Wikia has no priority to fix SMW, it is deprecated on Wikia and has been for a very long time. They're more interested in other things: just like how they're deprecating Gadgets because it does not fit their workflow for JS Review.

SMW on Wikia is very buggy and I would agree with moving the system to categories. The infoboxes are far too complex and there's nobody here who would be able to understand them (barring Dan himself) to fix a bug.

The lists are never going to work properly, unless we vandalise 6000 articles by removing the infobox and then restoring them. Even just restoring deleted pages causes a bunch of bugs with output these days, hence why people shouldn't be calling for articles to be deleted as they're just messing up other articles.

:/ damnit Wikia, I wrote a whole post detailing different categories, etc... and pressing the quote button to answer a different part of the topic erases my entire post and the undo history so I can't recover it.

*sigh* now I have to write a brand new post.

The first request made in this category was for categories based on our loyalty property (village/other affiliations). There are 226 of those.

We have "characters who use x jutsu" lists as well, these are what powers the jutsu lists in character infoboxes. Those lists would require 2,295 categories.

The number I came up with was a summary of those and a sample of other properties that would probably be turned into categories. Don't remember that list, can barely remember the list I just created now before Wikia's shitty forum erased it, but here's a new shorter summarized list.

• Characters per gender would another 2 categories
• 25 Kekkei Genkai, 26 jutsu types, 45 clans
• Appears in has 6 values, but we can't intersect those with Characters/Jutsu/Tools/Teams so that's actually probably 24 categories. Except people probably also want categories like "Anime-only characters" because categories won't let them filter a list to include those in the anime list but not in the manga list.
• And more I don't care to bother listing again...

The category system wasn't designed for this. Each property we want requires 1 category for each value of that property and more for any intersections. And even if we auto-fill presence in a category, we still have to create the category page. Even Wikipedia is practically trying to escape categories; WikiMedia is still working on WikiData.

Meanwhile with SMW and Drilldown, at the price of 1 property for each property we want to filter by: anyone can make just about any list they want by intersecting property values.

As for me being the one to notify Wikia, I can do that now. But if it's been like this for several months, then several months ago when it broke, shouldn't someone have pestered Wikia about it? Clearly, expecting me to tell Wikia something is broken when no-one tells me it's broken for several months isn't going to work.

They already knew that Special:BrowseData was broken for months and that was fixed without any prior notification. But lists in general are just broken: in fact, it actually reached a point where one of the previous sysops here had to resort to vandalism to fix the lists, since they're so cached in the system that they pretty much don't update any more. We even have to use CSS to hide the duplicate entries that appear.

Most of the time, it was down to sysops (well a sysop, UltimateSupreme) to report the bugs to Wikia, because nobody else did. But as you've no doubt seen, there's close to nobody caring about the technical aspects of SMW here, they've mostly moved on from the wiki and aren't interested in trying to maintain such a broken feature :P

Can't DPL just be used to list things in the infobox? Simpler, less likely to break and doesn't get stuck on the same entry for months on end: a quick null edit and it's updated instantly, whereas a null edit on SMW does close to nothing these days. I use DPL for some stuff on other wiki's with categories and it works out quite well on those wiki's (doesn't require the category page to exist either).

I would recommend applying to become a Vol Dev to sort out just SMW issues. It might speed up fixes if that was the case.

Re post below: I believe it's because of Concepts. The SMW upgrade that was done many months ago was supposed to fix it, but it never did and the same bugs continued. Wikia doesn't have any priority to fix it, it took them close to a decade just to do an upgrade, which didn't fix very many things at all.

Waitasecond! Some of the lists like Special:BrowseData/Characters are working. There's something different going on than drilldown just simply being broken.

While you try to sort out that, could you also submit this for review? Snapper removed his sysop flag a while ago and obviously updated the page, but then didn't bother submitting the edit for review (or maybe wasn't able to do so).

EDIT: It seems to have been submitted for review, but I've no idea when that was done.

Right before I made my last post. I noticed that when I looked up the forumchanges script to remember how to bypass the stupid limitation on even reasonable duplicate posts.

Somewhat related topic, apparently the Filter: pages we're using for Drilldown are deprecated. Half of them also look like hacks the way they use #ask and a Concept: covering a category to fill possible values. #drilldowninfo is now supposed to be used, and it explicitly supports a category= parameter to say what category to get values from. I wonder if this will make any difference.

@Dan

Yes some of the lists work. But sometimes the lists that work don't appear. Some of the lists I had to use a different method to make sure they are seen like on lists for genin, chūnin, etc. Also, we don't have to create a category for everything but it shouldn't matter the amount of categories, just the quality of them. Like we don't really need a category saying "characters who are the age 16" or "characters who are born in November". Your only good reason for not considering it is that you think your "fancy system" is better but looked how messed up it is.

Maybe a new website should be created (idk, just throwing some ideas out there).

That's pointless. A whole new wiki is not going to help matters whatsoever, especially as the wiki would have to be self hosted and you'd struggle to get anywhere with such an effort.

Let's just focus on fixing the problems, suggestions like this aren't exactly helpful.

Like I said, idk I'm just throwing random stuff out to see what happens. Besides, it's like they all say, "ain't nobody got time for that."