Talk:Episodes

This page is getting big, y'all
It's getting a little unwieldy to edit and scroll through. I've been taking a look at other wikis to see how they manage their episodes; however, all the wikis I've seen have been able to break down their episode lists into seasons, which MBMBaM doesn't really have, so I haven't found much inspiration on that front.

I did a little experimenting at Episodes/Testing, but I'm not 100% sold on using that format. It also has the problem that a) 99% of the stuff people are going to want to see is in the maximum fun era, so you'd think that should go first b) tabber doesn't display on mobile, so if I put the maximum fun era stuff first, it'd look like the episode list had the first 37 episodes listed last on mobile.

Also, I'm looking into ways to condensing the wikitext of the page. The table can probably be turned into some sort of template, but the question is whether to make some ridiculously large template capable of handling hundreds of episode entries in it (see Template:Transcript for how bad that can get), or just a template for a single line, repeated hundreds of times.

In either of those cases though, I'm not sure they serve my primary management goal of this wiki: make things as easy for casual readers to edit as possible. Lowering the barrier for entry into wiki editing continues to be absolutely vital to this wiki's ongoing survival.

Anyhow, I'm not sure I'll get much response on this, considering there's never really been more than a couple power users working on this wiki at a time. This is me experimenting with being more transparent about some of the design decisions behind the wiki, the ways I want to improve it, and the stumbling blocks I've hit, and playing around with where to share that information. Hopefully User:Stuffinmud will see this and have some insight.

--BoxDroppingManApe (talk) 20:53, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

I think just dividing the episodes into chunks of 100 would not be unreasonable. Along the same line of thinking, I think it's okay that the tabber format you've set up shows the Independent episodes first. It's not perfect, but 1 extra click to see the MaxFun episodes isn't the end of the world. (Ideally, you'd be able to specify a "default" tab other than the first one, but google suggests that's only doable with some hacky javascript.)

I do think repeating a single-row template is a better solution than a multi-row template, although that does cut into whatever gains you'd make in shrinking the source size. I also think a single-row template could be marginally more editor-friendly than the current table.

The biggest question on my mind is: "What is the use-case for this page?" Frankly speaking, I would only ever personally use this page in two cases: a) to check at a glance which episodes have transcripts or b) if I'm scraping stuff in bulk, and I want to use this page to pull the names, dates, and mp3 links.

Like, there was a comment recently asking whether the episode list should contain the TV show commentary tracks, which took me completely by surprise. It's certainly a valid suggestion, but it reveals a significant disconnect in their expectations vs my own. In my mind at least, the commentary tracks would be nothing more than additional clutter to the page.

Without a clearer picture of what a more typical user wants from the episode list, I'm really just not sure what to do with it.

-- Stuffinmud (talk) 23:27, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Chunks of one hundred is a good idea. I just saw something today where a podcast list was divided up into fan-defined "eras", and I was wondering if something like that would be viable here. The same way we already have an "independent" era, there could be something like "Cycle 2.0", "Post-T.V. Show Era", "Three Dads Era", and such (with better names, of course).

As for the purpose of the episode list, it's kinda become multiple things to multiple people, hasn't it? The thing it's always been to me is a sign of life. This is what this wiki's episode list looked like at one point. A poorly updated list of episodes indicates to me a dead wiki, podcast, or both.

It's also an alternate form of navigation to the search bar. If you don't know what exactly you're looking for, it can be handy to find to see a list of episodes to jog your memory. Admittedly, that's a little redundant with respect to the podcast's own feed, but it's a little bit of an ask to have someone reference the feed and then browse the wiki.

Also, something I half-assedly did at one point was make it into kind of a timeline of major events. With a podcast of 10 years, I think that still has value, and since an episode list ends up in chronological order, it kind of serves a similar purpose (though I have mixed feelings how well the episode list currently accomplishes that. At a couple points it comes off as obsessive over the brothers' relationship status and focused on minor trivia). I imagine it's possible to separate that kind of timeline out from the episode list, but a little harder to make sure such a timeline is trafficked enough to get regularly updated. That makes me wonder if it'd be worthwhile to make an easily visible list of what pages need regular or semi-regular updating, like the ladder, final yahoos, etc.

'''[When I was writing this, I went off on a barely related tangent about how to handle multiple podcasts. Rather than derail the topic, I've moved up it to My Talk Page ]'''

I don't really have a point here, just spitballing. Anyway, thank you for responding, it's nice to have someone to talk to about this. Maintaining smaller wikis gets a little Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, I think.

--BoxDroppingManApe (talk) 00:00, 24 October 2020 (UTC)