It’s been in my “hope to fix” list for quite some time, but there is a template here
that has way too many
's outside the noincludes that display when the template is used. It is currently being used on https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Templates/Discussion
and disrupts the flow of the page. It is fully-protected which means I can’t fix it. Can an administrator please remove these extraneous HTML-br tags so the pages where its used load a lot faster? It will also get the 1500 pages that it’s also being used to load a wee bit faster, and to help those read the Discussion page contents, since it is being used at the top of these Discussion pages. https://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:ID&limit=2000
(It is also sometimes being used on Talk pages, so keep that in mind, but removing these spaces shouldn’t be negative and shouldn’t make any of these pages troublesome when fixed.)Thank you.
2 Likes
I think the line breaks are there in an attempt to push the comments further down the page so people upon first load do not see any offensive comments right away. I don’t think those line breaks have any other use, so I agree that they should be removed.
Eric
3
Can you help me understand what you are wanting changed?
What @Awesome_Aasim
described is correct about the number of line breaks forcing the content further down the page so you don’t see the offensive comments while first loading the page.
Was that what you were inquiring about?
No. It’s not that. Look at the wikiHow:Templates/Discussion subpage. It’s got a large number of blank lines between the template and the next entry, so there’s no offensive comments there.
What you need to do is delete these < br >'s.
Removing those br’s will remove those blank lines and keep the flow better. It should only take a few seconds of your time, and one adjustment will fix everything else in turn.
Eric
5
That’s what we described in @Awesome_Aasim
’s post and my post above. Those br line breaks are intentional for the reasons we described. I realize that wikiHow:Templates doesn’t have offensive content, although the entire purpose of the template is to be used when there is offensive content, so the line breaks are intentionally there to push the offensive content down. Does that make sense?
If wikiHow:Templates is using the actual template, that’s why it has all the extra blank space.
2 Likes
Read the last line of Awesome_Aasim’s answer, @Eric
.
Eric
7
I am confirming the line breaks are indeed intentional, and they have a purpose — to keep readers from inadvertently being exposed to potentially offensive content.
2 Likes
This is only an issue on that page from my understanding and appears fine on an actual discussion page.
1 Like
@JayneG
- please look into this from the first message, because this is not wikiHow-style for templates.
JayneG
11
Although I understand where you’re coming from @EpcotMagic
, these line breaks are in the template itself, are intentional, and can stay as-is. As Eric has already noted, they are to keep readers from seeing potentially offensive content. We can’t change that just to look better on a different page.
I also don’t think removing them would change much with the page loading speed
I"m really disgusted at this whole situation, but I guess I’ll have to live with it - still. I’ll just leave it at that - angry as ever.
May I ask how you propose we handle making sure people don’t see offensive or sensitive content in a discussion page instead of the breaks?
There are other problems with just using line breaks; for example line breaks do not push the content down off the screen in all cases; namely specific zooms, screen sizes, and orientations can make 12 line breaks appear differently on pages.
Example:
Example in mobile F12 portrait orientation:
Example in mobile F12 landscape orientation:
I understand that wikiHow is not censored, and so it may cover topics that might be offensive if doing so will make the site more helpful to readers. At the same time, we discourage people from using profanity on the site as much as possible to maintain a level of professionalism.
The best solution would be to just remove
the offensive material in question if
it does not constructively add to improving the article. The template can then be used in the few cases where the offensive material actually gives suggestions for improvement. In any case, the line breaks should not be necessary.
Thanks for supporting my views, @Awesome_Aasim
.
1 Like
