Valve Developer Community:Proposals

Ongoing discussions

Community Portal • Help Desk • Discussion • Proposals

• Strata Source on VDC at this time (mid 2024)
• Splitting/rewriting the page Valve Hammer Editor

• Sorting out navboxes

Requests for comment‎ (5 P)

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Overall community centralization project

The idea of a "central location to discuss formatting changes" was discussed on the Valve Developer Community discussion page. This separate "Proposals" page is intended to serve that purpose, although as I said in the aforementioned discussion, I think there's a deeper issue with users not having any way to know of active discussions in the community outside of looking at recent changes. You could see some of the changes I've experimented with to try to resolve this issue in User:Blixibon/Centralized community proposals, which includes the "Current ongoing discussions" box at the top of this page.

Because my proposals themselves are formatting changes affecting other areas of the wiki, I'm going to use the initial topic on this page to consolidate discussion about what I've proposed.

Here's a checklist of what I've done so far and am currently planning to do:

• Ongoing discussions template (See Template:Ongoing discussions)
• Unique proposals page
• Integrate ongoing discussions template on other prominent community pages
• Rewrite Community Portal
• Link community portal and proposals page on Template:VDC-navbox
• Link community portal on Main Page (perhaps under "New to the wiki")

I received positive feedback from one other user in the aforementioned discussion, although I would prefer to have a broader or more solid consensus before changing existing (or at least the most prominent) articles. I'm also taking this slowly due to other ongoing changes to the wiki's landscape (e.g. the removal of Template:MultiPage among other language-related things), and I don't want to distract from or interfere with that if I change existing articles.

Please leave a response if you object to, support, or have any other comments on these changes. --Blixibon (talk) 17:09, 11 July 2024 (PDT)

Sorting out navboxes

There was a time when a lot of navboxes were spawned. There's huge navboxes like {{Sdktools}}, there's arguable navboxes (as to their rules of inclusion) like {{Half-Life games}} (especially when viewed with both third-party and cancelled content).

There's... difficult to parse, {{Branch-navbox}}.

And there's very redundant, very tiny navboxes for these many splinters of gamedev history, such as:

• {{dod games}}
• {{Dota games}}
• {{Insurgency games}}
• {{L4d games}}
• {{Postal games}}
• {{Quake games}}
• {{Titanfall games}}
• {{Ritual}}
• {{Taito games}}
• {{Tobgames}}
• {{Xash3d games}}

I am not saying these are all bad, need to be removed, etc. I am saying, that they need to be reviewed, some reworked, some updated, some cleaned up, and some, well, most likely removed.

Reminder that the {{navbox}} template itself warns against excessive use. They're not a piece of automatic patchwork; they shouldn't just be spawned because they can be justified.

Some of them (DOD, Taito) are so miniscule there's no navigation to really speak of. The few pages that use them, all can include their links in "See also".

Orange Box one looks messy because of its notice. And kind of matches the previous point (navigating in between three titles, essentially).

Xash is 2 working links and 5 redlinks.

I propose a discussion about them, some of it is broad stuff, some we can probably decide right on the spot.

More examples of needing work, can be brought in during the discussion. Cvoxalury (talk) 15:49, 17 July 2024 (PDT)