User talk:CBDunkerson/Archive2

Taxobox problems
Hi CB - thanks for the note; I noticed it when I'd been editing Rudbeckia laciniata (a plant); it added a couple of extra lines in the taxobox filled with triple curly brackets with 'subdivision' (if I remember rightly) in the brackets. The dinosaur one comes up very different; it was like this a week or so ago; I was able to correct that by changing the layout to:
 * | subdivision = Saurischia Sauropodomorpha Theropoda Ornithischia (my edit)

but it seems to have been changed back again resulting in the peculiar additions at the top of the page. I must admit I don't like the new taxobox style, thought the old one was much better (and still use it when making new articles), it was much less prone to these unpredictable formatting peculiarities, and also much easier to add extra details like author citations. Hope this helps! - MPF 00:21, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Dinosaur Taxobox
Hi. I seems that the "Fossil range: Triassic – Cretaceous" is a lot larger than it should be, and I don't know how to fix that. A good example of how it should be is on the Hampster page. --Khoikhoi 03:23, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks! By the way, another thing that's bothered me ever since the creation since the Taxobox template is the the size of the conservation status. I like the size on Quagga, would you be able to fix it? Thanks. --Khoikhoi 03:37, 1 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, thanks! --Khoikhoi 07:59, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Taxobox (again)
Hi CBDunkerson,

I just have one more request for help on Template:Taxobox. I'm having a problem with making the caption show. For example, on the Sperm Whale article, this version uses Template:Taxobox begin while this version uses Template:Taxobox. You'll notice that the only difference is that the version that uses the template lacks a caption. Is there any way to fix this error? Thanks. --Khoikhoi 08:26, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

Default parameters (aka Weeble trick)
Hi Conrad. (1) I've just updated my weeble sandbox example User talk:Ligulem/work/WeebleTrick using the new "if=" style. Example B1 still fails due to the missing "if=". (2) I agree with you that adding "|if=" to template calls isn't that of a big deal, I mean I would go for this if I were allowed to. It's not that difficult to add that to template calls. But of course it might get forgotten and looks a bit strange. Clearly we are in "everthing costs something" land (nothing new in engineering :-). Ligulem 17:05, 3 January 2006 (UTC)

Template:Language
I find his behavior annoying. He takes out little things like whether true or so is the right name. But instead of only saying true is the wrong word etc. he could also have answered. From his initial accusations/concerns not much is left, the template is not used anymore in articles, I have no problem if he does not like the dab tag etc... but he abused his admin power by blocking a page move and moving it to what maybe only one party wants. This two-class WP is annoying. If I would have eaten more today I would like to vomit. This kind of admin behavior is really bad. abuse is abuse is abuse. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:49, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Cyrius is the abuser. He moved a page to a page that was edited - you can't do this as a regular user. Now the page is blocked for moves - I don't know why, how, but strongly assume Cyrius did it with his admin privelges.

Conradi - a page I created. :-) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 23:17, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

fine, I didn't know that now I broke a lot. My fault. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:48, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

can you run a bot? we need to convert certain things in the articles, e.g. colornames should be changed to familynames, then the color array could be reduced in size. The bot should also change the ref from Template:Language to Template:Infobox Language - we should use standard name for the template. Of course the original language template should be moved there in advance. The bot could also convert some not optimal variable names nation=list of countries in which it is an official language better: official= Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:57, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

if you put it all in one line it works. but well this is ugly. maybe (we) try to find another point for linebreak, i.e. not directly after the colorname Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:33, 7 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, the quilt should be better now. Let me know if there are other issues. On the questions above. No, I haven't looked into bot use yet. It seems like the current template uses 'nation' and Netoholic's has 'official'. It is easy enough to make that change, but then all the calls have to be updated that way also. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 16:38, 7 January 2006 (UTC)

Template:Language/familycolor
Hi. Thanks for the improvements on Template:Language/familycolor. I have one question, however: what happened here? Why does it say this:

whitewhitewhiteyellowyellowyellowyellowgreenyellowgreenlightbluelightblue#eba9ee#eba9eelightcorallightcorallightcorallightcoralpinkpinklightgreentomatolightgreenlightgreenblackblackblackblacktantanmediumspringgreenmediumspringgreenlightcyanlightcyan#ff0033lawngreenlawngreen#dddddd#dddddd#dddddd#ddddddgoldenrodgoldenrodtantandeepskybluedeepskybluedeepskyblueorangeorangegoldgolddarkseagreendarkseagreendarkseagreendarkseagreendarkseagreendarkseagreen#fd79da#fd79datantansilversilversilversilverlightgreentomatolavenderlavenderlimegreenlimegreen

It didn't use to be like that... --Khoikhoi 02:31, 8 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The call to the template is slightly different than it used to be. This was necessary in order to convert it from a meta-template based on Template:Switch into a single template. I had updated the calls to it in Template:Language, Template:Language/quilt, and so forth but probably missed some individual calls like these. I updated the calls on that page to use the new format. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 02:47, 8 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Ok, thanks. See also Template talk:Language. --Khoikhoi 02:57, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

book reference without using qif
Hi Conrad. Many thanks for your work. Certainly I'm interested and of course I will look at User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox4 as you posted on TfD of qif. I will repost here (I also put this page on my watch). Don't know if I find time today. Shure tomorrow. Thanks again. See you later! Ligulem 20:05, 9 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I posted bug1 Ligulem 21:48, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yup, I didn't have the 'Date' parameter in the template at all. It wasn't listed in the blank parameter list on the 'Book reference' talk page. Must have been updates since that was put in. I'll check if there are any other missing parameters like that. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 22:44, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Couple of things: I added a space before the 'Date'... current template doesn't have it, but I think there should be one. Also, the template has a problem when there is no author name and/or article link... should be able to resolve that, but need to work on it a bit. I added the 'cite' style and category link from the original template... though I'm not really sure how the 'cite' is supposed to work. Finally, about the '|if=' in the call to the template... there is a way to get rid of that so existing template calls can remain unchanged, but it would double the length of the template and users with the Lynx browser would always get the full list of parameters - just as ' ' and such if they were not filled out in the call. I prefer this method with the extra 'if' parameter, but can really be done either way. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 23:24, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Are you really suggesting that we pursue that solution? It involves an empty parameter that we have to add to hundreds (thousands) of articles.  -- Netoholic @ 23:44, 9 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm open to either (though the 'crap' comment was less than helpful). For templates with lots of potentially suppressed parameters like this I like the non-CSS version, but if we don't care about the Lynx users I'm ok with the longer form - which is why I mentioned it as an option above even before you stepped in. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 23:58, 9 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I've tested your new weeble variant. See User talk:Ligulem/work/b-refCBD/weeble/2. It's damn close to the original book reference but there is a problem with the point at the end. There is also a problem with the rendering, but that's not due to your template. I've seen that earlier already but could not reproduce it. My guess: it has to do with the pre sections. So don't worry about that for now. Testing CSS variant now (will post that later). Ligulem 12:51, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I put a comment about the 'period at the end' issue on both versions. It needs to appear only when neither Publisher nor ID are set. Anyway, it is solvable for both variants. I've just been trying to come up with a solution that doesn't involve having an entire conditional section just for the trailing period. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 15:03, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * The folks on articles using book ref are pretty nitpicking. Such a missing point at the end is sufficient to gather complete refusal from them. I remember though that there was an old debate whether book ref should emit that trailing point or not. But however, if it does not it should at least not do so in all cases to be consistent. I've tested the CSS version at User talk:Ligulem/work/b-refCBD/CSS/1 there is a problem with ISBNs appearing on a new line. The CSS version has also a similar point-at-the end problem. Ligulem 16:30, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Both issues are corrected. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 17:06, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * [[Image:WikiThanks.png|left]] Indeed! Many thanks for proving me wrong and saving my butt on template:book reference. I'm impressed. I've posted my approval on the TfD of qif. Ligulem 19:56, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

I must I say that a the moment I tend rather to the CSS variant for book reference (and not to the weeble variant). Mainly because book reference is often used more than once in the same article, so that nasty |if= paramter hurts definitely more than on templates that are only included once per article. I also strongly think that, especially for book reference, there would be resistence among the article people if we add that ugly |if= en masse to articles. So I must say I'm with Neto. BTW I made a variant of your and Neto's work here. Test cases are here. I added line breaks and comments. Ligulem 23:13, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * That's ok. Given the number of existing template calls it makes sense to use the version which doesn't require those calls to be changed. It'll be messy for the Lynx users, but that's a small population. I use a mix of both as appropriate (and indeed the 'CSS version' isn't 100% CSS). It actually may be possible to implement this without any use of either '|if=' or CSS at all, but it would be pretty ugly code (see the way I handled the 'id' reference in the cite section on CSS and the 'ending period' in both versions)... something I just came up with while working on this. Need to experiment more to see if it can be made 'prettier' while retaining the capabilities - and I'd like to know if there are ways to do the same things in CSS without funky 'Weeble style' parameter default tricks. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 23:35, 10 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Ack. Thanks again. Ligulem 23:50, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Portal Template
Hi Conrad, I don't know what browser you use, but your recent change to Portal screwed it completely on all the browsers I have on my machine (FF, IE & Op8.5 on Windows). I reverted it, then decided to try and fix it myself. I think I managed to get the template:click template to work in there. Cheers, nick 16:53, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

Template:Locale length
What's going on on that template? See my question on Template talk:Locale length (please respond over there, thanks!) --Ligulem 12:20, 11 January 2006 (UTC)

Template journal reference
Hi Conrad. I just would like to thank you for your work on template:journal reference to convert it to WP:AUM-compliance. Best regards, --Ligulem 16:36, 15 January 2006 (UTC)

Yes, thanks!
YES!!!! user:infobox template is exactly what I (and Wikipedia) needed! --User:Mdob 201.14.253.106 00:30, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Glad you like it. Let me know if any other features/rows are needed. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 00:48, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Infobox president
Assuming you have reverted my reversion (I won't bother to check), see Talk:Michelle Bachelet and look at all those empty cells in the infobox. That's what I call a mess up. It was perfectly fine before. —Cantus&hellip; &#9742;   03:08, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Infobox Zwolle
Thanks a lot for your help with the infobox on Zwolle. I've now incorporated the flag and the coat of arms of Zwolle (which I'm hoping to bring up to featured article status) in the infobox and the article. I've got another question though. In the country infoboxes, you get a link to Flag of X and Coat of arms of X below the flag and the coat of arms of the country. I would like to do the same in the Zwolle article, because I've got articles for the flag and the coat of arms in the pipeline. Do you know how I can get this done? Thanks an awful lot in advance, Aecis Mr.Mojorisin' 15:31, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks a lot for the new code. But when I add it, the flag and the coat of arms end up on the right side of the article, while the rest of the infobox ends up on the left side of the article (See User:Aecis/Stub tallying). How can I fix this? Aecis Mr.Mojorisin' 18:08, 27 January 2006 (UTC)

Taxobox
Is the single taxobox preferrable? I've seen it done both ways all over the place, just wondering which was the more appropriate method. -Dawson 18:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)


 * It was recently brought to my attention that Opera does not display the single taxobox format properly. It eliminates the border around the binomial section. It probably is something that should be rectified. -Dawson 18:36, 31 January 2006 (UTC)

Template:Taxobox
Hi CBDunkerson,

Look at the diffs of the Bobcat page - the first one using the Taxobox_begin template] and the second version using Template:Taxobox. I was wondering, what's the deal with the fat grey line at the bottom? Is there any way to get rid of it? It's really ugly. --Khoikhoi 21:06, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Ok, thanks. I'm using Firefox too, but I'm using it in Mac OS X, so I guess it's different. --Khoikhoi 21:20, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Yeah, it looks better, but they the grey line at the bottom of the box is still thicker than the one used in Template:Taxobox begin. Good work though! --Khoikhoi 22:04, 29 January 2006 (UTC)


 * Personally, the version that you just showed me looks worse. The grey line at the bottom of the taxobox is thicker than I've ever seen it. --Khoikhoi 22:51, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Taxobox help needed
I seem to have broken Centrarchidae and I'm not sure why (the generated HTML doesn't seem to correspond to the template source). I would be grateful for your help. Gdr 00:02, 1 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for looking at this. It looks to me as though the
 * from the expansion of the range map gets turned into
 * Sunfish range
 * at some stage. I don't know why this happens: some thing that tries to fix up HTML, maybe? Anyway, the  gets omitted (or maybe postponed — there is one late on).
 * So maybe if we replace
 * with
 * then this transformation wouldn't take place and it would render correctly? Gdr 00:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * with
 * then this transformation wouldn't take place and it would render correctly? Gdr 00:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
 * then this transformation wouldn't take place and it would render correctly? Gdr 00:17, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, that seems to be it. How bizarre! Gdr 00:22, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Ranks and insignia of NATO armies officers
I want to achieve what I am doing there with 25 in one template. Ideas?
 * The images follow this pattern:
 * CC-Army-OF##.EXT
 * CC-Navy-OF##.EXT
 * CC-Airf-OF##.EXT
 * Where CC denotes country code and ## denotes nato code.

