User talk:Joram

User talk:RobinHood70
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Feel free to practice editing in the sandbox and don't hesitate to contact one of our mentors if you need any help. Have fun! -- Sarikitty 05:56, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Thx, Sarikitty.

Thanks

Thanks for that. Looks like I've had too much Christmas cheer and not enough Template practise! –rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 13:01, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Seems we're cross-talking. You're welcome. And there's no such thing as 'too much Christmas cheer'! Joram 13:04, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm at my sister's house along with three kids under the age of 5, one of whom got a drum kit for Christmas. Come to think of it, that's more likely to be causing my lack of concentration! –rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 13:10, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Haha. Repeat after me: 'I love the holidays!' Joram 13:20, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

Category Sort Orders

Before I forget... I saw you adding explicit sort orders to the categories on some templates and documentation pages the other day. That shouldn't be necessary here (see this). Were the pages sorting incorrectly or was it an instinctive change - I've made similar changes myself without thinking. –rpeh •T•C•E• 21:39, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

The /Doc pages were appearing under D. I should have used {{BASEPAGENAME}} as other pages do but I didn't think of it until I was almost done. I didn't feel an urgent need to rack up my edit count by fixing them, the manual names are ok for now. Joram 21:46, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

User:Joram/He

I see you are trying to circumvent the links on Special:Wantedpages created by ifexist... the problem is those links are created for a reason. When the page whose existence you check for is created, the page that contains the ifexist function has to be reparsed. If there's no link on Special:Wantedpages, that won't happen, and you'll get the cached version which still says the other page doesn't exist. -- Nx / talk 22:07, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

I just tested the first version, and indeed it doesn't create a link, but it also doesn't update correctly when the page is created. -- Nx / talk 22:15, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

That's a problem. Rpeh was looking for a way to do this for the {{Faction}} template so I was playing around. I had hoped Nephele had worked around the issue but hadn't thought about caching. I guess we'll have to cope with the redlinks or do what rpeh said and get rid of the ifexist check. Thanks for the input. Joram 22:26, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, we discussed this on Template talk:Exist, basically until they fix wikipedia:bugzilla:12019 the only options are to stop relying on Wantedpages (WP disables it even, since it's not terribly useful, and it's probably a resource hog) or stop using ifexist. I'm in favor of the former. -- Nx / talk 22:41, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Before we upgraded to 1.14 and before the Tamriel Rebuilt and Stirk mods got added, the Wanted Pages list was down to less than 50 entries, so it was a genuinely useful list of things that needed doing or fixing. I know it's never going to get back to that level again, but it has still let me find things that are broken. And tonight I got it back down under 1,000 entries! –rpeh •T•C•E• 22:46, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Thx Nx, I read that discussion when I started testing but it seems not as well as I should have. Joram 22:53, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Wanted Pages in User Space

No - they're excluded explicitly on UESP. It was something I asked Nephele to tweak when she was doing her big set of updates (I don't know where - probably on her talk page or the AN somewhere). Since a lot of user pages contained broken links, I wanted them excluded since it was filling the WP list up with a load of links that would never be created. –rpeh •T•C•E• 22:40, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

I was starting to suspect that. That test was just doomed from the start, see above. Joram 22:43, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

(ec) I used "what links here" and caching to see if a link is created, so it doesn't matter (I assume Nephele simply filtered out the user namespace on wantedpages, that wouldn't affect the actual creation of links). And the results were pretty conclusive (although without delete rights I can't do extensive testing). -- Nx / talk 22:44, 7 January 2010 (UTC)

Have a Cookie

You have been given a cookie! Your dedication and diligence to the wiki has not gone unnoticed. A user has seen the progress you've made, and has given you a cookie because of it. Good work! The user had the following to say: It was fun working with you on the {{Faction}} re-write, and on several other templates. It's good to have some more people who know their template-fu! May there be many more collaborations. –rpeh •T•C•E• 23:20, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. It was fun for me too. I must say MetaTemplate makes templates alot nicer to work with. ‒ Joram↝Talk 06:49, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

א

I hope you didn't mind me editing your sandbox earlier but I was on a kill-the-redundant-template binge, as you could probably tell. I've got another one for you to kill: Template:Oblivion Places Inns Trail is no longer used. It might be a good idea to take all the trails out of there because I'm going to go on another anti-trail binge. rpeh •T•C•E• 19:04, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Didn't mind at all, I'll add a note to the top in case it happens again. ‒ Joram↝Talk 19:08, 17 January 2010 (UTC)

Your Opinion is Sought

If you have a minute, would you mind casting your eye over Template:Sandbox (specifically this version, if somebody has cleaned it up) plus Template:Book Summary/Lore and Template:Book Summary/Game. The idea is to split the Lore and Game versions of the template into sub-templates to avoid an all-encompassing switch statement requiring {{!}} and {{!-}} all the time. My feeling is that this method should be more efficient as well, as being much easier to read, as there are many fewer templates used. Any thoughts? rpeh •T•C•E• 13:29, 30 January 2010 (UTC)

