User:GoldenRing

Update
How long have I been away? I forget. I got a new laptop and a new phone and neither of them had the requisite login credentials. I've moved house twice and the new place has loads that needs doing. Life has just got in the way.

The other day, I found my old phone in a bag in the garage and thought, "Hey, that's got the MFA code generator I need to login to enwiki on it!" So I borrowed my old laptop back from my son to get the password and here we are.

I don't propose to ask to be re-sysopped any time soon. I'm going to edit, lurk and comment for a bit. I'm sure lots has changed around here in the time I've been away.


 * Have just noticed I was inactive too long to request resysop in any case. I guess I'm now a "former admin".

My Username
My username is something I've come to regret a bit, since I wear a silver ring these days. I've also been accused of some sort of association with Sauron.

A Plea to the Vandals
Could we at least have a bit of wit in the vandalism? If I had a dollar for every new editor who thought it was funny to insert 'butt' or 'dickhead' randomly into articles, I'd be a rich man. It seems this sort of 'humour' is ever new. If even ClueBot can spot it, it's pretty dumb.

Tools
As well as editing English Wikipedia, I also develop and maintain a couple of tools.

WRCP
The recent change patrol tool is at Wikimedia Tool Labs. This tool is a new development and feedback and suggestions are very welcome at User:GoldenRing/WRCP.

Current plans for future development include:
 * Supporting more wikis - at first other language wikipedias, but any wiki will be possible.

MoveStats
The movestats tool is also hosted at Tool Labs. This tool is meant to aid in identifying certain types of vandals, who register a new account and carry out many page moves quickly. It has also expanded a bit to include stats on edits by new editors. Feedback and suggestions are very welcome at User:GoldenRing/MoveStats.

WordCount
Install this by adding: importScript('User:GoldenRing/wordcount.js'); to your common.js. This adds a new button to the header of each page, near the 'Read', 'Edit' and 'View history' buttons (possibly under a menu called 'More' if you have certain gadgets enabled) called 'Word count'. Clicking this (or using its shortcut key, Alt+Shift+C) will add a word count to every heading in the current page.

Word counts do not include:
 * Page navigation sections ("From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" and so on)
 * Invisible text (anything matched by jQuery's  selector)
 * Struck-through text.
 * Timestamps (anything matched by the 'Covert timestamps to local time' gadget, or the output of that gadget).

This script is quite new and bug reports are appreciated.

Generate Diffs
Install this by adding: importScript('User:GoldenRing/generate-diffs.js'); to your common.js. This does two things:
 * It adds a checkbox next to revisions in user contributions pages.
 * It adds an input field and a "Copy diffs to clipboard" button at the top of page history and user contribution pages. Clicking the button will generate a string of diff links, paste that string into the input field and copy it to the clipboard (it seems that having a visible input field is necessary for this to work for security reasons).

The diffs are ordered in the reverse of whatever order jQuery selectors return them; I think this will end up as chronological order, but it's not been tested much.

This script has only been tested on whatever version of Chrome I'm running on Windows and Ubuntu at present, with the Vector skin. Reports of problems on other browser / OS / skin combinations are welcome, though I'm not sure when I'll get to look at them.

Support on older browsers is likely to be quite limited. You will probably get the string copied to the input field and the content of the field selected, but you will likely have to copy the string to the clipboard yourself. There doesn't seem to be a lot that can be done about this, short of using a Flash applet to do the copy and I'm just not going there. Either get a modern browser or press Ctrl+C yourself.