I'll let you take a look at it and then toss ideas. Cat chi? 01:16, 6 February 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Cool Cat. I've been looking at the templates and they could definitely be condensed, but I guess the best way to restructure them depends on what you want to use them for. You could make a template like, which displays any given insignia based on the parameters passed to it, but at that point you might as well just use the 'image:' markup. Alternatively the template could just look for 'country' and 'force' as parameters and then, based on those two, conditionally display the list of insignia indicated. That would just involve copying the info from all the existing templates in and putting conditional logic around it. Another option would be to put the ranks in the parameter names like;  and then have the template logic display the insignia for which parameters have been set. It all depends on how you are looking to use the images I guess. Are they just going to be on a few comparison pages or would they be displayed on the pages of individual commanders and the like? --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 22:04, 6 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I am not happy with the templates as they are not generic enough. No argument there. When I created the templates an if/else structure did not existed.
 * One reason I am not sure how to handle the templates is that I do not have one solid patern. See luxembourg one for example or italian. How would I handle all that in one template.
 * The templates will be used just for comparasions AND are used on individual army pafes. For example see what links to the US, UK, Tr, GR etc ranks.
 * What I want to achive: Few/One generic template(s) that does what 26 templates are doing. I also dont want it to change the apperance (aside from perhaps condensing width a bit)
 * Cat chi? 00:16, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I put together a partial test at User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox2. Feel free to play with it. Changing the country in the template call on the first line should change the insignia displayed. Somewhat glitchy, but a general concept for how one template could include the contents of the 26 and conditionally display info for the country or countries called. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 02:19, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm.... You are tossing all images into one template. What I want to achiheve is to use a template repetively. (Use one templae for all countries). Template should be passed countries name, name of the ranks, branch of military... etc... Is this doable? Cat chi? 13:25, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

Parameters maybe something like:



or



I am thinking of using one or two enbeded switch statements to do this. However I am not certain how the table should look like... Cat chi? 14:04, 7 February 2006 (UTC)


 * That can certainly be done, but the tricky part would then be the formatting. How to tell the template to arrange particular insignia vertically rather than horizontally. That's why my first draft copied all the images/formatting in and then just displayed the requested set. I guess the '1' and '2' settings in your lists above are meant to indicate which row each insignia should appear in. Since it seems like the insignias for a particular country/force are always displayed together I'd suggest moving everything out of the call except ... which officer ranks exist for that country and the names assigned to them can be kept in the template code itself rather than having to be written into the call each time - unless you want to be able to do things like just display officer ranks 9, 8, 5 and 3 of the Turkish Army. Then all that detail needs to be in the call to the template. I'll work on it for a while now. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 23:43, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Ok, I put together a very simple template at User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox2 which just calls the existing templates based on parameters passed to it and a much more complicated template at User:CBDunkerson/Transition which uses a switch to set various parameters in a call to User:CBDunkerson/Sandbox4 - which then builds the insignia layout based on the parameters passed. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 01:40, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I somewhat like User:CBDunkerson/Transition, the only thing I do not like is it being passed something so simple. I want the rank names to be passed. The look of the teomplate shuld be achieved with passed parameters. Then I can do rank comparasions withg out editing the template. Also I want rank insignias and text be aligned. Not all of the current (static) templates achieve this but some do (see above). Cat chi? 03:05, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

When above is passed images such as this will work:. The ## will be determined if R10 is null then the default should be No Equavalent if R10 is passed 0 it should be a coming soon if it is passed 1 then there is only one rank insignia per this "cell". If passed 2 there are two vertical insignias (such as how it should be for R9)

Hope this clarifies what I have in mind. Cat chi? 03:17, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Hmm.. After some serious amount of though this is what I came up with (it still needs some minor work):

Cat chi? 21:00, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Ranks and insignia of NATO Armies Enlisted
Looks nice. Sorry I couldn't be more help working it out. --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 22:55, 8 February 2006 (UTC)
 * No that was the easyone. And you did help me greatly. Now, can you find a way to simplify this one (and make it much more generic)?
 * I'll take a look. Also, a couple of things on the current template. For the little flags - UK needs 'the United Kingdom' to get the flag file name right, but then prints 'the United Kingdom' next to it instead of 'United Kingdom'. If I recall correctly there is a version of those flag templates which works off the country code (UK) which would leave 'Country' free to be just the text displayed. For &#123;{Rank insignia OF/N}} (or OF/D) it might make sense to change it from |No  to just | so it could be set to the UK's student officer text, "single white stripe", the US "Various", or whatever... one template with configurable text parameter. Could also add a second parameter for a label below it (like Officer Candidate). --CBD &#x260E; &#x2709; 23:28, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the Infobox help
Just wanted to drop by and say thanks for helping out with the Infobox issue at Takipedia. Likely couldn't have figured it out without your assistance. The Crow 23:12, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

Thank You
Thank you so much for creating the Balitmore users template. It looks great. Thank you so much.

--chemica 11:07, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

Template:WPMA
That's fantastic, thank you! I will let the group know about it. Looks great. -- Stbalbach 17:36, 19 March 2006 (UTC)

Portal headers
I'm all for improving accessibility, but forcing onto every page makes ones like this rather difficult to edit ;-) Kirill Lok s hin 14:21, 21 March 2006 (UTC)

Tomorrow's edition
Just fyi, I copied your code to Main Page alternative (tomorrow) (and linked that from WP:MPA). It's good stuff. Thanks :) -Quiddity 21:29, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Nice, thanks. I set up a 'yesterday' version at WP:MPA also. --CBDunkerson 23:37, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

day+1
Do you think you can make a variant of this template, maybe day+1 underscore, that gives the date with an underscore to make it compatible with links? I try to have link to edit tommorow's POTD and I get this: Edit because the template includes a space. If you get me started, I'll even put in the underscores where they are needed. Shouldn't you be able to copy and paste the data from the regular template and start from there? Please investigate this for me.--HereToHelp 13:07, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

day+1
The browse links on the tips of the day are cool. I'll add them to the rest when I get the time. BTW, I was looking at the code for that template to see if there was an easy way to adapt it to a 20 day or even a one-month warning system for Picture of the day (which we have stocked one month in advance). But the last 20 days/month of the year becomes problematic. --Go for it! 15:05, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I can help with the browse links if people feel they are warranted. The 'warning system' is something which hadn't occurred to me. It could theoretically be done with something like, =  (effectively 'day+5'), but that would be ridiculously calculation intensive. However, a separate 'day+20' or 'month+1' template could be made for a 'warning system'. --CBDunkerson 15:15, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Yes, but how would you program it so that the last 20 days (or month) of the year do not produce errors? --Go for it! 15:36, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * See datewarn. For instance POTD column/ produces POTD column/. --CBDunkerson 17:31, 26 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Wow, you caught the 31sts, and the leap year's extra day -- I hadn't even thought of those. But I couldn't see in the code where December 15, 2006 (for instance) is turned to January 15, 2007 rather than January 15, 2006.  --Go for it! 21:22, 26 March 2006 (UTC)

Date templates
Are there more? Could you create a category for them? My full wishlist was here, where people pointed me to the rather comprehensive fr:Catégorie:Modèle calculant une date. What I would like to see most is somthing like day+1month or day+1day so constructions like Today is day 29 of July can be paralleled by Tomorrow is day of. I just need the templates to make sure tomorrow's and next month's Portal:Germany won't have any formatting erros, but I'm sure there's many other uses. Anyway, thanks again. Kusma (討論) 04:39, 27 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Of course I should point you to a similar effort: Ed Poor has been busy in Category:Date math. Maybe you should talk to him about the optimal way of doing these things. Kusma (討論) 06:02, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Featured content
Hi. I just recently happened across WP:FC and thought it was very neat idea! Yesterday, I went looking for it (I hadn't bookmarked it) and couldn't find any link, actually I didn't even remember what I was looking for except for the every minute refresh. I asked for and received help finding it at WP:HD. Anyway, I wanted to stop by to thank you for starting that and to let you know that I've added it at WP:WP. :-) --hydnjo talk 13:15, 29 March 2006 (UTC)

(copied from User talk:Hydnjo) ''Thanks, I'm glad you like the page. I responded to your question about when it was created at WP:HD. Like most things it was a process rather than all at once. The 'main page redesign' project was looking for a way to link all the featured content to the Main Page and decided to use what I'd built at Portal:Featured content for that. Hence the name change and shortcut. --CBDunkerson 13:59, 29 March 2006 (UTC)''
 * BTW - if you're interested in how it works (I was), there's a subpage (like a template) that selects which date to display based on the current hour and minute (see Featured content/SetDate). You get a different result (different date) every minute, but if you look at it at the same minute within the day you get the same results every day (i.e. it's distinctly not random). -- Rick Block (talk) 19:02, 29 March 2006 (UTC)
 * True. However, the order of the dates displayed each minute is randomized and I update it every couple of weeks to include the latest 'of the day' materials... re-randomizing the order each time. So unless you hit the page at the same minute within a few days of each other it will usually display a different result for that minute. Not truly random, but giving the appearance of such in most cases. --CBDunkerson 11:06, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

(end copy)
 * Conrad - this was not meant as a knock of any kind. I actually think it's quite cleverly done.  I don't know if Joe (or Heidi) has in mind to copy the technique anywhere, but thought they might be interested in how it works.  BTW - if you want it more random you could write and register a bot and rerandomize fairly frequently (every couple of hour perhaps).  There's also an uninstalled extension to mediawiki (called choose) to select a random entry from a list - it's used at Uncyclopedia but not installed here since I don't think anyone has made a case for a legitimate use for it.  If you want to pursue this, you might have a chat with User:Brion VIBBER. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:38, 30 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi Rick. No worries, I didn't take your comment as a 'knock'. I've explained elsewhere that it isn't truly random, but wanted to let you (and Hydnjo) know about the 'behind the scenes' re-shuffling which helps mitigate that. The 'choose' extension sounds like a perfect solution, but failing that a bot may be the way to go. Even just updating the random sequence once per day would prevent it from showing the same material at the same minute (unless that was randomly selected). I'd considered using and/or  as additional 'seeds' to increase the randomization, but they grow so fast that doing so would either require a huge switch or updates every couple of days... but a bot could theoretically handle that as well. Thanks for the comments. I'll look into these options. --CBDunkerson 17:03, 30 March 2006 (UTC)


