This is an archive of past discussions about Template:Rfc. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
An rfc with style and soc topics lists the soc-topic on its own line at the bottom of the infobox without a bullet. An rfc with style, soc, econ topics places soc-topic at the end of the line of main text and econ-topic on its own line with a bullet. I didn't try it with other topics. It would be better if the formatting were more consistent and less surprising - just put all the extra topics at the bottom of the infobox with a bullet whatever topics they are. Jojalozzo02:35, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
I think it was just missing some '*'s from when new topics were included. I added them in and it seems to be behaving. Jojalozzo18:24, 23 September 2011 (UTC)
Closing RFC
I have seen RFCs that were closed, and the whole thread was put in some kind of box with a notice at the top that the RFC was closed. However, I cannot recall the exact location of any of these at the moment. Is there a template that is used for this purpose? Jc3s5h (talk) 16:45, 16 May 2012 (UTC)
Thanks, but that doesn't seem to be what I'm looking for. That page contains the statement "discussions are usually closed in situations where someone, usually an administrator, decides that the discussion is irrelevant or disruptive." I'm more interested in the case when an RFC was conducted, and possibly achieved consensus. But if it is just left for the default 30 day period to expire, the RFC bot will come along and remove the RFC tag. Then subsequent readers will have to read through the whole thing to discover the consensus, and will be unaware that the discussion was advertized through the RFC process, and thus carries more weight than an unadvertised discussion. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:47, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
OK, when I read the template documentation, it is apparent that the templates could be used for much more than closing discussions that are irrelevant or disruptive. I believe this page should be modified to more fully reflect the variety of outcomes. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:21, 17 May 2012 (UTC)
WP:RFC says, "It may take the bot up to a day to list the RfC, so be patient." However, this template says, "Within 30 minutes, this page will be added..." In practice, the RFC that I posted several hours ago has not yet appeared. Perhaps the language on the template should be updated? --BlueMoonlet (t/c) 21:28, 11 September 2012 (UTC)
The template contains <span id="rfctag" />. The use is not apparent and when the template is used multiple times on a page it results in duplicate ids. --Gadget850talk12:53, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
It was added by Harej (talk·contribs) with this edit. At that time, we didn't have the |rfcid= parameter, and therefore didn't have the unique anchor which it creates, so some means of linking directly to the start of the rfc was needed when the rfc was not immediately below a section heading. It was later amended with this edit to use an anchor generated from |rfcid= for preference, and again with this edit by Hellknowz (talk·contribs) to use both. I don't know what Hellknowz means by AAB. --Redrose64 (talk) 14:50, 8 November 2014 (UTC)
AAB means WP:AALERTS, I needed a way for the bot to link to the RfC that didn't involve complex parsing of the template. At the time I was using the tag and the change broke existing links. I haven't transitioned to the new id tag. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK18:18, 1 December 2014 (UTC)
Technically it is feasible, but I oppose it on the grounds that it would mean that things that were closed as WP:SNOW within a few hours or days of being opened would be forced to sit around for 30 days before being archived, and there is no need for that. — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)20:57, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
Snow closers could simply delete the do not archive comment andor the rfc tag and the bot will archive it. The point is to make this a human's decision, not a bot's. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 21:10, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
One thing that will help make this happen is visible text on the screen saying "this discussion will not be archived until foo" so that closers know it is there and know to remove it. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 22:04, 11 December 2014 (UTC)
It's not feasible, because archiving bots don't look inside templates - they examine the bare plain text on the page to find the latest timestamp within each thread. If a thread with an open RfC is being archived, that means that the archiving time threshold is less than the time that has elapsed since the last timestamped post to the thread. Since RfCs typically run for 30 days, and most talk pages with archiving have the threshold set to a period longer than that, this sort of situation won't occur very often. It's probably better to ask the maintainers of archiving bots to add an enhancement so that threads bearing a {{rfc}} will be excluded from the selection process. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:58, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
