Template talk:MNR links

Recent changes have produced only this error message:

Expression error: Unrecognized punctuation character ",".

I can't figure out where it is ... someone who knows about this kind of coding will have to do it. Daniel Case (talk) 05:47, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, my bad, Daniel Case. I was a little overconfident of my ability to resolve this quickly and accurately and should have used a sandbox instead. It took me more time to fix than expected (05:34 to 05:48). Should be set now! jhawkinson (talk) 05:51, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

Oct. 2023, broken status pages?

It looks like the realtime status pages with per-station displays have recently(?) broken or gone away? E.g. for Poughkeepsie station, the template takes us to https://as0.mta.info/mnr/mstations/station_status_display.cfm?P_AVIS_ID=51,Poughkeepsie which redirects to https://as0.mta.info/mnr/onTheGo/avisGct.cfm which returns the Grand Central board. Previously the station pages, also linked in this template, like https://as0.mta.info/mnr/stations/station_detail.cfm?key=58, used to link to the realtime displays, and now no longer does.

Given that the GCT board still works, I'm not entirely sure the system is deprecated rather than broken? On the other hand, there is a traintime display now, e.g. https://traintime.mta.info/station?code=0PO for Poughkeepsie. So I guess we could/should transition to using those? Certainly they use less arbitrary numbers in the URLs, so that's a plus for…somebody?

Also, there is https://traintime.mta.info/sign?code=0PO. In a different world that would be an iframe, but probably not appropriate (or doable) for Wikipedia. On the other hand, and maybe this is a bug, it doesn't seem to consistently show NYC-bound trains, e.g. for Yonkers, https://traintime.mta.info/station?code=0YK has 3 trains in each direction as look at it right now, but https://traintime.mta.info/sign?code=0YK shows 5 trains to Croton Harmon. I guess they publish a support email so I'll contact them and ask both questions. jhawkinson (talk) 14:34, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

I had a dialogue with the MTA support folks and they advised on Oct. 30 that the AVIS links were deprecated and "shouldn’t be in wide use anymore." They agreed to look into the problems with the /sign pages, and it looks like those are resolved. I've changed this template to call Template:MNR links traintime code instead of Template:MNR links as0 and it looks like it's working. I suppose maybe the helper template name should be agnostic of the website API, but there are arguments both ways. I'll let the as0 template stick around for a while before figuring out how to deprecate it (I guess there's no value to deleting it and it might make somebody's life harder to do so). I guess, also, there is an LIRR question, since they now use the same system. jhawkinson (talk) 21:53, 3 November 2023 (UTC)