Forum:Broken boxes and links

(Recent readers of Forum:Problems with info templates and/or Forum:CategorySelect probably know this. Others may not have known where to look.)

If you see a page with neat boxes half shattered and extended with unwanted cells, or links that have the closing brackets in a new line so that they don't work as links, the page may have suffered from the effect of "CategorySelect" (or category tagging) on our info page template.

CategorySelect, which was introduced by Wikia a few months ago, moves to the end of a page (after a "newline" - called "Enter" on my 10-year-old keyboard) any category it finds. The resulting newline adds unwanted newlines to every "get" template that tries to use the page; that produces unwanted cells in tables and expressions that are supposed to be links but aren't links because there's a newline before the closing brackets. That directly affects every article that has an info page - about 5,000 and growing.

Wikia agreed to our request that CategorySelect be turned off here. That was OK until Wikia rolled out its nice new Rich Text feature, which unfortunately included CategorySelect. When we saw what was happening, we asked Wikia to disable Rich Text until they could fix the problem.

If Rich Text is unchecked in your preferences, that may be because Wikia has now responded to the request that it be turned off here. I suggest that, if any pages you have been working on have the broken appearance, you check your contributions - every info page, not just the new ones - for the last few days to see what's at the bottom in "edit" mode. The bad ones will have. Move the category link up a couple of lines to sit just before the previous, and delete the noinclude tags and anything else left at the bottom - everything after the "end comment" tag (-->). Save the page and look at the article.

Once the info page is fixed, you probably need to do a trivial edit to the article before it will fully incorporate the corrections.

If you see the same breaks on a page you have not been working on, please check the info page just the same - one of those "Edit info" links at the bottom of a box.

— Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:28, 27 June 2009 (UTC)