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Some background: the tag has passed the 100 Q milestone; now anyone may earn its tag badge. It is also part of our Top 15 tags on the site (currently #11 from all tags, and #8 if you count games only), so in general seems to be an important tag for the site that is growing.

I was looking at the autocard support for MTG, and I was thinking that something similar would be useful for YGO cards (as manually searching and pasting the links can be cumbersome when including several card examples). After doing some research and thinking it here is what I found and propose:

  • One useful site that could be the target of the linking is Yu-Gi-Oh! Wikia. This site has a thorough documentation of all the cards (effects, descriptions, ruling, etc.), and even of some anime and OCG cards.

  • The suggested syntax could be something like [ygo:Celtic Guardian], which would lead to http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Celtic_Guardian .

  • The URLs support the use of whitespace instead of underscores (the wiki automatically inserts them)1.

  • The URLs also support special characters like hyphens, commas, apostrophes, etc2.

1Playing a bit with that Wiki I found this could help the feature require less code and effort, as the URL link also supports whitespace instead of underscores. This means that you can type http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Celtic Guardian and still get to the same page.

2This Wiki would also be great for cards that have special characters on their names (a past problem with the MTG autocard it seems). Doing some tests I found that there is no problem in including such characters on the URL. It even supports whitespaces and special characters. Some cards I tested successfully were:

  • Lyla, Lightsworn Sorceress: You can leave the comma and remove underscores, so the URL yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Lyla, Lightsworn Sorceress works.

  • Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning: This card too, you can use whitespace and leave the hyphen, so yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Black Luster Soldier - Envoy of the Beginning works.

  • T.A.D.P.O.L.E.: As we can see this unusual card name is also properly handled with the URL http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/T.A.D.P.O.L.E.

  • Finally Swallow's Nest: You can again use whitespaces and leave the apostrophe in place, for which the following URL works: yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Swallow's Nest

So, this is what I propose, and would like to know what you think about it. Any suggestions that could help achieve this goal?

Text transformations needed

Convert all spaces to underscores.

Further testing and discussion confirmed that the YuGiOh Wikia supports special characters, with some exceptions. The only unsupported special character that has ever shown up in a card name though is #. To handle this, remove all instances of the character # from card names whilst generating autocard links. For cards like Winged Dragon, Guardian of the Fortress #1, the name is transformed from:

Winged Dragon, Guardian of the Fortress #1

to

Winged Dragon, Guardian of the Fortress 1

and then spaces are converted to underscores, so the link would be:

