Template talk:Infobox pirate/Archive1

old usage
When using this template, are you supposed to put the experience or the current standing in the puzzle fields? I'd personally recommend having them be experience fields instead of standing fields, since standing fluctuates wildly.--Zyborg22 07:41, 29 August 2005 (PDT)

Heh, I find this kinda funny as I don't think it's really useful due to the quick changing nature of both ratings and experience. Generally if you need someone's stats, it will be for an in game purpose and you'll want the most current data. Even the crew info for a pirate can change rather rapidly as I've seen before. --Guppymomma 07:49, 29 August 2005 (PDT)

Perhaps it would be better if it stopped at Archipelago... -Wmcduff 15:12, 29 August 2005 (PDT)


 * Is there any example of this template being used? --pevarnj (t/c) 06:23, 11 January 2006 (PST)

Propose for deletion
I'd like to propose this template for deletion. It's only in use by User:If0rg0t. As others have pointed out, the fast-changing nature of much of the information makes it kind of useless. --Barrister 07:06, 24 January 2006 (PST)
 * I support deletion. --Guppymomma 07:49, 24 January 2006 (PST)


 * Supported. If I want to know a pirate's stats, I'll log onto the game and look them up. --Thunderbird 12:42, 24 January 2006 (PST)
 * Support - It'd be nice to have a wiki extension into yoweb, but that's the only way it'd be useful. --AtteSmythe 15:20, 24 January 2006 (PST)
 * Support. It would be nice if people could update often and it was put into wide use but, it isn't. --pevarnj (t/c) 17:20, 24 January 2006 (PST)

Alternate use
Alternate idea here. It'd effectively blast the old template, but perhaps this could be changed to provide an easy box for the Familiars Won and Portraits boxes? Having to put some nasty table code in there is counter-intuitive, and this template name sounds like the perfect name for it. --Thunderbird 21:33, 21 February 2006 (PST)
 * I've been mulling this over in my mind. It'd have to be a series of nested templates just like the organization and island fields in the crew and flag infoboxes are now.  Probably "familiars=none, one, many" and "gallery=yes or no."  Maybe start the infobox with a portrait or some other image, so "portrait=yes or no."  The depth of the nested tables, and the lack of default template values, makes this a tricky one.  Of course, this would make it really easy to add in additional sections later.

Maybe this:

The trouble I run into here is that familiar fields 4 - 8 will not be blank, but will instead default to {{{familar4}}, thus causing some crappy formatting. Unless, of course, we make a sub-template for every number of familiar from one through however many Silverdawg ends up with. Then it would go " familiars=3 | familiar1= | familiar2= | familiar3= |

All in all, that's probably the best way to go. Parsing the existing templates as variables instead of creating oodles upon oodles of variables in this template would probably work best.--Fiddler 21:58, 21 February 2006 (PST)


 * After much experimentation today I've determind that the lack of default values for variables just kills this template idea. If we use the template without passing a value, even nothing, for a variable it just balks and throws out garbage.  Given the obscene number of familiars that Silverdawg has and the five oceans that a pirate can have portraits on, the template for each pirate's infobox is just as long and cluttered as some of the tables I've created.  As I've used on Silverdawg, the infobox is still a table in article, but the familiar section has been cleaned up by creating Infobox pirate/familiars/8 and below.--Fiddler 12:32, 22 February 2006 (PST)


 * Well, unless 1.6.7 doesn't have default values, I think we can start doing that now. --Thunderbird 00:38, 30 June 2006 (PDT)

Proposed deletion 2
Oppose. This template has been prepared for default template values available in MediaWiki 1.6.5. Once installed, this template can be used in every pirate article with less code than is used now.--Fiddler 12:32, 25 May 2006 (PDT)

Oppose. Its nonuse doesn't hurt anything, especially since it's meant for future expansion. The new template has nothing to do with the old template. Propose striking old Propose for Deletion discussion. --AtteSmythe 12:44, 25 May 2006 (PDT)

Quirks
Take a look at what happened when I tried to use 2 different names on Barrister. Any chance of widening the gallery? --Barrister 02:19, 30 June 2006 (PDT)


 * I've expanded the template to account for a second or third pirate gallery link. See usage above.--Fiddler 06:25, 30 June 2006 (PDT)


 * Very nice! And the usage is pretty clean.  Great work!  --Barrister 12:45, 30 June 2006 (PDT)

