Template talk:Countdown-ymd

This template was considered for deletion on 2015 May 11. The result of the discussion was "keep for non-mainspace use".

countdown-ymd (ex countdown/sandbox2)

Moved from Template talk:countdown

Four suggestion for the template

Here are my four suggestions on how to improve upon some of the template's presentational aspects:

Whether or not the "refresh-link" is displayed should be optional.
Allow for the section of the article be defined, so that after a refresh, we will not just jump to the top of the page.
Make the display of seconds, minutes, and hours, optional but without losing accuracy. Currently, this is not the case. If hours and minutes are defined, then seconds will automatically be displayed. The only way not to display seconds is to not define minutes, with the negative effect that now the number of minutes is no longer accurately displayed.
Make months optional. Instead of "1 month, 3 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes, 5 seconds" it should be possible to display "33 days, 22 hours, 11 minutes, 05 seconds" (if the month in question has 30 days, of course). A whole different format would be "33d : 22h : 11m : 05s" or even "33 : 22 : 11 : 05".

In other words I'd like to use optional parameters, such as:

|hide refresh= hiding refresh link using the values → yes, y, <empty>
|refresh to= redirecting to the correct section using the value → "articlename#sectiontitle" or "#sectiontitle"
|trim display time= configure whether seconds, minutes or hours, or hours will be displayed. Using the values → "sec" to hide seconds. If it is set to "min", then seconds will be trimmed as well.
|display format= using value "no months" allowing for number of days to be greater than 31, and "colons-xyz" for the different formats.

Of course, that's just my short-sighted, incremental take on adding a few new parameters to the existing Module:Countdown-ymd. To define the countdown-date and the displayed format independently from the start, would be a much better solution, but I guess that's basically means to start a new template. -- Cheers, Rfassbind -talk 15:02, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why should refresh be optional?
Don't know how to do this. The simple tests I made by hacking my browser's address box would refresh the page but I couldn't get the browser to jump to the section.
This could be done. I think perhaps |time display=keyword where keyword is one of hm, h, or none; would only apply while time to event is greater than 24 hours.
Isn't this a different template? The purpose of {{countdown-ymd}} is to display months; to turn that off seems contrary to the purpose.

—Trappist the monk (talk) 17:49, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there,

Why should refresh be required? That's a more reasonable question to me and the answer is simple: is not needed. Or it's bothering or messes up the layout. Who knows what else? That's why is should be optional, I think.
Oh well, I don't know either where the link http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ARTICLENAME&action=purge comes from. But it can be done by simply assembling HTML code, adding #SectionTitle to it. Isn't it possible to generate a HTML link from scratch?
Yeah, "timedisplay" with hms, hm, m, none makes sense to me
Oh well, maybe it contradicts the template's name, but that say probably more about the naming conventions used for the template, rather than anything about the usefulness of the feature. Is there a other countdown template that goes from years straight to days without using months or weeks? I must have missed that, sorry.

Anyway, thanks for the reply. -- Cheers, Rfassbind -talk 18:27, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

for convenience I suppose; New Horizons is changed so often that perhaps it doesn't matter, but when a page isn't edited as often as that one is, a simple button click to refresh the countdown is easier than a null edit
making an html link isn't a problem. I manually made a couple of links as you suggested:
first this one based on the extant refresh url:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_Horizons#Current_status&action=purge

then this based on a standard section header link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons#Current_status&action=purge

neither of these worked. Go look at New Horizons#Current status, note the countdown time, and then paste either of them into your browser's address bar. What happens? All that happened for me that my browser fetched a fresh copy of the same page from the server without doing a refresh. I know this because the countdown time did not change when it should have. You have asserted that it can be done: show me.
|time display=hms is not needed because that is the default; |time display=m should cause an error display because years, months, days minutes only makes sense when hours value is currently 0.
I don't know of a years, days, hours, minutes, seconds countdown; how meaningful to a reader is a countdown of 1 year, 247 days, 17 hours, 25 minutes, 48 seconds?

—Trappist the monk (talk) 19:52, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]