http://yugioh.wikia.com/wiki/Winged_Dragon,_Guardian_of_the_Fortress_1
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    Unfortunately this requires SE dev work, and they're spread pretty thin, so even if it'd be really nice to have, our odds may not be too high.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 20:31
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    @Cascabel I see, still I'm not saying that this has to be done ASAP, but it would be indeed useful. This could still benefit from further discussion and alternatives, let's hope it does not take too much time to consider.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 2, 2018 at 21:19
  • Might be a good idea to edit to the title to a question "Should we" instead of a declaration; it looks like an announcement that yu-gi-oh support is happening right now.
    – user19942
    Commented Feb 3, 2018 at 0:30
  • @Riker thanks will consider it. The fact that this is a feature request is self evident don't you think? Thus, it is a request at this moment. If implemented a status completed will appear
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 3, 2018 at 1:20
  • @DarkCygnus not if you only see the title in the sidebar from the main site, no tags are shown. (nor an author)
    – user19942
    Commented Feb 3, 2018 at 15:00
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    To be honest if we are going to get dev time for work I would rather see it to take the site out of beta or to fix the MTG auto card which has issues.
    – Joe W
    Commented Feb 3, 2018 at 23:54
  • @JoeW features like these will help make the site less beta-ish. If the YGO autocard seems easier (basically same code base as the MTG which is already made, thus candidate to refactoring) then I don't see why it would be a bad idea. It also seems to be less problematic than MTG autocard, as per all the whitespace and character behavior, so perhaps may be a good feature after all.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 4, 2018 at 5:23
  • I think it would be better to fix something that will be more heavily uses (2867 vs 107 questions) or work on taking the site out of beta which can improve traffic then add a new feature.
    – Joe W
    Commented Feb 4, 2018 at 6:35
  • @JoeW again, not saying this should be done tomorrow morning, but seems to be a good idea though. I agree with those other needs you mention, but there is no reason to discard this idea just for that. Seems like the thing in common is that we are in considerable need for any dev time...
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 4, 2018 at 6:41
  • And I am not saying it shouldn't be done but that there is other work that should be done first that has been asked for for a lot longer. Also when you condenser how long sites do wait for dev time it becomes understandable to make sure what we ask for is prioritized
    – Joe W
    Commented Feb 4, 2018 at 6:48
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    @JoeW I was researching on the "getting the site out of beta" you mention. I found these stats of the site on Area 51. Seems that everything is great, except for the number of questions per day, currently on 3.7 (we need 10). To get the site out of beta we should be striving for that. Don't get me wrong, but seems that "dev time" is of little use if we can't reach that goal, so this strengthens the fact that this feature request could be not so far-fetched to achieve.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 7, 2018 at 17:51
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    FWIW, regarding special characters, Wikia uses the MediaWiki software, which allows most Unicode characters in page titles. The most notable exceptions are the characters # < > [ ] | { }; if any of those ever appear in a Yu-Gi-Oh! card name, the wiki editors would have to figure out alternative page titles for those cards.
    – Ilmari Karonen
    Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 8:05
  • @IlmariKaronen thanks for the info :) seems unlikely a card will have any those characters
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 11, 2018 at 11:53
  • @IlmariKaronen Unfortunately, # appears on quite a few cards, although perhaps that won't be an issue since they are almost all from some of the earliest sets.
    – Thunderforge
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:06
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    @Thunderforge yes you are right, like the famous Winged Dragon, Guardian of the Fortress #1 ... although the YGOWikia link ommits the hash altogether and just considers "of the Fortress 1"... guess it's a matter of indicating that the autocard feature has to be used without those characters
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Feb 15, 2018 at 23:18

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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I'm declining this feature request not because I think it's a bad idea, but because I don't know when we'll have the resources to implement it. (Insert sad emoji here.) I know the MTG autocard feature is pretty useful and I'm going to ask a developer to look into a proposed improvement. The hope is that it'll take a few minutes and not delay other work. A new feature (however similar it might be) will take more time to plan and implement. And we need to factor in the cost of maintaining it later.

As is often the case, there's a chicken-and-egg problem. Right now, there are 152 Yu-Gi-Oh questions. Presumably, setting up this feature would prompt more of them. But it's hard to justify a new feature that can be used on so few existing questions. Magic has 3207 questions, which gives us a better return on the investment. Still, I'm not sure we'd have the resources to work on MTG features if they weren't already in place.

I wish things were different and we could devote time to utility features like this.

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  • Still YGO is in the top 10 tags... I know MTG posts are quite more, but this site is not named MTG.SE... it's B&CG.SE and seems a bit unfair to favor just one tab. Because of that, and other things exposed in my post, is that I don't agree on using the 3207 number as justification... but yeah, perhaps after the MTG autocard feature is improved (again...) replicating it for YGO will be easier.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 19:49
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    At least you could have deferred the request, not completely declined it if you say it's a good idea but lack the resources... but :) guess it's just a formality. Thanks for taking the time to look at this post at least, even though it were 6+ months after... seems that indeed there are few resources (and will?) to spare.
    – DarkCygnus
    Commented Sep 11, 2018 at 19:51
  • Hi Jon, maybe a bit off-topic. But would it be reasonable to have the community potentially implement this feature and have it somehow rolled into the SE software. I've seen some sub-communities have their own features like Furigana on Japanese.SE, and am interested if this has been thought of - company using external community software. I probably would take time to answer here if this were implemented, and would be happy to do it myself when I have the time. Thank you for your time.
    – user14390
    Commented Nov 9, 2019 at 10:23

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