Template talk:Shortcut/First parameter error category

Broken

Resolved.

Can I just say that most of the links to pages that need repairing have already been repaired whilst they cannot be removed from the list. Any help in fixing the repair list would be greatly appreciated. Please contact me on my talk page with any help you may have regarding this issue.

Someone dedicated to making your day a little bit better! (talk) 09:01, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, don't worry. The Wikipedia servers run category updating as a low priority task. Usually it only takes an hour or so before the category is updated. But sometimes when they are too busy it can take up to some days before the category is fully updated. The last few days the job queue has been very high, 7-12 million, so the servers have been very busy lately. I don't know why it is so high lately, but one reason can be that we have been updating a lot of high use templates lately, templates that in turn are used on LOTS of pages that then need to be re-rendered.

--David Göthberg (talk) 13:09, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Complex cases

Resolved.

This discussion was moved here from the talk page of David Göthberg.

Thanks for your note about category updating. While working on these pages my experience has been that the category page gets updated almost immediately when I fix a simple problem like the ones outline on at CAT:SHORTFIX. Why I have been resorting to forcing pages to remake (recompile) is because of a special case. Some of the fancier pages are formed using included subpages. For example WPP:GT which currently appears on CAT:SHORTFIX. If I fix the syntax on the subpage that does not cause the page itself to be updated. It certainly would update if given enough time but then its hard to tell if I fixed the problem. I know that that forcing the page to recompile uses server resources and clutters up history pages but the alternative is also wasteful of my time. Thankfully these complex pages are not that frequent. The reason you see a lot of this kind of activity in the last few hours is because once I figured out what was going on I went back to pages that I had already identified as problematic and gave up on the first time through.

There are at least two other categories of problematic cases. One entails pages that have a shortcut template but for which the redirect page does not exist. I have found that after I create the redirect the page itself is not recompiled. I can force it to be removed from the category by doing a minor edit such as removing a trailing space or adding one as above.

The other case I have not figured out how to resolve. As I sure you are aware, there are other templates such as {{humor}} which include {{shortcut}}. Some of the pages I have not been able to fix include such templates. I've checked their syntax and it looks good. I'm going to leave those for someone else as of now.

I'm enjoying my gnomish self so not to worry about the work. If you see anything I need to change then let me know. Best. --DRoll (talk) 14:00, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that there are a few protected pages that it will take an admin to fix. If I ever finish I'll probably make a list of them and what needs doing and get an admin to do the work. --DRoll (talk) 14:08, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Ah, what you need to do is to purge those pages instead of doing dummy edits. (They really should add a "purge" button among the page top tab buttons for logged in editors.)

And yes, some cases are more tricky or even need an admin to fix. But I and some other experienced template coders who also happen to be admins will handle that. I have just been a bit busy elsewhere lately so I did let other editors do the bulk of the about 2000 pages that needed handling. And I am very thankful that so many editors helped out!

--David Göthberg (talk) 14:32, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks that works great. I found it easier for me to just edit the page and then click Save page without making any changes. Anyway, all done except the user pages and two template pages that just sort of that way. --DRoll (talk) 16:40, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Wow! Thanks for all your hard work!

I have to think about what to do with that "Template:Wikipedia subcat guideline/".

And those user pages are not even supposed to be there, since four days ago I made it so that {{shortcut}} doesn't report user pages. And most of them seems to be fixed now too. But that means that we now know that Wikipedia has an even lower job priority in updating category listings for user pages than for updating category listings for other pages. The servers have been very busy lately.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:13, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

The list will grow again

Resolved.

I am going to update the code of {{shortcut-l}} and {{policy shortcut}} too. So the list will grow again with new pages.

And when they are done I will change the code of all three templates so they report user pages too. I thought we would handle those separately since some editors didn't want to help fixing user pages, and thus thought they were clogging the list.

--David Göthberg (talk) 17:16, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

I added the user page reporting some day ago, and all those pages have now also been cleared out. So we seem to be all done here now.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:29, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Some won't be removed

Resolved.

User:Asdfasdf1231234/Notes is formatted correctly, but still shows up here. I'm thinking it's because the shortcut links aren't actually real yet, but I'm not sure.

