User blog:Wingstrike/Inane Ramblings of the Tech Guy

 So when I first joined this site , I put together a little code that automatically categorised character traits: age, height, hair colour and so on. This simple code has evolved over time and now drastically helps people keep articles in line by doing a lot of the work for them, requiring only the occasional tweak (such as when some smart-ass gives their character amethyst eyes) to keep it up to date.

After that we managed to adapt the Avatar Wiki's own icons templates for our own purposes, using them to help identify pages instead of the rather huge tophat notices (Template:Archived Character etc). Tophats are fine if you really want someone to notice them, but at some point they can just add to the clutter if they're huge and filled with text. Icons are small, which makes them multi-platform-friendly and again help categorise pages automatically.

''' Why do I keep bringing up the perks of categories? ' Because we have (as of 27 December 2015) 337'' normal characters on this site, and as not everyone who takes part on the ARPW is code-savy, it's easy for characters to slip through the cracks when they stop taking part in immediate events. Having a system that does the filing for you takes a strain off the staff and the users, but it's not foolproof.

Over time I've been adding as many features to theses systems as I can dream up, this includes things like faction-specific icons, Special Case Character/Location Icons, Icon replacements for tophats (NPC, Dead or Archived) and most recently, code for marking heterochromatic eyes. But these will only work if the underlying templates are actively used. '''Thus, any pages that don't use templates, but instead use pure wikitext/raw code to format them, will be converted to their nearest equivalent. In theory this should not change the page's appearance much, if at all.'''

This should not affect anyone one the site, as 99% of the pages do currently use our templates. However, new users will need to pick a supported template from the guide instead of haphazardly planting their own here. This will make it far easier to manage a growing character population without having to panic about unsupported formats.

As a final note, ideas or suggestions to add are always appreciated, and I will see what can be incorporated into our system. A lot of my improvements have been created in response to the community's needs.