explain xkcd talk:User: Aprilfoolsupdate!

Talking with DollarStoreBa'al

No way am I that cool man.

By the way, here's a way to create a userbox: {Userbox | border-c = #255 | border-s = 1 | info-s = 9 | id = ;) | info = [[User:Aprilfoolsupdate!|This user _____ ]] | float = left}}. Thank User:Definitely Bill Cipher for this, I learned it from him. --DollarStoreBa'al^ConverseMy life choices 14:05, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry. Misunderstood your request. Userboxes are used on user pages to add supplemental information. I have one or two on my user page if you want to look at those. By the way, I'm not quite sure what you mean by 'the numbers'. Please clarify if you can. --DollarStoreBa'al^ConverseMy life choices 14:09, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

like these numbers border-c = #255 | border-s = 1 | info-s = 9 | ^April_fools^update!(talk) 14:18, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

border-c controls the color of the userboxes border, between 1 and 255. Border-s is the thickness of the border. info-s is the font of the text inside the userbox... I think. Honestly not sure. --DollarStoreBa'al^ConverseMy life choices 14:22, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks anyway ^April_fools^update!(talk) 14:24, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

You're welcome! Always happy to help. --DollarStoreBa'al^ConverseMy life choices 14:28, 7 August 2025 (UTC)

Can we help you..?

So, {{brda}} seems to have been an experiment. To what end? Can we help you make your original idea work? 92.23.2.228 17:26, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I just don’t want to write the link down so I used a template. I just don’t understand what does that picture mean, and I need someone to help me explain.

*cringe* ...well, hope you can use what I gave you over on the other page, then.

Slightly more confused, myself, about the need for a template. Thought you'd maybe be wanting to include the image (ebedded, or as a link) in a signature or even something you'd want to manually enter in multiple places. Never mind. 92.23.2.228 00:18, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

I'll go further, in explaining this. It might look complicated, but that's just the way I am, and you might even understand it so well that you can spot several errors I made in writing it. (I claim no monopoly on understanding, or even infallibility.) If not, it's here for re-reading later.

Whatever 'pops out' of a template appears on the page that calls it. If you "subst:" it, it works that thing out and makes it permanent, otherwise whenever you browse the calling page it asks the template what it currently says and uses that.

You can use potentially complicated dynamic 'markup' in your template that you could have used directly in the outer page, but don't want to have to apply each time. Or use the template in multiple places and don't want to have to re-edit each instance if you ever need to change it... instead just change the template and (as long as you didn't subst: it, of course) it gets corrected everywhere it gets used. And, you can pass parameters to the template, which can be used in the dynamic logic of how it presents itself in any particular use, so you can have it do "sort of the same thing", but differently according to the situation.

1. A simple example of the first is {{Citation needed}}, which easily inserts the 'fake ^{[citation needed]} text', without having to worry about re-writing it accurately enough every time.
2. A very common example of the second is {{LATESTCOMIC}} which is asked to hold the very latest comic number. At the time of writing, 3126, at the time of reading, 3176. Right now, those two values will appear identical, but I used the "subst:" on the first one, as I did the "Citation needed", so that whatever is current is inserted as if I wrote it straight. Once the next comic gets added to the wiki, the second number will change, and keep changing, without me ever re-editing this page.
3. Probably the example of the third type that you will have noticed (maybe even used) more is the {{w}} template for 'easy' wikipedia linking. Though as every single comic page uses the {{comic}} template at its start (so complicated, with so many parameters, you may not have realised that it is even a {{}}-thing!), that's one example of how each individual use of a given template can give you subtly (or very! or anywhere inbetween...) different looks in different places.
   • On top of that, there is internal dynamic markup that looks at what page it is being called from (or with a more simple markup, whether it's being viewed directly or transposed into a 'parent' page, or only being seen when transposed into a 'parent' page), so it can (for example) stop some aspects of text in a Comic page (of the latest comic) from being seen alongside the rest when it is inserted into the Main wiki page.

As you can see, this can get complicated, especially when templates do multiple or all of the above, at the same time. I'm not expecting you to take in the full potential of what templates are useful for, just trying to give you an indication of what they are used and useful for.

Meanwhile, you had to 'write down' the link in {{brda}} in order to not write down the link in the place(s) you 'wrote down' the template instead. And, testing it (or maybe initialising it, as a red link) aside, the only place it seems you wanted it to be 'wrote down, but not by writing it down' was on the question in the Portal page. It saved you no work (or difficulty), and in fact slowed things down compared to just using it straight. So it didn't help you with point #1, above.

Similarly, while you could have intended it to perhaps say "the thing I currently most want someone to explain is <insert latest thing>", where you just have to alter the <insert latest thing> elsewhere (without finding and editing where you mention it), it was named to suggest that you were never going to change the contents, referencing the current contents. And asking a question, getting answers then potentially 'silently' changing the question (but leaving the answers) isn't exactly useful. You'd be best to think of a different way of doing "At the moment, I'm most interested in <insert latest thing>" as a rolling record.

I think what the above IP was imagining, though, was that you had wanted to do a Trout-or Whale-like template, but starting from the ground up. You were going to refine how the image (eventually, when properly marked-up) displayed, choose left/right/central justification, subtitle/surtitle, boundary box, etc, in one spot, perhaps even later change the image used from the What-If site version to your own freshly edited and uploaded (to here, presumably) animated-gif version, or potentially a more subtle edit. But by then you might have used the template-transclusion in several places, which you wouldn't now need to re-edit individually as you've changed the source 'page'.

Also, it's worth noting that using templates for purely static content (at least between manual edits) is an organisational choice not too different from just transcluding a normal 'non-template' page itself. And the boundaries are blurred in the case of how the Main Page of this wiki uses nested templates and 'normal' transclusion to show the latest edit of the latest comic explanation in there at all times. But let us not get hooked up over such minutiæ, just yet. ;) With many authors, many ideas, much fine-tuning and jury-rigging of ad hoc mechanisms and back-end automation, you'll find blurred lines (and probably intentionally blurrable, from the way that the wikimedia framework was set up — itself a mass of bolts and screws from different developers across different timescales, or even the same developers with different ideas over time!) all over the place.

Understanding it all is a lofty aim, and I'm only an amateur analyst of some small parts of it. Understanding the general concepts, however, can act as a future springboard to such greater things and ways of thinking, even beyond the sphere of wikis themselves. Be curious, but also thoughtful. More haste, less speed. <Insert further profound-sounding epithet here...> 82.132.236.103 13:11, 11 August 2025 (UTC)