Forum:Missing Episodes Indicator

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Just wondering if any one thought it would be a good idea to put text next to the titles of individual missing episodes. Obviously it would'nt look like this but for example:

Devil's Planet (Missing Episode)

Perhaps it could be a different colour? Skittles the hog 21:15, November 26, 2009 (UTC)

Story Notes on the article page would be more of a place for that info. --Tangerineduel 14:05, November 27, 2009 (UTC)

Not really, this makes it imediately obvious. Nobody wants to read the story notes.--Skittles the hog 19:11, November 29, 2009 (UTC)

Reviving discussion

I'd tend to agree with Skittles the hog on this one. Though I think he's given to hyperbole when he says "no one" reads the story notes, it should be immediately obvious that a particular episode is missing. Don't like the idea of incorporating it into the section title, but I do think a little template underneath the section head would be appropriate. This is very rough, but I'd definitely support a li'l something like:

Bell of Doom

The next morning, Anne is hiding back at Preslin's shop, waiting for Steven to arrive. When Steven arrives, he informs her of the Doctor's death, still believing that he was pretending to be the Abbot.

Telling her about the TARDIS key, the two begin to search for clothes in the shop, hoping that the Doctor had changed into the Abbot's garb at the shop, and left ...

Obviously that need to be tweaked a bit. Still, without actually making the template and using it "live" on a page, it's a little tricky trying to "guess" how to fix it. But at this stage, I think I can support the notion of doing something to highlight the fact that a particular episode is missing. I think, too, that if the whole serial is missing, a "companion" template should be used in the article's lead to denote a "missing serial". CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 20:42, March 27, 2010 (UTC)

What is it with yellow? Is there not another alarming colour in the spectrum that isn't yellow? Why yellow? Can't it be a nice green hue, or a shaded grey?

If this were to go live I don't think it needs to be alarming, it can just be a note, something subtle, some things don't need bright templates alerting the reader to things. Or a link to the Missing episodes page. --Tangerineduel 09:49, March 29, 2010 (UTC)

Heh, now, you know that wasn't a final design, and that the color is easily changed. Don't miss the forest for the trees. The real question here is whether you really mind that there's some kind of notation like this for missing episodes.

Since you've brought up colors, though, lemme talk about that for a bit. My main thing with yellow is just that it's a post-it note color that makes most people in the industrialized world to think: "Hey, here's a little note". The other thing is that I know the hex codes off the top of my head, so it was simply quick to code that in there. And the third, and most important, thing is that linked text within the box is still quite legible. After all, one of the reasons 3M chose "straight yellow" as the color of post-its is because red, blue and black pens all show up well on it. Blue, after all, is the precise compliment of yellow (in the RGB model we use in computers). Greens don't work well on wikis because red links in them look Christmassy, and blue links barely show up. Yellows, greys, some reds, some lighter browns, and some blues are pretty much what you're left with, when you consider the fact that you have to choose a background color that works equally well with blacks (or whites), reds and blues. We could potentially change the link colors, but that's more coding work. Not necessarily hard work, but enough work on enough templates that I'd want to know that you actively wanted to see some options in that regard before I put 'em up for you.

[As an aside, though, the yellows I've been using aren't, mathematically, "bright". Brightness is the addition of the red, green, and blue values divided by 3. Standard yellow is ffff00. That is, 100% red and green and 0% blue. So our yellow is only 66.something% of the maximum brightness (white). As you add blue, it gets brighter and brighter until you end up with the brightest yellow of all: white. So this is, for all intents and purposes, almost the least-bright "true" yellow (i.e. one that's 100% red and green). It's only between ffff20 and ffff65 that things get really bright, while still allowing you to discern the color as more yellow than white. There are plenty of other colors you could make 66% bright, and you'd probably think it was fine. When you look at the color your chose for the Update/Cleanup/OOC templates, FFCC66, that's actually brighter than this yellow (and, actually, significantly so: that's more like 75% white). "Brightness", therefore, isn't your issue. It's just the actual color of yellow, and that's fine.)

So, no, it's not necessary for it to be yellow, but some sort of yellow "works" without having to introduce the additional level of color matching fonts. What ultimately I'm trying to do with all these templates is find some sort of unified design. At the moment I'm going with the paradigm that grey templates are informational (stubs, real world, wikipedia). The information on them isn't critical or surprising really. Yellow notes are for things that are "warnings", and say, "This is something you may not have expected about this article". So: Non-canon, conjectural, current, missing, things of that ilk. I was trying to go yellow for the update, ooc, cleanup thingies too, but you switched one of those big, central things to the more orangey ffcc66, so i switched 'em all to that color. Then there's blue for delete, and red for the highest order warning: spoilers. I don't know that's the best way to go about it — in fact I think it's probably altogether too colorful — but I do want to get some sort of rational, predictable thing going on. Too often we've made infoboxes, navigational templates and warning templates a color that pleased us in the moment, without considering overall site design. We can do better. I don't claim to know, yet, what that overall design ethos should be, but I know we should have one, so that an average viewer can see the difference between the different types of messages.

For the future, I'm thinking we should probably reduce the number of colors used to just three, and introduce some level of transparency to the background so that all these templates look more solid and less Crayola. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 23:13, March 29, 2010 (UTC)

Well that's me told. (As a side note I don't know the hex codes (I think I learnt the basics at some point) and instead use a site [1] to work out a 'nice' colour).

I don't think we need to be making work / adding complications by changing the colour of the links default and recognisable elements are good.

As for the original question, I'm still not sure about something that sits within the text like a template, I think subtlty over alertness. Would as Skittles suggested originally just the words (Missing Episode) one the relevant episode subheading work? And for whole stories that are missing perhaps a missing story template that would float up in the right hand corner the same way the Template:Featured spotlight star works? (Just throwing ideas out there). --Tangerineduel 06:10, March 30, 2010 (UTC)

Well, I've gotten myself sidetracked a bit with the timeline nav rejig, but lemme just quickly note here that the problem with incorporating the words "missing episode" into the subhead is Jon Pertwee. Because, as you know, during his era you've got the specialised "missing episode in colour" and "Colour restored" things. It's gonna add rather a lot to the line to be precise about what's missing. I still think a floating thing is a little subtler and cleaner than clunky wods on the subhead. But now that I think about it, grey would actually be a better colour for this particular box. This information isn't really "surprising, and all the missing episodes have something to do wih monochrome anyway. Dunno about the missin serial thing; still need to give that a better think. CzechOut ☎ | ✍ 10:22, March 31, 2010 (UTC)