Red, they actually started there with User_talk:Legobot#Question about archived pages. The user seems to have a flawed perception that bot archived threads are automatically closed or that all discussions must be formally closed, which I have been unable to convince them otherwise. Perhaps you will have better luck with it than I did. :) — {{U|Technical 13}} (e • t • c)22:14, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
An RfC is no longer treated as an RfC from the moment that the {{rfc}} template is removed. It may be manually removed, or removed by bot; AFAIK there is only one bot that does that, it is Legobot (talk·contribs), and it does so if either of two circumstances are met: (i) more than thirty days have elapsed since the first timestamp after the {{rfc}} template; (ii) the RfC is on an archive page. An example of (ii) is this edit: the thread had been archived one minute earlier, even though the RfC had started 23:16, 15 November 2014 and so was not due to end until 23:16, 15 December 2014 - slightly over two days from now. --Redrose64 (talk) 22:39, 13 December 2014 (UTC)
Technical13, clarification on my position. A discussion in an archive is de-facto closed, period. It's no longer on watchlists, it's no longer widely visible, so there is no practical difference between a closed discussion and an archived one. I've never seen an archived discussion get new comments, on any topic, ever. Therefore, when a bot archives a discussion is also closes it. This isn't a problem in most cases, but RFCs are intentionally there to give everyone a chance to comment, so most need the full 30 days. Yes, some are snow closes and can be archived quickly, so let the closer remove the DNAU note so it's a human decision. Also, discussions don't need to be closed and most aren't, and a lot of RFCs aren't, and that's fine, as long as RFCs get their 30 days. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 04:44, 14 December 2014 (UTC)
I changed the tag on my RfC to remove the category "policy" soon after it was indexed, as it turned out not to be appropriate. I also added another more appropriate category. Will the bot eventually update the listings to reflect this change? Artw (talk) 22:55, 16 March 2015 (UTC)
I was asked recently to comment on Talk:United States article. There are multiple RFC on this page and RFC questions are confusing. The article like this one (long and very popular) need a bit more policing.
My proposal is to update RFC template to:
include section of the article it relates to {{rfc|topic|section}}
specific question that could be easily answered with Oppose/Support
create an rfc response template {{rfc response|oppose/support/neutral|reason}}
I had a look at that talk page and the problems they are far beyond what a template can fix. Also, I consistently object to support oppose options, since in many context it's not clear what those words mean (such as saying oppose in a deletion discussion which could mean oppose deleting or could mean oppose the article) Oiyarbepsy (talk) 03:11, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
@Oiyarbepsy I agree with your assessment of United States. The articles like this are not rare, there will be always multiple disputes around them and hard to find all related information. It would help if an RFC could be connected to the article section it relates to. Maybe my suggestion is not the solution but it could help. I noticed it is hard to choose between support and oppose and added a neutral option too. These choices are important because of the final decision made based on these votes. I also believe the reason it is hard to vote is related to the way questions in RFC are formulated. Gpeja (talk) 16:51, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
Template-protected edit request on 13 April 2019
This edit request to Template:Rfc has been answered. Set the |answered= or |ans= parameter to no to reactivate your request.
Please replace the template with the current sandbox version (diff). This would ensure that the text When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. becomes {{...removed from the lists}} when there are multiple RfC lists. The result can be seen in the current /testcases. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 19:12, 13 April 2019 (UTC)
Oh right, I didn't expect bot instructions to be listed there so I didn't check. I'm also blind and didn't see RFA listed twice. Welp, so much for that guess. Feel free to remove this section so it doesn't interfere with your testing. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK11:30, 18 April 2019 (UTC)
This is not a real RfC, it is a test. Some RfC listing pages have empty entries: a linked heading, but no statement or timestamp. These appear at the bottom of the pages concerned, just above the navbox. I'm trying to work out what is causing these mis-listings. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 10:56, 12 May 2019 (UTC)
Another: either this edit or this one by Icewhiz (talk·contribs) fixed another of the incorrect entries. At this stage, we can't tell which edit was the successful one, because the second one was made two minutes before Legobot had a chance to detect the first. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:41, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
I do RfCs pretty often, so I don't think it would have anything to do with Unicode characters in my sig, or this would have come up much sooner (and probably with someone else, since I'm hardly alone in have more than basic Latin 1 ASCII in my sig). — SMcCandlish☏¢ 😼 23:51, 21 April 2019 (UTC)