 * Hey guys. Conrad, I dropped over (first) to tell you that I had copied that very interesting thread going on at my talk over to FC's talk and here I find that you and Rick have started without me. Thanks to you both for your comments, they helped a great deal in my understanding of how it all worked, my markup skills are minimal and I appreciated that. And Conrad, you have been quite clever in your use of the available tools in implementing your FC solution.
 * I also wanted to spill out some thoughts:
 * This seems like a fairly high maintenance project for you (or anyone).
 * Another complication is that FAs sometimes lose their featured status which would result in losing that day's featured picture as well so,
 * Ideally there would be two lists and decouple FAs and FPs.
 * Also, it would be nice to be able to "click here" for a refresh (like Random article) and,
 * The choose feature seems like a good way to implement that as it seems that mediawiki is math challenged (no innate math functions).
 * Once decoupled from the mainpage date you could then decide to include all 930 FAs rather than only those that have been on the mainpage.
 * A bot could then be used to keep the lists current leaving you with, well... nothing to do ;-)
 * hydnjo talk 03:45, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I copied this additional text to Wikipedia talk:Featured content and responded there. --CBDunkerson 11:41, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Month name of tomorrow's date
Does any of the clever date templates give this already? The simple-minded construction

unfortunately fails on the last day of the month. Of course I could just grab this from one of your templates, but I guess you'll find a better naming convention and a way to simplify it from the code in tomorrow than I could. Thank you, Kusma (討論) 20:57, 1 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thank you! It appears to work, and it seems like a good name. Kusma (討論) 22:20, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Template Magic
Hello again. Our paths began to cross when I inquired at the HD about a place that turned out to be WP:FC. Well, from there I, after some additional prompting from Rick, I decided to learn more about the underlying wiki markup. I was astonished at the amount of code required to do something as seemingly simple as providing a random selection of our best and featured stuff, at that time I had no inkling of switch or case. Anyway, I then saw how you you took a routine like day+1 and used your skills to re-implement it as tomorrow and I said wow! From there I found your RfA still in progress and AzaToth's recently failed bid (I have notified him of my intent to support him in his next bid). Hmmm... I forgot why I started this conversation... ooh ooh, now I remember, is there a place for me (or anyone ) to learn about all of the wiki markup available to us or do we need to learn it piecemeal by studying the works of folks like yourself, Rick, and Aza (you... you... template masters you). Thanks BTW for your very detailed response to my thoughts about "improving" FC, it seems that you have thought it out quite thoroughly without my meddling. As for my own skills, a true challenge for me was to find a way of recoding a program on an HP 48 to accomplish in 1 minute what was requiring 10 minutes (perhaps that's why I admire your template work so damn much). hydnjo talk 23:14, 3 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi Hydnjo. There isn't a single 'training guide' for markup and templates, but there are a number of useful pages. The best single page to start at is Markup... which contains an overview of all aspects of Wikipedia 'coding'. From there Help:Table is the standard document for table markup - though MediaWiki:Common.css is also critical for understanding the pre-defined CSS styles used in most tables. From there the real 'coding' aspects can be found in Help:A quick guide to templates, Help:Template, and m:Help:Advanced templates... which are progressively more detailed (and less organized) examinations of template and parameter logic. Finally, Help:Magic words, Help:Variable, Template:Wikivars are largely redundant pages for information on special tags and commands which are often very useful to templates (both WP:FC and the various date templates rely on these to work at all).
 * All that being said, I think I picked up more from just jumping in and seeing what was out there than I did from the help documentation. The above links are good resources for looking up details, but experimenting is the most certain way to learn. Believe me, it doesn't take long - a few months ago I didn't know what a Wiki-template was. The best place to look for good examples of existing templates (and most of the 'utility' templates which make others easier to write) is Category:Wikipedia special effects templates and especially the 'if templates' and 'boolean templates' subcategories there.
 * Finally, you might just keep an eye on the contributions of User:AzaToth, User:Netoholic, User:Locke Cole, User:Ed Poor, and other skilled template writers to see what sort of template work they are doing currently. Alot of this stuff evolves as people come up with new ways of doing things and then we all debate the pros and cons of each methodology. --CBDunkerson 23:55, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks & Help
Your changes to Template:Good Job are great; thanks. Since you seem to be an expert on templates, could you help me with User:Iamthejabberwock/Welcome? When I use, for example,  - for welcoming an anonymous user who edited Wikipedia, is interested in Rush and might want to visit Portal:Music - it produces a result that looks good, but contains the original variable formatting:. Could you advise me of a way to either (1) stop this formatting from being included or (2) switch to a more effecient method of varying the contents of the message? Thanks, TheJabberwock 02:14, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Works perfectly! Muchas gracias. TheJabberwock 19:33, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually, nvm, the formatting is still there. See here. It's not a huge problem, but I'd like the welcome to look less mechanized if the user happens to click "edit." TheJabberwock 20:33, 7 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Excellent! Thanks again. TheJabberwock 23:54, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Nice job! Thanks!
...on merging the two US Senator boxes. That kinda bugged me that there were two -- redesigning and redirect is a nice simple solution. Well done. -- Sholom 20:04, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Infobox Aircraft
CBD - I have a favor to ask of you. Can you work with me to update Infobox Aircraft? The template is way to generic and is not being used by any articles. I think this is a prime candidate for creating a detailed infobox. Ideally it would be flexible for both civilian and military aircraft - see (Boeing 737, Pipers, F-15, [C-130 Hercules]] B-2 Spirit. I have left a message about my suggestion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aircraft.  Thanks! --Reflex Reaction (talk)&bull; 14:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
 * My apologies for sending you on this wild goose chase - it looks like they have already decided what works well for them. --Reflex Reaction (talk)&bull; 15:50, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Babel-X
Hi Conrad. I'm attempting to implement your nice Babel-X template here on Memory Alpha, and I'm not having any luck in getting it to work. For some reason, the HTML  and   tags don't seem to be working (but if I recall correctly, they did work before the latest MediaWiki upgrade). As far as I can tell, both MA and Wikipedia are running the same software versions, so I'm not sure where to look. I also noticed that the title line isn't centering properly, either. Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide! -- Renegade54 15:54, 13 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi. There were three problems. First the '{{#if:' format relies on new features that were just implemented for Wikipedia yesterday. I confirmed that Memory Alpha isn't using those and then reverted back to the '{{{if|' format. The centering difference was due to CSS differences between the two sites - basically, Wikipedia has predefined formatting at MediaWiki:Common.css and Memory Alpha doesn't have exactly the same pre-defined formats. I put in the centering manually to get around this. Finally the HTML tags were behaving oddly. I have no idea what was causing this... the first few sets were displaying as text, but then they were kicking in and evaluating correctly. Normal wiki table markup (i.e. |-, |, !, et cetera) can't be used because the '|' character confuses the '{{{if|' logic. To get around that I created a 'Template:!' which just inserts a '|' character. This allows wiki-markup to be mimicked and doesn't interfere with the other logic. I wrote up a version using that methodology and copied it out for up to 20 babel boxes. Can be extended if need be. --CBDunkerson 17:00, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

FCpages
Um - have I missed a discussion about moving the generic section of fapages and FLpages to a sub-template? The nice little "&larr;" doesn't display on WP:FLC any longer, for example... -- ALoan (Talk) 17:08, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

More template magic
Thanks for giving me some examples of how to use Tim Starling's #expr: feature. I've joined you in converting some of my old-style templates to the new format, and they seem a WHOLE LOT faster. I've also renamed a few, replacing the User:Ed Poor/ bit with Template: to publish them.

I have more ideas for date math. Stay tuned! --Uncle Ed 16:08, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

DefCon boxes
Hey Cool Cat. In reference to the DefCon boxes which you marked for speedy. Would you object to them instead being 'de-userfied' into template space? It seems like alot of people are using them currently. --CBDunkerson 14:39, 14 April 2006 (UTC)
 * The wikipedia comunity (made out of few determined users) have hammered me for creating the defcon template etc.. They forced/ordered me to move them to my userspace or else they would vandalise/maliciously edit the templates in question. So if you want to move them to templatespace, good luck.
 * I dont care what happens to it so long as it isnt in my userspace since I am not allowed to participate in rc patrol, I do not want anything implying I have anything to do with WP:CVU.
 * Cat chi? 18:28, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

Template functions
Just bringing to your attention conversion templates and specifically a note on the talk page suggesting that we standardize on a naming convention for future template functions. I'll be passing this note along to AzaToth and Ligulem; feel free to post it/mention it anywhere else you think it would help to raise awareness and avoid the duplication of work. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 01:58, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

TfD nomination of Template:Fpopages
Template:Fpopages has been nominated for deletion. You are invited to comment on the discussion at the template's entry on the Templates for Deletion page. Thank you. (I am telling you because you have edited it). Batmanand | Talk 22:38, 15 April 2006 (UTC) Sorry rush of blood to head. Ignore it. No longer listed. Batmanand | Talk 23:34, 15 April 2006 (UTC)

qif
qif mass extinction seems to have started P:. --Ligulem 13:07, 18 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Conrad. You wrote that parts of PF (ParserFunctions) already have been removed. I'm just curious: what has been removed from PF? --Ligulem 07:00, 19 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh noes! Seen it. The random function. But I don't believe that #if has any chance to ever get removed form PF. This was the major driving force for Tim to create PF because I believe he felt that qif was starting to get a problem and all endevours to extinct it had failed :-). So he had to accept the fact that it is needed. This was demonstrated by using good faith wiki-process. If he would remove #if this would be massive vandalism and it would take less than 24 hours for the community to restore the current situation, i.e. using qif again. --Ligulem 07:09, 19 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree that it seems unlikely that #if: would be removed at this point. However, we don't know for certain. There were and still are some problems with the way it works. Changes have been made to the #if: processing and syntax which required some of the calls to it to be rewritten to work properly. More such changes could be made going forward. Further, some people are arguing (quite strenuously) that #if: should be removed. All I've been saying is that we ought to proceed in a deliberate fashion rather than jumping out and performing mass conversions before the feature is fully tested, stabilized, or approved. As to 'restoring prior version in 24 hours'... and during those 24 hours Wikipedia would be a complete mess. Worse if 'qif' and other conditional templates were actually deleted because then reverting templates relying on them wouldn't fix the problem. Essentially we're risking a major Wiki wide mess for no good purpose. Chances are it won't happen, but it's just foolish to take a risk that gains absolutely nothing. --CBDunkerson 16:52, 19 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with you. The problem was created because Tim already activated #if on all wikis. I would have expected some thorough testing on a sepearate test wiki before releasing it into the wild. After this had been released, people started migrating templates to #if. This is a logical consequence of the releasing. Once released, there is no way back. Safest thing we can do now is putting use load on #if. qif is under heavy destructive pressure now. Let's move the use pressure over to #if. I'm confident that it works. And it is easy to make it working if it doesn't. Tim is capable for taking care of this. There is no need to protect wikipedia from him. He's doing a bangup job. However, if this were a live critical system or even critical for business revenue, I would fully agree with you. Wikipdia is special in this. But it's quite successful with this approach. --Ligulem 17:13, 19 April 2006 (UTC)

