freakofnurture wrote:
Phil Boswell wrote:
Ilmari Karonen wrote:
It might be useful to add a mention to the {{SharedIP}} template. To make the change effective, we'd also need to have a bot fix all the substed instances of that template.
This is where I manfully suppress my opinion of the mad rush to SUBSTitute every damn template on the wiki... Does anyone recall what the actual point of having templates was? Oh yes: so we could update stuff in a single place and have it propagate automatically.
The [[Template:Openproxy]] message that is placed on the IP's user_talk page is primarily for our own convenience, as it adds that IP to [[Category:Wikipedia:Blocked_open_proxies]]. We generally use the template call "{{openproxy}}" as the block summary, like this:
- 09:11, March 18, 2006 Freakofnurture blocked "213.216.199.14 (contribs)"
with an expiry time of indefinite (Tor {{openproxy}}) When somebody attempts to edit from that IP, they are presented with the [[MediaWiki:Blockedtext]] page, and on this page, the "$2" is replaced by the block reason, which in this case expands into the _current_ revision of the {{openproxy}} template. So I don't think we need to run an "unsubsting bot" anytime soon. Especially whatever is on the user_talk will only be read by the first user of that IP who sees the orange "new messages" banner on their screen, and never again.
I think you've got your templates mixed up above. {{SharedIP}} is the "This IP address is shared by multiple users." template, used on talk pages of IPs that should not be blocked for long periods. It's the generic template from which {{AOL}} was forked. I agree with Phil that it shouldn't be substed, but the folks at [[Wikipedia:Template substitution]] seem to think otherwise.