Forum:Moving dialogue pages away from subpages

Hey there, Tagaziel here once again with a proposal (yes, I do have a bucket of these). Recently, I've been looking into some minor aspects of SEO, and one thing caught my attentions: Dialogue pages for Fo3+ characters aren't visible on search engines. When looking for eg. Elijah's dialogue, Google and Duck Duck Go don't pull up the NVDLC01Elijah.txt page (I wonder why), but the one for The Vault as the top result. This is losing traffic to an archived site (much as I'm fond of it), and given that files like MORPH.MSG are displayed properly, a quirk on our end.

The proposal is simple: Follow The Vault's example and move the dialogue pages to (NPC name)'s dialogue or dialogue files, which will hopefully recoup some of the traffic down the line and make it easier for us to deal with long-term. Thoughts? Tagaziel ☏ 11:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Comments[]

Am all for this change, our current system is based off of how the games handle it which is downright scatterbrained because of how many formats there are. it should be one standardized format imho 11:40, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I am likewise all for at least documenting the why of the page's names someplace. As it stands, as far as I'm aware, there never was any. It appears to have happened organically. Speaking of the dialogue files, I've had this project page (User:Ant2242/Dialogue_file_format) not only about standardizing the naming but also writing up the why of the pages and verifying it's content along the way. For example our current dialogue file pages (on Nuka) adds materiel while moving it into the dialogue. Also most of the pages do not have the prompts that trigger them.--Ant2242 (talk) 15:28, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Agree. And we can make a dialog infobox that gives a quick summary and links to the characters involved with the dialog, the relevant quests, the dialog file name (Pre FO3) or the form and edid's of the dialog (FO3 and later). Perhaps even a 'see also' for other dialog pages that may have dialog from this character (for example, Grahm has his own dialog, but also has dialog as part of Meat Week. If we had to split these 2 for some reason, we could then reference one from the other). -Gilpo1 (talk) 17:03, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I like this idea, but maybe with a tweak ... I don't care for having an apostrophe in the page name/URL at all. Doing a quick look at all the games on the wiki, it seems we are allllllll over the place with how the dialog pages are handled. Personally, my favorite is how it's been handled for FO76 ... the exact name of the character's main page followed by /Dialogue or /dialogue or /dialog to make it a subpage. Or alternately, my second choice would be the same but not as a subpage: Character Name dialogue or dialog. Either of these would make it easier & consistent for a user to find - I remember having lots of trouble finding dialog I was looking for as a new FNV player. Ant, you've done some good work with the start of that project. The only thing I didn't love was the widths of some columns in your examples. Gilpo I like your ideas too, I also think each character main page should have right at the very top a template link to their dialog page. The exact file name of the dialog should be listed right at the top of the dialog page (and also the exact file name in the infobox on the character's main page as it is now but with the link corrected of course). Could we make one set of character/dialog pages for us to all play around with editing what we think should be included and how it should be displayed (detail your edit summaries please!!) ? With some exceptions, the below table is how the dialog has been handled for the different games (using "Sally" as the character's pretend name, who originally lived in Arroyo in FO2, but moved to Primm in FNV). - AngelaStuff2 (talk) 23:39, 11 June 2024 (UTC)

Looks like Sally has been all over the wasteland, huh, and maybe even crossed paths with a Vault dweller or two (or three, or four... five... six... all the Vault 76ers...). I suspect we probably won't use the current Fallout 76 dialogue format ("Character/Dialogue"), as it's apparently just as bad for SEO as the .txt format (this was a point made on Discord before Tag put up the forum). FDSMDP (talk) 23:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

Ha, yeh she's a wild child. And old. haha

Ahhh, good to know on the SEO but dang it. In that case, my proposal is "Sally dialogue". - AngelaStuff2 (talk) 02:27, 15 June 2024 (UTC)

I'm in agreement with everyone else here and would be happy to assist in the required format changes, if this is something we agree to change on an organized level. I'm a frequent GECK dialogue user so it kinda kills me to see the ".txt" mess being carried past FO2, as that's not even accurate to how the engine handles dialogue for FO3 on, since there is no "dialogue file" unless you filter and export it (and that can be incomplete, since it often doesn't account for shared dialogue or lines that are only assigned to an NPC based on voice type), not to mention quirks between individual NPCs used to export dialogue for all generic NPCs of that type, NCR troopers for example. Relying on an export format also doesn't preserve the dialogue tree structure and also leaves out information such as skill or perk checks, though that's outside the scope of this discussion, I suspect.

Another case would be characters who have multiple different NPCs for technical reasons. See James, who has five different dialogue pages because of this lmao. FDSMDP (talk) 23:18, 14 June 2024 (UTC)

We can do both, I suggest we use the format from The Vault. That is to say keep each column named as is in game with all the content as is in game. Including punctuation, spelling, spacing, and other various "errors." I've tried to make that clear in the dialogue file project pages I've drawn up. Each game has it's own unique dialogue file format and at least if we write down the why of our format it can't be forgotten.--Ant2242 (talk) 13:52, 15 June 2024 (UTC)