Board Thread:News and Announcements/@comment-126761-20150625165159/@comment-122657-20150915170738

Kirkburn wrote: If someone could provide a summary of what tweaks you'd like to Special:Flags, we can easily get that done.

One of our biggest 'flags' is the move tag. Because we have to update the page title on every page where it's listed for categorization, we require a bot to actually move most pages on the site (as it's easy to miss some as a human). For this reason, there's a move tagging system where someone applies a move tag to a page with the proposed name. The template records the datetime and the proposed name and waits two weeks for any discussion about the proposal to take place on the talk page. At the end of the two week period, the page is moved to the appropriate category for the bot to actually perform the move. (The bot checks how much time has passed and moves them appropriately for each page in limbo before it actually starts moving pages).

In this case, we need the 'flag' to hold valuable pieces of information, what should the new name be, and what day did the process start. Is there any way the flagging system can house those variables to be accessed by a bot?

In the same way, some of these templates are designed to hold some information like deletion reasons or pages to redirect to. I'm sure our move tagging situation (while highly and uniquely developed), isn't an exception in the way of needing to house data.

Kirkburn wrote: On my own quick review, I think MessageBox should be taken off the list (since it's a template used to make other templates), along with Directors, Producers, Movie Images and Video Game Images - since those are primarily used on category pages, not articles.

That's a bit disappointing. Many of the templates used on categories are just a little bit of header and navigation data, which would be perfect for flags instead (albeit a bit misleading, since we're not really flagging them for any temporary purpose). Is there a problem with using the flags system on categories? (Other than clogging up the flags list).

Kirkburn wrote: If someone wrote in an article, it will get converted to the flag version on Publish (note: this is not working right now, so it would actually just stay as the wikitext version - but that will be fixed).

I imagine this has been fixed at this point?

In the end, it looks like the flags system is intended to replace any 'header' templates that don't have a special function other than delivering message text or navigation elements to a page. Is that about right? I can think of lots of other examples on the site that attempt to do this, but in most cases, they aren't an individual template, but part of a larger template (as is just about everything around here). The key would be to identify all pages where all we're doing is providing some generic header text before presenting the page, and then figuring out how we can make that text move to a flag.