Adref

This task is unfinished This is a wiki task that requires more thought or peer review. An important issue that needs to be solved, which will appear at the top of Sega Retro:Todo until this message is removed.

Template for referencing (print) advertisements. These could appear in more than one publication - we want the oldest shown first, but we need to keep track of where else they were printed (and for how long).

It's also to avoid situations like these^{[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]} where every reference points to effectively the same thing (and we wouldn't have to update every instance if a new magazine scan came along). Official advertisements are usualy more reliable than what editors print in magazine columns, so these references need to stand out as something more important.

e.g.

Print advert in Computer & Video Games (UK) #86: "December 1988" (1988-11-xx)

rather than

{{magref|cvg|86|150}}{{magref|cvg|86|150}}{{magref|cvg|86|150}}{{magref|cvg|86|150}}

it would be...

{{adref|something}}

and that would link to... something else.

Don't know if we want to take into account the advertising agency responsible. Also don't know how to handle retail/mail order advertisements, which I think we need to do eventually for NEC Retro as there were only grey market distributors for the PC Engine in many countries.

I have no idea how to make this work. I just throught I'd throw an idea at a template page -Black Squirrel (talk) 09:43, 1 January 2019 (EST)

Updated thoughts:

I think galleryPrintAd should add things to a database table. e.g. something like this:

{{gallery
|{{galleryPrintAd
|cvg|86|150-151
|mms|87|101-102
|segapro|88|42-43
|ssm|89|54-55
}}
}}

then any call to adref using any of those magazine parameters should return the same thing. e.g.

{{adref|cvg|86|150-151}}
{{adref|mms|87|101-102}}
{{adref|segapro|88|42-43}}
{{adref|ssm|89|54-55}}

all return the same thing, which would be written in the references section as:

• UK print advert, first seen in Computer & Video Games (UK) #86: "December 1988" (1988-11-xx)

This way we don't have to worry about updating references whenever an earlier magazine comes along.

The problem with this solution is it breaks when you consider multiple things may be advertised at once. I don't know how to cleanly solve that yet, but it's a start? -Black Squirrel (talk) 15:28, 7 April 2019 (EDT)