Changes to Infobox_Bridge
I noticed that you recently changed Infobox_Bridge. For some reason, some of the bridges I've recently worked on are displaying the text "style="vertical-align: middle;"" outside the infobox, in the main part of the page. I've narrowed it down to the "coordinates" parameter -- if "coordinates" is specified, then the spurious style information is inserted. If "lat" and "long" are specified, then this problem doesn't show up. For examples, see Franklin Avenue Bridge, Intercity Bridge, and Fort Road Bridge. If you could take a look at this template and fix whatever might be wrong, that would be great. I'd consider fixing it myself, but I'm not really well-versed enough on template syntax to make sure I wouldn't break anything else. Thanks. -- E lkman - (talk) 03:22, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed it CBD. =) Elkman, if you still have problems, leave another note here and someone will get to it. ;) — Locke Cole • t • c 04:57, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks for looking into it. --CBDunkerson 16:16, 19 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Looks good now. Thanks for looking into it.  -- E lkman - (talk) 00:37, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

#if
Can you point me to where I can learn about how to use " #if "? Thanks!!! &mdash;Markles 11:21, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Shortcut
His is explicitly written to only work inside tables (not by itself). You might try adopting some of the HTML/CSS he uses (leaving stuff configurable), but IMO some of his changes are just plain ugly.. —Locke Cole • t • c 12:55, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I figured out that 'inside tables only' was the problem. I wrapped a table around it to deal with that... then becomes a table in a table when called on the header box templates. It is rather convoluted, but it eliminates the '#if:' in the call so that's somewhat beneficial. --CBDunkerson 13:17, 20 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Re guideline, remove the includeonly's from around the | (pipe) in the shortcut call, it looks like a stray  is being inserted when a shortcut isn't provided. I don't know that avoiding a #if was this important either, FWIW; the parameter default incurs a similar number of CPU cycles on the server side I'm sure, and from a code POV, I think people will grasp #if easier than the funky parameter default magic going on at shortcut. =) Having said that, if it'll give us peace, leave it alone. ;) —Locke Cole • t • c 13:44, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

ParserFunctions category
Apparently you are one of the valiant crew replacing qif and switch with and. I would encourage you to ensure that you add clients of these functions to Category:Templates using ParserFunctions for the time being, this being our only method of tracking usage until we get some sort of "What links here" facility for these functions. Obviously if you are already doing this…thank you. HTH HAND —Phil | Talk 10:32, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

JD-month error?
gives = 15. As far as I know, there is no 15th month ;). Perhaps that template only works for days after a certain date?  I'm working on simplifying the calculation, but I don't know how to make the right calculation in the first place.  User:dbenbenn 00:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi. The JD-month template assumes conversion to months in the Gregorian calendar... which came into existence in 1582. Thus, before that it would be producing 'months' for a calendar system which did not exist yet. A Julian date of '123' would be one-hundred and twenty-three days after the start of the Julian period... in 4713 BC. :] The formulas for this and the related JD-day and JD-year templates should work correctly for all dates in the Gregorian calendar system. For anything prior to October 1582 we get into hypothetical calendaring and it's fairly meaningless. The formulas can be derived from the Julian date article or the template. --CBDunkerson 00:51, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
 * Ah, thanks. I've added that explanation to Template:JD-month.


 * Another question: I noticed that right now is giving 21, not 22.  Julian day explains that the day rolls over at noon, but the Gregorian calendar still rolls over at midnight.  So is that a mistake?  I guess the fix would be to subtract 0.5 from the parameter to JD-day. User:dbenbenn 05:23, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox River
Hi CBDunkerson, a change you made recently to the Template:Infobox River seems to have had an unwanted effect. If you compare this previous version to the current one you'll see the change in the appearance of the Infobox (the disappearance of the boldface headings Origin, Length, Basin Countries etc.) I'm not familiar with the workings of templates; would you be able to fix it? Thanks kindly -- Malepheasant 00:21, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
 * As Malepheasant said the headings of each row had disappeared. I din't understand what you tried to do, so for the time being I have reverted to the previous working version. thanks --Raghu 05:49, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Template:TP Train Station
I've seen you've edited the template to implies the new #if Parser Functions. However, some articles that using the template has been broken. (it shows this part [style="vertical-align: top; font-style: italic; font-size: smaller; background: #EFEEEF;" style="vertical-align: top; font-style: italic; font-size: smaller;"] before the infobox). See Stirling railway station, Perth for example. As before, I've reverted this template into previous working revision. But seems maybe you didn't noticed that such changes would have those effects on those articles and reapplied the #if Parser Functions. Maybe you can revise those article that using the template before apply the changes. ;) --Shinjiman &#8660; &#9832; 10:58, 23 April 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Shinjiman. Sorry about that, I was just looking at the infobox itself and didn't notice the extraneous line of text in the article. I made an adjustment which should resolve it. --CBDunkerson 13:12, 23 April 2006 (UTC)


 * It's does not have the problem now, thanks a lot. :) --Shinjiman &#8660; &#9832; 14:02, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Template List
Thanks for the heads up on the Pro-Life template. I was wondering if you could direct me to a list of all available templates? Thanks again--Ian 01:58, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks a bunch
Thank you so much for making the template. Its not the fact that im incompetent, its just that at the mediawiki page for templates there is so much info bull that i dont need. and taht was exactly what i was looking for. --Zack3rdbb 23:12, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

#rand
Since #rand got nuked, I thought you might find this useful. It seems you can now use "R" (for raw) as a parameter to the various NUMBEROF magic words (there's also a new NUMBEROF magic word; NUMBEROFUSERS). Samples:

You could probably use some combination of these, together with maybe, to produce some semblance of randomness. Just an FYI. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 09:23, 1 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I don't know if you heard the reason for #rand's removal, but from what I heard on IRC from Tim Starling, it had something to do with a concern by (NullC on IRC) over vandals using #rand to perform "random vandalism" (vandalism that only appeared randomly).
 * At least NUMBEROFxxx can now be used. Same issues with the cache as #rand had; you'll need to do  on pages to get them to update. But you could always automate that with wget and (if you're using Windows NT/2000/XP/2003) a batch file in conjunction with  . Though I'd still like to see #rand return. Bah. :P —Locke Cole • t • c 11:00, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

includeonly
I don't know if you remember, but a while ago you helped me with my welcome message. You suggested the use of to evaluate the subst: when the template is subst:ed. Turns out there's a much simpler way: tags around the subst. See here for details. TheJ a  bb  e  rw  &#664;  ck 23:32, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Rounddown/Roundup reverts
I see that you have reverted the Template:Rounddown and Template:Roundup.

But you are restoring a known serious bug of mod and floor in PHP and that transpires in MediaWiki.

(Note also that negative numbers are incorrectly rounded, it's not only small positive numbers)

Just try rounding 0, you get... -1. See the test in Rounddown... Note that floor in PHP is using mod which is symetric around 0, this makes it inappropriate touse directly for computing floor, if we don't test the sign to round the non-integers. This is waht makes the Template:Floor much less intuitive as you would think.

Now I've got calcs that will return again the wrong results if I use the reverted templates. I discovered the Media Wikibugs when computing dates.

My correction was not much complicate. And I had avoided to use Pow for computing roundings, when powers of ten constants can be used in a small switch covering the same range of acceptable number of decimals (-20 to 20).

verdy_p 03:20, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Why is a switch using the powers of ten constant better than calling the pow template to compute them? As to the -0 and other rounding anomalies... personally I don't consider them a big deal given the limited circumstances in which they occur. However, they can be addressed by directly identifying and handling those conditions separately. --CBDunkerson 04:06, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * The problem affects several ranges, one range for each value of the decimals parameter.
 * This means that you need to test all these ranges,depending on each decimal, then you'll need to compute powon each of them, in which case they are constant, and you don't need Pow.
 * Once you have suppressed Pow, the range is tested in template:Floor. There's only one call to Floor on the server, because it evaluates the switch as a builtin. And so Floor will be called only once before redividing its result by the reverse Pow constant.
 * Believe me. These are not "limited" circumstances, and this is what has really complicated the expressions for calculating dates (without those corrections almost all calcs were wrong). verdy_p 04:12, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Also try rounding up -1 with 0 decimals: your version will add 0.5, so you'll get "-1.5" which finally rounds to... -2.
 * The symetry of the builtin "round" is the problem, ceiling and flooring are not symetric for negative numbers (and that's why the Template:Mod was written to get the true mathemetical meaning). verdy_p 04:17, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Hrrrrm? -1 + 0.5 equals -0.5, which correctly rounds to -1. The '-0' issue is something inherent in parserFunction rounding and ought to be addressed there rather than putting switches in each template performing rounding operations to get around it... but note that it shouldn't impact calculations at all. It is only a display issue. The 'switch to avoid pow' is presumably motivated by an effort to 'save processing time', but both are insignificant calculations... and the extra call to 'floor' burns just as many nano-seconds. --CBDunkerson 04:47, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Processing time is not the issue. My version or yours takes the same time. But you seem to ignore the fact that the built-in mod or floot operators are definitely not the mathematical operators because they are symetric (whichmeans that the absolute value of their result is the same independantly of the signof the operand),unlike the mathematical operators which are not. There's a difference, and it is significant in many cases for correct arithmetic.
 * These templates are made for maths; they must respect some axiomatic definitions: they won't change integer values, they will round non-integers in the correct direction. Otherwise the result in formulas using them is unpredictable.
 * The "-0" issue is not from MediaWiki but from the way PHP internally manage numbers, using signed zeroes, that it "displays" in strings. MediaWiki actually does not parse these signs that docomefrom the result of calculation, see:
 * : all is positive; MediaWiki does not parse numbers while exvaluating the operations, it only parse the expressions, but not the intermediate results.during processing, it even keeps the datatype of the operand (integer or float) as determined by PHP.
 * I don't understand whyyou have started this edition war, ignoring the bugs that I had described enough in my initial commit (also discussed elsewhere),and then documented in the template page byadding tests for them. Isn't it enough?
 * Believe me the #expr are complex, and that's why we need those templates for correct mathematics. They are needed to handle the complex cases, otherwise, we wouldnot use them and would use the supplied operators as they are... The simplest cases don't need those templates, it's needed for the complex cases,because there are even more complex formulas that depend on them. 05:02, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I haven't been ignoring your test cases... you just keep adding more of them. :] My primary concern is just that the template has grown from a single line of logic to a few pages for details which don't impact any of the pages actually using these templates at present. On the 'symmetry' issue... that's actually the way most calculations do it in my experience. I've just tried three different tools and all show rounddown(-0.3, 0) = 0 rather than -1. You want these to work on a 'next lower value' rather than 'towards zero', but I don't think that is the way most people are used to seeing them behave and thus they produce unexpected results for many the way you have them now. For most templates I really don't think it matters, but our 'roundup' and 'rounddown' templates now work differently than the built in 'round'... which means sometimes formulas will round 'symmetrically' and sometimes not, creating greater confusion than if all rounding were consistent. --CBDunkerson 05:37, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
 * It is not "a few pages". The active part is a single line switch and a simple 1-line formula per case. Not difficult to understand. The pages are for the doc (not included when using them). Thosetemplates were createdin the math category for math use. Wedon't need them for the other use which is ignoring negative values. Andyou should have noted the cases for things like rounddound(0.12345, 3) or roundup(0.123, 3) which must be 0.123, not to zero like your modified version incorrectly returns (and this case is part of the common-sense meaning, and for them, the builtin round operator works just as well without needing the template). Those templates ensuse that roundxxx(value, decimals)=roundxxx(value+N, decimals) in all cases where N is any positive or negative positive offset. A lot of formulas using modular arithmetic depend on this property. In fact, as long as the existing builtin operators will not be corrected (to avoid returning "-0", including for positive values), and similar builtin "ceil" and "floor" operators won't be provided, these templates will be needed. Those templates that use the builtin "round" and "mod" were tested in their own cases and patched according to usage; But when they finally can't be fully debugged, the templates come to the rescue and provide consistent results.
 * If you still think that these templates should implement the "common-sense" symetric behavior, it will still require you test the sign of the value and the decimals cases to return consistent results for the near-zero value range. The result will be even more complicate than the current implementation. Your implementation is inconsistant in both the "common-sense" and mathematical usages.
 * (my opinion is that the "common-sense" usage may be implemented using new built-in operators similar to round, and they will still be different from the mathemetical floor and ceil functions, and for most people the common-sense just dictates using normal rounding to the nearest rounded value). verdy_p 12:07, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