Sans Categories?
Could there be an option to strip out the pirate categories, so that this can be used on, say, Ringer pages (as I tried to do with Thalette)? --Emufarmers 22:57, 1 July 2006 (PDT)


 * This should be possible; let me try something in a little bit.--Fiddler 12:54, 3 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Done, see instructions above. It won't quite work for user pages but it'll work just fine for Ringers pages.
 * Incidentally, I think we should re-examine the automatic inclusion of the categories with the portrait template. To me, it seems that the number of exceptions and workarounds we're creating are more detrimental than the amount of work that the automatic inclusions are saving us.--Fiddler 13:12, 3 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I thought it was clever when I did it, but if it's causing a hassle, then yes, remove it. I'm not sure how better to categorize the pages, though.  --Barrister 13:59, 3 July 2006 (PDT)


 * If the template could be altered with even more sub pagey stuff, then each category could be optional and it'd still be a nice & neat package dealie. --Guppymomma 16:32, 3 July 2006 (PDT)


 * On that note, we could add a line to the template like this:

Oceans of play:

To indicate what oceans the pirate is active on include the following line, filling in the number of oceans the pirate is active on for # and replacing x with the number of that ocean and ocean with that ocean name:

 | active= # | Ax= ocean

Ex: |Active=3|A1=Midnight|A2=Viridian|A3=Ice would include the pirate article into the Midnight, Viridian, and Ice ocean pirate categories.


 * I'm not sure that active is the right word for this; if we go down this route we should try to come up with a better word.--Fiddler 16:44, 3 July 2006 (PDT)

Thinking on this further, there are two routes I think will work well.

1)We can follow my example above. I think if we do we should change the word Active to Oceans, simply because it's more intuitive.

2) We can just make a seperate template to go at the bottom of the pirate article. I'd imagine something like Template:Oceans or Template:Pirate.  Either way I'd imagine it would look like this:    The first number being the number of ocean categories the pirate belongs in and the rest being the oceans themselves.  Honestly I think this may be the easier method, as the infobox pirate template is fairly packed as it is, and without a visible result it's likely that many people would get this section wrong.--Fiddler 19:38, 10 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Okay, I've put together the templates necessary for option 2; you can see it in action on both Ursela and Paladin. I'm thinking this might be the cleanest way of implementing this.--Fiddler 20:05, 10 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I probably should have just written this here, rather than your talk page. Anyway, things can be shortened to  . --Barrister 21:18, 10 July 2006 (PDT)


 * I like it. Nice & easy to use. --Guppymomma 06:59, 11 July 2006 (PDT)

Small proposal
Similar to what I did for the Portraits template awhile back, I'd propose changing the image in the portrait/yes section to look at the page name, instead of the pirate name. The main issue is the fact that some names are held by different pirates on different oceans (such as Millie), and they might booch up. The mouseover popup would still list the pirate name instead of the page name (so Millie (Midnight) would show Millie in the popup, but the image would be looking for Image:Pirates-Millie (Midnight).jpg). --Thunderbird 12:15, 3 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I can't think of any reason not to. --AtteSmythe 12:29, 3 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Easy enough to do, I don't think it'll break anything--Fiddler 12:55, 3 July 2006 (PDT)

Infobox
Nothing major, but isn't the name of this template a bit misleading, since it doesn't exactly serve as a concise box offering specific information about the subject at a glance, but rather a series of boxes which give separate pieces of information and serve as visual aids to the text? The way it is now, a pirate's name appearing depends on him/her having galleries and the ocean he/she plays on has to be inferred from the galleries' location. I don't really think this is a problem, but seeing how these colourful boxes are what grabs the readers' attention first, won't it be a good idea to have them present information as complete biographical infoboxes? Gail 11:33, 11 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Well, we can't use the usual Ocean-specific header like we do for flags, crews, and buildings. Too many people play the same (or similar) characters on multiple oceans.  Do you have a suggestion for addressing this?  --Barrister 11:47, 11 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Since you say you don't think it's a problem, I'm not really sure what sort of solution you're proposing.
 * The problem with trying to create an "at a glance" infobox is that pirates have so many different accomplishements in many different configurations. Unlike buildings, crews, or flags there is no list of parameters that all pirates will values for that is sensical to track on the wiki.  Stats change far too often to track across 500 odd pirate articles, as do flags, crews, ranks, and even political affiliations.
 * Because of the shifting nature of the players, a pirate's main ocean can also change far too often. We're currently in the middle of a shift from having the portrait infobox provide ocean categories to having those ocean categories expressly defined.  Trying to represent anywhere from one to seven oceans visually in the infobox is too much information: we have to rely on the reader to acually read the article at some point, including the categories at the bottom of the page.--Fiddler 11:54, 11 July 2006 (PDT)

