Forum:Discontinuity pages and search bug
If this thread's title doesn't specify it's spoilery, don't bring any up.
This may not be the right place to post this but I wasn't sure where else to put it.
I think the discontinuity pages have led to a serious problem. Sometimes, when searching the wiki for an episode name, what actually comes up is a link to the discontinuity page on that episode (or the talk page for that discon page) rather than the article itself. Sometimes the summary is nevertheless that of the article.
I'm not sure I've nailed down the bug exactly, but I have at least one repeatable repro:
- Go to Forum:Index.
- Type in "Destiny of Daleks" (without "the") in the search box.
- The first result will read as if it were a link Destiny of the Daleks, and the summary will be appropriate to that article, and it won't be a redlnk.
- Click the link, and you are instead taken to Forum talk:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Destiny of the Daleks.
--Falcotron 02:49, May 7, 2010 (UTC)
If you actually type the full name of a page--e.g., "Destiny of the Daleks"--you do go right to the correct page, not to the wrong one. It's only when you do a "search" instead of a "go" (or whatever the distinction is). --Falcotron 02:51, May 7, 2010 (UTC)
- Calling this serious is overstatement. It is I grant you reproducable in this one case, but doesn't happen when you search for "ark space", "delta bannermen" or various other truncated ep names. I have occasionally seen this in the past, but it has usually been solved by actually creating the forum page. What is a little weird here is that it is linking to the forum talk namespace, rather than the forum namespace. I don't know why it is doing this but is not a widespread error. Possibly removing the redlink above will sort things out. Will look into this further but am not overly concerned. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 15:36, May 7, 2010 (UTC)
- You're right, it doesn't seem as serious as I first thought. At first, it happened to me 5 out of 8 times that I tried searching for 4 different articles from within the forum by copying and pasting slightly-misnamed versions of them out of forum posts. When I tried to repro it, it happened repeatedly with the last one I remembered having failed, but didn't happen with the last one that I remembered having worked. So, I assumed either it happened on 3/4ths of the articles, or it happened on all of them except that some cache effect was saving some of them, or something like that.
- But it looks like I was just very unlucky that day, and it's just a few articles that are affected. --Falcotron 18:41, May 7, 2010 (UTC)