Template talk:Forum link

Usable as replacement for cite web used for forum links?

I was about to look up all the links to the FlightGear forum replace those links with this template (due to the post flightgear.org/forums/ dead link post on the forum by legoboyvdlp, Thu May 30, 2019). I have quickly noted that a lot of the links are in a {{cite web}} template. Because that seem to be a common use case I am considering to add the parameters author= and date= and when they are used format them like {{cite web}} does. (in essence: Author (date). Title (Icon)).

I maybe should look into how the various ways the forum is linked first though.

—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 14:10, 30 May 2019 (EDT)

Note that I have created forum URLs directly in the {{infobox aircraft}} template. I currently cannot use this template there as a pure URL is essential. That should qualify as a different way. Supporting this would probably require a parent template, say {{forumurl}}, that generates the URL, and then this template uses it to generate URL part of the link wiki markup. I'm sure there would be other cases on this wiki where the direct URL for the forum is used rather than a wiki link.

Bugman (talk) 05:04, 31 May 2019 (EDT)

Hi,

If you come up with a nice regex we can let the Bot run it over the entire wiki. Simply replacing all the old urls by the new ones is easy, but maybe this is the right time to use the forumref template instead ;-)

Gijs (talk) 12:22, 31 May 2019 (EDT)

Manually counting pages that appear with a search of everything for "forum.flightgear.org" and manually changing the limit currently gives 59 pages [1]. There is a lot of pointing to the base URL, e.g. with markup such as [http://forum.flightgear.org FlightGear Forum]. Also note the {{project infrastructure}} template that provides the forum base URL and which could be used as a master template here.

Bugman (talk) 02:19, 1 June 2019 (EDT)

I've just tried to unsuccessfully convert a much repeated link in the newsletters. Specifically [https://forum.flightgear.org/viewforum.php?f=23 AI forums] which renders as AI forums. Using this template I can get:

• {{forumref|label=AI forums|f=23}} resulting in Template:Forumref. For future reference, this is currently rendered as "forums Forum link ".

• {{forumref|title=AI forums|f=23}} resulting in Template:Forumref. For future reference, this is currently rendered as "AI forums on the forum ".

I'll just update the label description to be more precise (it is a HTML anchor, not a HTML label). From this I see that we might need some template expansion to cover all uses. For example a text parameter to allow for arbitrary wiki links to be created. And probably default to not showing the icon.

Bugman (talk) 09:08, 1 June 2019 (EDT)

I've been working on a set of templates to implement a few of the ideas discussed:

• {{project infrastructure}}
• User:Bugman/forum url
• User:Bugman/forum link

Johan, could you have a look at these and see if you think they are flexible enough replacements? User:Bugman/forum link uses User:Bugman/forum url which itself uses {{project infrastructure}}. I was thinking of converting User:Bugman/forum url into {{forum url}} and renaming this template to {{forum link}} (to match MediaWiki syntax).

As for {{cite web}}, I think that 99% of these are inserted by Hooray's quotation script (FlightGear wiki:Instant-Refs). I think we can leave those, as articles filled with these quotations are generally of low quality and need a complete rewrite anyway. I think the {{cite web}} usages with a forum link should be manually converted to use this template, or simply ignored. I don't think we should build some of the {{cite web}} functionality into this template as Hooray's script will probably not use it anyway (it would require some work to parse the URL to insert the elements into this template).

Bugman (talk) 08:44, 3 June 2019 (EDT)

I saw you updated the URL:s in {{project infrastructure}}.

Having that dependency chain is a Good Thing(TM) from a maintenance perspective (i.e. Don't Repeat Yourself). Please do mention in the documentation for {{forum link}} that it uses {{forum url}} for the URL:s under a section "Technical details", and do the same for {{forum url}}. Might be useful later.

Using either the text "on the forum" or the icon instead of both was a good thing. That it used to have both was unnecessary redundancy.

I think you are right about the {{cite web}} uses. I think the main use for them is if someone is willing to work really hard on reading in on a subject, or for a rewrite, if that happen (it seems that a well written article is much more conducive to getting improvements and updates).

Feel free to move User:Bugman/forum url to {{forum url}} and rename this template to {{forum link}}. It seems like making a good regex for Gijs bot will not be too difficult.

Go for it!

—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 08:28, 4 June 2019 (EDT)

Yes, I'm hoping to have {{project infrastructure}} provide the URLs, MediaWiki links, or plain text technical details for all FlightGear infrastructure on the wiki. Having a single edit point for all this information on the wiki about the FlightGear infrastructure makes it incredibly easy for us to maintain outside link stability and other information whenever there is a disruptive infrastructure change.

The "Technical details" section is a good idea. I've been packing that information into the "Goals" section in all my previous template work. I'll update the documentation, move the templates around (with no redirects), and fix all usages of this current template (forced by having no redirects).

Bugman (talk) 03:48, 5 June 2019 (EDT)

All done! I've even added a German translation as a demonstration (currently only used on de:EMAS). Left to do - convert all hard links! I think this will require a lot of manual work before any database scripting can be performed. There are too many unique side cases.

Bugman (talk) 04:50, 5 June 2019 (EDT)

That was a lot huge amount of good work done.

Marking some of the template change edits as minor (i.e. by checking the "This is a minor edit box") could have been helpful as those can be filtered out when viewing Special:RecentChanges. ;-) Typically I use that for things like grammar, spelling and category changes.

—Johan G (Talk | contribs) 09:27, 7 June 2019 (EDT)