User talk:GalaxiaGuy/Military Offensive

Semantic work
This is just a couple of quick notes, as I haven't had a chance to look over the whole system you're trying to set up yet:


 * slottrait shouldn't be used purely for display purposes. It's designed to both set properties and apply formatting to traits. It's meant to be only on the input side of things, not the output. We'll need another template that just applies the formatting (or not even necessarily that, since the formatting is just coloring a link anyway).
 * For sorting by quality in a semantic query, as far as I'm aware, we'd have to use a kludge of setting another property through doffpage to do it. I'm not aware of any way to create a custom sort for a property yet, so we'd do something like create a numeric property with a value of 1 for common, 2 for common, etc. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 11:11, 4 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I fixed the first issue in the two templates. They now include just what's needed to color the links and won't be setting properties on the pages you use those templates on anymore.


 * I created Property:Is of quality/order for sorting purposes. It's just a number with 0 for white, 1 for green, 2 for blue, and 3 for purple, solving the second issue.


 * Solving the problems with SMW's not comparator may be more of a problem. I'm thinking it's choking on the colon in the page names; SMW may be trying to treat Specialization: and Trait: like namespaces when the not comparator is used. Since they aren't actually namespaces, that screws things up nicely. I created Property:Has traits/string and Property:Has specialization/string to hopefully dodge that issue.


 * The bad news is that this may not solve all of the problems. SMW's user manual has an ominous portion that suggests trying to use the not comparator on a property with a list of values may not work as expected. Quoting it below:


 * "You can select pages that have a property value which is unequal to a given value. For example,  Area code::!415  will select pages that have an area code which is not «415». Note that this is query description does not look for pages which do not have an area code 415. Rather, it looks for all pages that (also) have a code unequal to 415. In particular, pages that have no area code at all cannot be the result of the above query."


 * The good news is that the user manual doesn't seem to be kept up to date, and it is possible this doesn't mean what I think I means for a property with a list of values. We'll be able to test that when the new properties get populated, which will no doubt take some time with 2000+ pages to process. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 15:05, 4 January 2012 (UTC)


 * One slightly unpleasant workaround could be a 'not prisoner' property. Or maybe a more general 'normal assignment officer' in case more duty officers types that don't work for normal assignments get added. GalaxiaGuy 13:09, 5 January 2012 (UTC)


 * That issue was solved by the new Has specialization/string property. Unfortunately, the broken behavior for the not selector described in the manual has proven to be completely correct. You need to exclude any doffs that have the Peaceful trait, but even with the new Has traits/string property, the not selector would only excludes doffs that have Peaceful as their only trait. (I just confirmed this behavior by testing a query for not Congenial. Only the doffs that had only Congenial were excluded from the results.)


 * The extremely ugly workaround would be to find a way to make Template:Doffpage assign all of the traits a doff doesn't have to, say, Property:Doesn't have traits. Preferably, this would need to be done in a way that doesn't involve saving the page twice. Not sure at the moment how to pull that off, and there's a good chance any way to do it is going to be a really ugly hack. For now, this looks like this is stuck. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 14:36, 5 January 2012 (UTC)


 * So I guess the question is: in the short term is providing this information for assignments without supporting removing bad traits still useful to players? GalaxiaGuy 14:44, 5 January 2012 (UTC)


 * If I recall correctly I had kind of the same discussion with Eyes when he was setting up the framework and I thought it was useful to provide a suggestion for a fitting duty officer. The main problem (besides the technical issues) I see is that if we just throw all possible duty officers at them it gets rather crowded on the specific assignment pages. Depending on what Eyes has in the backhand for the trait/doff pages it might be more elegant to link to 'possible' double trait listings instead. --Dukedom 16:39, 5 January 2012 (UTC)