Wikipedia:External peer review will not work because there is a blacklisted hyperlink (shoutwire.com), that I feel shouldn't be removed from the page. Perhaps an admin can override it, but as I'm not one, I don't know. -- ṃ•α•Ł•ṭ•ʰ•Ə•Щ• @ 02:35, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:In the news section on the Main Page/Style and Wikipedia:Index/Administration's shortcuts won't fix. I'm assuming it's because they have a / in it. -- ṃ•α•Ł•ṭ•ʰ•Ə•Щ• @ 02:54, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

User:Mcginnly. No idea why not. -- ṃ•α•Ł•ṭ•ʰ•Ə•Щ• @ 03:12, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

You are right about User:Asdfasdf1231234/Notes. The reason that one is listed here is that the first shortcut in that box doesn't exist. The simple solution to that is to create the shortcut. Since that seems to be a draft page I guess for the time being those shortcuts should be set to that draft page. (I know of no rule against that.) Or we can just leave it as is. Since this error reporting by the shortcut boxes is just a temporary thing so we can clean up all pages and then add the new anchor dropping functionality to the shortcut boxes.

The other links you list here were just fixed by Droll, who seems to be hard at work fixing shortcut boxes. The shortcuts with slashes in should not be a problem and it seems they were no problem for Droll to fix. Strange that you had problems with them.

He also fixed the page with the blacklisted link, without removing that link. I just read up a little on blacklisted links and it seems one can edit and save separate sections that do not contain the blacklisted link. Since the shortcut box was in section 0 I assume that Droll has some tool that allows him to edit section 0 alone. If you want to be able to do that too: There is a gadget you can turn on to get edit links on section 0. See in your user menu on top of any page: "My preferences" - Gadgets - User interface gadgets - "Add an [edit] link for the lead section of a page".

The User:Mcginnly was fixed several hours ago. But updating category listings is run as a low priority job so when the servers are busy it can take up to some days before the listing in the category changes, but usually it changes within an hour.

--David Göthberg (talk) 03:29, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks everyone!

Resolved.

Hugs and kisses to everyone who helped to clear out CAT:SHORTFIX !!! Now I'll wait a day or so to see that no more delayed category updates show up and then I'll add the new anchor dropping functionality to the shortcut boxes.

--David Göthberg (talk) 16:22, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

You're welcome. I came across this cat by accident and as I was bored I helped out, so I just have one little question: What is the new anchor dropping functionality? -- ṃ•α•Ł•ṭ•ʰ•Ə•Щ• @ 18:33, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

You can read about the new anchor dropping functionality for the shortcut boxes here: Template talk:Shortcut#anchors. And by the way, the "#anchors" part of that link is an anchor.

--David Göthberg (talk) 10:29, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Seems we were celebrating to early. More pages and categories get reported in the category listing all the time now. And most are pages who have fed the first parameter in the wrong way for a long time. At first I thought this might be due to that pages only get re-rendered when visited. But several of the pages that turn up now have had an average of 10 visitors per day the last few weeks. [1] So seems to simply be that MediaWiki updates categories really slowly.

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:28, 30 April 2008 (UTC)

Finally! The only pages that I have seen coming into the category listing the last few days have been pages with new shortcut parameter mistakes. So now I will deploy the anchor dropping functionality.

--David Göthberg (talk) 20:55, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Talkheader template usage on User pages creates numerous Shortcut error listings

After spending some free time paring down the number of User_talk pages listed with Shortcut errors, I've started to wonder if it would be better to just switch the offending pages' Template:Talk_header to Template:Archives (when archives exist) and just deleting the Username parameter from the Talkheader syntax where no archives are shown?

I started out by correcting the Username or UserTalk "shortcuts" syntax so they'd parse correctly (thus being eliminated from CAT:SHORTFIX), but since a shortcut to someone's UserTalk page (and especially Archives) was never intended or expected to be useful, I'm tempted to backtrack on my previous syntax edits and just delete the unnecessary params completely.

If any guidance is forthcoming, I'll also be prepared to revert my edit on the Category article page (bulletpoint illustrating quick syntax fixes to User: and User_talk: params).

BTW, is the persistence of my Chappy84 edits on the error list just a SHORTFIX quirk or a weird slowness of the servers? No redlined links can be seen anymore, and none of the Chappy84/Archive subpages show redlines now. — DennisDallas (talk) 23:44, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Found the issue with Chappy84 base talkpage: an obscure post with an outdated WikiProject link had a deleted WP:PRODIGY shortcut in the wikilink. Edited-out the shortcut, & base page disappeared from CAT:SHORTFIX list. Will have to sift thru Chappy84/Archives for similar instances, since the Talkheaders no longer have original errors. — DennisDallas (talk) 16:02, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Need to exempt template demos

Any case arising in the "Template:" namespace should be ignored. It keeps categorizing things like Template:Policy, which demo non-existent shortcuts, as error conditions when they really are not. If it's seen as desirable to be able to detect bad shortcuts in the rare cases of templates themselves having legit shortcut templates of their own (i.e., shortcuts that point to the template itself), then perhaps implement a white-listed dummy shortcut like WP:SC1, so that banner templates and the like have something to demo without triggering the error categorization.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  00:30, 23 June 2016 (UTC)