Template talk:Release table row

So some questions on this since you want to start a discussion:

• The name parameter should be split into the name and page paradigm like is done on {{achievement table row}} to avoid the {{!}} trick. Most release pages aren't disambiguated.
• What are we using the date parameter for? Will we be using it to sort Release/Features?
• What are hideyear and hideupdate for and why do we need them?
• icons is not needed, we can add a parameter to {{achievement table header}} to associate it with a release and pull that information. Even if we didn't, you can grab the achievement category icon. I'm not sure I like displaying the icons there in the first place. I realize this is the same approach done on achievement table row, but the icons aren't categorical; the achievement categories are already mentioned in the features section and we could easily display the icons there. The Living World icon does make sense in that respect.
• description, I hate that we stick the official description on release pages and even more so here. This should be the description you removed when you revised the release page. I'm not sure what part of the discussion on the talk page lead you to this.
• features: We already have the Features section for an exhaustive list of features. I don't think we need it on this pages because people don't need to see what the entirety of the release contained. If we did, I would stick the Features section from the release article into an expandable table. We want to avoid having to display features in two separate places and lists don't look good in templates in any case.

It seems that since you are moving these release sections to a template, we should rather have a release infobox to store all this information on the release article and the pull it up on the release page. After all, the release page shouldn't contain any information that isn't on the release article itself.--Relyk ~ talk < 21:05, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

• name: Perhaps. I'm not aware of any disadvantages in either approach, but I might be wrong, so if there are some, I'd love to know. The fact that most pages aren't disambiguated was the exact reason why I didn't find it necessary to make a separate parameter, though.
• date: I thought this one would be fairly straightforward; anyway, it's used at Release to generate the links to the corresponding game updates and display the launch dates. Regarding Release/Features, I'm not much familiar with dpl, so you'd have to ask Alex, who used the template there.
• hideyear: This hides the year part in the displayed launch date (so for instance July 1 instead of July 1, 2014). It isn't currently used, but that's because I tried to group the releases by season which ANet seems to like lately instead of year as before. However, if we were to change that back some day, the year would be repeated everywhere, which is why I added a way to hide it.
• hideupdate: This removes the link to the game update. It's currently used with Super Adventure Box, which didn't have its own update (it was downloaded along with The Razing) and never had a link to one either.
• icons: Well, glad to hear that this could be automated. I did originally try to write down all the achievement categories in text somewhere next to the features, but a) it was getting quite long and unwieldy and b) most of the time the categories are called the same way as the releases (give or take a definite article), which in the end didn't make it that easier to read anyway. I personally think the icons are recognizable enough by themselves to understand it's the related achievements (they have a tooltip if need be), considering the alternative of not displaying them at all like until now. And as far as I know, none of them are actually linked to or even mentioned in the features section.
• description: What led me to it? Summary of this edit and the state of the descriptions lately. The descriptions weren't being upkeeped and considering they were there mostly to give an idea about the story and so are the official descriptions, I chose the path of least resistance.
• features: The exhaustive list of features on the subpage is just that: it goes into too much detail. It has everything (in theory anyway), every single new gem store item, miniature, UI update, crafting recipe, emote, week-long SPvP event, just everything. It's designed for Ctrl-F, not for reading it as an overview. On the other hand, regarding "I don't think we need it on this pages because people don't need to see what the entirety of the release contained", I'd say that this is exactly the reason why anyone would want to look at a list of releases, to get an idea what each one added. Because the full sections are too long and the text description was frankly a mess, I tried this middle ground: to give you an overview but not overwhelm you.
• I was thinking about a potential release infobox ever since The Lost Shores were announced but I always dismissed it thinking there would be too little information in it to deserve one. Maybe it would work after all.
• The last time I rewrote the list I tried to give enough information about both the story and features as easily understandable and as concisely to possible, but I knew I pretty much failed at that. Having then taken a break from the game for a couple of months, coming back to this page and finding that it doesn't help at all, I knew something needs to be done: no-one really bothered to write the basics of the story and the features were mostly missing. With the redesign of the official site (and removal of the nav images), creating of those quest-like checklists for the living world and the arc finale coming up, I did what I could to make the list both informative and reasonably upkeepable. As always, if anyone has a better suggestion for the layout, I'd love to see it, but so far nobody seems to have done that. If anyone has technical suggestions, wonderful; all I know about wikicode comes from experimentation and, yes, this is about the extent of my knowledge. And last but not least, I'm terribly sorry for ruffling your feathers, Relyk, but I was getting quite tired with always starting a discussion first that no-one would contribute to anyway. 23:08, 12 February 2014 (UTC)

You aren't actually "ruffling my feathers", I was making a melodramatic statement in response to your summary and the time lapse, which is why you shouldn't read the news.

