Board Thread:Support Requests - Getting Technical/@comment-3020860-20190416123959

The standard MediaWiki special page Special:ExpandTemplates doesn't appear to be enabled on any of the FANDOM sites that I'm a member of, nor can I find any mention of the feature by searching Help on Community Central... which makes me think it's probably been disabled Wikia-wide, for some reason.

Why? When working on more intricate template coding, having someplace you can test-execute a piece of code is invaluable (or at least, there are those of us who find it invaluable), and Special:ExpandTemplates is the best way I know of to do that.

Sure, if it's just the transclusion or parameter syntax that I need to debug, I can use Wikipedia's Special:ExpandTemplates to execute the code and that works fine. But Wikipedia's version doesn't have access to the same set of templates as any given FANDOM community site, and sometimes you really need to test how a piece of code will interact with what's already present. That means you need to test that code in the local Special:ExpandTemplates for the wiki in question.

So, why has that option been (apparently) taken away? Is there some down side to making Special:ExpandTemplates available that I'm not aware of, some exposure it creates (that isn't also created simply by having the ability to edit a page on the wiki)?

It doesn't have to be advertised. It doesn't have to be user-friendly. It doesn't even have to be acknowledged anywhere — I'd be perfectly fine if the only way to access it on a wiki was by manually navigating to the "secret" URL for — I can do that. Or... I COULD. Why can't I?

Thanks. 