Board Thread:Ask the Staff/@comment-23880286-20150604134412/@comment-23880286-20150605075700

Superluigi6 wrote: I have no idea what this is (variables, strongs, etc). Explain it to me a little bit if you can, and then if you can write me a letter I can send to Special:Contact that'd be great (because the Wikia staff wouldn't take "Hey can you enable this please" without an explanation). I'll explain it in a more SL-friendly way then. The original post is pretty much what I'd write to Special:Contact, except with some small edits. But I'd just start from there and maybe make a few adjustments. (By the way, I posted it here and not on your message wall because I know you're bad with code stuff so you probably wouldn't be the best person for it. I don't know if any of the admins are good with code though)

Anyway, strings = text. Simple as that. The only difference is that the word string is usually used in programming instead of text. And since it was about coding stuff I thought string might be more appropriate to use. But you could simply replace strings by text and it would mean the same.

The way I need to use the variables thing is to make it possible to remove the previous and next parameters (those things you enter, next = "Rose's Room", previous = "Gem Glow" on the episodes template for example, next and previous are called parameters here) and let the system know what episode comes next and before by just using the page name and a list of all episodes. This is not necessary to add, but I just think it would be nice. So you should decide if you think it's useful enough to ask for.

So I've made a code thing that gives the name of this episode, a link to the previous episode and a link to the next episode if you put it on an episode page. The code for this episode looks a bit like this if you simplify it into more SL-friendly language:

this episode = If the pagename has (episode) in it, remove (episode). If not, use the pagename.

To make the links to the next and previous episodes you need to know what the current episode is as well, so in the previous episode this entire code of "If the pagename has (episode) in it, remove (episode). If not, use the pagename." is used again. And not just once, but five (!) times. The same goes with the next episode link. This is because I can't tell the system that all that entire code defines is simply the current episode. So every time I have to use the same code again and again and again because the system can't remember what the current episode is.

And that's where variables come in. With variables, you can simply say " this episode = If the pagename has (episode) in it, remove (episode). If not, use the pagename." once, and it will be saved as this episode. So I can replace every other time the code is used by just "this episode". This will make the code much much shorter and easier to read. Because right now it's just much too long and pretty much unreadable. Using variables would fix that.

Like I said, it's only useful if the variables work for strings (text) as well, since that is what I'd be using it for. I'm 90% sure that it should work for strings (text), but all the examples are with numbers. So that's why I added that to the post.

So it's up to you to decide if you find this useful enough, because it's not really necessary but it would be nice. If you send anything to Special:Contact I think the original post comes closer to what you have to send because they already know what variables do. But now that I hope you know better what this is about exactly, I think you have a better idea of what you'd have to send. I hope.

Sorry for the extremely long message. That's also a reason to just pretend the person you're writing to is good with code. If you have to explain it to someone who doesn't know code the message gets extremely long.