Template talk:Monsym

I thought I'd do my civic duty and update Genocide to use monsym, after seeing that chickatrice was hard coded to be yellow, not brown. It seemed timely to update the page to use Monsym instead and make everyone happy.

After making a couple of tiny changes to this template (monsym can now be used in-line with following text and not carriage return after the symbol, gypsie is now an allowed monster name) I noticed that there is a major issue with either the Wiki itself or this template.

It seems there is a specific limit on the number of times (21?) Monsym or one of it's sub-function (switch? see reasoning below) can be called. I suspect it is a Wiki limit on the number of times a subroutine can be called, but I am not sure. Here's what brought this on and my reasoning:

On the Genocide page, the use of monsym broke after printing perfectly up until the table for use with a blessed croll. After "quadrupeds", the 21st call of Monsym, further use of monsym would break.

The next immediate use of monsym just printed (complete with link) "#switch:", and then every use of monsym after that simply printed a link to Template:Monsym.


 * Initially I thought it was simply a missed case or I made a spelling mistake for Vampire, so I changed the template to use vampire_lord, still broken.
 * I double checked both entries were in Monsym, still broken.
 * I then REMOVED (temporarily) the table entry for Vampires entirely, and the same error immediately passed on to the next table item (Zombies) instead. Still broken.
 * Restoring Vampire made no difference. I was convinced I was poking more in to the inner workings than I should, so I stopped.

This effect was not expected usage and I didn't know why. I applied judicious use of the Undo function and rolled back my changes to Genocide to use the previous version with the original hard-coded colours. As I don't want to clog things up and only make a half-baked solution (if any), I now seek those with greater wiki-fu to assist. Sorry for the problems with Genocide, and this rambling talk page (I hate not knowing what happened in a wikia error). -- Kalon 00:49, 26 February 2008 (UTC)