Template talk:Football squad player

message: The consensus was to make the table responsive to window width (if possible) or two-column (if not), but I can see from the discussion above that making it responsive is important to Walter Görlitz, so we should try again for that. I see that earlier attempts didn't find an acceptable solution. Below are transcluded discussions relevant to that from  talk. – wbm1058 (talk) 04:37, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Responsive template 

message: With regards to the recent change (which I reverted), I don't believe the discussion above is definitive on requiring the full country name (the closer refers to MOS:Icons#Accompany flags with country names, which gives (which produces ) as an example of appropriate use). Using the full names makes the template look a mess – compare the two options here. Having the trigramme means the country name is a reasonably consistent width all the way through the table. When you start using full names, it starts looking quite disjointed. The full name works better on fs player 2 because the country is in the final column rather than in the middle, and also because that template has gridlines, making it easier to follow the row. As this version has no gridlines (confirmed in the RfC above), placing the full country name in the middle of the columns makes it noticeably harder to follow IMO. Cheers, Number 57 22:17, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: While MOS:FLAG does advocate for the use of the full name "adjacent to the first use of the flag", the "Accompany flags with country names" section also states "However, some editors feel that some tables such as those containing sports statistics (example) are easier to read if  is used throughout". Nehme1499 22:26, 24 February 2021 (UTC)

text: Finding that  is apparently unused, I've removed it. – wbm1058 (talk) 15:43, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title: Country name

message: In working the invalid parameters list I've seen many cases of editors adding an unnamed parameter with a date which I assume is the player's date of birth. For example, see ESAE FC. Any idea why this is happening, and any better option for fixing this other than simply removing the date from the template? wbm1058 (talk) 03:25, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Such a parameter exists for national team squadlists (e.g.) so maybe they are confused by that. I can't really see any solution other than removing it where it exists for club squadlists. Number 57 15:50, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. I'm trying to get these cleaned up before the March report is generated. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:19, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Birthdates? 

message: The little-used  parameter was added to  in August 2012 as a way to remove the Nation column and was first used on Ayr United F.C.. However the current version of Ayr United F.C. does show the nation. Indeed the March TemplateData report found that this parameter wasn't being used anywhere. However I found that Southampton Women's F.C. wasn't specifying the nation in its table so I added  there. If we continue supporting this parameter, it needs to be merged/added to . I can do that. wbm1058 (talk) 22:11, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm having second thoughts on supporting the option to remove the nation column. While it works fine on Southampton Women's F.C. where none of the players have their nation specified, it's more problematic on articles like Haringey Borough F.C. where just a couple players have their nation specified or Kansas City Comets (1979–91) where all but one have their nation specified. The implementation should be more robust to handle these better. I'm thinking of just removing support for this parameter rather than going to more effort to make it work better. – wbm1058 (talk) 02:04, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the best route to go down would be to follow the nonumber option – i.e. the nationality column is included unless turned off via a nonat parameter. I don't recall the mess that is the Haringey Borough squad being possible previously – is it a recent change that has caused this? Number 57 09:11, 19 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, a recent change I made, now reverted, caused that. I've reached a sort of impasse. The increased template complexity required to support these new options is causing some pages that have a lot of football squad tables to exceed template-include byte limits. So I'm stuck in my efforts to merge  and . I think this can be solved by coding the decision logic in a Lua module, but I'm still not particularly proficient in Lua. Perhaps this project is the push I've needed to take a crash course in Lua coding, so I can finish what I've started. – wbm1058 (talk) 14:50, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  nonat 

message: Can we shift the ref field to go after the |other= field, as we use that field for loans information also, is seems smarter to have the ref run after that maybe? At the end of the string line. I've used the feature on Tottenham Hotspur F.C.#Players for Out on loan players. Thought it would help, thoughts? Govvy (talk) 12:39, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Just put the ref outside the template at the end of the line as at Manchester United F.C. No need to put it in its own parameter of the template. – PeeJay 16:46, 2 February 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  ref location 

message: Association football positions describes more specialized positions. See #Add postion Field Player (FP) for a less-specialized position. From the archives:
=== Player positions abbreviation? ===
=== Multiple positions ===
Should any other valid positions be added to the template? I've run across several malformed attempts to add a second position. For example, see this diff.
Is THIS an acceptable way to show players who play two positions? wbm1058 (talk) 20:00, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: No, we should stick to one position between GK, DF, MF, FW. Nehme1499 20:03, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Positions 

message: Should any other valid positions be added to the template? I've run across several malformed attempts to add a second position. For example, see this diff.
Is THIS an acceptable way to show players who play two positions? wbm1058 (talk) 20:00, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: No, we should stick to one position between GK, DF, MF, FW. Nehme1499 20:03, 7 March 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Multiple positions 

message: (higher up on this page)
And now I've been here on and off for over a month, I'm just now looking deeper into this. Each  transclusion uses roughly 1,000 nodes. I ran a test on one example use and found that without  the node count was just 146, but with  the node count was 1158, thus  uses (1158-146)=1012 nodes! So that's where to look to make efficiency improvements.
List of Iranian football transfers summer 2013 has 1,172  transclusions and that put its node count at 1,008,338 which is > 1,000,000.
I saw that this 20 August 2020 edit by  attempted to solve the issue. I don't have any experience with working on other instances of this rarely-occurring problem, but will take a stab at further investigation to figure it out. I'd like to fix this before completing the merge with  so as not to risk making this problem worse. – wbm1058 (talk) 17:09, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: The primary issue here is that those articles shouldn't be using this template, as it's not what it is designed for. They should look like List of English football transfers summer 2020. Number 57 19:25, 14 March 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not always easy to get all editors on the same page, and have Iranian and Serbian and Romanian and Japanese editors to all follow standards established by British editors. In the meantime, I've implemented the easier patch, and cleared :Category:Pages where node count is exceeded, but for four user pages. wbm1058 (talk) 02:36, 15 March 2021 (UTC)

text: Related discussion and analysis at Talk:List of Serbian football transfers summer 2018#Too many templates. – wbm1058 (talk) 16:14, 6 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  High node counts coming from this template