Template talk:Rightcolumn

Complexification

G'day BOBO (or good afternoon or good evening)! I see that you've been diligently working on simplifying the front end part of this Rightcolumn template. But as for the backend LE template, (and to be honest) it looks complicated. I'm assuming there's a very good reason you're taking it this far, the problem, I don't know what that is exactly.

Thus far, I've had ChatGPT dissect the template setup, and from what it describes, I think this complex setup isn't really needed (don't take this personally). As an example, as of the 18:53 edit on the LE template, most of the wikitext in Template:LE is being used to automatically find the case's image. From what you could see in mysandbox, I was expecting this to be manual, after all it isn't much of a hassle to find the names of the case images.

In general, I think it is best if we balance between what is automatically done by the template and what isn't. This is, most notably, to keep the templates simple enough for future debugging. But, by all means, if you have a more important reason that you would like to share, and that reason backs up the complexity of the templates, then please continue development in that direction. Your thoughts are appreciated. --Avico (talk) 19:05, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

G'day to you as well Avico! Yesterday I separated Template:Latest news into both Template:LE and Template:NE. I did this since the parameters were very confusing initially. The version I left yesterday edit history was rather imcomplete; reluctantly, it would work too by passing the parameter named {{{Case number}}}, but the only defect was that it could not establish a link that redirects to "latest episode" when clicked. It was not possible to access the parameter {{{Episode name}}} since it was moved to the LE template under a new name {{{2}}}. I enquired of ChatGPT about it, and he told me that to access "the parameter of the parameter" must require modules, which would be even more complicated. The reason that the template looks messy is that the wiki seems to not support excessive indentation, and if so the text acts abnormally. That being said, right now I am certain that the LE template will work when the {{{part}}} parameter is numeric. In terms of non-numeric part parameters, only the first part is supported.
Now I am rather baffled... Only if I had known it would become this complicated, then why didn't I leave everything blank and just insert announcement messages manually at the outset? --BOBO (talk) 19:24, 23 January 2025 (UTC)