Three hours ago I thought I had a minute, I was wrong. :) The changes look great, they're much simpler- I glanced at them and understood what you were doing in minutes, the original not so much. They'll for sure be more efficient because they don't call {{!}} and {{!-}} repeatedly. I skipped {{Book Summary}} when I came to it because you were working on it. Looks like you did a great job. ‒ Joram↝Talk 02:48, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Thanks! I'm going to check one last thing then I'll make it live. I'm looking at a similar split for the NPC Summary but that's based more on different games than specifically making things easier. I ran into a couple of little niggles though. Next time I'll ask you to cast your eye over it before I jump in. Maybe I'll try the combined Place Summary next instead. rpeh •T•C•E• 07:35, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Creature Summary should be modified the same way too. It's on my list for 'Round 2'. Thank you for the compliment on your user page! ‒ Joram↝Talk 08:07, 31 January 2010 (UTC)

Hover: Broken

{{Hover}} is currently broken whenever "<" or ">" are used (see OB:Dremora for an example). I figured I would point it out to you since templates are your current focus. –Elliot ^talk 03:43, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

The only thing you can do is escape the '<' or '>' with '&lt;' and '&gt;' or use metatemplates to do it. You can't use {{<}} and {{>}} tho, those are disallowed in page names. Example: 1 Random Leveled Mysticism spell ‒ Joram↝Talk 06:20, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

I assume it is a problem with the #expression tag or something along the lines. I have no intention of fixing it, since I am not really concerned with it; I just thought I would mention it to open ears. –Elliot ^talk 07:30, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

It's an HTML problem. It sees '<' or '>' as the start or end of a tag. I ran HotnBOThered on it last night and Oblivion:Dremora is the only problem page. You could use #replace on {{{1}}} but that could break tags like <br> and <sup>. I fixed it on the page, thx for the report. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:34, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Dead-end Descriptions

Those last 6 description pages are still being used on Daggerfall:Quests. The save/load code has a mechanism that makes it look for a /description page if it can't find a variable called "description" and those six are still loaded because the quest pages haven't been created yet. It's a pain, but hopefully one of our DF experts will create them soon. rpeh •T•C•E• 08:45, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Should I create stub pages for the 6 quest pages with just {{Stub}} and the description, or is there a reason not to do that? ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:36, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

Sorry - I missed that question. Might be an idea. I'm not a DF expert though and there may be some reason why people like Uniblab and PLRDLF haven't done it. rpeh •T•C•E• 15:02, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Attributes

I forgot to put the example on the Template:Attributes back to use just PAGENAME - the only fix that was really needed was the 0|1 switch in the first line. rpeh •T•C•E• 21:55, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

That fixed it for Oblivion pages but I think would have made Morrowind pages use Oblivion as the namespace. That line should make Template and User use Oblivion by default. The problem was that there was a #switch for {{{namesp}}} when it might not be defined. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:58, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Navimg Template

Sorry but I had to revert your changes to {{Navimg}}. It was causing the ol' "UNIQ37bc1c783453b1a9-cleanspace-00000002-QINU??UNIQ37bc1c783453b1a9-item-3--QINU? Fortify Intelligence" type problem on Ingredients - with the number of places #load was used the page looked pretty spectacular!

The longer term tweak will probably be to not save the whole EffectLink call, but that will mean tweaking {{Ingredient Summary}} and {{Ingredient Entry}}, which will be a rather tricker task. It might even be worth harmonizing the MW and OB effects and picking up the icon from somewhere else. If you see what I mean. Anyway - I thought I should explain the revert. rpeh •T•C•E• 15:00, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

I believe just removing the cleanspace tags and extra spacing will fix it but I'll have a look at it later when I get home. ‒ Joram↝Talk 19:13, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Well that was an exercise in demonstrating how stupidity and the butterfly effect interact very well. I think.. or at least hope.. that the problem is fixed for the moment so I'll try to reproduce and solve the Ingredient issue 'by hook or by crook' in my sandboxes. Not saving may be the way to go but I'll know more as I follow the entire process through. I think I left includeonly tags in my version originally, it may be that removing those as well will solve the problem. After that disaster, I'm not going to do it in Template space until I'm confident it'll work as advertised. ‒ Joram↝Talk 21:55, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

Now that I'm reminded how it works I agree that not saving the entire EffectLink call is a better approach. I don't see any nice way of switching away from it tho. The best ways I can think of are:

1. We add an extra parameter for each effect so we would call {{Ingredient Summary}} with eff1=Drain Attribute|eff1title=Drain Intelligence, the title being optional as in {{MW EffectLink}}.
2. We take eff1 as optionally a link or plain text then parse out the link and title in {{Ingredient Summary}} and save them as eff1 and eff1title. The parsing should be fairly easy I think.