• The Property:Has canonical name is suppose to be a solution to this so you are always guaranteed the ability to pull the canonical name. The simple solution without SMW is to simply strip the disambiguation to display the name.
• The date parameter should only be the release date for when the release is available, because we can sort by that. You avoid the SAB special case by not using one parameter to conjoin two different properties. We need the ability to explicitly define the game update related to the release anyways as we aren't guaranteed that the release day of the release and the game update are on the same day (given we already have SAB for a special case).
• We would hide the year depending on whether we organize it by year. The row template (this) shouldn't be deciding whether it shows the year or not. Since we can do this automatically, the parameter isn't needed.
• hideupdate isn't useful or necessary because we can't define what game update or generate it automatically in the current state. Like hideyear, this behavior should be the same for all the templates.
• Sample code to generate them would be {{#arraymap:{{{achievement category|}}}|,|@@@|[[{{#show:@@@|?Has game icon|link=none}}|26px|link=@@@]]{{cname|@@@}}|}}.
• The lack of upkeep doesn't mean it should be changed. The release articles also lack a summary and is something that needs to be worked on. A brief summary of the release seems to be difficult to write and no one wants to do it, but it's ultimately more useful for people. If it continues to be an issue, I will simply start copypasting my featured article description of the release into the summary...
• Another way to present the Features list could be to move the sublists into subsections of the Features section so we can generate an outline of "new gem store items", "new miniature", "UI update", "crafting recipes", "new emotes", etc. That would still be long enough that we would collapse it apart from the current release.

Hopefully this doesn't seem like an exhaustive point-to-point response for the sake of responding.--Relyk ~ talk < 00:10, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Just thought I'd mention that theres an easy way to do dates: basically you'd fill in the full date, e.g. 2014-02-13, and just use the time parser function to format it: {{#time: F d, Y | 2014-02-13 }} - i.e. February 13, 2014. There are a bunch of other formats available too, for example if you wanted to not display the year. -Chieftain Alex 00:31, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

1. Implemented date simplification
2. Patched in {{cname}} to provide canonical release names (and added properties to pages that needed it)
3. I reckon we can remove the hidedate parameter - as relyk says above, if we're consistent throughout the page then we don't need this parameter.
4. The wordy bit (before Noxx updated it to how it currently is) was just a wall of sentences that nobody will miss.

I should say that I was rather fond of the "nav" tiles (such as File:A Very Merry Wintersday nav.png) layout from before, with the exception of the overview text. It is rather unfortunate that ANet have stopped making the "nav" images - currently this page looks way too much like an achievement page :/ -Chieftain Alex 00:58, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

• Well, I think I'll just leave the technical stuff and the automation to you as you clearly know what you're doing. Just regarding SAB, I guess it depends on the point of view, whether the release launch date and game update were on different days or it just didn't have its update; while it was downloaded with The Razing, it was essentially in secret and the patch notes don't mention it at all, except for the sneaky achievement category. So far, the update essentially defines when the release starts, and having a date link to a different date's update would be confusing at best anyway; but as you say, there's no guarantee for the future (although I personally can't see them do it, with all the datamining that's around).
• The question of upkeep was only part of the problem, which wouldn't make me change it by itself, it's more that the paragraphs didn't do their job very well. Each release has a story element and some new features; the story is fit for a paragraph of text, but the features aren't (as much as I thought they would be a couple of months ago). Your featured article description is perfectly fine with that, because you always read only one at a time, but it wouldn't work here at all. The purpose of this table is to give an overview of the releases at a glance, to give a quick idea. You know, I'm sure a simple bulleted list would do just fine as a list (although that's what the navbox is for), so why bother with this? Because it's informative: it has all the defining features and a short teaser for story. If you want more on the features, click on the title. If you want more on the overall story, there's Living World summary (and before you're surprised, I'm planning to change that as well). This has everything important, but not too much, because there's already 27 releases to read about and that number is still growing. I find the page informative and helpful and so does everyone I ever showed the page to; when it was up to date, it was even directly linked to from sidebar of GW2's subreddit with the text "Returning player? Click here for more information on what you've missed" or something like that (it's still there, just a bit more hidden), as far as I know the only wiki page featured there among the sea of dulfy, thatshaman and woodenpotatoes. So, in order for it to stay that way, I did what I thought to be the only real way: split the story and features, leave the story in a paragraph and make a list of the features. But there isn't anywhere else to take that from: we could write our own short story synopsis, and we still can, but this, for the time being, makes it easier to keep it up to date.
• And for the features, why force automation when the result would be much worse? It's useless information to repeat "new gem store items" or "new rewards" for every release, those aren't the defining features; besides, the current length of the rows is pretty much borderline acceptable, and if you want more, there's the release page itself or the /Features subpage. Prelude was defined by laurels, ascended amulets and guesting, not the SPvP event, tweaks to WvW, Orr and Fractals; on the other hand, sometimes we need to be a bit more elaborate, such as what SAB:Back to School has in the section now, something you wouldn't put to a section header. Yes, the choice of the defining features is fairly subjective, but it's useful and it simply requires human input.
• I miss the nav images as well. Perhaps we could go the way the French wiki has chosen, that is to make our own. 10:43, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

