Issues with the "Tag:" pages (this won't be fun)

Discussion in 'Wiki Discussion' started by M_Sipher, Jul 20, 2017.

  1. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    Okay. I'm aware that what I'm about to go into constitutes "giant pain in the ass". But I'm'a go ahead because I think this is important.

    I get that the "Tag:____" pages are populated by a template thingy that culls info and automatically places it. And given the sheer amount of items in the game, sure, gonna want something like that... but there are two major issues I have with these pages that I think need addressing. Whether these are addressable within the existing template or not, I dunno. But the "we gotta make this accessible for everyone" editor in me is screaming.

    The sorting of the items is a giant mess. Really think the entries need to be alphabetized by name at a default. I don't know what the template uses to sort stuff, but the end results are really hard to read. Especially since the Pixel Printer menus are alphabetized by name. Actually, it'd also be really convenient if they could do like some other tables and re-sort by category. Start sorted by name, but click a column header to re-sort by object type or size. Speaking of...

    Since the Tags dictate Tenants, and block size is used to determine requirements and priority and etc... these lists really really ought to have the items' block sizes listed. If I need 24 Humanbunker "blocks" or whatever, and the area I wanna put that Tenant in has limited space, I'd like to be able to calculate what to make first and not have to guess "is this enough". Now this might mean going into every item page and manually adding that info after adjusting whatever templates are there first to allow that info to be added. Personally I don't mind compiling and plugging in that info at all (this kinda shit was my paid job for several years), but I am so not up to adjusting templates on that kind of scale in order to accommodate that info.

    So uh. Yeah. What can we do about that?

    Thinking about it... maybe instead of altering an existing template, make a new "Tenant Tags" template? Something that makes a standard chart-like deal that automatically plugs in the tag types but needs a manual block size plugged in? Then alter the gigantic "Tag" template used on the Tag pages to read that? This would have the added benefit of making the Tenant Tags of the items more noticeable as and Important Game Thing, which they are.

    {{Tenantobject|cabintable|10}}

    Just spitballing. I'll mock up a graphic later at home if needed.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Jul 20, 2017
  2. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    So those tag pages are actually queries which pull data from both the data page (raw game dump) and the article page for each object.

    I understand wanting to make it more 'friendly' for editing for everyone - but tag page lists were specifically designed that way so that information only has to live in one place - which isn't those pages. I don't want to deconsolodate info more than necessary.

    I do agree that number of blocks would be helpful to see, but the appropriate place to 'hold' that data is the article pages. Then it can be passed to the tag list or used other places if we want via queries. I'm not against adding a 'blocks' parameter or something into infoboxes, but I can't think of a way short of manually checking each object and entering the value in every article. Storage objects use something similar to manually define 'width' and 'height' to calculate storage efficiency in their article, so those are 'done' already.

    Sorting the list entries by letter was extremely easy - they all use the same template, so I just added that sort value to the column inside the template - that's a good suggestion.
     
  3. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    Sure, I don't think I was quite clear enough, but that's likely because I can get coding concepts and intentions even if the actual mechanicals are super-obtuse to me, so I probably explained it badly.

    But yeah, I meant the block size info would be stored on the individual items' page, and the Tag: list-pages would pull from there. I just wasn't sure what would be involved in getting that info onto the item pages.

    And if manual plugging it in is the only way? *shrug* I'm up for it.

    I'm not kidding. I used to transcribe and sort JRPG stats from developer documents and sort them into charts for guidebooks. And that was in Word docs. I've been doing long slow manual alterations to the Transformers wiki for years. Like this page, where every faction-symbol bullet point used to be a simple *. That required manual replacement... and there's 30 years of toys to do this to. And I did it.

    If you can set it up, I can fill it out.
     
  4. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    Alright, you think 'blocks' is an appropriate parameter name?
     
  5. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    Sounds good. I'd use "Block size" in the table column header to be sure it's clear to the reader what's being counted, but for the guts of the coding, "blocks" works.
     
  6. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    You should be all set to start plugging in the data.
     
  7. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    Sweet.

    I am though looking at the items that are completely removed from the game assets and wondering if there's any way to mark them in the lists as gonezola. I'm not keen on removing them completely from the lists because I believe that even this old deleted stuff should be discoverable through semicasual browsing, but... I kinda feel like there needs to be SOMETHING in the Tag list that indicates "uh, yeah, you really actually can't get this item anymore even through /admin".

    It's not a big deal if there's not a good way to note that outside of the actual item page.
     
  8. M_Sipher

    M_Sipher Oxygen Tank

    Also... is there something to be done about this?

    upload_2017-7-25_21-56-1.png

    The "Description" column is heinously small, mashing the text there into an unreadable morass, while Tags is far larger than it ever needs to be. I was looking at the code involved in these tables and it was... denser than I'm used to. But can we set some column widths rather than let the computer dictate them?
     
  9. Katzeus

    Katzeus Chucklefisherman Chucklefish

    Let me look into that and get back to you
    Also this
     

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