User talk:RobinHood70/ToDo

Fix the following pages

Is this "Fix the pages after HnB" concerning quest headers with "this giver or that giver"? If so, most of the East Empire quests are like that. On that page, check 5,6,8,9,11,12, and 15. You are already listing #9 --Brf 13:56, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

I hadn't really processed the fact that it was multiple givers, just that the Start didn't encompass all the "at" text. I'm not sure what the best approach is for those cases then. I'm wondering if the best solution might not be to add a Giver2 and Start2 parameter, then modify the formatting appropriately. – Robin Hood↝talk 14:26, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

That is not "best practices", since you can have more than two givers. Your own first example has three. --Brf 15:19, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

You're quite right, but almost any solution would be a kludge. It's one of the nuisances of template programming. If we had the Loops extension, we could do it more elegantly with a #foreach loop, and I might be able to cobble something together with MetaTemplate, but it's probably not worth going either route for only a handful of exceptions. – Robin Hood↝talk 15:57, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Without loops, best practices would have you use a template for each occurrence. I am not familiar enough with templates to know whether that works, or if there is such a thing as a sub-template or embedded template. --Brf 21:11, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

That's the way we've done it for things like the Morrowind faction reactions (e.g., the "Friends & Foes" section in the table at House Telvanni), where there are multitudes of them. In a case like this, I'm a little more torn - sub-templates are more difficult to use and understand for the average user, but are certainly a better way to go for something like this. The Writ for Mavon Drenim page, amongst many others, also shows the inherent problems of only having x number of Giver/Start parameters, since there are four givers there, and for all I know, there may be other pages with more. I'm wondering if the better approach here might not be to ask Daveh to install Loops, which we could then use for this and probably some of our other templates to process parameters of the form Param1...Paramn. I suspect it'll work with MetaTemplate instead of VariablesExtension, but we'd probably have to try it to be certain. I'll get the other major template writer to have a peek at this discussion and see if he has any particular opinions. – Robin Hood↝talk 23:23, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

(←) You know, it occurs to me that we might be over-complicating this. Now that it's been redesigned to remove the "a at b" format, the only purpose of having the Giver and Start templates separate is to make sure there's a space between them. That seems like a pretty dumb way of handling the situation. While I think the Loops extension might still be useful in any number of situations, I think in this particular instance, it might make a lot more sense to simply merge the Giver and Start parameters all into a single Giver, with free-form text to display whatever you want. There's really no need for Giver and Start, much less multiple Givers and Starts. – Robin Hood↝talk 00:14, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

That makes more sense to me too. Simply have one "Giver" parameter and remove the location one.--Brf 00:58, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I just finished writing a reply on my own talk page when I decided to post here instead and discovered you've had the same idea as me :)

One parameter definitely makes sense, although there's no reason why you couldn't do "Giver=A, B and C" and "Start="D, E and F" if you really wanted to keep two params. rpeh •T•C•E• 06:26, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

I see no real reason for two parameters, if all it does is put a space between. If there was a "Giver" table cell and a separate "Start" table cell, then it would make sense. All it is doing now is complicating it when there is not the usual one-giver. Since there is only one table cell, I would think we should remove the Start param --Brf 11:49, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I think we're all in agreement. I don't expect it'll be much of a change to the code to merge the two parameters, so I'll make the needed changes later today, then run it tomorrow morning unless I run into unexpected complications. – Robin Hood↝talk 12:24, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

To follow up: I've got the code written, and in preliminary testing, it's performing beautifully. In writing it, though, I decided to create a brand new template handler to make this sort of task significantly easier in the future. That'll need more in-depth testing before I feel comfortable letting it actually save pages, so I'll take tomorrow to put it through its paces, and assuming all goes well, I'll let it run on Tuesday morning. – Robin Hood↝talk 00:13, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

If you need a place to let your bot do testing without affecting contentspace my templates and sandbox 10 should work for that.--Ghurhak gro-Demril _{or TAO}^Yes? 01:40, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the offer, but if I were going to do that, I'd use my space or the bot's. Alternately, I could switch to a wiki I use just for testing. Unfortunately, both have problems in their own way (User space is normally inviolable and my testing wiki doesn't have all our namespaces or MetaTemplate, etc.). In this particular case, it doesn't really matter, as the easiest thing to do is redirect what would have been saved and send it to a text file instead. – Robin Hood↝talk 10:11, 25 October 2010 (UTC)