DYK-Refresh
Hello Conrad, you seem to be the main author of the excellent refresh template and you kindly fixed some formatting anomalies recently. Unfortunately it seems to have "gone off the rails" again for some reason. It's currently displaying "Earliest time for next refreshment is Wednesday, 11 May 2006 00:15 Wikipedia time (UTC).". I'd be grateful if you could have a look into this, thanks. -- Cactus.man  &#9997;  08:37, 11 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the interim fix. Such are the joys of collaborative editing I guess, with little bits here and there being switched back and forward :-) I just find the template incredibly useful for updating DYK, both in refreshing the update time without having to compute UTC offset factors and as a quick glance view of when an update is overdue. Thanks again. -- Cactus.man  &#9997;  11:03, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Before
Thanks for trying to figure out what went wrong with before and for trying to fix it. --Uncle Ed 20:48, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Infobox Character
Hey

Thanks for creating the template but I was wondering if y'all could just alter something. When you add the pic it screws up the info underneath it. If I knew who to bloody alter it I would. Can y'all just help with that one last thing. Something like this one Template:Infobox Lost Character-1 but more for other characters of cause.

Cheers

Originalsinner 01:40, 21 May 2006 (UTC)D-Man
 * Actually don't worry about it. I made my brain work.  Thanks though.  Originalsinner 01:40, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

Template request
Thanks for getting back to me on the Photoshop template. The three currently in existence will do just fine. D e nni &#9775;  16:31, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Very many thanks for taking this on. Templates look so simple when done by someone who knows what they are doing. I had no idea where to start. Small additional note for you at Requested_templates Fiddle Faddle 19:57, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Minor bug. Reported on Requested_templates.  I hope it's minor, at least, Fiddle Faddle 21:09, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Portal template
There's nothing to apologize for, the tfd notice is supposed to go on the template to invite discussion. Anyway, my argument for deletion was flawed, since portalspace is indeed apparently part of the encyclopedia (which means that links to WikiProjects from portals are self-references, but whatever), so the template probably is valid after all. --Rory096 23:01, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Tip of the day idea...
I see that you are still accumulating barnstars. Congrats. I was wondering if it wouldn't be to much trouble for you to create a modified version of the totd template, one which displays a random tip. Please reply below, I'll be checking back. --Go for it! 06:32, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
 * No problem. I'll put something together this afternoon. --CBDunkerson 12:30, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

(no subject)
You lose. — Jun. 6, '06  [11:35] < [ freak]|[ talk] >
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Templates_for_deletion/Log/2006_May_2&diff=52921585&oldid=52920509
 * http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template%3ATest-self&diff=56740699&oldid=39603919
 * Heh. Yeah... we're just being over-run with those new uses of QIF. However will we 'maintain the deprecation' when a couple of times a month someone who hasn't heard of #if: yet mistakenly uses QIF? Why, at this rate there could be a dozen new pages this year that we will have to take five seconds updating. Each! Woe is us. :]
 * C'mon. I stand by my prior statement as it was obviously correct. There was no need to delete those boolean templates because even the much more common 'qif' template has been and remains deprecated. As time goes by the handful of stragglers still using QIF will find out about #if: and even these rare applications of it will cease. Surely you have better things to worry about? Or are you for some reason desperate to continue the pointless nastiness over 'meta-templates'? --CBDunkerson 12:57, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, let's not delete them then, let's move them out of template space and into the museum. And what can be said about crap like this, where one person puts a conditional template inside another that's supposed to be always substed, then other people unknowingly proliferate the template across a couple hundred pages, which I spent much of yesterday cleaning up. — Jun. 7, '06  [00:14] < [ freak]|[ talk] >

DYK-Refresh again
Hi Conrad, unfortunately the DYK refresh clock seems to be off the rails again. If you could wave your magic wand over the bits and pieces once more, that would be great. Many thanks. -- Cactus.man  &#9997;  08:56, 17 June 2006 (UTC)
 * For a bit more on this: Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know (last section at the moment of this message in case teh relative link doesn't work)... at least to me it appears to be a problem with preview and to be intermittent because I was able to get the clock to update. but I've seen it in preview be as much as 36 hours off from what it should be. I run FireFox 1.5 on win XP. Thanks for your efforts with this template, much appreciated, it is VERY handy.  + +Lar: t/c 13:32, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox generic
What was your aim with Template:Infobox generic? have you abandoned it? Circeus 00:38, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Maybe it'd be better off in your userspace? Circeus 16:18, 18 June 2006 (UTC)


 * To answer your questions with my own - Why exactly? What's up? I don't know what the 'issue' is here because you haven't made any non-interogatory statements. :]
 * I had left this in template space because many times others will come along and start using/improving something once the concept is introduced... as, for example, the similar which you made changes to previously. --CBD 12:56, 19 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:CURRENTMINUTE
See 6356, it's a bug with MOD. Your more expensive formula has the 59/00 problem, but that strikes less than 1 out of 20. I've no idea how likely it is, whenever I got garbage I thought it's a 59/00 case, but maybe it was the MOD bug. --&#160;Omniplex 11:05, 18 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Company
Hi. From the template's history I believe you added the footnote parameter? If so could you explain what it's for? I don't think its mentioned anywhere and I don't think its being used. Thank you, Mark83 17:14, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Many thanks for the response. Glad I asked you, rather than "accusing" you! Regards --Mark83 22:32, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Findbox
I believe that this template is not a good idea. Say someone has 10 userboxes and on average it is found in N/2 (with N being 18 currently). That is 90 ifexists calls, 10 ifs, and 21 transclusions. It is not unheard of for people to have hundreds of userboxes on a page--and given that Template:User is checked next to last, and that is where many babelboxes and other boxes are located it isn't hard to imagine a userpage ending up with a thousand or more calls. There is also the problem of invalidating the caches of over 2000 userpages whenever a new archive is added. Kotepho 21:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)
 * To date I have not seen any detectable slowdown as a result of using or editing this template. My understanding is that the difference between one 'ifexists' call and thirty is neglible. Likewise, concerns about server load from 'meta-template' style transclusion have been described as inaccurate by the lead developer. Finally, in the grand scheme of things 2000 pages is not a significant number. All of these things are born out by observed performance. The 'Template:User ' check should be first, to get the version from the template namespace over any copies, but I've got it listed last currently because alot of 'deleted' userboxes have been replaced with notices indicating where the new version resides in user space... which would then come up instead of the actual box if the Template namespace were checked first. Eventually those notices should be cleared out and I will switch the order around. If dozens of people start creating 'archives' of just two or three boxes and adding them to this template, it winds up transcluded onto 30,000 pages, or other events transpire which make it begin to be a measurable drag on performance then there are various adjustments which can be made to address those issues. For instance, consolidating archives or limiting the scanned archives to those with over 50 boxes, protecting the template page to prevent frequent changes, et cetera. If an issue develops there are ways of dealing with it. --CBD 13:11, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Template:Dynamic navigation box with image
Could you please take a look at this one? It displays incorrectly for me (with the image under the top bar instead of above it) although the text is essentially the same as on the German and Spanish templates. I wonder whether there is a CSS issue involved that I don't understand. As you are one of the people who know their way around templates, I hope you can help. Happy editing, Kusma (討論) 01:34, 22 June 2006 (UTC)

Citation templates
Hi Conrad. I would appreciate if you could take the citation templates under your auspices. I know you are one of the best template specialists here, and you have been a great help during the WP:AUM wars, for which I was and am very thankful. Now cite book (used on more than 15,000 pages), cite web, cite journal. cite news are fully protected and the admins that drop by there don't always know what they are doing. Since I've done a lot there and tried to keep things running there it would be a shame if everything would go down there, after I (and others) have invested that much their wiki time (including you!). I intend to step back there a bit, not alone due to the fact that I can't edit anymore there, but it's nevertheless a good breaking point. I do not intend to leave Wikipedia completely, but I start getting some serious "all is done what I could do" feelings. So I probably won't be that much around as during the WP:AUM wars last years. Thanks for everything and whishing you all the best. --Ligulem 22:30, 29 July 2006 (UTC)

Slang glossaries / glossary discussion
Thank you for your input on the glossary issue. You suggested that all glossaries be transwikied to Wiktionary. Such a plan has many drawbacks when looked at in greater detail. There are many aspects of glossaries and how they are used on Wikipedia which you did not consider. I've pointed some of these out in response to your post, and would be interested in reading your response to them. You can find them at: Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not. --List Expert 02:02, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Seeking programmer input
We need the advice of a programmer at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Sidebar redesign proposal. Is the project practical? What are the limitations? Are there structural or system considerations? What options/opportunities are we overlooking? How would the current proposal be implemented? 'Thought it would be best to get some techie help on this from the start, before we blow this out for discussion to the wider community. --Nexus Seven 02:52, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

iso 15924
Hi coding profi, your help needed at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Infobox_WS&diff=69869143&oldid=62080587 Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:46, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

- thank you :-) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:36, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Template /doc pattern
See User:Ligulem/work/min. I made an edit link. --Ligulem 12:43, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * That works for me. Some users don't have 'section editing' enabled so having a 'hard-coded' link to the documentation sub-page makes sense. --CBD 14:07, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm. Just wondering: do you see section edit links on Template:Tl? I have them enabled but they don't show up there for me. --Ligulem 15:57, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Answering myself: Conrad is an admin and Template:Tl is protected. I'm not an admin, so I can't edit Template:Tl. But I could edit Template:Tl/doc, which is not protected. But the display of the edit links of sections is obviously disabled because of the protected page. Counterexample: template:cite video (is not protected, so I do have the section edit links, even though the doc is transcluded). --Ligulem 18:55, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmmm, hadn't thought of that... even though the section of the page you would be editing is not protected the edit links are suppressed because the page is protected. So hard-coded edit links are definitely going to be the way to go. --CBD 01:10, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Greek alphabet
I get errors when adding iso15924 at Greek alphabet. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 15:49, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox_WS - I fixed it. Made the param like the params at the top. IMO now there will be allways lines, even if empty. Before i did the fixes the code was shown i same line as the preceding stuff (sisters or parets, depended on lang IIRC). Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:25, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Whupps, see what I missed now. Sorry about that. --CBD 21:50, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I created Template:User iso15924 Tobias Conradi (Talk) 16:52, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

Your help is appreciated at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:User_iso15924/category-intro&diff=71949679&oldid=71948606

if-else stuff would be needed. The Template:User_iso15924/category-intro is used at the top of every category. It should set the parent categories depending on 1=script 2=knowledge level. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 05:02, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

It was deleted, I am really pissed off. Several hours of working and a wild admin just deletes the stuff. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 19:14, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

THANK YOU!!! Tobias Conradi (Talk) 18:50, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em
Quiddity was spotting me wherever I turned up, so sockpuppetry was futile. So I've shrugged my shoulders and have accepted him as a team mate rather than viewing him as a tail. We're actually getting along now, if you can believe it.

