User talk:MACH-59330

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I'm really happy to have you here, and I look forward to contributing with you! Dharden (talk) 14:29, December 14, 2016 (UTC)

Re: Portable infoboxes

I wanted to give you a bit more context regarding exactly what is going on here. I don't want you to walk into this completely blind.

One of the issues I encountered is that I don't necessarily want to design an infobox that matches the current infobox style that you'd see on {{Sim}}, {{Game}}, etc. The current infobox style is several years old and doesn't match the general theme of the wiki. The wiki's overall theme can best be seen by visiting the Main Page (on desktop or laptop), or by looking at our {{Metabox}} and {{Pagecover}} templates. There isn't a consensus in place for changing the infobox design, but it's also something that's really hard to conceptualize, so I was planning on pursuing a redesign and bringing that design forward for discussion, so that people have a clear picture of what they're getting if they support the redesign. The preliminary style I've made is located on User:LostInRiverview/Test.

Currently, (most) infoboxes follow the same theme; the layout and style of each infobox tend to be defined by inline styles on the template page, rather than on MediaWiki:Wikia.css. Our infobox templates use a number of what we call Auxiliary templates, including templates that add categories depending on where the infobox is used, templates that determine the colors of the infobox (more on that below), and templates that change whether certain elements appear when the infobox is displayed on certain pages. Even factoring out the inline styling and auxiliary templates, our infoboxes are very complex and not well understood; it's often a difficult process modifying them to continue working.

Our infobox coloration is based on "game generation;" An infobox displaying information for a character, family, location, object, game etc. in "generation one" displays as red or variants of red, generation two is dark blue, generation three is green, and generation four is light blue. I've mentioned the potential of abandoning this generation-based coloring, and instead setting the color of each infobox based on the type of infobox it is. However, this proposal hasn't been ratified by the community, and precedent stands in favor of keeping generation coloration.

I'd also like to start a community-wide discussion soon regarding redesign and portability, but I'd like to see if you want to proceed a different way first. If the idea of a community discussion is okay to you, I'll start a thread on the forum and I'd ask you to weigh in there on your role, the need for portability, etc.

I realize this is a lot of information. This is part of the reason why getting these infoboxes changed has been such a difficult process to get started. Let me know if you have any questions about any of this.

Thanks! -- LiR ^{talk · blog · contribs} 23:33, December 14, 2016 (UTC)