Once we have the link and title we call {{MW EffectLink}} or a generic EffectLink if we go that way. It'll mean an extra template call for each {{Ingredient Entry}} but it'll also be more flexible for any future changes. I think I can create something that'll handle the interim and cope with anything coming in eff1; I'll play around and post it in User:Joram/Youd with examples in User:Joram/Tet when done. ‒ Joram↝Talk 00:05, 20 February 2010 (UTC)

#Inherit Problem

Looks like there's a bit of an issue with the #inherit keyword. Take a look at Oblivion:Priest of Arkay. All four priests appear with the same refid and baseid, but if you look at the source you'll see that all four were specified correctly. It seems as if the sub-template that picks up the ids using #inherit always picks up the first case.

The workaround I'm thinking of is to pass through all the necessary parameters to the sub-template, but that's a bit annoying. I wondered if you had any better ideas before I make the change? It's {{NPC Summary}}, {{NPC Summary/Oblivion Header}} and {{NPC Summary/Oblivion Main}}. rpeh •T•C•E• 14:19, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

I was going to see if the Place Summary subs did the same but right now I'm getting nothing at all so I'm trying to figure that out first. (Edit: I realize now I was getting nothing because it doesn't just remember passed parameters between calls, it remembers what wasn't passed too.) I don't see any other way than passing the parameters but if I figure something out in testing I'll post back. ‒ Joram↝Talk 22:58, 22 February 2010 (UTC) Edit: 23:21, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

That was unexpected! Pass the sub-template any one parameter and it seems to correctly inherit the rest. It could be that it's more specific than that, like only if it's the first parameter inherited or only if it overrides an inherited parameter, but I'm not going to play forever. If we ever hear from User:Nephele again we should ask her to make the source code public. ‒ Joram↝Talk 23:32, 22 February 2010 (UTC)

Spell Templates

You may have noticed some new templates and a couple of new pages that I've created. Specifically, {{Spell Definition}}, {{MW Spell Effect}} and {{MW Spell}}; and Morrowind:Spells/Fireball, Morrowind:Spells/Firefist and Morrowind:Spells/Panacea. The idea is to eliminate redundancy and improve accuracy on pages like this and this, which list spells and their effects.

So the question is... what do you think? It'll mean creating about 880 more pages for each spell then re-jigging the other pages to use the new template. The other question is: what do you think of the templates? Can they benefit from the Joram touch? I know there's going to need to be a tweak so that the template doesn't always reference the Morrowind:Spells page, but I didn't want to get into that too much before getting a second opinion. rpeh •T•C•E• 14:45, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed actually. It's one of the things I wish they'd implement is 'Watch for pages created in x namespace'. Recent Changes'll get you there sort of but it's not the same.

I think the templates look really good and they're a great idea. Some of them could have been made with subpages and #splitargs calls but there's no pressing reason to do that- it's much easier to understand as written. I don't see any other 'Joram touches' leaping out at me. Oh and I don't see the need for 880 more pages for each spell- I think one for each spell with a total of 880 should be fine. ;) Are there any cases where spell names overlap, like Fireball from one place does 5-20 but Fireball from somewhere else does 10-35?

Would the other namespaces benefit from something similar? I think Oblivion would. Morrowind:Spells could then be changed to {{NS_PARENT}}:Spells or use ifexist to check {{NAMESPACE}}:Spells then {{NS_PARENT}}:Spells. ‒ Joram↝Talk 23:29, 1 March 2010 (UTC)

I was going to use subpages and splitargs but I decided that since there's a maximum of 8 effects it was easier to do it like this. It can always be changed later though.

Forgive my grammatical inexactitude!

There are a few cases where we'll have to tweak names. There are several spells with identical names: Blind, Cure Blight Disease, Cure Common Disease, Fire Barrier, Frost Shield, for instance. There are also some with names that won't be valid on the wiki, like Deadly Poison [Ranged].

One thing I'm going to tweak before I start is that each spell page should be a redirect rather than a full page, otherwise there will be a lot of spells that show up on Orphaned Pages, which would be annoying.

Other namespaces could definitely use the same mechanism, which is why I changed {{Spell Definition}} to have a non-specific name. I don't want to to #ifexist checks though. Having just got the Wanted Pages list under 500 so it all fits on one page, I'd hate to see hundreds of spell pages clogging things up. I'm probably going to add a namespace param to force the template to use, say, Morrowind when used on a TR3 page. It'll be a bit annoying but on the other hand it should help in cases where mods/expansions add other spells with the same name. rpeh •T•C•E• 11:06, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Okay, that sounds like a good approach. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 18:59, 2 March 2010 (UTC)