Template talk:HistLink

Template broken

With the recent change, none of the old links for MF posts < 670000 work correctly except the one for k=165 dated 2003-12-22. Are other changes going to be made? Gary Barnes (talk) 21:46, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

Undid last change plus other noted changes. The test effectively broke the history links for 90+% of MersenneForum posts. Gary Barnes (talk) 01:54, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

I think a new prefix (something unique, like MF) should be added. This would allow us to gradually convert all old-format MersenneForum post IDs to the new node IDs (using the chosen prefix). After that, the template can be flash-cut to use the node link template and User:HappyBot or the global search-replace tool can delete the prefixes from the pages. --Happy5214 (talk) 06:05, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

It's a mess since the last update/conversion of the MersForum! I've included a new Option 'M' for such cases: if the link to a first post of a thread don't show correctly, use this option instead. I've edited two entries for Riesel k=165 (entries for 2003-12-22 and 2025-03-05) and working. If there're other special cases needed post here. Karbon (talk) 09:58, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, Karsten. It fixed the problem. Note that the new 'M' option is only needed when a first post in a thread is prior to 2005. I made some small changes in the template that reflect that fact and to clarify the important note due to your changes. So far only Riesel base 2 k=75, 165, 225, & 146865 needed this change. There should be very few changes that will be needed since there is little MF history prior to 2005 that is currently reflected in the Wiki. Gary Barnes (talk) 21:26, 19 March 2025 (UTC)

Description of 2025-04-13 changes

1. Clarify the different post formats for MersenneForum. Make it clear in the Important note that we now want to use the new post IDs in order to migrate to the new Node post format (M#) instead of only using that for very old posts that were the first in a thread.

2. Remove duplicated NFS@home link reference (due to error introduced in Karsten's 2025-03-19 change).

3. Remove Yahoo dead link references. I kept the Y= coding for Yahoo at the bottom to avoid breaking anything where it had previously been used and for potential future reference to the internet archive if possible.

Gary Barnes (talk) 08:43, 13 April 2025 (UTC)

Gary, please stop changing almost all Hist-links to the "M#..." format. The format (only post-ID) should be the default phrase to use otherwise there are thousands of entries to be changed. And stop only changing the post-id to a different (new) one although the result shown is the same (between before and after MersForum update). Please discuss here first, what you want do to here. If you want do update _all_ Hist-links you have no hint other than looking in the source of a page to determine which links are updated. There have to be another solution like a new template perhaps putting a color into the old template to show which post is not updated. Stop and discuss first! Karbon (talk) 09:57, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Karsten, Alexander and I had agreed by PM that we need to migrate to the new node IDs. There is something that you are not considering. There are 1000's of k's with old history that still need to be added to the Wiki. It has been a tremendous effort for me to add new k's properly with all of their old history because I have to look up their old post numbers, which is time-consuming. I'm keeping a spreadsheet of them but that barely helps. I'm happy to have the new M# format for posts in the future. It will allow me to add many k's with old history much more quickly.

I'm getting a jump on this by starting with the most difficult small-k pages and working my way up. Yes there is another solution: Acquire a table/database that has all of the old post numbers and their corresponding new post numbers in it and use that to automatically convert everything. It is a long-shot but I will ask Mike (xyzzy) at MersenneForum if there is such a table. Leaving everything as is with another template to color code things is not tenable for the future because people who wish to add k's with old history will struggle to do so correctly unless they use the M# format. Also I think it will only confuse people who look at the pages with different colors for links. Gary Barnes (talk) 12:47, 17 April 2025 (UTC)

Alexander has created tracking categories for this migration. The idea is that we will migrate everything in this category:

old post links

to one of these categories:

new post links with M prefix

new post links without M prefix

After that is done, then we can use a bot to remove all of the "M#" prefixes and update HistLink to remove that prefix.

Gary Barnes (talk) 16:17, 17 April 2025 (UTC)