At some point in the past, it was determined that the StringFunctions extension (now part of the ParserFunctions extension) would be disabled on enwiki. I know saw a comment to the effect of: if StringFunctions was turned on, it would only encourage people to start writing parsers in wikicode. Maybe other people were already aware, but not me, that we have a set of hacked-up string functions on enwiki, for example [[Template:Str len]]. There's a whole category of them at [[Category:String manipulation templates]]. I'd like to know the current opinion of the server ops about these things. Is there any chance of StringFunctions being enabled? If not, should we feel free to work around it as these templates do? I'm writing to this list so it will be possible to link from enwiki to the mailing list archives, so responses on-list would be best. - Carl