Requests for Comment/Proposal for a new blog creation feature for all Qualitipedia wikis

I should've done this right after I made changes to the blog creation thingy. Oh well. Better late than never.

Update (6. Jan 2022): Hello?

Description
For years, the BlogPage extension has been implemented by 13 wikis of Qualitipedia and used by hundreds of users across these wikis (as of Freitag, 4. Februar, 2022).

And while I have to admit that the extension has made it easy and quick for users to create blogs to express their thoughts, opinions or just socialise, I and some users have noticed that everytime one creates a blog, the extension adds a category date, i.e. it secretly adds something like this  to the end of the blog's source code without informing the author.

It does not harm the wiki in any comprehensible way, and most users are oblivious to it, but some are not pleasant by this. Some even complained that the sheer amount of date categories created by the extension every single day had absolutely little to no use whatsoever in any capacity, aside from telling the user, ''“Oi mate, on July 7, 2022, there were seven blogs written on that day. One from user X, one from user Y, two from user Z, blah- blah- blah ...”'' Blazikeye535 stated:
 * [...] the categories list is cluttered to the brim with "categories" that simply state the date a specific blog was made. This makes navigating through the categories a pain, and of course causes massive clutter as stated previously. [...]

Fortunately, all these pesky categories can be deleted. But it is not that easy. An admin can delete their(3 rd person singular pronoun, not plural) multiple pages in a blink of an eye, but deleting all these date categories is a pain in the buttocks. And even if they are gone, the extension will still create more, as long as users are still using it. I tried writing a blog using the BlogPage extension on Awful Movies Wiki, and as you can see, it added the pesky date category.

'' That is some supreme bullshit. ''  — The Angry Video Game Nerd

With that said, I am proposing a change. The blog creation feature of 11 of 13 Qualitipedia wikis needs an overhaul. In fact, the blog creation features of AGW and CGW were changed a few months ago, by me.
 * Some users complained that they did not like adding the mandatory template (that automatically adds  and   to the blog) and saving it and editing it again (and that was before I knew about the preload parameter used by InputBox), but it did not matter. The new blog creation feature worked like I had expected, it no longer added the pesky categories like it used to.

If this Request for Comment is approved, we will retool the blog creation features of 11 wikis, using my design: {|class="wikitable" !:Create a blog post !MediaWiki:FastBlog Enter your blog title here...

NOTE: ''Do not add categories regarding blah-blah-blah- blah-blah- blah-blah- blah-blah  ... as it will only clutter the wiki. Expect a block for doing so.''



Comments

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🦖️ my Name is Katsumi (BA↗RI↘BA↗RI↘)    talk    contributions  11:40, 4 February 2022 (UTC)

Votes
You see the header above? You know what to do.

Abstain

 * : I was going to oppose initially, but seeing how the system works now it is actually far, far better than when it launched. Proper use of preload does it credit and the system is ultimately a bit cleaner to execute than I was going to propose myself (which needed bugfixing and was frankly not worth the time to develop anyway, as evidenced by my inattention to the subject). I am not inclined to oppose. But there are still things I should note for the logic of the proposal and how we handle blogs.
 * 1) The 'clutter' problem is a red herring. Special:Categories is not what we should be using. Category:Browse, a default structure for every QP wiki is what matters. That is what I'd personally like support with, and from a category POV should be the clear priority. A majority of people are not bothered by the dates and frankly, those who are really aren't affected in any tangible way. What this midway shift means is that we have a tremendous amount of work to purge dates that had admittedly questionable value, but still offered a point of reference to easily point at for when a blog is written and what others correspond with the day as a bit of trivia. It's frankly a waste of time to go after. There are far better things that could be done on categories alone that would tangibly help. So I don't care for the purging logic that inspired this mechanism in the first place, but again I am not opposed to making the page universal if that's what is agreed here.
 * 2) I don't like the cold language used about blog categories. It goes from the above issue to a waste, ignoring a feature entirely that does have some organizational merit. What I wanted to execute some time back and haven't gotten to is the thought of 'blog categories', an approved list of categorizations for people to use based on the type of blog it is. Thus the question is not 'don't add categories or block' (and frankly a block is an excessive, overbearing act I would overturn personally if appealed or witnessed for the 'offense'), but instead using the right categories and giving the feature potential. That is language I would rather see change in this proposal, after which I may consider a support in respect of the effort and mild research that lead to an admittedly fairly usable page as proposed here.