Template talk:GlobalProblems

Excessive Whitespace

I have absolutely no idea why, but the combination of this random check and removing the now-unnecessary manually typed platform name actually fixed the trailing whitespace after descriptions issue caused by this template. When I went to remove the edit since it was meant to be temporary, I saw the whitespace come back on Phelios (Genesis) after purging it, then I put it back and purged again and the whitespace disappeared. It makes no sense to me, maybe the category is causing the whitespace culling to work differently? I considered just leaving it in there for the sake of removing the whitespace, but there's no reason that it should work like that, and the check would start spewing a pointless category around if we tried to take advantage of it. - Xerxes (talk) 10:34, 15 September 2017 (CEST)

Well, putting Category:Pages using GlobalProblems in place of that check and then hiding the category fixed the whitespace. I'm okay with this workaround, but I don't understand it. - Xerxes (talk) 02:37, 16 September 2017 (CEST)

It was because the output was absolutely nothing at game page level (it's starting to see this template as just newline), this template went silent the whole time if it wasn't for that category you've added there. Lucario (talk) 14:12, 25 September 2017 (CEST)

That's true, but why does the category shrink down the whitespace the way it does? I get that the extra space is actually just from too many newlines in a row on the page, and has nothing to do with the template really, but that doesn't explain why an invisible category is eating newlines like that and solving the problem. - Xerxes (talk) 22:22, 25 September 2017 (CEST)

Well, that's one interesting quirk of Wiki. Maybe in the past when category was truncated to the footer, the excess newlines were immediately noticed, so the coding team in the past have made Wiki conscious enough to specifically backspace any amount of newlines above it. Not sure about the exact details. Also interesting that text right after that category will be merged inline with the line above it. The Wiki plugin like parser function (#if:), on the other hand, I guess it didn't work together with Wiki on the excess newlines especially coming from multiple lines of empty output yet. It used to be a big problem in Template:Config where there were lot of empty newlines when most don't have anything to output, and they couldn't be inlined because each header tag (== ==) requires newline to parse properly, until we've discovered that <H2> does not so the equal signs were replaced with this for heading. Lucario (talk) 07:45, 26 September 2017 (CEST)

You definitely understand it better than I do at least. Thanks for that bit about how it inlines whatever comes after the category, that was the reason that pages displaying global problems ended up having the TOC a little too close to the description, so I was able to fix that. - Xerxes (talk) 19:53, 26 September 2017 (CEST)