Category talk:Oblivion-Birthsigns

Continued

I was just wondering why there is a L continued and S continued, when theres enough space on the page, is there any way to fix it?Mikeyboy52 10:53, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

That's the wiki software itself doing that, so there's nothing we can do. Daveh or Nephele might be able to do something about it if they really wanted to, but I doubt if they'd want to spend the time on it. It's possible it'll be fixed in a later update to MediaWiki, but that's probably about the only way it'll change. The other option, on a user-by-user basis, would be to use Javascript to reformat it on-the-fly, but there again, only a couple of users know how to do that around here. You may want to browse around on Wikipedia and see if there are any Javascript scripts there that would do it. ‒ Robin Hood↝Talk 17:53, 30 May 2010 (UTC)

The easiest "fix" would be to add a space in front of the sortkey for each of these pages (e.g., [[Category:Oblivion-Birthsigns| Apprentice]]), which would just get rid of all the headers completely. Or if you wanted to be fancy, catpagetemplate could be used (<catpagetemplate>{{#define:catgroup| }}</catpagetemplate>)... except it won't work on all our servers at the moment and it seems like a bit of overkill. Sorry if that's all just technobabble... --Nephele^Talk 18:51, 31 May 2010 (UTC)

Mikeyboy, it's actually one of those things that looks like it should be really easy but turns out to be a real PITA. I came across something similar to this when doing the Wares lists for Tamriel Rebuilt NPCs (and before that, to a lesser extent, with the Oblivion Factions lists). Putting n items into c columns is easy. Then you need headers, but you can't tell where the headers might go until you've already put them into columns. So you end up having to loop round and round to balance the size of the columns, and then it turns out that one of them contains three items that wrap onto second lines so it all looks wrong anyway.

In the cases I mentioned before, I got my program to spit out a basic layout then hand-tweaked it when adding it to the page. MediaWiki can't do that, and any kind of looping would kill the performance of larger pages.

TLDR: there's nothing that can easily be done. Nephele's given two suggestions that would work... but your best bet is simply to ignore it. On most categories you won't see anything like this - in this case there's simply an unfortunate combination of headers and items. rpeh •T•C•E• 19:56, 31 May 2010 (UTC)