Bah, I thought that this got fixed when I brought it up earlier! Maybe it broke again?
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=r2lk1xjkgk5770fdjo6ydt5e&page=1
Update from another thread: Some indexes are temporarily borked as it appears the admins are working on this problem.
the glitch now appears to be confined to:
pages adjacent to another page in the index where the entry is a bulleted red link followed by a blue link.
I just duplicated the problem by adding "Is This Thing On??" to Eight Million Ways To Die on Films of the 1980s.
The adjacent page in the index, Dead End Drive In, which was fine before the test, now has a borked index-banner displaying:
- Eight Million Ways To Die as the following link, followed by:
- All of the plain text between it and the following blue-link, followed by:
- The page-bottom ad, inside the index banner.
The blue link is ignored (yay!) and pages on indexes where the following page is a red-link with no link behind it work fine (I checked).
Looks like this glitch stems from efforts to hide blue-links behind red-links on index banners. ;-)
Using Eight Million Ways To Die as a test entry — the following page in the index, Ferris Buellers Day Off, should (ideally) show Dead End Drive In as the preceding entry in the index.
The test entry on Films of the 1980s reads:
- Dead End Drive In
- Eight Million Ways To Die testing Is This Thing On? testing
- Ferris Buellers Day Off
Removing the test message (or just the blue link) and everything displays normal.
edited 28th Jan '11 12:15:25 AM by berr
Tested index which hadn't been borked (hadn't been edited since early January)
Films of the 1920s has several redlinks followed by blue-links.
Prior to refresh, the first blue-link showed up as the following page in the index, as has been the case on all pages since mid-fall (I think Madrugada mentioned).
Post-refresh, the blue link is ignored, but the red link and all text between it and the blue link is displayed in the index-bar instead, along with the page ad in some cases.
See the index bar for The Lodger.
Hmm. null-editing index causes it to disappear again.
Not just from pages adjacent to a redlink-bluelink.
Went back and removed test message.
The Lodger is already adjacent to a redlink followed by a bluelink on Films of the 1920s so that's a convenient test.
I haven't refreshed Films of the 1920s yet, so it still appears.
I guess the path builder is parsing the following elements to build the index bar every time the index page is edited: bullet, redlink detection, bluelink. The redlink detector has been set up (for a long time) so it ignored redlinks but did not escape to the next line upon seeing one, so it registered the first bluelink on the line. Possibly to avoid this programming nightmare ;-)
My wholly-uninformed guess: Initial (and current) fix results in the entire index bar not resolving on any page, so something (the redlink detector?) must glitch during the post-edit index building process.
The Intermediate fix restored the index bar upon edit, but caused the redlink detection to reverse itself if there was a blue-link on the line, printing everything prior to the first blue-link on the line and then escaping, causing the page-bottom ad to appear in the bar. Hopefully this helps.
Sorry
I hope we're not making work for you...!
edited 28th Jan '11 1:14:30 AM by berr
Reporting that null editing (and even minor formatting editing) on Sports Stories has not fixed the problem where the index does not show up on the indexed pages.
Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!Same with Funny Moments.
Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.Check The Lodger if you want to see where we were at when the intermediate fix was applied w/ redlink detection off. The index still appears as it was there. The indexes disappeared again when it was attempted to fix that small problem.
Currently features Ad Of Win for me:
Films of the 1920s — (next entry) Napoleon — An epic five 1/2 hour drama about the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Might never be seen in its intact form again thanks to FREE LAUNDRY COUPONS!
◊
edited 28th Jan '11 9:08:23 PM by berr
Null editing seems to work now, but all the media sub pages for Funny Moments have the exact same index bar appearing twice. Not sure if this is in any way related to the previous problem.
edited 28th Jan '11 2:43:43 PM by Killomatic
Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.Yeh, the problem is now the same as it was temporarily last night. Indexes work, but certain index bars show up funny on the actual page, e.g. if the following page in the index is a redlink followed by blue link, like The Lodger.
And (I think) if multiple indexes were borked, you have to refresh both the missing indexes or they overlap somehow.
edited 28th Jan '11 7:43:08 PM by berr
The double indexing bars for the Funny Moments sub pages are still there even after null editing them and their parent page.
Regulated fun - the best kind! I don't make the rules, just enforce them with an iron fist.Fast Eddie, thanks for working so hard on this. It looks like most of the problems are fixed now, including the old hidden-blue link bugaboo that the original poster mentioned! Thanks!
Killomatic — I dunno, check the index page and see if the page is listed twice? Oh, hmm, that's interesting... If it doesn't occur anywhere else it's not a huge deal, but...
edited 29th Jan '11 9:21:33 AM by berr

A bullet point that looks like this:
- I Am A Redlink, and You Suck.
is universally an attempt to index the nonexistent trope I Am A Redlink (either because the indexing editor screwed up, or because they're expecting it to be created at some point in the future). Nevertheless, the current indexing software sees it as an attempt to index You Suck, leading to spurious index bars at the bottom of pages unless someone notices and throws [/index] / [index] tags around it.If it's not too difficult, it'd be good for the indexing software to ignore it entirely, just as it ignores lines like:
edited 5th Jan '11 8:23:13 PM by Micah
132 is the rudest number.