Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-32354545-20170716103358

Template:Infobox in its current revision is a mess.

It's a throwback to the old, old, old style of Template:Infobox as can be seen in this oldid from the default-pages wiki, in which every call of that infobox had to specify every single row title in addition to the row content. This was good for two things: But someone seems to have run an old titles-and-contents infobox through the portable-ifier to make the current revision of the page Template:infobox, which achieved only a mess.
 * 1) making really minimal infobox templates, templates-of-templates without much customization available
 * 2) silly banter social infoboxes for one-time use (and so not worthy of their own template) such as that attempted on User:Au3xanadu and the other pages currently using Central's Template:Infobox

I'm not going to say that people can't have silly banter social infoboxes to tell us their height and age and astrology sign, deciding the names of their rows on the fly with no intent that it should be used again. But the subject of infoboxes is one that thoroughly befuddles many users, and it will not help that purpose for Template:Infobox on Central - which should be an easy, accessible reference point - to be the unintelligible mess that it is, so divulged from the infobox templates they will actually be looking at.

I propose that Template:Infobox on this wiki be rolled back to precisely what it is on every-single-new-wiki, and all the userpages that should like to copy the infobox format but name their rows on the fly should instead be changed to use a different template designed for such. I have made a template at Template:Modular Infobox that uses the portable-infobox code yet is capable of titles and contents specified for each of twenty rows, and I think it should suffice.

Unless someone has a better solution for these users of silly banter social infoboxes? 