Different names for the same pirate
I know this is a relatively rare occurrence, but could we have a version of this that somehow allows for different names across different oceans? With Kas, his name is Ksmfg on Viridian and Kas on Ice, and I can't include both galleries at present. --Emufarmers 00:24, 12 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Actually, it already does that. Look further up the page for the heading "Multiple galleries under different pirate names".  And, for an example of how to use it, take a look at Barrister. Enjoy! --Barrister 00:29, 12 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Bah, I knew I shouldn't have just skimmed over this page. Thankee! --Emufarmers 00:32, 12 July 2006 (PDT)

Simplifying gallery section
I think I can simplify the gallery entry by eliminating the "number" field and allowing galleries= to be no, 0, or a number. We'd just need a portrait-frame-0 that doesn't do anything. Maintaining backwards-compatiblity should be possible, but a little tricky. Worth the effort? --AtteSmythe 10:39, 14 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I had considered doing this, but I don't see how we'll be able to maintain backwards compatability. Then again, there's only 53 pages that currently use the template, so going back and fixing them won't be too painful.
 * If we eliminate the number field, then we'd have to create a number of sub-templates ( through  ). /0 could be a copy of /no right now, with no portrait frame called at all, and /1 - /6 could all be copies of /yes.  In the template itself, it would probably have to look like this:




 * Simple enough, but it will be a large investment in time to make the changes and fix all the existing articles at once. I'm not likely to have that sort of time until next week.--Fiddler 10:58, 14 July 2006 (PDT)
 * My thought was to leave the templates as-is. Infobox_pirate would then include portrait-frame-X directly, and we'd create three new ones: portrait-frame-0 & portrait-frame-no would do nothing, while portrait-frame-yes would include Infobox_pirate/gallery/yes with the appropriate parameters. Am I off? --AtteSmythe 11:02, 14 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Just a little bit. Maybe.  I'm not sure where you're passing the number of galleries needed to determine which portrait-frame-X gets used.  Could you show how it would look in , as above?--Fiddler 11:12, 14 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Proposed, untested, new template. Some unedited sections redacted for clarity: --AtteSmythe 11:17, 14 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Taking a break, before I completely edit-spam the recent changes. Fiddler, my apologies for scuppering up your example, above - I kept accidentally editing it instead of my own. I think that mine is right, but I haven't gone back and fixed yours. :/ --AtteSmythe 11:23, 14 July 2006 (PDT)


 * Okay, I see what you're getting at now. I like it, a lot.  Personally I'd rather make the template changes and fix all the afected pages at once, but I like how you've managed to build in that backwards compatability.  That will definitely cover the transition period well.--Fiddler 11:33, 14 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I think it's in! I verified that YPPedia:Sample pirate page worked both before and after the conversion, so the backwards compat is still in. I don't know anyone with more than one gallery, off the top of my head, so I've not been able to test the 2- and 3- templates. --AtteSmythe 11:46, 14 July 2006 (PDT)

Thirty-seven!
There has to be a better way, aye? Seems like a lot of wiki processing on a lot of pages for a handful of people with lots of familiars. Maybe it's not something with which to be concerned, though. --AtteSmythe 08:42, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Handful? One!  I'm seriously considering making a Template:Infobox pirate/familiars/Silverdawg and just updating that when needed.  There's seven people with 3 familiars, six with 4, and then one dude with 21.  I think it'll be a long time before the larger numbers start getting used regularly.--Fiddler 09:11, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
 * How bad is it to nest templates? Maybe we could use this opportunity to get rid of a layout glitch on non-ocean-designers, too (they still have an empty cell where the designer flag goes, leading to a double cell-padding/border width break between the portrait and gallery cells). If we have a Template:Infobox_pirate_start and Template:Infobox_pirate_end, we can have Infobox_pirate include _start, _end, and optionally _portrait, _gallery, _designer, _familiar, etc. The modules would include their new row designation ( |- ), so if it's not included, it's simply not included. Then, instead of using a real infobox_pirate on Silverdawg's page, we could use the modules directly. He'd simply need multiple infobox_pirate_familiar modules included. The benefit is that if we change the style by modifying infobox_pirate_start, for example, his page is still updated just as if it used a real infobox_pirate. --AtteSmythe 09:29, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
 * And, to reply to myself, it would require some real work to prevent there from being breaks between his familiar cells. C'est la vie. --AtteSmythe


