Talk:Bus routes in London

Discussion on solution to the issue of Limit of Template Include Size being reached

This page has now reached the limit of template include size. This means that the templates at the end of the page fail to display correctly. It currently affects the Night Buses table from N551 to the end of the page, but will affect more routes from the end of the page, as more templates are added to the incomplete tables, higher up the page. In summary, there are too many uses of templates (Relation and State Route) within the page.

This issue will have to be resolved, in order to complete the tables with the missing routes (each route master addition adds three extra templates to the page) and routes that are still to be converted to route masters (each conversion adds two extra templates to the page).

I can see two possible solutions to this issue:

a) Reduce the number of templates used per route for route masters from three to one. That is, for a route in Route Master format, there would only be an entry in the Route Master column. It would only be possible to follow the Route Master link to get to the individual routes. It would not be possible to access the individual routes directly from this page. I will temporarily edit route 3 to create an example of this, to make it clear what this would look like.

b) Split the page into several pages. Logically this would probably mean having a separate page for each table, that is a total of eleven pages. Although the creation of pages could be done progressively, as needed.

Are there any other possible solutions and, if not, does anyone have a preference for either of the two solutions above?

--Eastender (talk) 01:07, 14 May 2017 (UTC)

I would have a preference for splitting the page, but only in 2. It should be enough before reaching another template limit and would avoid scattering the informations onto too many pages. I'd pick the split solution over the reformating because that second one seems like a temporary fix that could become useless in the future if we need to add other informations

--yyog (talk) 01:04, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

There may be a problem with how the template itself has been written.--Andrew (talk) 06:05, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't live in London, but for buses in (or that pass through) Tendring I only list the Routemaster relation --EdLoach (talk) 12:44, 16 May 2017 (UTC)

I have found a third possible solution. We currently have a strategy of trimming back the 'tools' associated with a route relation template, when that route reaches the checked status. If we further trim back the tools for these routes and route masters, then we can probably create enough template include size headroom, to avoid having to drop route references or to split the page. I have trialled this approach by editing the template parameter "tools=josm" to "tools=no". Assuming that nobody finds this approach problematic, then I propose that we continue with this approach until the end of the project, unless the limit of template include size is exceeded again in the meantime.

--Eastender (talk) 05:12, 12 June 2017 (UTC)

The use of "tools=no" had resolved this issue, until a few days ago. The template(s) must have changed again recently, because the page is now exceeding the technical limits again (without any significant page data having been added). It therefore seems inevitable that the page will have to be split. As the preference seems to be to keep the number of separate pages to a minimum, I propose to make one split, such that the "Daytime or 24 hour buses" are all on one page and everything else is on another page. If anyone has a different suggestion then feel free to propose it here.

--Eastender (talk) 14:12, 4 March 2018 (UTC)

The pages have exceeded the technical limits again. So I have moved "Daytime buses A-Z" into a separate page.

--Eastender (talk) 07:40, 6 May 2018 (UTC)

I have posted on the forum about the relation template and pages that include it a large number of times.Andrew (talk) 08:40, 30 July 2018 (UTC)

A change to the template(s) has caused the Daytime buses page to exceed its technical limits again. So I have created separate Daytime buses pages for this page.

--Eastender (talk) 15:05, 9 September 2018 (UTC)

Go back to a single page?

There has been an effort over the past few months to relax page restrictions on this wiki while using optimised templates (Scribunto/Lua) to make this feasible. A unified page now appears possible again and would be no harder in tamplate terms than Beijing Bus. --Andrew (talk) 11:17, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

Good idea. I have re-integrated the Daytime buses tables from the sub-pages into the main page. It seems to work OK. I have also taken the opportunity to merge all of the Daytime buses into a single table, and removed the tools=no (now the default) from the use of the Relation template in that table. I'll remove the duplicate tables from the sub-page hierarchy in due course but it is probably worthwhile retaining the framework of the hierarchy for a period, in case we have to use it again.

--Eastender (talk) 05:55, 16 July 2019 (UTC)