Template talk:Faction

Couple of Issues

I've noticed a couple of issues with the use of the Faction template on Oblivion NPC pages, which people have attempted to fix with little success.

Firstly, there is the issue of the Arena faction, which currently points to the disambiguation page at Oblivion:Arena (see Ysabel Andronicus, for example), rather than the faction page at Oblivion:Arena (faction). Attempts to point the link at the faction page sends the categories out of whack.

Secondly, there is the issue of the Imperial Legion Battlemage, who is in a faction of the same name (found at Oblivion:Factions I#Imperial Legion Battlemage). Pointing the NPC at the correct faction name leads to the link pointing to the NPC page (and therefore showing as bold and not a link). The current 'solution' is to call the faction 'Imperial Legion BattleMage', which doesn't link properly.

I thought of a possible solution, but wanted to pass it by people before implementing it (in case somebody comes up with a better idea). How about introducing a 'catname' parameter onto this template. All this would be used for is to indicate how the category should be defined - so, for example, for the Arena faction members, you would have {{Faction|faction=Arena (faction)|rank=whatever|altname=Arena|catname=Arena}}. This would result in the faction name being displayed as 'Arena' but linking to Oblivion:Arena (faction), while the category would be 'Oblivion-Factions-Arena' (rather than 'Oblivion-Factions-Arena (faction)').

For the Battlemage, you could set the link up as 'Imperial Legion BattleMage', using an LE on the 'Factions I' page - using {{LE|Imperial Legion Battlemage|Imperial Legion BattleMage}} would ensure that the 'BattleMage' link would work while displaying 'Battlemage' - and use a faction link of {{Faction|faction=Imperial Legion BattleMage|altname=Imperial Legion Battlemage|catname=Imperial Legion Battlemage}}.

Of course, in both of these cases, catname is equal to altname, and I can't think of a situation where you would want to specify catname as anything other than the same as altname - but you might want a different altname while leaving the catname as the actual faction name (if that makes sense).

--Gaebrial 10:06, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

That's probably going to be the most popular solution, but I'd personally prefer the template to go back to the way I originally wrote it, which is to have everything pointing to the Factions_x pages. In time, all of those sections will have links to the specific articles where they exist (like Mages Guild, Arena (faction) etc) so the detail is only one extra click away. This would also fix the problems you mention and would also mean the behaviour on all the links was the same. –Rpeh^{•T•C•E•} 10:11, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

The problem is that some of those Factions_x pages are quite long and slow-loading, and that's just one more page load the viewer has to sit through when all they really wanted was a direct link to the Mages Guild page. Additionally, the Factions_x pages do not exist for Morrowind (and are unlikely to, as there are far fewer factions, and each has its own page), so the template would then not work on Morrowind NPC pages. Unless we wanted to make a separate template for MW vs. OB factions, and then go through the work of changing them all out, which I feel is just unnecessary when the current template is so close to being able to work in all cases. (And if we take Gaebrial's suggestion, it WILL work in all cases, so it's not that difficult.) --TheRealLurlock ^Talk 10:33, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

More Issues

For some reason, this template is causing Oblivion:Factions A to effectively be transcluded onto pages such as Oblivion:Gaspar Stegine. The contents of Factions A are not appearing on Gaspar Stegine, but processing from Factions A is being done: the trail is being set to the Factions trail, the page is being added to the Factions category, Factions A and Factions Header are listed as pages being transcluded, etc. Having already spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out what's going on, I'm giving up. But at some point, this really needs to be fixed. --Nephele^Talk 19:37, 21 June 2009 (EDT)

RankIcon values

Up until now, I believe the RankIcon values were only used by this template, so it wasn't an issue to have them be full [[Image...]] tags. In the end, however, I think it makes a lot more sense to have it be only the name of the image with the sizing and image name done as part of the template. This is coming to light because {{User Rank}} will now be using the RankIcon values and needs to have them at a different size since it displays a Userbox. I'll be changing the RankIcon tags as I come to them and have just made changes to this template to handle either name-only or full Image tags during the transition. ‒ Robin Hood↝talk 19:48, 1 August 2010 (UTC)

Just a note on the recent tweak to remove the <cleanspace></cleanspace> tags...I'm a little rusty, but I believe these can be reinstated once the above conversion is done. I hadn't planned on doing this until later in Round 2 of my template work as I don't see any terrible urgency to it, but if desired, I can remind myself of the issues and what needs to be done, and look at doing it sooner rather than later. – Robin Hood↝talk 22:43, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

That wasn't yesterday's problem, but I'll probably fix yesterday's problem by fixing today's problem. I hope. rpeh •T•C•E• 08:48, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

What was yesterday's problem? I saw the Sandbox testing, but didn't know what had triggered the testing in the first place. – Robin Hood↝talk 08:57, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

The {{NPC Data}} template was getting the ol' UNIQ_gibberish problem on pages that included a faction, so yesterday's problem was to fix that. Today's problem was that I realised that faction categories were being added to the place pages, so the whole way I was saving the faction data had to change anyway. I think it's all fine now. rpeh •T•C•E• 09:26, 21 September 2010 (UTC)

Faction rank display

It would be much more reader-helpful to have the faction rank display as something like "7 (Assassin)" or "Assassin (7)" instead of just "Assassin", since these rank names are meaningless to 99% of readers without going to another article and looking them up in a table. — Darklocq ^☎ ¢ 18:55, 15 August 2017 (UTC)

I know the numeric ranks aren't really highlighted in Oblivion, and they're deliberately hidden in Skyrim. Do they have some use in Morrowind? My thinking is that if they're not useful to know in the game, there's no point cluttering each faction entry with them. But if there is some use for them, we could probably add them just for Morrowind space. – Robin Hood  ^(talk) 06:18, 16 August 2017 (UTC)

Faction ranks not loading properly

Noticed this issue in MW:Merchants. Seems like some factions' ranks aren't loading properly:

• Ashlanders 6(Champion)
• Aundae Clan 6(Reaver)
• Berne Clan 6(Reaver)
• Imperial Cult 6(Oracle)
• Imperial Legion 6(Knight Bachelor)
• Quarra Clan 6(Reaver)
• Tribunal Temple 6(Disciple)

Tried troubleshooting but was not successful. Salamangkero (talk) 17:36, 30 April 2023 (UTC)

It's all part of a faulty upload I did last night. The problem itself is fixed, but it's affected a large number of pages. The wiki's slowly going through the worst offenders, but there are some very widely used templates that have been affected, so it's going to take a while. For more isolated cases where it's only a few pages affected, you can just go to the source page (i.e., Ashlanders in your first example) and purge it, then purge the page you were looking at and it should be fixed. – Robin Hood ^(talk) 18:12, 30 April 2023 (UTC)