The main reason I'm contacting you, though, has to do with a project I've been working on: the page formatting on Wikipedia's main reference pages. Please take a look. The edit buttons are opening the template page Reference page section. Basically, in order to get a box around each section, I was using each subsequent template to close the section that came before it. Here are the links to the reference pages:

"Basic topics" lacks the template, and has the code embedded in its text (to customize the font-size to match the titles of the other ref pages). We haven't had a problem with this page because the section edit buttons are turned off. "Fields of study" and "A-Z index" don't include the template at all.

I've temporariliy turned off the section edit buttons in "Topics", above, because the edit boxes were coming up blank. In "Tables" the behavior is even freakier. --The Transhumanist 06:30, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for all your help in the past (it seemed more like wizardry, actually), and I look forward to seeing whatever miracles you may perform this time around.

Sincerely,

--The Transhumanist 06:25, 27 August 2006 (UTC) (aka Go for it!, Go for it, Nexus Seven, True Genius, Polar Deluge, The Tipster, etc. etc.).

Template:Shortcut hack
What is the purpose of the bizarre template code on shortcut (wrapping it in {{{1)? ed g2s &bull; talk 12:10, 30 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Okay, but the {{{1 wrapper should be around the inclusion of the template, not in the template itself, otherwise you end up with {{shortcut|}} calls which are a unnecessary:

{{#if: {{{1|}}} | {{shortcut|{{{1}}}}} }}
 * How many templates pass a parameter to shortcut like this, so I can fix them? ed g2s &bull; talk 13:05, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Sorry to bother you again
Hello again, CB! Remember Infobox WS? I was wondering if it would be possible to make only the first word under the "Type" variable count. For example, if I write

|type= Logographic with syllabic elements

can the color for "Logographic" only show up, instead of it being white? I've been doing some work with templates but I can't handle this advanced stuff like you can. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 19:45, 2 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Ikiroid. In this case what you are trying to do actually isn't possible directly. Wikipedia doesn't have any functionality for isolating portions of a string with the exception of a few tricks for wikilinks only (e.g. Shire knows to ignore the parenthetical and just shows Shire). You could simulate something like this by having a 'type' parameter and a 'type description' which is displayed right after it. So, in this case, type=Logographic and typedesc=with syllabic elements. Alternatively, if there are only going to be a few variations like this it could be added to the #switch so 'Logographic with syllabic elements' would be a recognized text for producing the red color. I'll implement that for now, but if there are going to be alot of variations then the 'type and typedesc' method might be better. --CBD 08:17, 3 September 2006 (UTC)


 * CB, I like your idea for an optional "type description" parameter. I was thinking of calling it "typedesc." I tried to add it in, but I didn't do it because A) It was your idea, so you should get credit, and B) I didn't know where to add in the code so it would be transcluded next to  without disrupting the color code. Do you think you could add in a "typedesc" parameter, just like how you described it above? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 02:21, 4 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi Ikiroid. I made an update for the 'typedesc' parameter. Since we only want to use it for display we can bypass the color code entirely and only include it on the line where the type is actually displayed. --CBD 09:46, 4 September 2006 (UTC)


 * I just used it in Cuniform, it works great! Thank you! I'll try adding it to other Writing systems with exceptions. By the way, I put my two cents in into the ipa-0 DRV. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 14:22, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

DYK Refresh
I found the time elapsed line extremely useful. Why did you comment it out? - Mgm|(talk) 12:14, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

Template:Babel-N
I have modified Template:Babel-N to let it support center alignment. --Hello World! 12:06, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Should template:babel-0 be removed? --Hello World! 13:23, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

The input parameters of Template:Babel-N is different from Template:Babel (with the addition of "User_"), so the two templates are not prepared to be merged.--Hello World! 13:27, 10 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I have no idea how to merge template:Babel-N and template:Babel. --Hello World! 15:42, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

Template:Infobox Highway
...copy past sister (can you fix?) "Infobox highway". Should all be at the uppercase name, which is infobox naming standard conform. Tobias Conradi (Talk) 11:00, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. --CBD 11:18, 13 September 2006 (UTC)

Date template
Hi Conrad. I know you have been involved in date templates before, and I was wondering if you could help with an idea I raised at Talk:Hurricane_Katrina. It involves the tendancy for people to give dates without years (ie. day and month only) for current events. Unfortunately, as at the Hurricane Katrina articles, this can be confusing over a year later, as sometimes it is no longer clear which year people are referring to. The ideal situation is for people to use the year when they first write the sentence, but in articles with lots of dates the repetition of the year can be annoying (and anyway, a well-written article will make clear what year a series of yearless dates refers to). Still, I was wondering if some date template magic using "current date" could be used to construct something that displays the day and month for a year after the date entered, and then displays the day, month and year after a year has passed? If this would only work for wikilinked dates, it might not be worth it. If it can work for all instances of a date, that would be great. Maybe something like this already exists? I haven't found it yet though. Thanks. Carcharoth 09:06, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I'll raise this at MOS:DATE as you suggest. I'm not actually surprised that it doesn't mention it. A lot of guidelines that superficially look good miss out basic stuff. Though sometimes they have been removed under the mantra of anti-instruction creep. Carcharoth 12:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * New text now in place here. I'm sure you are aware of it, but I thought I'd also point out As of, the rather long-lasting stop-gap measure implemented until "someone comes up with a better idea, perhaps using a template" - can you think of a suitable way to tackle recentism in dates using templates? Carcharoth 23:48, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Actually, I hadn't seen As of before. Reading up on that it looks like a template of the form,, was recently developed at  for this purpose. After a specified date it displays an 'update needed' superscript note and adds hidden links to the day, month, and year so that people can check all pages needing update in the current month. If enough people use this for tagging and perform cleanup it should do a pretty good job. --CBD 10:36, 3 October 2006 (UTC)
 * And I hadn't seen ! Thanks for pointing that out. PS. I only spotted your reply here by chance. Must be more organised! :-) Carcharoth 00:23, 7 October 2006 (UTC)

templates using hiddenStructure
Hi Conrad, per request of Carl, I did a xml dump scan for templates using hiddenStructure. Feel free to help cut down on User:Ligulem/work/templates using hiddenStructure :). --Ligulem 12:48, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Great. I've been tempted to just take it out of the 'common.css' to spur cleanup, but this list will help alot. --CBD 11:24, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Ruud did this. I reverted for now, because I want to cut down on the list first. Ruud's idea is good though, and I took it into my monobook.css. See also discussions at MediaWiki_talk:Common.css. --Ligulem 11:32, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I forgot to mention that http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css already contains hiddenStrcture (see also User_talk:R._Koot). --Ligulem 11:38, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

Hi CB, got another programming request for ya...
As you've probably noticed I work with lists a lot, and one thing that takes up an inordinate amount of time is columnization. Do you know of a way, or could you whip up a tool, to add columnizing markup code automatically? Counting the column of links and placing the tags manually is extremely tedious, and must be repeated for each heading section. And there are hundreds of lists which need columnization.

Here's the page I'm about to tackle, along with some sample markup code (also if you know of better markup code for this, I'd be glad to learn of it):  Talk:List of academic disciplines. --The Transhumanist 05:25, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * For simple lists I think that the easiest markup to use is just;


 * However, for lists with indented sub-headings like on the page above I think you are pretty much stuck with a method like you are using on that page. The easiest way I know of to split up the lists manually would be to copy them into a spreadsheet program like Excel or Lotus 123... then you could highlight the full list to get the complete count of entries, add rows with the markup tags at the appropriate spots, and then copy the whole thing back to the edit window. --CBD 15:53, 6 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I use Excel as well. It is a simple way to concatenate different mark-up tags and coding together, if you don't really know enough programming to use a proper editor that will do things like that for you. Have a look at the CONCATENATE function in Excel. Search and replace is also useful for manipulating and rearranging data, as are the data sorting functions in Excel. Carcharoth 00:20, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
 * Cool, I'll try these.

How hard would it be to create a bot that processed list pages and their columns automatically? --The Transhumanist 22:29, 7 October 2006 (UTC)
 * I haven't worked with Wikipedia bots at all, but I'd suspect that the general concept wouldn't be too bad. The problem area would be any sort of decision-making. Should a particular list page be columnized? How many columns should it use? Should the column breaks be made at different points to accomodate indented lists? Et cetera. It would likely also get confused by any images, comments, or other 'non list entry' text as there would be no way to distinguish those. I think there is always going to have to be human input and review. Where are you running into hangups? It might be possible to put together a macro to automate any task that takes a while. --CBD 11:13, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

NavigationBar
Hi - I'm interested in any comments you might have about template:NavigationBar. I've started a thread on this at WP:VPT. Thanks. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:43, 15 October 2006 (UTC)

Update to Template:Update_after
Hi! I've made changes to Template:Update after (it now links to Category:Wikipedia articles in need of updating and As of), and made significant changes to the documentation at Template:Update_after (including documenting the built-in ability to add a comment, and a changes in where it's allowable to be used); please review, and provide comments at Template talk:Update after if you think any are appropriate. Thanks! --Scott McNay 03:58, 16 October 2006 (UTC).

Template:Announcements/New featured pages
Thanks for fixing my erroneous transclusion of the discussion - too much cutting and pasting! You had fixed it by the time I noticed and went back to correct myself. -- ALoan (Talk) 15:09, 17 October 2006 (UTC)
 * No problem. --CBD 16:59, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Templates question
Hi Conrad. I wonder if you'd be able to have a look here, and see if my concerns about what I did are justified. It's a little trick I discovered using templates and categories, but I suspect that (a) there is a simpler way of doing this, and (b) doing this sort of thing this way is mildy disruptive. I'd appreciate any advice you could give before I ask around a bit further. Thanks. Carcharoth 22:22, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Randomized "Did you know.." list?
Hi CBD, I liked your randomized Featured content page so much, I "borrowed" the technique for Portal:Dogs/Selected breed. I also would like to randomize the "Did you know..." list, but I don't know how to prevent duplicates. Would you be willing to give it a go, or send me off to someone else who could set up the control structure? Thanks. Rfrisbietalk 20:49, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

More randomized featured portals?
Check this out. :-) Rfrisbietalk 16:37, 2 November 2006 (UTC)

if else in templates
...maybe you can help at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template_talk:Infobox_WS&diff=85955965&oldid=84386344 Tobias Conradi (Talk) 01:12, 6 November 2006 (UTC)


 * looks good, and I think I understand how the if else works. :-) Tobias Conradi (Talk) 17:07, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

