Template talk:Trip signup

You guys are making this complicated :) Why not let people sign up after the pre-trip meeting? Well, I can understand why you might not want that I guess, but it seems that the VOC almost always lets people join last minute if they can get themselves organized and find a ride. Also, having people decide when to have the pre-trip meeting could be more difficult than deciding when to have the trip, so they won't know what date to put in the template anyway. I guess choice (in how to use the template) isn't bad, but we need to make it clear how to use it, otherwise people likely won't. Good work though, I don't mean to sound too critical :) Scott Webster 10:14, 22 September 2008 (PDT)

The pretrip=1 and open=XX options are meant for events like glacier school where there is a mandatory trip meeting. For normal trips, the day=, month= and year= options are sufficient. I think most people can understand this. I'll fix up the "how to use this template" to make it more clear. Scott Nelson 11:42, 22 September 2008 (PDT)

Locked banners

The two locked banners are now the same. Looks like the code doesn't differentiate between the tentative trip date and the pre-trip meeting date. Champagne 15:28, 22 September 2008 (PDT)

I modified it to keep it a little simpler. In particular I wanted the date parameters to always be the date of the trip, since this is how most people will use the template. The pretrip parameter is not taken into consideration when calculating when to open the signup. Only the open parameter and the day of the trip are considered. The pretrip parameter is used to close the signup after the trip meeting has occurred, but before the trip has taken place. I wanted to make the usage of the template as similar as possible when using it for trips with and without pre trip meetings. Scott Nelson 16:02, 22 September 2008 (PDT)

Changeover time zone

It seems the template switches over at UTC, but I would think this should be PST. My hotsprings trip didn't start yet, but the banner now says it did. --Matthew 17:36, 3 October 2008 (PDT)

ok, I tried to put in an 8 hour UTC offset. We'll see how it works. Scott Nelson 18:44, 27 October 2008 (PDT)

I rolled back Scott's edits and changed all the variables to their local counterparts e.g. LOCALHOUR etc. I think this is better? Scott Webster 23:38, 6 November 2008 (PST)

Is it really better? This meas that people who have their time zone set incorrectly will be able to sign up earlier. I think it would be ideal if the wiki templated changed at the same time for everyone, regardless of how they have their wiki profile setup. Also, what happens if you are not logged in to the wiki. Does LOCALDAY default to UTC? Scott Nelson 09:20, 7 November 2008 (PST)

The documentation made it seem to me like it was local server time, not a user preference sort of thing. I just changed my time offset and it didn't change the behaviour of {{LOCALHOUR}}. Then I logged out and it also stayed the same, so I think it actually is good? Can anyone confirm this? Scott Webster 10:03, 7 November 2008 (PST)

LOCALHOUR is based on the mediawiki's config in LocalSettings.php I had this set to be the correct time in Vancouver half of the time (didn't switch to/from daylight savings). I fixed this at some point not too long ago. It should now track Vancouver time year-round automagically. Chris Michalak 17:42, 9 December 2008 (PST)

I'm still not quite convinced this is working properly - e.g. Winter Longhike 2009 now says the trip meeting has happened, but it isn't for another few hours. --Matthew 15:44, 6 January 2009 (PST)

The template only works on a daily basis, it doesn't function down to the hour, so presumably the template has been saying that the meeting has occured since midnight last night. Presumably we should either make the template accurate to the hour or change it so that the "pre-trip has occured" notice appears the midnight after the meeting rather than before. Scott Webster 15:48, 6 January 2009 (PST)

Ah, I get it. Yeah, I realise it's only daily, but for some reason I assumed it should change over after the end of the day of the meeting, not before. If we wanted to get really clever, we'd have it say "the meeting is today" or something on the day. Maybe I'll do that --Matthew 16:02, 6 January 2009 (PST)

Sign ups start at midnight, Friday nights?

Veenstra and I discussed the fact that it might be somewhat non-ideal to have sign-ups open at midnight Friday nights (since you should be tucked away in your bed, ready to wake up for a saturday trip) with the "usual" 14 day sign-up period. Might hurt people who go on a trip 2 weeks before yours. Just something to keep in mind. Scott Webster 23:50, 6 November 2008 (PST)

Modified closed/locked wording

The first real "test" of this template occurred last night for Veenstra's Brew debacle. It didn't really go so smoothly. A bunch of relatively experienced wiki users signed up before the sign up opened. It seems that they were somehow confused by the fact that the signup wasn't really "locked" and they were able to sign up anyway. Of course, signing up when it tells you not to is obviously not really a good idea, and this is what they did. Nevertheless, I changed the wording to "closed" and "Please do not sign up. The sign up will open ..." Hopefully this makes it a little more clear how it works. We could make it more explicit with some sentence like "If you sign up now, before this banner changes to "open" then we will notice, and remove you from the list." But that's a little wordy. Scott Webster 11:53, 8 November 2008 (PST)

I added a "how does this work" tag to the closed banner, which redirects to the FAQ. Maybe this will solve the problem...--Bigbadbasstrombone 09:51, 25 August 2010 (PDT)

Date format

May I suggest using YYYY/MM/DD in the output rather than DD/MM/YYYY. The latter can be confusing for our amerifriends because they like to use MM/DD/YYYY. Chris Michalak 17:38, 9 December 2008 (PST)

Done. Good idea. Scott Nelson 01:18, 10 December 2008 (PST)

Sorry, my bad, YYYY/MM/DD does not comply to any known building standards. I changed it to YYYY-MM-DD which is ISO 8601 compliant. Chris Michalak 10:12, 10 December 2008 (PST)

Leading zeros

The template needs some conditional leading zeros in the info boxes. I'm not sure how to do this elegantly (other than an if day <= 9...) Currently some of the examples read "It already happened on 2009-01-6. Please do not sign up for it." --Matthew 16:04, 6 January 2009 (PST)

Leading zeros are ok as is - it all depends on how you use the Month= and Day= parameters. In the test page for the template, the Day= parameter is generated from an expression with #expr, which trims off the leading 0. For an example of leading zeros working correctly, see Intro to Backcountry Skiing 2009. Scott Nelson 18:08, 6 January 2009 (PST)

That's only working because I fixed it earlier. That was what made me think "hmm, the template should deal with this". The instructions for the template seem to imply that you can add the month and day without a leading zero, which you can sort of - it works ok for the template calculation but not for the output to the note about when the trip happened. I guess we can always "fix" this by updating the instructions. --Matthew 22:32, 6 January 2009 (PST)

open date

When "closed" the template currently tells you that the signup opens X days before $TRIPDATE. It might be nice if it told you when it opened, in a precise, non-ambiguous way. This is basically a feature request. Maybe I will eventually even get around to trying to implement it myself. Scott Webster 21:29, 30 August 2010 (PDT)