Have the "current debates" page, or whatever it's called, contain the last 2 days, rather than the last day. That way you would move only debates at least 24 hours old off the page at midnight UTC, rather than moving all debates (including ones only 5 minutes old).

Luna wrote: That's a good idea - and when you think about it the logical way to do these things. Though I can guarantee if this change is adopted, the first day it goes into effect the nominations will all end up in a jumbled heap :) -Gurch

On 12/31/06, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I suppose we could use {{CURRENTSECOND}} to transclude 1 of 60 sub-templates, which in turn contain something around 200 #ifexist: statements to transclude the various AfD sub-pages. It'd be a lot of work to set up, but it's simpler than it sounds. AfD logs would look something like this... {{AfD Log {{CURRENTSECOND}}| |Foo |Bar |Yar |Pirates |Ninjas }} Then the page would transclude {{AfD Log 04}} (or one of 59 other templates), which each contain a lot of this, in different orders: {{#if:{{{2|}}}|{{#ifexist:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{2}}}|{{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{2}}}}}}}}} {{#if:{{{3|}}}|{{#ifexist:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{3}}}|{{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{3}}}}}}}}} {{#if:{{{1|}}}|{{#ifexist:Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{1}}}|{{Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/{{{1}}}}}}}}} Let each one take about 200-300 optional parameters, and I don't think there's much chance of an overflow. Surely I'm missing a few things, but the general concept seems workable. I donno if it's a good idea. Still brainstorming. "Newer noms to the top" would require a lot less overhaul, but I can see benefits from a pseudo-random arrangement such as this. If there actually is some template that generates random numbers, somebody shoot me now. ;) -Luna

On 01/01/07, Luna <lunasantin(a)gmail.com> wrote: Run it past the devs so they don't want to kill anyone for trying this. (AFD has been problematic in the past. The old VFD, which included seven days' deletion discussions in one huge multi-megabyte HTML page, was not only a major pain in the backside for the users, it caused server performance problems all by itself. Leading to the present situation where it's broken up by days.) I wonder if it's possible to implement the Towers of Hanoi in template code. Or Emacs. Or a wiki bot. - d.

On 02/01/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: When I say "we", I mean it exists, rather than that Wikimedia has it - I don't believe we do. - d.

Thomas Dalton wrote: That's probably the best suggestion so far, either combined with Luna's order reversal or not. The easiest way to implement this is probably simply having the current day's page transclude the previous day's one at the top (or bottom) of the nomination list, and removing that line from the previous page whenever a new page is started. (We could maybe even wrap that line in <noinclude> tags, as a belt-and-suspenders approach to make sure we don't get huge transclusion chains even if people forget to remove it.) You can see a similar system in use on my user talk page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ilmari_Karonen -- Ilmari Karonen

On 1/2/07, David Gerard &lt;dgerard(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: Good luck with the inclusion limit (which I believe is currently 2 MB). If you can squeeze it in, note that due to caching, it won't randomize unless you constantly purge it. All of the above, I believe, if you disable the inclusion limit (and don't mind exorbitant CPU/memory usage). Rumor has it that templates have been proven Turing-complete.