US Covered Bridge Template
Hello. I'm hoping you can help (are willing/have time). I would like to make some upgrades to Template:Infobox U.S. Covered Bridge, basically upgrading it to something more along the lines of Template:Infobox Bridge. I contacted the originator of the CB template, asking if we could add a parameter (there are others that could definitely be beneficial, but I just wanted to start small). He was receptive, but says he has not had time to make improvements (testing, etc.) to make it more like the Bridge template. I don't understand all of the coding that's involved, so this is where I'm hoping you might be able to lend a hand. Let me know if you're able, and I'll get the creator involved in this discussion as well (on the Talk page for the existing template). — Homefryes  Say•Do 20:54, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Template help (if you have time)
Hi CB, it's been awhile. If you can, could you help with the esoteric template WP Writing systems? I want to remove a feature which removes the "importance rating" when the "class rating" is posted as NA. There are some pages, such as templates and lists, which have an importance rating but do not fit into an article class. It's isn't urgent, but if you could get around to tweaking the template that would be great. Thanks. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 21:56, 2 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Ikiroid. I made a change which should do what I think you are looking for. Please let me know if it isn't what you wanted or is not working properly. --CBD 01:10, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, it's very good. Thank you for the help! The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 23:39, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Conversion templates
Hi, CBD! Recently, for no apparent reason at all, I thought that having some conversion templates would have been nice. Unfortunately, it did not occur to me to do a prior research, so I failed to notice that a collection of such templates is already available at Category:Conversion templates. Before I found that category, I produced the following templates: km to mi, mi to km, m to ft, ft to m, km2 to mi2, mi2 to km2, m2 to ft2, ft2 to m2, C to F, and F to C. Now, these are much nicer and more convenient than some of the templates that have been created so far (FootToMetre, for example), so at least part of my  work has not been in vain. However, their functionality is not much of an improvement over conv-dist and the likes which you created. Hence, I don't see a point for me to continue with this. I only have one request for you: could you incorporate some of the functionality of my templates into your topical templates? Mine allow the users to specify whether they want the output to show full or abbreviated unit names, whether the unit names should be spelled in American or Commonwealth English if full unit names are output, whether the unit names should be wikified, and allow to specify the precision of the result. If you could do that, we can deprecate my templates and then clean the whole Category:Conversion templates up. Cheers,&mdash;Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 17:49, 7 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Hi Ezhiki. Yeah, there are several different variants on conversion templates. The options you describe all sound doable, but one difference between the templates you've created and 'conv-dist' not noted above is that 'conv-dist' only works properly when substituted while yours are designed to not be substituted (if they were they'd copy in all the conditional logic). Converting 'conv-dist' to a 'not substituted' format is easily accomplished, but I haven't been able to get it to work as both - only one or the other. I've been sticking with the substituted version because it leaves an end result which is just the actual text of the measurement(s) in whatever format specified. On the other hand, unsubstituted templates are easier to use and spread faster because people see their syntax on pages and re-use them. Any thoughts or preferences on this? --CBD 03:14, 9 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I copied this thread to and replied at Category talk:Conversion templates. Thanks for the feedback!&mdash;Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); 16:26, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

Your edit to WP:FA
Hi, CBD; since I don't "speak the language", I just wanted to make sure you were aware of this regarding your recent edit to WP:FA. Can you make sure that you and are on the same page? Regards, Sandy Georgia (Talk) 16:19, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks&mdash;even I understood that :-) I think.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 16:32, 10 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Is the "onlyinclude" tag documented somewhere? It's not mentioned on Help:Template, and I've avoided using it because of this. It's so similar to "includeonly" that I wondered if it's deprecated legacy code. Gimmetrow 14:59, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Huh, I thought it was documented in Help:Template. It must be documented somewhere... or I wouldn't know about it. :] Probably got removed by someone who thought it was an error for 'includeonly' - I've seen that happen before. The 'onlyinclude' tags are used extensively with featured lists. No plans to deprecate it that I'm aware of. --CBD 15:11, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I know I've seen it. Would be nice to see documentation on whether or how it works in combination with other tags, or what happens if there are two "onlyinclude" sections. Gimmetrow 15:22, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * I can tell you that. The 'onlyinclude' tags would be better named, 'includebetween'... if you've got two sets of them then the contents of both sets are included. If you mix them with other tags then stuff between them is included along with anything so identified by the other tags. --CBD 15:30, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That almost made sense, but usually text not between any tags is included. When the onlyinclude tag is there, it's not. This seems like a non-local effect, which is a little odd. Gimmetrow 15:47, 11 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Definitely listed (here in M:Help:Template on the commons... think you nailed the right page too. Patrick and I traded a couple of edits on same. // Fra nkB  19:45, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

I need your help with an esoteric template edit
Hi CBD. I tried to add another class to the wsproj as "dab" (disambiguation), along with a category for it diff. For some reason, it isn't working. Can you see anything wrong? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 01:19, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
 * Your change was essentially correct and 'working', but you were likely having problems with capitalization. Both the switch that determines the class to display and the template call for the box indicating the class were case sensitive... one requiring 'dab' or 'd' and the other 'dab' or 'Dab'. 'DAB' and various other options would have failed both. I've changed the template to be case-insensitive, but also got rid of the 'd' option since it would require a Template:D-Class in addition to Template:Dab-Class. You can now use 'dab', 'Dab', 'DAB', 'dAb', or any other capitalization of those three letters. The page Talk:Hieroglyphs already has the 'dab' class set and is working. --CBD 11:51, 23 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the fix! The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 16:00, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Color change
Hi Conrad,

Do you know how can I change the background colour for my talk-pages. I'd like to change the color of the entire wiki-page as it is currently on wikipedia. I write my own special pages for my wiki and would like to display diff colour on them as well - do you know how can I set this value?

thx in advance,

--Aretai 15:48, 2 April 2007 (UTC)


 * Well, you can set any single page to show a particular color by putting at the top. To make a global change you would want to update the MediaWiki:Common.css or MediaWiki:Monobook.css page. See Memory Alpha Monobook.css for an example of a Wiki which has set all of the different screen elements to use a different default background color. --CBD 17:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Thx for info

--Aretai 08:12, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

I tried the, but it works only for some part of the page (I wanted to have the entire page formatted). I've also tried the trick with MediaWiki:Common.css, but didn't succeed, thus my question: On what versions of MW does it work?

thx, --Aretai 09:38, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Users can generally only change the appearance of the 'content' section of the page - not the sidebar, header, footer, et cetera. The only ways I know of to do the latter are by adjusting things in the MediaWiki: namespace. For instance, changing MediaWiki:Sidebar alters the contents of the sidebar. Thus, you could presumably make color changes there. However, changing CSS settings on the MediaWiki:Common.css page should work for all versions. Adding '.portlet {background: blue}' to User:Aretai/monobook.css should change the background color of the sidebar for you - a similar change to the MediaWiki: CSS page(s) should have the same impact on all users. Et cetera. Some different options for help on these issues can be found at the MediaWiki admin hub. --CBD 11:26, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

Project Microformats and templates
Hi,

You might be interested in Project Microformats, not least because the application of microformats will necessitate changes to a number of templates (such as "birth date", et al), which I gather is something close to your heart. We're currently working on Geo and starting on hCard. I'm happy to answer any questions but please consider using the project talk page, so others can learn and participate. All the best, Andy Mabbett 23:46, 7 April 2007 (UTC)

How to write bots?
Hi,

Do you know how to write bots designed for wiki use or could you point me to any tutorial/manual? I'd be v.grateful.

Regards, --Aretai 15:58, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

ISO 639 redirects
Bot_requests - for the category page, could grouping be done via the template? Tobias Conradi (Talk) 22:17, 23 April 2007 (UTC)

FL onlyincludes
Hi, I'm not sure where to put the onlyincludes in United States Navy enlisted rates, which is missing them. Thanks :) --Quiddity 01:12, 2 May 2007 (UTC)
 * There are no hard and fast rules. I generally like to include a bit of text explaining what the list is about, an example image, and several rows from a compact table/overview of the list. I put in tags along those lines and added this page to the random display cycle. You can see what it will look like by previewing --CBD 11:40, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Featured content portal and excess FAs
Hi Conrad. I seem to remember you had a hand in setting up Featured content, or at least the random selection bit of it. Would you be able to comment over at the talk page for the "Today's Featured Article" request page, in particular the second point I make here? I'm effectively suggesting that the excess amount of FAs not put into the TFA queue yet be featured in some way at WP:FC, in order to give more exposure of our featured content, and to remove the pressure on the TFA process. Would this be feasible do you think? From what I can see, Template:FCpages controls the content of WP:FC, but I have been looking at the code for that template and I don't understand it at all! :-( Would I be right in saying that articles promoted to FA, but that haven't appeared on the Main Page, don't appear on WP:FC? I suspect I was wrong to say this, but the date appearing with each FA suggests otherwise to me. Maybe they appear in the "new featured content" bit, which comes from Template:Announcements/New featured pages, but that is manually updated, so I guess not. Help! :-) Carcharoth 00:06, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * PS. Would you be offended if I said I saw this and thought of you? :-) Carcharoth 01:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope, it's a fairly good fit. I commented on the 'great main page requests debate'. Short answer is that the non Main page articles aren't displayed on WP:FC currently (other than being listed in the 'new featured content' section for a few days), but they could be if people are willing to set them all up in a consistent format and/or location. --CBD 11:11, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
 * OK. Thanks. I'll probably raise this issue at Wikipedia talk:Featured articles, as that is probably the better venue. I think two things may work best: having a daily article featured at the top of Featured articles and integrating the featured articles into the list used for Featured content as soon as they are promoted. Would there be a way to automatically have a list of recently-promoted articles appear in the "new featured content" bit further down the page? That appears to be updated manually, as far as I can tell. Also, see Wikipedia talk:Featured content, where I point out some broken links. Carcharoth 09:26, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * I can't think of any way to automatically generate the 'new featured content' list. Any sort of bot would inevitably confuse page name changes for 'new' articles, get thrown off by reorganizations of the featured article list, et cetera. The weekly signpost Features and admins column covers all new featured articles while the Template:Announcements/New featured pages list attempts to show them as they are promoted. I'll try to dig up a few 'featured article blurbs' for articles which haven't appeared on the Main page, put them together somewhere, and add them to the random display list as a proof of concept. From there it will be a matter of people setting up the blurbs in the right place and updating the pick list. If we get a bunch we could change it over so that the random list only shows articles which haven't appeared on the Main page yet. That'd allow each to come up more frequently. --CBD 11:58, 17 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds great. Do you think you could add this over at the dicsussion I've started at Wikipedia talk:Featured articles? Carcharoth 12:14, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

ME templates
Hi Conrad. Several ME templates are at TfD at the moment. I actually voted delete in the ME-canon templates debate, but feel I should have told you about it first. That one has finished, unfortunately, but there is still a debate going on about consolidation over various "in-universe" and "fact" templates that are used to tag articles. Would you have a view on those. I made reference to the "designer and maintainer" of the templates, but now realise that it is really the other ones I use as examples that you were involved in, not the ones actually being debated. Anyway, I thought you might want to know about the debates. Carcharoth 10:06, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Forgot the link: Templates_for_deletion/Log/2007_June_5. Carcharoth 10:07, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * I'm actually not a big fan of the 'fact', 'in universe', and suchlike style 'cleanup' templates. I don't use them, but for those who do presumably it is easier to have the topic specific versions - which seems to be the way the TfD is headed. The 'Mecanon' templates served a useful purpose at one point, but they and the pages they linked to got rewritten and redefined so many times it was pointless. The original idea was to say, 'here are all the different versions of this story/fact' in a consistent way across articles, with links to explanations of why there are different versions and disputes about what should be considered 'official'. I think NOT having templates makes that necessary task much more difficult, but there were other ideas about how we should handle the 'canon' issue in general. --CBD 11:03, 12 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for commenting over at the TfD. I like the fact tag, as it is fairly unobtrusive and specific. I hate the general "top of article" banner tags - off-putting and not helpful. As for conon stuff. Did you see the ME cannon AfD? Middle-earth canon and Tolkien's legendarium are probably OK for now, but still need improvement. Not quite sure what to do with Middle-earth Cycle. Carcharoth 11:36, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

Template:Fix-inline
Would you mind explaining what you've done with that, at Template talk:Fix-inline, or documenting the template at its /doc page? The purpose, appearance and usage of that template were plainly obvious yesterday, but aren't now. :-/ —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 18:42, 13 June 2007 (UTC)


 * Actually, yesterday the template had the same (zero) documentation it has now, and was used (incorrectly) on exactly one page. Further, Template:Fix which was used to call fix-inline and pass parameters to it had been deleted. Thus, I don't think there was any significant disruption from the change. However, I do intend to document how it and the related templates work. --CBD 12:44, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. Did not mean to imply you'd disrupted anything, only that the template's code is esoteric now, it is not even visible on its own page (looking at a template is one of the chief ways of figuring out what it is for), and its usage was formerly simple (just add the template to a page), and does not appear to be simple any longer. I.e., I'm not sure anyone understands it any more but you. :-) —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 22:55, 14 June 2007 (UTC)
 * No worries. I was surprised anyone noticed. The /doc sub-page has been updated with usage notes and an explanation of the template's purpose now. --CBD 11:52, 15 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Keen. Noted your consistentizing activities in other templates of this sort. Methinks you should be on the roster at WikiProject Inline Templates (WP:WPILT), which remains a little shorthanded. —  SMcCandlish  &#91;talk&#93; &#91;cont&#93;  ‹(-¿-)› 18:17, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

Some advanced template stuff
Hi Conrad. I wonder if you have time to take a look at two template questions I have? Hope you'll be able to help! Carcharoth 11:03, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The first one is rather simple, but I'd appreciate another set of eyes checking it over. Have a look at Template talk:WPBiography.
 * The second one is a bit more complicated, and involves trying to get an assessment template to take auto-signatures, or any sort of signature parameter. I've been investigating and failing to find any clear instructions on this. Do you think you could look at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Auto-signatures in templates for assessments?

