Talk:E-Reader card

Creation of individual e-Reader card pages
Currently, our coverage of e-Reader cards is solely on villagers' pages and only covers what is physically printed on the card (profile, catchphrase, clothing, password, etc.). However, e-Cards contain much more data that we do not cover yet, and there are more types of cards aside from Character Cards that we do not cover at all. Here is an overview of some of the data:
 * What happens when you scan it in (either at the post office, the Able Sisters, or the town tune board).
 * When scanned at the post office, Character Cards send you a letter from the character on the card. Each card has a unique message and gift, and they are all on unique stationery.
 * When scanned at the Able Sisters, Design Cards allow you to save the design displayed on the card.
 * When scanned at the town tune board, Town Tune Cards allow you to save the town tune displayed on the card.


 * What happens when you mail a villager the code printed on the back of the card.
 * When sent to a villager, the character on the card sends you a letter. Each card has a unique message and gift, and they are all on unique stationery. These letters and gifts are different from what you get for scanning the card.


 * What happens when you scan the card on the Game Boy Advance by itself (no GameCube or copy of AC required).
 * When scanned on the Game Boy Advance alone, a message from the character on the card is displayed. Each message has unique stationery and background music.

Because of the vast amount of data for each card, I propose we create individual pages for each of them. Additionally, the series pages could be turned from simple galleries into tables using Cargo data (much like our item list pages), and the e-Card template could be updated to pull data from Cargo, since the card pages would be the new source of the Cargo data.

I have a sandbox that shows what pages for each card type would look like. The only thing I'm not sure about is the naming scheme of the pages; I think something like  would work, but please let me know below if you have any other ideas.

As for how these pages would be created, it would use data from the (letter data can be found here), which has near-complete North American e-Card information; with this, the pages could be created with a script, much like our item pages. ~ AlexBot2004  ( Talk ) 21:17, June 29, 2021 (EDT)
 * Great proposal, and well done with the examples—they look solid and show how detailed these articles can be. For the article titles, I think it would be nice to specify that they're e-Reader cards. One reason is for clarity, but the more important reason is that it could cause conflicts down the road. Not that we're planning to, but as an example, amiibo cards follow a similar numbering system and it could cause conflicts if we made pages for individual amiibo cards (or whatever cards the future may hold).  would be my recommendation, but I'm open to other thoughts. ~ Super  Hamster  Talk Contribs 23:31, June 30, 2021 (EDT)


 * Yes! This is a great idea. I've always wanted to do more with our e-cards, but never got around to working on it. E-card actually has functionality to display ?all? the different types of e-cards, but it only ever found use on character pages. The template should be entirely rewritten, as it's a bit of a mess, and using cargo data would help simplify it quite a bit. The mock-ups look great, the only thing I would suggest is perhaps 'recreating' the villager letters using the image files of the stationery and transposing the text on top. I believe Dorsal Axe made a mock-up in one of his sandboxes, originally for use on the CF DLC page before it was converted to a Cargo table. I would also be interested in capturing animations of the letters similar to File:Animal Crossing-e 1-001 (K.K. Slider - Letter).gif. I don't remember how I did that, or if you would have any ideas on how to automate that process. If you think it's something worth doing I would volunteer to try and create those gifs.


 * I agree with that adding '(e-Reader)' to the page name would be helpful. It might also be worth considering creating a new namespace (Merch or Card)? Sunmarshsignature.png  ( talk )  13:52, July 1, 2021 (EDT)
 * per sunmarsh and Alex's suggestions. -- PanchamBro (talk • contributions) 19:01, July 30, 2021 (EDT)
 * I've opted to come back to this proposal by suggesting to do a separate E-Reader and Amiibo namespace. Reasoning stems from the fact that just by slumping the e-Reader cards and amiibo cards into a Card namespace will leave out the amiibo figurines. And while I think the figurines aren't as numerous and important as the cards, I think it's still vital to describe the functionalities that amiibo figures gives off as well. -- PanchamBro (talk • contributions) 16:56, October 22, 2021 (EDT)
 * - I agree that we need to do better about documenting amiibo functionality, and that each amiibo should get its own page, but I don't know that it should get an entire namespace. Maybe something like ? And then the amiibo functionality information found on that page could be transcluded to (or fetched via cargo query). This way all cards can still be grouped together, amiibo get their own page, and information on amiibo effects are documented on one page rather than being duplicated. Sunmarshsignature.png  ( talk )  13:01, October 29, 2021 (EDT)


 * PanchamBro just alerted me to this proposal and I like it, especially AlexBot2004's sandbox. I also like sunmarsh's idea of a new namespace. I am currently in the process of scanning and uploading my complete collection of Japanese cards, which could be very useful to this. The ones definitely merit their own pages, but I'm not sure about the  ones, because I don't know whether they act differently than North American cards. (The messages are definitely different because they're in Japanese- should they be included and maybe even translated?) The thing is the JP cards follow a different order for series and numbers than the NA ones. I also think maybe we should include series numbers like the filenames do, but I'm not sure about it. My idea is to have page titles like this: ,  ,  , etc. Chubby Bub (talk) 04:01, August 20, 2021 (EDT)


 * per all of the above, and I agree we should have a new namespace for this. We really need to expand our coverage of the cards, and this approach is definitely the way to go. The prototype looks good, though my only suggestion would be to change the display of the appearances section. I don't recall any card featuring in more than one series, so it seems a little odd to me to display the information in that way.
 * Also a big yes to Sunmarsh's suggestion to adapt my old letter template :p I've been wanting to use that for absolutely ages, and the original purpose for it was abandoned long ago... --Shark HHD Icon.png  Dorsal Axe  (talk) 15:24, October 28, 2021 (EDT)
 * - I agree regarding the appearances section, it should just state the series designation for each region. And maybe each series gets its own color based on main colors of that series' card pack (these colors are used for example purposes and don't correspond to the card pack colors). Example:


 * Sunmarshsignature.png  ( talk )  13:01, October 29, 2021 (EDT)