Board Thread:Wiki Technical Discussion/@comment-4356266-20170121135941

This RFC supersedes the previous one which I decide to cancel due to dismal performance.

The revised new News implementation intends to tackle the following issues with the current system: as well as new issues arising from the previous new News formatting proposal which include:
 * Nonexistent transclusion logic in the archival, causing the whole news page be transcluded to the main page, slowing it down.
 * People not being bothered to do manual archival.
 * Large number of break tags left behind
 * Needing to switch to a new system consisting of new templates.
 * While it outputs smaller HTML, the dismal parser speed on the server's side defeats the original goal of optimizing loading.
 * Equal signs needing escaping inside the templates

The newest system consists of a simplified parsing operations, summarized as: all done in a single method call, vastly improving parser speed (0.13s vs. 2.3s using the previous proposal)
 * 1) loading the data page
 * 2) calculating the cutoff month
 * 3) finding the cutoff month heading in the data page
 * 4) extract the text before the cutoff month heading
 * 5) process and returns that text

Improvements over existing system: And over the previous proposal:
 * Automatic archival, with configurable max month age
 * Improved size and speed performance
 * No need to transfer to new format, only small changes to existing format (already done for here by yours truly)
 * Eliminates need for the two templates
 * Improved parsing and size performance

With the minimal changes to formatting of this new system, I suppose we can transition to it sooner.

See this newest implementation: data page, parsed transclusion, full transclusion. 