Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-122657-20140616211333/@comment-122657-20140708233050

Hatebunny wrote: I have an opinion on this! (He shouted from the DC wiki).

I have no experience with Lua (and frankly their claims that it's easier to understand than wiki markup are ludicrous). But I do know that our issues with footnotes and references began when they implemented it, and not before.

Yes, removing the Cid template does fix it, but if, one day, they are going to come back and demand that both wikis switch all of the page template infoboxes to Lua, (which will therefore mean removing templates like Cid from every page), that's going to be a problem.

If they hate dpl so much, they ought to find us a workable replacement. We are using it to do a lot of awesome stuff, and we'll lose a lot of it if we can't use it in the simplest of places.

So, wah wah wah, on my part. I want to keep Cid. Of course, Wikia is not forthcoming in offering solutions that don't involve us using as little dpl as possible.

I understand your viewpoint, but I've also been able to have more direct discussions with Wikia about the differences between our needs and theirs, and I can say that they make every effort they can to be on our side. They try very hard to understand why we need the tools that we use, and what options are available to give us both what we need. In one case, (removing dpl from the Volume pages), there was a miscommunication about what was an acceptible solution to the both of us. (They implemented something different than we believed we agreed upon). As soon as we told them there was an issue, they stopped and began working to find another solution.

So yes, DPL is hard on their servers and costly as far as performance goes, which translates to actual monetary costs as well as loss of income due to the percentage of people who have to wait a full 60 seconds for a page to load and just move on. But they also understand what we're doing with it, (writing factual information in one place, and using it all over the site), and they want us to be able to do that. They just don't have a better solution in hand at the moment.

Lua is the first attempt at improving performance while maintaining the complexity of our templates. It's a compromise (and really only a test of one), in that they get better performance on their end, and we get the templates to do everything they currently do. (Lua hasn't impacted DPL, as they're used for different reasons). We're sacrificing a template coding syntax we know, and they're sacrificing optimum performance by continuing to allow the level of complexity we do.

These are the kinds of compromises we come to in order to maintain the complexity and depth of our growing sites.

They are also working on a database-like structure that would enable us to do DPL type stuff more efficiently, but as we're the only wiki that currently needs it, it's a long-term project for them. Symantic was another option we considered a couple years ago until another wikia (the Korean Soap Opera wiki) tried to use Symantic at a level of complexity equal to or deeper than our own, which caused worse problems than our minor DPL use.

The messages on my message wall suggested that we use the dpl early on in the infobox, or separately from the references, to enable them to work. This may be an option, since when I tested putting the cid call in the first field of the infobox, the references after it worked as expected. The challenge will be making the dpl area separate from the rest of the infobox and still making them look as if they're not separate.