Taerel Updates and Change Logs

Welcome to the world of Taerel.

TPretty much Taerel: The Twilight Age, and Taerel: The Awakening Age, are an world set after a vampire outbreak. The Awakening age is set at just after to 415 years after the outbreak. The Shattering Age is set from 415 to 915 years after the outbreak.

It was very much inspired by "Apokalyx, I Am Legend, Stake Land, and Daybreakers. The setting is free to read in its entirety. Be warned, the setting has adult content not okay for people under 15 and may have unmarked triggering content.

Link: https://taerel.com/w/Taerel_Worldbuilding_Wiki

This journal is for updates and change logs for the Taerel wiki. Please read the updates from top downwards. Higher on list = newer. The comment section will be open for Taerel discussion only. Spam, scam and offtopic will be removed.

05/07/2026: Controllers: The update

I have updated all place pages so that the controllers templates are moved the controllers from the infobox to a dropdown just above the nearby places box. This iso that the infobox is not so long.

This will be an help on mobile as to avoid long scroll thoughs. On desktop, it means that the text will be less pushed into longer paragahs as the infobox is not so long.

09/01/2025: I broke my wiki - ChatGPT had to help me

Basicly, I spent over an hour trying to fix my wiki and broke it many times. I wanted to remove all the www redircts and remove the google sites hosted page as I replaced it with a self hosted and nicer page. Look at that in https://taerel.com

Google sites is ugly after all and I had to work with ChatGPT and Google Gemini to get a nice landing page how I wanted it. I wanted it to look like my wiki after all, but still have the same layout as the google sites page.

Removing the www and getting MediaWiki's short URLs to work again was a nightmare of trying tons of diffant configs and non works. Google gemini was useless in this. Turns out after ages and a load of prompting, ChatGPT-5 Mini knew.

I have added ChatGPT 5-o Mini's answer here in case someone wants to do the same setup.

Ubuntu version: Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS MediaWiki version: 1.43.3 PHP version: 8.3.6 (apache2handler) MariaDB version: 10.11.13-MariaDB-0ubuntu0.24.04.1

ChatGPT's answer:

Ah — finally, here’s exactly what was happening and why all your previous attempts 404’ed:

1️⃣ The root cause

Your wiki files were in:/var/www/html/Wiki/

You wanted the URLs to be under:/w/Page_Title

But your symlink was wrong:/var/www/html/w -> /var/www/html/Wiki/index.php

Notice: it pointed to the file index.php, not the folder Wiki.

2️⃣ Why this caused 404s

Apache tried to resolve /w/Page_Title.

/w pointed to a file, so /w/Page_Title doesn’t exist → 404.

Even with correct $wgScriptPath = "/w" and rewrite rules, the filesystem path didn’t exist for Apache.

All the previous rewrite attempts failed because Apache cannot rewrite URLs inside a symlink that points to a file.

3️⃣ How it was fixed

Remove the incorrect symlink:

sudo rm /var/www/html/w

Create a correct symlink to the Wiki folder:

sudo ln -s /var/www/html/Wiki /var/www/html/w

Ensure Apache rewrite rules point to index.php inside the /w directory:

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]

AcceptPathInfo On allows URLs like /w/Page_Title to be passed correctly to index.php.

✅ After these changes:

/w exists as a directory (via symlink).

/w/Page_Title → /w/index.php?titleage_Title

MediaWiki sees $wgScriptPath = "/w" and works perfectly.

So the entire problem was:

“The /w symlink pointed to a file instead of the Wiki folder.”

Once that was fixed, the wiki works with short URLs as intended.

If you want, I can draw a diagram showing how /w maps to /Wiki and the rewrite flow, which makes this crystal clear. Do you want me to do that?

Part One of Categories: The Reorganization.

The groups of Taerel have gotten a overhaul in their category systems. Gone are the large, flat categories such as "kin'toni clans in the Twilight Age" , "zu'aan tribes in the twilight age and "zu'aan cities in the Twilight age"

Now, all kin'toni clans, zu'aan tribes and zu'aan cites have a date of founding. These groups are now categorized by their century of founding and type. Categories are such as "Category:2nd-century Twilight Age kin'toni clans" and "Category:3rd-century Twilight Age zu'aan cities"

The categories are categorized in a logical tree along date: (eg "4th-century Twilight Age Groups" and type: eg "Zu'aan tribes established in the Twilight Age by century". There is a category tree to make it easier to use.

This is a step forward in categorization as it makes the wiki more easy and less overwhelming to use. There are plans to categorize groups also by province and places by province as well.

07/25/2025: Introducing: Writers: The Profiles Unveiled

The Taerel world building wiki has a new feature, just finished today. Introducing: Writer Profiles, an category just for each writers' work and with a nice profile, links section and infobox. This category is on all the pages of each writer.

It contains a short 25-50 word bio for each writer. It has an infobox listing their name, pseudonyms, location, languages, and for Taerel, their writer type, lore areas pages written, and words written. It also has links to all their outside pages.

The categories are named "[name's] contributions". It will help you find info on each writer, lead to their outside pages and let you read all pages by them. Perhaps you may like their work enough to commission them for your own work.

This feature took over 4 days to roll out as I had to categorize all pages by writer, write writer bios, and make the infoboxes. But, it is done, now. I hope you enjoy this new feature I worked hard on bringing for you.

Stevie Lambert