 * I'm actually planning on fixing that layout glitch, but at the moment I'm taking advantage of it to help in my conversion efforts. Only 350 pirates to go, and then I'll fix it.--Fiddler 09:37, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
 * And, to answer my own objection, if we went the modular route, we'd need infobox_pirate to include infobox_pirate_familiar_start and infobox_pirate_familiar_entry. SD's page would have multiple infobox_pirate_familiar_entries after the start. The next module or infobox_pirate_end would close the row. --AtteSmythe 09:40, 18 July 2006 (PDT)

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here, but it sounds far more complex than is really necessary. I'd prefer if we didn't have to use non-standard formatting on any pirate's page, especially one as prominent as Silverdawg. Bad examples lead to bad copies. When I'm finished converting all currently infoboxed piraes to this template, I'll make changes alog these lines:

will become:

The same with the various familiar templates and other sub-templates of this infobox.--Fiddler 09:53, 18 July 2006 (PDT)
 * - align="center"
 * [[Image:Island designer box.PNG]]

Spacing Conversion Limitations
Making the spacing even by eliminating blank table rows is done. Unfortunately, it's made the template very unstable&mdash;perhaps unmaintainable. Initial attempts to rework the templates resulted in more space between rows for those pirates who didn't have all the modules. Looking at the HTML source, the wiki was inserting this:

between cells. The problem was newlines. Including a template includes a newline, even if the template is blank. The template inclusions in the Infobox_pirate template were separated by newlines. This made omitted boxes insert two newlines, which Mediawiki converts into a hard paragraph break.

To fix that, I had to eliminate the newlines between template inclusions, since one is always added at the end of the template include. Unfortunately, this broke the included cells, because their |- were no longer on new lines.

To fix that, I had to insert a newline at the beginning of the template. Fortunately, mediawiki does not trim that out on submit. Unfortunately, it does trim it out before handing the page to the edit box when updating the template. The first time anyone edits any of these cells, if they don't know to re-add the newline to the beginning of the template, all the user pages that include that cell will break.

I think the solution is to change from table rows to divs&mdash;divs don't need to start on a newline. It's a bigger task than I want to handle today, though. --AtteSmythe 11:21, 26 July 2006 (PDT)
 * You may now lavish praises upon me: User:AtteSmythe/Demo, User:AtteSmythe/Sandbox, and sub-pages. There's no special formatting required by the subtemplates, and templates can each begin on their own new line. Margins for the various boxes should overlap. Only tested on FF so far.


 * The sandbox will dump directly into this template page with a subst (TEMPLATEREDIRECT=Infobox pirate|GALLERYREDIRECT=Portrait frame-). Substs still hurt my head a little bit, but I don't think there's any way to automagically move over the Sandbox/ subpages, because some of them have includeonlies that are stripped out by the subst. Still, they're the minor ones. Rolling this out will mean touching all those familiar and gallery tables again. Still have to think of a better way of doing the familiars... Researching subst took a while, but it sure made setting up this mockup easy... --AtteSmythe 11:10, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Yah on IE, the boxes are slightly wider than the portraits, and there is always a gap above the portait gallery link box and the box above it. --Sagacious (talk) 11:18, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
 * IE wanted "gray" instead of "grey" because apparently one more term in the switch statement to pick the color was just too much for Redmond. Image is fixed now. The spacing is now correct in IE, but slightly broken in FF. IE won't combine the margins of the table and the div, so the margin needs to be on the div only. FF allows the table's margin to override the contining div's margin. I'll hash it out in a bit... --AtteSmythe 11:27, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
 * Praise! Lavish!  Worship!  Sacrifice!  I honestly don't care how it's done, but as long we can satisfy these three goals, I'm a happy happy man.
 * Eliminate the odd gaps that occus when a pirate does not have all the modules included.
 * Keeping it simple enough that it's not a horrible horrible pain to add new modules in the future.
 * Not having to go and re-visit 400+ pirate articles.
 * Thank you atteSmythe, this really helps a lot.--Fiddler 11:25, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I think I've got everything but #1 for the familiars on FF... --AtteSmythe 11:27, 27 July 2006 (PDT)
 * I'm completely stuck - it won't display the same in these two browsers, and I don't understand why. Discussion at User talk:AtteSmythe/Demo. --AtteSmythe 16:09, 31 July 2006 (PDT)

