Forum:Cover Page Characters Subsection For Chapter Pages

I'd like to propose a new subsection be added under Quick References for the chapter pages. This subsection would be a separate table to display characters who are featured in cover pages/color spreads, instead of what we do currently which is to group them all together with the characters who appear in the chapter properly.

This would solve one problem which is that if a character appears in just the cover, we add the (cover) label after their name in the table currently, but if a character appears in both the cover and the chapter, then we don't add that label, making the information we display inconsistent. With this new subsection the character can be put in either or both tables as appropriate.

This is an example from the latest chapter of how it could be.

The table is also less cluttered in each subsection as we don't need to do the (cover) label anymore after any character's names.

As for implementing it, it would be simple to do since no new template is required. We'd just go through gradually from the start of the series and update where appropriate. Damage3245 (talk) 13:56, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

I agree. On chapters with color spreads it becomes hard and annoying to read the table since I and most people probably didn't come to see a cover page's characters. Hollowhen (talk) 14:31, 22 May 2023 (UTC)

Two words: Chapter 691. Or is that four words? I'm in favor of this, but I think it should be another tab. Similar to our infoboxes with the pre/post timeskip thing. I also think it should mainly be used for colorspreads which usually have a wide cast, while cover stories and other non-spread covers just have a couple characters. But using it for the non-spreads is fine. 00:17, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

A few suggestions:
 * The canon cover stories should stay where they are in the main box since they are still part of the overall story and, outside of one or two instances, there are no overlapping characters.
 * The section for cover characters should be a simple list rather than the table setup. There isn't a need to differentiate them by organization/group since most aren't being depicted in-universe anyways.
 * For longer ones, like the Chapter 691 example above, we can shift the list into columns or a scroll box.

Dragonus Nesha (talk) 19:20, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I think that for the sake of consistency we should move the cover story characters to the new section as well. The cover stories rarely suffer from the problem of overlap but they would have the unnecessary stipulation of adding (cover) to the end of the character's name which would no longer be necessary if the characters were always listed in their own subsection specifically for cover pages. Also, the table setup would be to carry on the format set by the current characters section which is also a bit more informative than just a list. Damage3245 (talk) 19:35, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

There are other such labels, like (flashback) and (image), that get frequently applied in the character tables; keeping (cover) among them isn't so burdensome. Dragonus Nesha (talk) 20:22, 24 May 2023 (UTC)

I'd like for us to have a go at trying the format of separating the characters and cover page characters completely into separate tables, and see how that works. If it doesn't work, then we can roll it back for some pages. Damage3245 (talk) 18:44, 19 June 2023 (UTC)