WPBiography template stuff again
There seem to be no objections at Template talk:WPBiography, so do you think you will be OK with carrying out the changes? Or do you want to leave it for a bit longer? There is also another edit to be done at Template talk:WPBiography (you will need to scroll right to the bottom), cleaning up a bit that got missed. I had also considered adding a category allowing people to track the "living" parameter, since at the moment the instructions say to put "living=no", but that doesn't actually do anything. There is a need to distinguish between living people, dead people, and those where we don't know, but that is covered by the main article categories of Category:Living people and its ilk, so duplicating that on the talk page seems a bit silly. Anyway, that's off topic for the current changes, so I'll stop there. Carcharoth 11:59, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Third change now! "Fair use" to "non free" where-ever it occurs. I'll see about setting up the code in the template sandbox and linking to it. You'll have to check though that no-one has changed it since I last edited the sandbox, and preview the "changes" to check it is all OK. Carcharoth 15:11, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Done. Carcharoth 15:27, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Another kind admin came along and made the change! :-) Carcharoth 00:41, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Ah, good. Sorry I wasn't around much. --CBD 21:10, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

No problems. If you look at the talk page of the template, the behaviour of DEFAULTSORT meant that there were problems. See Template talk:WPBiography. The solution I've come up with, tedious though it is, has been to add the following to every category tag in the template code: " | ". If I understand things right (and I did test this at Talk:Aaron Lawrence - see the page history), this will pipe-sort the categories by listas if listas is there, and if listas is not there, it will simply add "|" to the category tags (which won't change anything). I left the original listas/PAGENAME conditional alone. The change can be seen here (I hope I didn't miss any categories out - any way to check?). I think the observed behaviour will now be as follows: It is this last case that has made me realise that what I really should have done was make the manual pipe sort a "listas if listas is present, but PAGENAME otherwise" for each one. That would free the categories inside WPBiography from the threat of DEFAULTSORTs from lower down the page, while the DEFAULTSORT inside WPBiography would still distribute the listas or PAGENAME to categories outside WPBiography on pages where no DEFAULTSORT was present. Does that make any sense? Would you be able to check the above and see if the changes I want to make are doing what I think they are? I have a few more things to check and test. Carcharoth 01:26, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
 * If there are no other DEFAULTSORTs on the talk page (eg. naked DEFAULTSORTs or ones added by other templates), then WPBiography will DEFAULTSORT to PAGENAME in the absence of listas, and DEFAULTSORT to listas if listas is present. The categories pipe-sorted to listas will be sorted by listas if that is present, or will take DEFAULTSORT=PAGENAME otherwise. Non-pipesorted categories on the page outside of the WPBiography template will sort by the DEFAULTSORT value provided by WPBiography.
 * If there are other DEFAULTSORTs on the talk page ''above WPBiography, then WPBiography's DEFAULTSORT will be used instead of those ones, and the behaviour is as above.
 * If there are other DEFAULTSORTs on the talk page below WPBiography, then the lowest one will be used. The categories provided by WPBiography will be pipe-sorted to listas if that is present, and will take the unknown DEFAULTSORT value otherwise (this last bit is wrong, I want them to take PAGENAME if listas is not present).
 * Right, that change I made above didn't work for some reason. I think the naked "|" were messing things up. I also took the opportunity to change from " | " to " " - using the | to insert the "|" pipe characters instead. That seemed to do the trick. The full change can be seen here. This edit here to Talk:Aaron Lawrence was the crucial test - the DEFAULTSORT of Xenon that I entered over-rode the "PAGENAME" sorting of the LGBT template, but the performance of the WPBiography template was unchanged - it still sorted to PAGENAME when there was no listas, and sorted to the listas value when there was a listas. Only one problem. There are a total of 283 category tags in the WPBiography template, ie. I've just inserted 283 #if and | thingys. When I saved the test template at Talk:Aaron Lawrence, it took a long time to load (over 20 seconds). For a template used on over 380,000 talk pages, do you think the change I'm proposing to make would severely overload things? Earlier, you said "BTW, the  at the top could be replaced with just  ." - so could what I entered be simplified to  ? And would that speed up the template performance? Carcharoth 02:13, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem with | was likely the fact that if a parameter is unset and un-defaulted it evaluates as text. Thus, if listas were unset that would be sorting on "". Changing it to |, to default to 'blank' would likely have done what you intended. However, if you want it to use listas if set or otherwise PAGENAME it could just be | . The save time you mentioned after the change could have been due to something else going on in Wikipedia at the same time or just the overall length and complexity of this template. The changes you made should not significantly increase rendering time on the display page. The equivalent to your #if: logic above using parameter defaults and the '!' template would be, | . Again, parameters evaluate first to what they are set to (including blank if so set), then to any default specified after the | character (including blank if there is nothing between the | and closing brackets), and then as straight text if unset and no default is defined. It is essentially a built in 'if-then-else' condition... which was actually used to create templates that worked exactly the same way as #if: and the like before those were added to the MediaWiki code. Thus, there is never a need to use a #if: to choose between a parameter value and a default... using accomplishes the same thing in less space. It will also render faster, though in this case the difference in speed is tiny. --CBD 11:03, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Thanks for explaining all this. I tried your suggestion, but ran into the same problem as before. I've realised that the template performs differently depending on whether it has "listas=", or "listas=NAME" or no listas on the page at all. Have a look at this and this, a difference which is produced by this edit. Those talk pages were using this version of the sandbox template, but when I switched back to the old version here (the one using "my #if: logic"), then the template performed the same way regardless of whether it was "listas=" or no listas. I think. Anyway, what is to be done? Carcharoth 23:23, 4 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The difference is that evalutes 'listas=' to 'blank', while  evaluates 'listas=' to  . Being set to 'blank' via 'listas=' is treated like any other listas value by the first version. However, #if: looks for a NON blank value to evaluate to 'true'. If you think it is likely that alot of pages will have 'listas=' when they really mean to set no parameter then the #if: version would work better. Usually the preference is just to leave the parameter out rather than setting it to blank. --CBD 00:07, 6 August 2007 (UTC)

Infobox Book
Hi again,

Your template expertise, comments,advice and/ or assistance would be appreciated at Template talk:Infobox Book, please. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:54, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Template:Babel2
Hello, I saw that you are the creator of Babel and I wanted to consult you on the new template, Babel2, up to the first 100 entires the template was perfect, until I had to start adding more entires, now I get this weird box in the background towards the end of it (User:PatPeter), just press show and you will be able to see my userboxes, I cannot presently figure out the problem. I will freely to the monotonous work that takes a while if I know what I am doing (hell I made this awesome template by myself I generally do) so thank you in advance for hearing me out and I hope to talk to you soon. -PatPeter 19:44, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

Template:Listadmins
--MZMcBride 00:43, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

Oh My Goddess character articles
Can you apply this change to all the articles? :) -- Cat chi? 10:58, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * FYI - You mentioned in a deletion discussion that there was a color difference between the two templates. The template was deleted, but the color can be fixed. I updated Belldandy to show the color used by the original infobox. Any other significant style differences can probably be cleaned up with other optional parameters or by editing Template:Infobox animanga character or some other template (e.g. Template:Infobox character or Template:Infobox generic). Let me know if I can help reformatting things. --CBD 11:10, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Yes. I would have considered this an acceptable compromise had it been mentioned once on that discussion. People preferred a forceful and covert deletion request instead... I think it looks fine as it is now. Though the "voiced by" section is a bit charmed and I really would like to seperate the Japanese (original) and English (later) voice actors just like how it was on the original template. This would resolve most of the redundant repetitive (English)/(Japanese) referances in the infobox as well solving the problem I just mentioned. -- Cat chi? 11:19, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Is this better for the 'voiced by' lists? It's a bit hard to tell because with the template deleted I can't line the old and new formats up side by side like I normally would. Sorry people didn't discuss these formatting options with you beforehand. If this looks good I'll try to help update the other infoboxes in the series. --CBD 11:51, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * It looks good. On the older infoboxes fields were separated with a field. As it is now it is a bit hard to tell which one is "seiyu" and "voice actress". Take a look at http://www.answers.com/topic/belldandy for example. I really like the new "Profile" and "Information" seperators. I cannot express my gratitude enough, I thank you again for your efforts. -- Cat chi? 15:42, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I almost like it as much as the original if not more. There are 6 minor things I would love to see fixed. One the width of the infobox should be 250px. Two the text should be aligned right "Species" "Seiyu". Three same text should be ified to save space. Four the "Species" should contain a colon (':') at the end (looks nicer IMHO). Five same text should occupy a single line and not warp to a next line (with previous fixes this should be easier to achieve). Six the same text should link to the relevant articles (ex "Elemental Affinity" linking to Classical element). If these are done it would be perfection. If these are done the end product will be much better than the original. -- Cat chi? 20:51, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, it is closer. I couldn't put links on some of the fields without impacting the appearance of other templates, but I think I got most of the issues. Also copied over the shading on the left column from the original template. --CBD 00:39, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I missed two more things. Could the text be bold too... and the back ground colored (you mentioned it). I know I am being picky. I hope I am not being too much of a bother :( -- Cat chi? 00:47, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * There may be an intermediate template for Oh My Goddess for all these "fixes" so that we do not need to repetitively pass the same parameters perhaps? -- Cat chi? 00:47, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Which text do you think should be bold? The 'header' cells (left column and three 'title' sections) are bold by default. The right column could also be made bold if that is what you mean. I added the background shading to the left column with the prior set of updates. I had been thinking that an 'intermediate template' would make sense, but wouldn't be surprised if there were pushback on that. --CBD 18:12, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * I was referring to the text on the left. It looks different from how it looked on the former template. Also consider archiving your talk page. :) -- Cat chi? 18:22, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Hi, sorry I was distracted. We can continue. -- Cat chi? 12:07, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Template:DYK-Refresh
Wonderful template. --Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - &lt;*&gt; 05:53, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Soap Character Info Box
The template you insist works, doesn't. Added a message to the discussion page if you could explain what you did, it would be appreciated. I tried it on the Bo Brady page and it was just a big old mess. I reverted it to the old template that worked wonderfully. IrishLass0128 16:56, 1 October 2007 (UTC)