Another set of templates

I've been rather making work for myself recently, so I've been working on a set of templates that can be used to improve the organisation of project member lists. I'll eventually port it to be as easily transfered between projects as possible, but before it gets too obfuscated, I want to get a live system running. Here's roughly how it works

• Members joining the LOCE add the code }}{{LOCE/T|s={{{s}}}|u=~~~|check=~~~~~ to the top of the list of similar template calls on the Members page. A very short example with two members is currently running at the very bottom of that page.
• This is expanded automatically to their signature and the current date and time.
• That userbox usually looks the same as the old {{User WPLoC}} userbox. You can see three examples here. However, this is where the mechanics of the templates come into play.
• The {{LOCE/T|s={{{s}}}|u=~~~|check=~~~~~ normally displays as you see it in the example at the bottom of Members. When Members is itself transcluded (ie called using curly brackets {{...}}) it normally displays in the same way. However, when WP:LOCE/M is transcluded from Userspace (as happens in the userbox), the output is completely different. First the wiki compares the signature in the userbox template call to the various signatures in each call to LOCE/T on the members page. Only the call where the signatures match is displayed. The wiki then calculates the difference between the timestamp in that template call and the current time. If that difference is more than a definable value (currently 60 days) it returns "inactive", else "active".
• Whether or not the above made any sense, what happens next should. If the date in the "check" field is less than 60 days old, all is fine, and the userbox displays like the first one in the page linked to above. It adds the user to Category:Members of the League of Copyeditors. If, however, the date in the "check" field is more than 60 days old, it displays like the second one above, saying "this user is believed to be inactive", and it adds the user to Category:Members of the League of Copyeditors (inactive). The third example hasn't got the signature coded up properly, so it displays like the old one, but also adds the page to Category:Members of the League of Copyeditors (broken).

What does this all mean? Essentially, after having added their name to the list, it's easy for editors to forget about the project altogether. But if their check date grows more than 60 days old, they're added to a category for easy recognition. Anyone on the project can then go through the category and check to see if the editor is still an active contributor to the project's articles. All anyone has to do to "check back in" is to edit the members page, and replace the date in the "check" field of their entry with five tildes, which will be expanded to the current date.

I don't know how easy that is to follow, but I hope you get the gist. I'd be very interested to hear comments, criticisms, suggestions etc. Happy‑melon 22:46, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Discussion

Incidentally, if anyone can tell me why the links to the members page above are red, I'd be very grateful - I can't seem to fix them! Happy‑melon 22:55, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Fixed your red links. (WikiProject not Wikiproject. It's CamelCase. :oP) I didn't know what the "Category" links were supposed to do so I didn't touch them. Though my understanding of how you did all that code-y stuff is limited, I can easily see that your system is a great improvement upon manually sorting members into the inactive and active categories. Excellent work. clicketyclick_yaketyyak 23:57, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

Maybe some people wouldn't like having a negative-appearing message placed involuntarily on their user page? Listing as inactive at the Member roll is appropriate. Here's a <lame> idea. Since you are so adept with coding, perhaps when the 60 days is passed, a bot could put a message on their talk page asking whether they still intend to participate in the League in the near future. Something could be mentioned about, if they are not, the League respectfully asks that they delete the box from their page until becoming active again. If they are not active on WP at all, and don't answer, well, lots of people take wikibreaks, and there are lots of inactive user pages with all kinds of logos. Visitors can see pretty quickly that there haven't been any entries in a while, so maybe it doesn't matter much </lame> Unimaginative Username (talk) 09:46, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

This system is admittedly inferior to the bot request I made two weeks ago. I'm going to poke Betacommand as he requested, and see if this could be done. At the LOCE this would be pathetically easy to implement, given that all our work involves edits to subpages of Wikipedia:WikiProject League of Copyeditors. However, although I'm great with templates, I can't code bots. If I can persuade Beta to add this functionality to one of his bots, however, it would provide an infinitely more user-friendly and less complicated approach to this problem. Happy‑melon 10:45, 27 November 2007 (UTC)

Cool! Unimaginative Username (talk) 00:51, 28 November 2007 (UTC)