• The update does not define when a release starts, the start date is defined on the official release page. We can explicitly point to the release page and say "Yes, that is my start date." Small note: SAB wasn't actually in secret, a simple counterexample is that the page was created on the release day!
• "why force automation when the result would be much worse?", to avoid the issue of not upkeeping the information in the first place. I identify the Living World content portion of the release along with the game content portion of the release. One issue with the template having its own features section is you aren't reflecting content of the release, you are presenting the portions that you think are important, which makes it quite hard for new users to add the section themselves. If we can generate that content automatically, such as flagging stuff that we can always consider important like: Achievement categories, Living World instances, new locations, and new Category:game mechanics and avoid trivial content like the items and events related to Living World content; essentially an overview. We should be able to do that with some sort of format in the Features section of the release article, given that we can already do that to some effect by simply including the entirety of the section.
• I would love for us to make our own, but that requires someone making them. It honestly just requires superimposing the text onto the new nav icons they use on the release page, but someone has to do it every release.
• User:Relyk/Release infobox for sample release infobox. If we are going to set any properties on the release article itself, it will be with an infobox instead of having free-standing #set calls (Alex :P)--Relyk ~ talk < 11:22, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

• SAB was an open secret: the achievement category appeared along with The Razing (for technical reasons, I'd presume), April Fools was about to happen, the release page was leaked before it was taken down again and Josh Foreman had talked about it. We did know about it, but the patch notes, where the link would potentially lead, don't mention it at all (except for said achievement category at the bottom in the wiki notes).
• It was the paragraph format that hindered the upkeep more than anything else, it was doing perfectly fine until then. Presenting the information we think is important is the whole point of having a lucidly written overview and I see no reason why this should make it harder for others to contribute to, unlike, say, how making everything automated and pull and parse the information from several other pages and templates does. (Seriously, though, do you have any idea how many people are being put off from contributing to the wiki when the stuff they want to edit isn't even on that page?) In the end, if we don't want to display everything, there will always be a human element that chooses what to keep, whether it be directly by editing the list or indirectly by making the script (and even if we were to display the whole section, this would still hold true). If what you want is somehow marking the important stuff on the release pages, it's just harder to edit for no profit, and if what you want is making some sort of automatic detection of the important parts, than it's about as promising as the automatic captions on YouTube; either way, it will be awkward and difficult to edit. Of course, if you'd manage to pull it off, hats off to you, but as far as I see it, some stuff just needs to be written by hand in order for it to be concise and helpful. 16:18, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I just created a template to generate nav images [[User:Chieftain Alex/Templates/release nav generator|here]]. Not 100% happy with using the backdrop images, but they look alright. I guess that manipulating the image size + position could be an option too - but this effectively means we could keep the tiles if we wanted. -Chieftain Alex 19:32, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

It works great, I would just perhaps upload them as png's like the previous ones: compare the text quality in jpg and [[:File:User Noxx Origins of Madness nav.png|png]] (and please disregard the change of the image's position :). I'll try to reimplement them to my proposal if I have the time for it tomorrow. 20:08, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

Edit: Actually, now that we have this option, why go the extra step of saving it as an image when we could use the template directly and make a link of the date and release name separately? 20:13, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Oh whoops, I'd totally not noticed they were .png files. I guess it wouldn't be too bad to have to convert the backdrop the a .png image first. I'll fix that. (I believe that the text difference is likely due to my choice of obscure browser (Opera 12.16 1680) but lets stick with the same file format eh.

