Something has gone wrong with the featured article on the wiki bit on the sabre homepage.

Today I am being treated treated to this gem:

It's because the entry on the home page doesn't understand Wiki code - so it's an issue there rather than the Wiki itself.

Yes, the script that pulls an article onto the main page only does some cursory formatting of wikicode - it doesn't do the whole lot due to technical reasons that would be too complicated to explain. This has popped up now because it appears somebody has given a 4 star rating to the roads lists.

I'm planning on making changes to the Navbox and the Place templates on the Wiki at someone point over the next couple of days with a consequent massive increase in the job queue.

The Navbox is the blue box that appears at the bottom of pretty much every page on the Wiki, whilst the Place template is what generates the box with the white heading on the right hand side of non-primary destinations. Examples of both can be seen on Kingsbridge.

The changes are in order to fix the problem where non-primary destinations show up in the Navbox under "Miscellaneous" rather than being hidden like the primary destinations are. In addition, it will stop the issue where the Navbox breaks 99% of the time if a non-primary destination is placed in its own category. Placing non-primary destinations (and indeed, primary ones) in their own categories is valuable so that they appear in the "needs work" lists.

Whilst I'm doing that, are there any other changes to those two templates that people would like me to look at, perhaps the addition of a cat3= parameter?

Yes, and can it not exclude Primary Destinations that are places, if there's to be a list of Places? The Navbox doesn't exclude Crossings/Junctions that are PDs when it parses those things - mostly as they use {{Bridge}} / {{Tunnel}} / {{Crossing}} / {{Junction}} and are manually added to [[Category:Primary Destinations]]. {{Primary Destination}} adds the page to the regional Place category automatically already. (edit:I need to learn to read - you are doing this anyway!)

A cat3= parameter would be wonderful. However, as I've been saying for a while, we need to get a solution for collapsing the {{List Template}} to the header - with three categories, Navboxes will certainly reach the "very large" stage.

Simon, I'm confused. Can you speaka da Eeeenglish?

The plan is to add {{Places}} to Category:Non Primary Destinations, then exclude that category from appearing in the Navbox, just like Category:Primary Destinations.

So non-primary places won't appear in the Routebox or the Navbox, and Primary Destinations will appear in the Routebox only (unless they are a crossing or junction or airport).

It seems bizarre to have a Navbox that links to all the pages in the category, but to exclude places. It made sense when all the places were primary destinations, a list of which gets generated in the Routebox, but now it seems silly, and rather than excluding non primary places just because their primary destination counterparts are excluded (though not in the way you assume), it makes sense to include primary destinations and to sort them out better.

What I'd like is for a Place category in the Navbox. {{Primary Destination}} puts pages automatically in [[Category:Places in <region>]], but obviously the code that excludes pages with that template on would need removing. It is not a duplicate listing to the primary destination one in the routebox, it's a different listing with some duplicates.

Of course, this wouldn't solve the breaking Navbox problem.

If you look at A15 You shall note that the Humber Bridge (rightly) appears in the list of Primary Destinations in the Routebox, and (rightly) appears in the Crossings section of the Navbox (despite being in [[Category:Primary Destinations]]). The Navbox excludes pages with {{Primary Destinations}} on it, as far as I can tell, thus PDs that use {{Crossing}}, {{Bridge}}, {{Tunnel}}, {{Junction}} or {{Airport}} and are manually added to [[Category:Primary Destinations]] can, and do, get including in the Navbox.

In short - the Navbox does NOT exclude pages in [[Category:Primary Destinations]], but rather pages with {{Primary Destination}} on them, so you need a different approach - excluding pages that use {{Place}} to do what you want to do.

Edit:split the two different bits of the reply up for easier reading.

WARNING: Deeply technical, dull discussion follows. You have been warned!



Not quite.

The Navbox is built up in sections. In your example, Humber Bridge appears on the Crossings section of A15 because it's in the Crossings category - whether it's also in another category is irrelevant.

The final section, Miscellaneous, is the one that causes the broken Navboxes. In the A15 example, the Navbox builds everything else, then basically looks at everything in Category:A15. It then ignores anything in the following categories: Primary Destinations, Junctions, Services, All Crossings, Road Projects and Roads - which should have been caught by either the "Primary Destinations" section of the Routebox, or all the other relevant sections of the Navbox. Think of it as a "catch all".

Where it goes horribly wrong is where the only article in a section is the article itself. The Navbox starts to create the "Miscellaneous" section because there's something that gets trapped in the "catch all" box. But, it's not allowed to show the page it's on for obvious reasons, so it has a screaming flake and doesn't know what on earth to do with the rest of the Miscellaneous section, as suddenly there's nothing there. This happens all the time with Non Primary destinations as they fall through to the "catch all", UNLESS there's something else that gets caught in there too, in which case it all works fine.

The change to add add all the Places to the Non Primary Destinations category simply means that I can add another "ignore" to the "catch all" list, and we won't have that problem any more.

If you want a "Places" list in the Navbox, then that will get kind of tricky - it'll work OK with roads, but it is guaranteed to break when you use the Navbox in a place article.

Please do NOT edit the Navbox for at least another 48 hours, even if there's a problem with it. It's going to take that long for the current job queue to clear.

There is something seriously wrong with the refreshLinks2 phase of maintenance. It may be that the current templates are too complex to process quickly. Seriously! A single page edit of an A road page is taking 10-15 minutes for the refreshLinks2 phase to run. A B road page takes 2-3 minutes.

(And before anyone says that this never happened on Site5, well the problem would have been hidden by their "kill off a job if it has used more than a second of CPU", which never allowed these tasks to run to completion.)

Is there any difference between the time taken for a primary A road and a non-primary one?

Not that I've noticed.

Why has the Navbox broken on Cable Stayed Bridges when it hasn't on Suspension Bridges and as far as I can see I've done exactly the same thing both times
Thanks for any help.

Because it is the only Misc in the Cable Stayed Bridges category and the Navbox doesn't refer to the page you are on. We fixed the issue for Places. I suggest just taking it out of the category.

Like so!

Why does this page:

http://www.sabre-roads.org.uk/wiki/index.php?title=A601/Junctions say 'Junction 7 project' in the introductory paragraph, when it shouldn't.

The relevant code is: , and I have no idea why this says Junction 7 Project...

I don't know why it does this (as I've not delved into the code), but it appears to be an issue with the Junction List templates in that sometimes, just sometimes, it replaces the first link on the page with a copy of the last link. Usually, this manifests itself on the first line of the table, but as you've got a link in the introduction, it's broken that instead.

Strange.

Have you got any idea about how I could either fix it or work around it so it links to what I want it to?

I think it's fixed now - certainly your page is now displaying correctly for me.

There's something very seriously wrong with the current photo of the month gallery. Some of the pictures are missing, replaced with hyperlinks appearing as the text "170px", which link to the upload form when clicked. I have no idea what's gone wrong.

It looks like all pictures uploaded between about 1440 on 23/7 and 0000 on 20/7 are missing, whilst all of the metadata exists.

Check the backup time...