FFXIV Wiki:Automate vendor updates

< Wiki to-do list

Project description

Members

Gurgum (talk)

Status

In progress

Last updated

25 May

Discussion

Talk page, Discord

To-dos

MVP

• ☐ We should be able to auto-generate any given shop's vendor lists with the necessary data:
  • items and costs
  • quest/achievement unlocks per item
  • quest/achievement unlocks per shop section
  • the necessary header settings (i.e. show level, rarity, additional info, etc.)
• ☐ For any given vendor to be auto-updated, the structure of the page and any subpages should follow the standard pattern:
  • For a vendor with a single page, this includes an "Items for Sale" section with sub-sections for each shop section. Example: Maisenta
  • For multi-page vendors such as Sundry Splendors vendors or Scrip Exchanges, The main NPC page should include an "Items for Sale" section with links to its subpages. Each subpage should contain an "Items for Sale" section with sub-sections for each shop section. Example: Agora Merchant
    • ☐ Consolidate the scrip exchange pages
    • ☐ Consolidate sundry splendors pages as needed
• ☐ The structure of our vendor pages is inconsistent, particularly for multi-page vendors. The inconsistencies include the subdivision of subpages (such as vendors with a shop per page vs. a section per page), the use of templates to transclude NPC information, etc.

Done

• 🗹 Deprecate all the Vendor NPC Infobox templates. Use Labeled Section Transclusion instead of templates to display consistent NPC infoboxes on subpages. Those include the 4-letter templates such as {{SSAM}}, which have now been deprecated.

Nice-to-haves

The following features/issues are considered to be non-essential and may be added or fixed after the primary updating mechanisms are in place:

• ☐ Determine logic for showing rarity/level columns. This appears to be inconsistent at the moment. I've put some logic in place, but otherwise we should show those columns by default.
• ☐ match in-game sorting for vendor lists - most, but not all, vendor lists will match their in-game order.
• ☐ Load shop pages faster. Shop pages with many subsections (i.e. Agora_Merchant/Melee_DPS_(DRG/RPR), Hokonin) load slowly. This is a pre-existing issue and improving performance of those pages may be a future, separate project.
• ☐ Add the EDB shops page link to vendor pages, to give users easy access to the official shop page.
• ☐ Special handling for society merchants. We've formatted those vendor lists by reputation rather than showing the in-line quest unlocks. For the time being, those pages will need to be updated manually.

TBD

• ☐ How much do we need to worry about editors adding or editing anything in the "Items for Sale" sections? Those page sections should be auto-updated, which would blow away any manual edits. Those seem few and far between, but there may be edge cases to consider. Potential solutions:
  • Don't worry about it and just accept that manual edits may be blown away by bot updates...(easy but dangerous)
  • Add a comment at the beginning of each "Items for sale" section and/or shop section warning editors that their changes will be blown away. (also easy but hacky and still prone to user error)
  • Use a protected namespace and/or protected pages for any "Items for Sale" section, such as "Shop:Maisenta" or "Shop:Agora Merchant/Crafter". The NPC pages would transclude these pages (for single-page vendors) or link to them (multi-page vendors)
• ☐ Determine the best way to flag auto-updated vendors vs. manually updated vendors so that we know what work needs to be done on patch days. Some vendors may not need updates at all if they can simply transclude the data from another vendor (i.e. Recompense Officers).
• ☐ Determine the best way to generate a list of vendors that need updates on patch days. The EDB shops page with the "latest" filter on displays vendors with changes for any major patch (i.e. 7.3), but will not display the subset for a given sub-patch (i.e. 7.35), so that is not reliable.
• ☐ Determine whether we can convert all the templates in to subpages (these don't even necessarily need to be transcluded, because a bot doesn't care how many pages need to be updated), and retire {{Inventory}}