHome is a "home page" for all submitted and approved links, listing the following data about each link:

1. date when submitted (I think) (as a top-level h2-like header element; not a proper h2 or anything but just a stylized div tag)
2. link title, which is a clickable location to the link target via Special:LinkRedirect (I'm not sure why this is so; maybe the ArmchairGM devs wanted to eventually be able to display ads here before the user is taken to the link? It's really the only thing I can think of that'd justify the existence of the Special:LinkRedirect page.)
3. user-submitted description about the link (below the aforementioned bold link title)
4. a link to the Link: page so that users can discuss the link

I hope this helps! If you have any further questions about LinkFilter or other social tools, feel free to drop me a line here (and ping me on IRC for any time-sensitive matters).

Thanks! Is there a live wiki where this can be seen? I tried googling for ArmchairGM, and found several sites, none of which seems to have it. But I probably didn't search well...

Nah, I'm sure your google-fu is just fine; though ArmchairGM "exists", in a certain way, still at armchairgm dot fandom dot com (and the original armchairgm.com URL redirects there), it's a mere shell of what the site once was. As per the detailed history of social tools I've compiled, Wikia "dropped support" for all the extensions developed by and for ArmchairGM circa 2010 if not prior to that (de facto prior to that, at least for all the non-ArmchairGM wikis like Halopedia etc.).

It's probably fair to say that it's not being used on any (public) wikis for it was always an obscure extension that probably has/had limited use outside ArmchairGM: unlike with most wikis (including even big names like the English Wikipedia), ArmchairGM had a hard-coded Main Page that wasn't editable directly on-wiki. It wasn't 100% static, though: updates to "top stories", recent news, etc. could be made by users via dedicated workflows. LinkFilter, in my view, was a part of that puzzle: it allowed people to contribute to the "Hot Links" section on the Main Page (see this archived snapshot of the ArmchairGM Main Page from 1 July 2008 for more context). The archived snapshot also contains a link to ArmchairGM's Special:LinksHome page, although it appears to be missing the CSS.

You're probably thinking of what I'm thinking as I type this: "that sounds awfully complex, how come it's like that?", to which I have to say...I have no idea, I had no role whatsoever with these extension when they were developed actively by ArmchairGM or later Wikia. :) My guess is that this was somehow related to caching and cache-purging: ArmchairGM had a lot of "moving parts" and it was decently popular at the time, so utilizing caching was not optional, yet the developers and operators of the site wished to show as accurate, up-to-date data on the Main Page (and similar pages) as possible, so the custom Main Page (served by an extension called CustomMainPage, how clever!) was somewhat cached, as were (to my understanding) the individual bits and pieces that made up the Main Page. I guess this enabled to e.g. have the Hot Links cache(s) purged when new links were approved without purging the "main" Main Page cache or something?

It could also be related to fundamental misunderstandings of MediaWiki's inner workings and architecture: back in the day the installation instructions for Extension:SocialProfile, for example, suggested that you had to hack MediaWiki core to enable SocialProfile's AJAX functions, but this was a misunderstanding (on the original developers' part) that was later on corrected by the FOSS community.