(respond to final version) yeah that would be a good idea :P I guess that way it doesn't even matter which background image we use - though the backdrop images work well for those two we'd end up with loads of dark files. -Chieftain Alex 20:16, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

I updated my suggestion using your template and I must say I'm really happy with the result. It still needs a few tweaks with long release names, for instance SAB 2 or Wintersday 2012, it looks a bit weird in Firefox (haven't tried Safari), of course the date could link to the game update and the code itself is for the time being a bit, well, rough, but overall I think this could very well work. 13:15, 14 February 2014 (UTC)

I just glanced at this while at uni from within Firefox - I think the font-size-adjust was making it look odd - I think your reported issue should hopefully be fixed now. -Chieftain Alex 16:57, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

(Reset indent) I generally like the way these on-the-fly nav images look. The only problem I see is that it's not obvious that the text lines are links. I'm not sure what to do about that other than adding an explanatory sentence about it. —Dr Ishmael 16:43, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

still too subtle? -Chieftain Alex 17:03, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Eh, that doesn't look good, and I'm not sure it helps anyway. It's probably not a big deal. —Dr Ishmael 18:20, 28 February 2014 (UTC)

Font died - CronosPro

I'm getting CORS error messages in my log, and firefox is blocking the font from loading. What other font do you want instead? --Chieftain Alex 19:48, 26 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure what's wrong, it loads fine to me, both in Chrome and Firefox... 16:35, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

http://imgur.com/a/H6F11 :( ... I am browsing over HTTPS though. -Chieftain Alex 16:46, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm also browing over HTTPS, but it loads correctly and with the "access-control-allow-origin" header present, leading to this address. (For some reason the CronosPro URL has a double slash in the loaded sources for me, but I can download the font from the single-slash URL as well...) I have no idea what could cause this, though, especially when the other font works fine for you... 17:40, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

When i try to visit "this address" I get:

Page not found

Host
    origin-static.ncplatform.net
URL
    /fonts/cronos/v1/cronospro-regular-webfont.woff
Remote Address
    52.56.127.93:25615

SpawnSrv/302.7031402 Instance/0.511897747

I guess I'll go purge my computer of cookies and stuff and see if it resolves properly. -Chieftain Alex 18:07, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Well I definitely reach the webpage successfully without a "page not found" message with the single slash in the url, however the url being called in the console is a single slash, and the url being called in the common.css is a single slash too (I spotted the doubleslashes a few revisions ago in the common.css, I figured it was a bug...). --Chieftain Alex 18:19, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

I really have no idea where Chrome gets the second slash from, it isn't present in the loaded stylesheet either, and Firefox doesn't do it, but both browsers work for me, that shouldn't be the problem anyway. (And, funnily enough, I can safely say it isn't a caching issue, as I happen to have a new computer since 24 July... :D) Anyway, if you can reach that link now, did the font load as well, at least after a hard refresh? 18:37, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Nope, CronosPro still fails even though I can reach all the links perfectly. (wtf) -Chieftain Alex 19:22, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Simply reaching the link isn't enough, the browser needs to receive proper CORS headers along with it to allow its usage on the rendered page, which is what your browser was complaining about on your screenshot. I have no idea why yours shouldn't work, though... :( 19:39, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Even disabled all my addons, firefox sitting on latest version too. Maybe the answer is to add a fallback font. -Chieftain Alex 19:43, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

Have you tried it in other browsers (Edge, Chrome...)? 19:47, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

It works in anything but firefox >.> -Chieftain Alex 20:02, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

If all cookie and cache purging fails, you can try to reinstall Firefox. If even that won't help you... well, you either have a very picky firewall, or your computer is out to get you. 21:03, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm 99% certain that the firewall isn't it (it's on the router). I guess if it doesn't affect other firefox users it doesn't matter. >< -Chieftain Alex 21:14, 28 July 2017 (UTC)

In what I can only say is great, the font came back. ;) -Chieftain Alex 23:16, 8 August 2017 (UTC)

That is certainly good to hear... whatever the cause actually was. ^^ 17:01, 9 August 2017 (UTC)