New system
I got the new system working. Stupid solution, too: Instead of everything having a top and a bottom margin, and they sometimes overlap (or not!), every block simply has a bottom margin of 3px. Blank cells are empty divs with no margin or padding. To add a new cell, just make it a div with a width of 100% and a bottom margin of 3px. No float, no clears necessary. I tested on IE and firefox, and I believe I got all current elements (checked Barrister, Belgarion, and Silverdawg). I haven't tested putting whitespace between the template includes in Infobox_pirate, but they definitely don't have to be run together all on the same line. --AtteSmythe 10:46, 3 August 2006 (PDT)

Monolithic versus Modular
I don't plan on doing much more with this template for a while, but it does have me thinking: Now that everything is a stack of divs inside of an outer div, we really have a modular system. Adding a module is a simple as making a <=174px-wide block with a 3px bottom border. The Infobox_pirate template loads a bunch of modules in a predefined order. Take Drake, though. Surely, the two island designer blocks should be together, but we can't do that right now. The closest I could do would be to subst: the Infobox_pirate into his page, then insert the other image where it needs to be. Subst is bad, though - if this template is ever updated, there's no way to go back and get all the custom pages, except manually. Personally, I find systems like what I set up for My trinkets to be more intuitive than a monolithic design, but I don't know if I'm alone in that. If I were to break it up and make it modular, I would leave Infobox_pirate calling all the modules, just like it does now, so we wouldn't have to touch any pages. We just also would have to not be squeamish about some pages being set up calling the start/modules/end individually. --AtteSmythe 14:01, 9 August 2006 (PDT)
 * Conversation bump. I added the custom= field as a stop-gap measure, but it's really suboptimal. If we move beginning and ending formatting to their own /start and /end templates, I think we can safely subst:infobox_pirate on those pages that need it while retaining backwards compatibility for those that don't. The result of the subst code is a little messy due to that abominable familiar code, but empty parameters can be safely removed. Adding features to this infobox would not trickle down to subst'd pages, but any new elements added would (should?) be disabled on all pages by default, added only deliberately. Formatting changes would still be made through subtemplate, and would cascade to subst'd pages, as would changes to the individual elements. Infobox_pirate becomes a useful shortcut for creating a modular infobox. Useful, or too much mess at the top of pages? I'd start by converting over Epimetheus and all the fantasy designer pages. --AtteSmythe 11:26, 29 August 2006 (PDT)
 * Too much mess and not enough gain in my opinion. I think it was you who said, back at the beginning of the summer, that we were perhaps including too much information in the infobox, which makes for a harder to understand infobox and for less info in the actual text of an article.  In addition I don't think any page "needs" to use the sub-templates directly; creating a standard for open formatting will lead to a gradual loss of the standard look that has been established.
 * As to bringing the two designer boxes together, that can be done simply by creating additional sub-templates. Instead of yes or no for designer=, we could also have fantasy, metropolis, champs, and oceans as valid paramaters.--Fiddler 05:54, 5 September 2006 (PDT)
 * I'm personally in favour of the generic island designer icon, rather than specific contest related ones (such as the fantasy island one). That way, every time there is a design contest, we don't have to make tags and icons and whatnot. Also - it avoids the debate of whether or not we should add tags for every notable contest ingame, (which would get out of control). The original fantasy island contest tag thing was made by Drake because he wanted something on his page to highlight his achievement in the contest and appointment as island designer, which is fair enough. I was hesitant to add the island designer tag proper to his (and indeed every other winner from the contest) page as we hadn't produced any islands that had been shipped onto a production island. A minor debate ensued, discussing the semantics of whether or not the lack of the tag made the newer designers (including myself and Orsino/Fiddler) any less "on the team". Drake made the tags and added it to his page in place of the brown island designer tag. I avoided removing it, although I was planning on bringing the issue up again whenever Drake, Falkenberg, me etc have islands we've made put onto production oceans; replacing the fantasy island tags with the generic designer ones. --Featherfin 06:06, 5 September 2006 (PDT)


 * I concede the gradual loss of conformity. This template is a monster, though. It sounds like this one issue, at least, would be resolved by determining whether the island designer tag denotes a place on the team, or an island in an ocean. Otherwise, we'll need to do another messy #= parameter for that template, with an ever-growing number of 99.99% ignored template parameters. --AtteSmythe 08:43, 5 September 2006 (PDT)