With the latest of these occurring within the last hour, I feel that I should list all the problem RfCs that are presently appearing in the RfC listings only as links without text or timestamp, and their categories. They are:
Is the timestamp with user link supposed to count as the cutoff point? Otherwise, the music one has 2 entire subsections. The campaign one is basically one sentence. Unless I'm missing something about what you're saying. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK07:37, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
Any string that can be parsed as a timestamp and that is also in a format that could have been yielded by five tildes is taken as the end of the statement. If it is part of a four-tilde signature, the signature preceding that (such as the user link) is just treated as normal linked text. Try putting all of these pages on your watchlist, and observe the various RfCs getting added and removed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:04, 10 May 2019 (UTC)
I fixed a number of them by copying the signature to an earlier point. Doing this I noticed that a number of the problem ones were started by Snooganssnoogans - so Snoogans, please observe WP:RFCBRIEF in future. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:07, 11 May 2019 (UTC)
It's probably ~2048, because you are including timestamp length, but the code likely doesn't unless the coder took a deliberate step to add timestamp length. Without timestamp, it's 2044 characters. It seems more likely they got the difference between template and timestamp positions minus template length. I imagine a few bytes are lost in newline, length math, and/or some string storage or processing stuff. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK13:57, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
The source is here, but I can't find where the length of the variable $content is set. Or the length of any other string, for that matter. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:51, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
Gee, I didn't realize you had the source. I tried to debug the relevant part and the script fails (first) on this line: preg_match_all("/\{{2}\s?Rfc(tag)?\s?[^}]*\}{2}(.|\n)*?([0-2]\d):([0-5]\d),\s(\d{1,2})\s(\w*)\s(\d{4})\s\(UTC\)/im", $description, $m);. The preg_match_all RegEx fails with a PREG_JIT_STACKLIMIT_ERROR (6) as of PHP 7. Basically (though not technically accurate), the input is too long (~6k on that website). Since PHP sucks lets the code run with bad values, the script keeps running. Either RegEx needs to be more efficient, the PHP set to higher limit, or just not use RegEx. — HELLKNOWZ ▎TALK22:37, 13 May 2019 (UTC)
An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. Within 24 hours, this page will be added to the following list:
Not a real RFC
When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.
Wikilink and some text, then some redacted text, then some added text, then some more text, all entered on the same line.
This only appears to occur in the initial paragraph. A workaround is to stick a <p> tag before the opening wikilink, but does anyone have any idea what causes this glitchy behavior? (Note: I’ve substed the RFC template in the hopes that it won’t be listed as an actual RFC.) —174.141.182.82 (talk) 05:17, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
Testing: Wikilink and some text, then some redacted text, then some added text, then some more text, all entered on the same line. - Ok, that's weird, this time it's all on the same line, just as you described. Oiyarbepsy (talk) 05:46, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
For comparison an empty wkitable ending with |}<span>[[Wikilink]] <del>redacted</del></span> rendered as in your examples (indentation before the wikitable):
Obviously MediaWiki or tidy insist on putting the link into a paragraph, if it immediately follows the table outside of other block (div, list item, etc.) or inline (span, etc.) elements. Adding "something" between table and link—my {{-}} idea + variants with empty br, div, hr, span, or nowiki closed before the link—do not help. This reminds me of nine years old pre-oddities, but I'm not checking which long forgotten WONTFIX this was in 2006. –Be..anyone (talk) 21:39, 24 February 2015 (UTC)
How do we go about adding a parameter for site-wide discussions for sources? This is to widen participation in source deprecation discussions via WP:RSN. Ideally I'd like to add source as a parameter and have that advertised as for other sitewide items. Guy (help!) 13:18, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
If we add a new category code to WP:RFCCAT, we must ensure that Legobot (talk·contribs) has been set up to recognise the new proposed code, since the use of any unrecognised code will dump the RfC into Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Unsorted, a page which should not contain any ongoing RfCs. To get the Legobot code amended, you need to convince the bot operator, Legoktm (talk·contribs), of the need for this. I doubt this will be carried out, since Legoktm is very busy and is unwilling to carry out any changes to the Legobot code, except for "Unbreak now!" bugs. This means that the list of category codes at WP:RFCCAT is pretty much fixed. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 12:25, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
Resolved
