All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XXIII

[GethN7]

Anything along the lines of "That's the way TV Tropes does it" has always been shot down everywhere else on the wiki. Why should it suddenly be a concern in the Reviews namespace?

When the backend is updated, will Flow stop breaking magic words?

Rob, I remind you it provides a FEATURE on par with something they provide, which, is why ATT exists, to provide an alternative community with all the features (barring technical and practical limitations) of TV Tropes in order to allow others to make the jump easier, hence why we forked. It does NOT mean we are cloning what they do exactly, merely providing our own version of the same service tailored for OUR needs.

Past this, I don't know what to say. I hope the above is helpful, and I will cooperate to try and go with whatever solution the community wants, but there are downsides to regular talk pages and Flow as well as upsides, and we lose certain features and things that make out lives less stressful either way. Regardless, if this is important enough to you and you can get a consensus on changing core features to address what you consider to be a problem, and I will do everything in my power to help either way.

Update: To eliminate a possibility, I tried enabling slow parser functions very briefly to see if that fixes the issue, no dice. Instead, it confirmed that Flow returning the correct result. Rob, when I switch to view the source, this is what I saw:

<code>
And of course I can't preview the test.

First, the page name: {{PAGENAME}}
</code>

What the user sees is this:

<code>
And of course I can't preview the test.

First, the page name: Wn4fz55iuamwacnt
</code>

The magic word is NOT broken, it's working as intended, because this is the operative page value in the URL:

Topic:Wn4fz55iuamwacnt

Everything after "Topic:" is detected as the operative page value by the magic word by the parser and that's the result you get, same with stuff like BASEPAGENAME and similar magic words.

In short, Flow is not broken, nor are the magic words broken, because the talk pages are NOT in the same namespace as the page itself, which is by design, so the magic word returns the page value of the Flow Topic namespace, not the page name of the source page.

If you want to disable Flow and go back to stock talk pages, then what you want to do will work, but we lose the convenient autothreading and topic creation tools provided by Flow. Certain features that only worked with regular talk pages (as the regular ones will reference the base article page) will work again, but that means we will have to create new topics by hand, space out conversations by hand, and do a lot of other things Flow is nice enough to automate. As for performance, Flow should greatly improve once they offload the search to it's own cluster freeing up more server resources to avoid the timeout issues we saw. As for the other stuff, we could disable Flow for talk pages and simply keep it for other things, but we have a clear tradeoff which we will need to put to a vote on what the community prefers. Whatever is chosen I will of course happily go with.