Help talk:CategorySelect

Use by "anons"
Houston, we have a problem: http://www.wowwiki.com/index.php?title=Corrupted_Ashbringer&diff=1795865&oldid=1792780&rcid=1786896

Anonymous users aren't supposed to be able to edit on WoWWiki, but now they can "thanks to" this extension. -- 12:10, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Availability
No longer "may not be widely available for some time"? How about "was rolled out over all wikis on 18 March 2009"? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 09:39, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Sorted :) Kirkburn (talk) 13:39, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Moving categories to the end may be rather bad on a template page
Can you please fix it so that any "noinclude" categories do not start a new line. The thing (even without anyone actually using it) has been breaking one of Genealogy's most important template by adding a line, and I expect that that could be a Wikia-wide problem. — Robin Patterson (Talk) 10:54, 26 March 2009 (UTC)


 * This newline issue has come up elsewhere - we're looking to see what we can find out. Kirkburn (talk) 00:57, 27 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Can you add a link to the affected template and result you're seeing? Kirkburn (talk) 11:20, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

I sent a "Contact Wikia" message over a week ago. I've not noticed a reply but maybe there was one. I requested staff to look at http://genealogy.wikia.com/index.php?title=Forum:Problems_with_info_templates, where the matter has been raised, with the main template listed as the first word. Discussion from late on 19 March started to home in on the suspected problem after a couple of misconceptions were cleared up.

Briefly explaining the setup and the apparent problem:
 * Our pages for individual people are tied to subpages (with names adding "/info") that tabulate data (such as parents and birth dates and children) for the person page (and other pages) to extract and display without retyping.
 * Those info pages are used as templates, requiring that certain text (notably the overall category - much the same class as "Category:Template documentation" used for "/doc" pages) has to be "noinclude", and has been near the end but not right at the end.
 * Trouble started showing up when CategorySelect was introduced; those of us who were landed with it might not have used it, but it seems to have been grabbing the category on each info page we edited and dropping it to the bottom in a new line - which is not the proper thing to do with a "noinclude" and was predictably messing up displays that transcluded those info pages. For example, a table on the person page is meant to take the person's father's name from the info page and put it in the infobox with brackets around it so that it is a link to the father's page; but we were seeing the closing bracket in a new line and therefore not making a link.

You asked for an example. We probably have very few left, because CategorySelect has disappeared (possibly because one admin decided that it was more trouble than it was worth). The one for my mother's mother was an example I remember. Someone has since fixed it; but I have now restored it so that the category is at the end in a new line as it was after I unwittingly left it properly edited, I thought, but with CategorySelect lurking and making its mischief. See first her father's page - http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Gordon_Forlong_(1819-1908) - to see how tidy an infobox should look. Then look down at the second of his "offspring" boxes, where Anna's row is horrible - because her info page is mucked up, now that I have moved its category into a "noinclude" new line. Then see her page itself - http://genealogy.wikia.com/wiki/Anna_Gordon_Forlong_%281873-1926%29. Info box links are all broken because they are trying to "get" data from a crook info page. Her children box is fine, because her daughter's page is quite all right. I'm sure CategorySelect is a good idea. But if it must move categories you must stop it putting categories in new lines, because, as is well known by people who have worked with templates a bit, templates are likely to display wrongly if there is a "noinclude" that does not start in the same line as the last character of the rest of the template.

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:30, 28 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the very detailed explanation! Kirkburn (talk) 07:31, 30 March 2009 (UTC)


 * Any progress towards stopping the tool from inserting "newline" at the end before the categories? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 01:56, 12 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Not yet, but we're still looking into it. Kirkburn (talk) 11:40, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Customization
I have to admit that CategorySelect, although a very handy tool, is one of the most uncustomizable features on Wikia. It is impossible to change the colors of the tool without using  tags, and anything that is already marked as   in the CategorySelect stylesheet is permanent. As far as I can tell, the only way to customize it is to use JavaScript. I would definitely like to see this changed. User:Followed by 100 zeroes/sig 17:02, 31 March 2009 (UTC)